Ranglen stirred in his chair, spoke without looking at either of them. “The Clips that control the teleportation, the one you saw me insert, are relatively easy to find. That too is strange.”
“I found one also,” Sabal said. “They’re not buried in geological strata. They almost lie in plain sight, nowhere as hidden. There has to be a reason. The Airafane always seemed to know what they were doing. It’s the only way they kept their perfect control.”
Riley thought to herself, trying to grasp the complications of the idea. She said, “The Airafane would exist across all the universes. But maybe they existed in exactly the same way across them, consistent from universe to universe, unlike everyone else—transcendent, above the changes, and that’s how they became all-powerful.”
“I’ve wondered a
