" - OK. Sure."

He puts his basket down and opens the door.

Deep breath. Ignore the blood.

She heads through the door and up the stairs and out of the building and looks around for a convenience store. There, OK. She heads in, brute-forces the bare minimum amount of human interaction needed to figure out where the phone is, and calls the number on her paper.

Someone answers. Not in English.

"Umm, hi, this is Karen Tiu and I'm calling this number because Alex told me to?"

"Oh! Hi, Karen - wait, Karen who?"

"It's - nevermind. There's a, uh, some kind of magical anomaly here that opens doors into other universes, and I'm from one of those, I guess, and Alex thinks I'm a version of someone from this universe who died? Or something? And also if you go in you can access published materials from virtually any universe that exists, supposedly, and Alex says you should come here and see."

"Okay. Are you at, uh, ... store in Hunter's Point, Alaska?"

"Probably?"

"Okay. Is Alex there too?"

"Sort of? He can't leave the anomaly on this side without closing it."

"Okay. Backup's on the way. Anything else?"

"Um. He thinks maybe you should tell Azalea that there's a Karen here. Sort of."

"Will do. Do you want us to bring her once the area's secure?"

"Um. If she wants. Yeah."

"All right. Looks like the first people will arrive in about three hours."

"OK. I'll, um, go tell Alex. Thank you."

"Of course."

She waits a few seconds, realizes she's stuck, says "bye", and hangs up.

It's less terrible crossing the street back to Milliways. Not because anything has improved, really, she just doesn't have any phone calls to make on the other side of the street. She has enough presence of mind this time to notice that it's cold outside.

"They said people will arrive in about three hours."

"Oh good. Are you okay?"

"Yeah! Fine."

"Great." He keeps holding the door.

"I'm gonna go... clean stuff," she says, even though this is not terribly necessary, because it is theoretically her job or something.

"Okay."

She'll just do that. And try not to think very hard about anything for the next three hours.