A Thousand Pieces of You

  I guess Paul turned against everyone who ever helped him, all at once.

  The elevator doors slide open, and we walk out through the chic mirrored lobby. I smile at the doorman as we go out, cool December air ruffling my hair and Theo’s jacket. The doorman seems surprised; I don’t think this Marguerite spends a lot of time being nice to people. Once we’re alone again, I ask, “How do you know Paul’s not coming after us first?”

  Theo shrugs. “I don’t. But either way, we don’t have to waste time looking for him. The fight’s coming to us.”

  The tech conference is being held at a super posh hotel in the center of the city. Theo and I head in on one of the shimmering monorails that slithers over the crowds below.

  “How do we get in?” I ask as we sit on the plastic seats. Above our heads, holographic ads glitter and dangle like hallucinogenic Christmas ornaments. “Tech conferences like this don’t sell tickets at the door, do they?”

  “Hell, no. If Wyatt Conley’s the keynote speaker, this thing probably costs a thousand bucks a head.”

  My eyes widen. I have more money in this dimension, but that’s a lot—and anything that expensive probably sells tickets in advance, not in person. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to sneak in.” He gives me a sidelong look, and he smiles. “Since I’m the one with the criminal instincts on this team, leave that part to me, all right? Once we get past the main entry area, nobody’s going to look twice at either of us as long as we play it cool.”

  The people at this conference are going to be corporate tycoons, millionaires, and so on, but Theo’s wearing beat-up jeans, a parka, and a T-shirt. “What about your clothes?”

  “You’re the one who’s dressed wrong for a tech conference—not that you don’t look as sensational as ever.” He’s as cocky as he ever was, like I didn’t see him stoned and helpless on the bathroom floor an hour ago. Is that infuriating or a relief? Theo gestures to his beat-up jeans. “I’m probably slightly overdressed as it is, but I can get away with it. Just stick close to me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Nervous energy is building inside me as we come closer to confronting Paul. Or not—we might have got it wrong. This isn’t necessarily our dimension’s Paul Markov at all. What if he’s fled somewhere else entirely?

  Then we’d have to jump into a whole new dimension, with a new set of rules, and maybe an even greater distance to cross to reach each other. The thought of it makes my head hurt.

  And yet, a new dimension might be one where I’d be with my parents. Both of them. By now Mom feels almost as lost to me as Dad.

  What is Mom doing right now, back home? Theo and I left a message explaining what we were doing; she would have lost it when she read that, but without a Firebird of her own, she can’t follow us. It’s awful to think of her being scared about me and Theo when she’s still so raw from losing Dad, but when we decided to go, I didn’t stop to think about how long we’d be missing in our own dimensions. We’ve been gone for a day and a half so far.

  I wonder if they’ve had Dad’s memorial service—they couldn’t even have a real funeral, couldn’t even give him a true resting place—

  No. I can’t let this get the better of me now. This close to our goal, I have to stay strong.

  “Show me how to use the Firebird,” I say, pulling mine up from within my shirt.

  “You’ve got the basics, right?”

  “I don’t mean the basics.” This is difficult even to say. “I mean, show me how to use it to kill Paul. Our Paul.”

  “You want to keep it down?” Theo glances around us; we’re surrounded by commuters. But they’re too absorbed in their own holoscreens and headphones to have heard a word I’ve said.

  I insist. “Show me.”

  “Listen. For your safety and my peace of mind, let’s leave that part to me, okay?”

  “My safety isn’t one of our priorities here.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he says, so intense that once again I find myself both thrilled and afraid of what it might mean.

  My voice softens, but my resolve doesn’t. “You need to show me how to do it, just in case.” In my heart I know it’s my job to kill Paul—my duty, my right—but I also know that’s not an argument Theo wants to hear. If he’s worried about safety, fine, we’ll talk about safety. “If something happens to you, I have to be able to defend myself.”

  Theo still looks wary. “You understand that this isn’t easy, right? Paul either has to be down for the count before you do this, or you have to have grabbed the Firebird from around his neck—assuming he’s got it on him. Which he might not.”

  Paul might have his locked in a safe somewhere. But I’d bet anything he hasn’t. Theo and I are still wearing ours, because this thing is too precious, too valuable, to keep anywhere else but right next to the heart.

  “I understand,” I say. “Show me.”

  So Theo leans close and shows me a fairly elaborate set of twists and turns of the Firebird’s many layers and gears—by pantomime, of course. There are so many steps to the process that I can hardly even begin to memorize them all. “Why does this take so long? How is anybody supposed to do this in a crisis?”

  “Nobody’s supposed to do it, period,” he answers. His head is so near mine that one of my curls is brushing his cheek, and he doesn’t push it away. “We were building ways to travel through dimensions, not killing machines. What I’m showing you is technically a reset—something you should only do in your home dimension, to allow the Firebird to . . . connect to a different person, a different dimensional resonance, you see what I’m saying?”

  “Kind of.” I’m letting my frustration get the better of me. “I wish it were easier, that’s all.”

  “It has to be difficult, because it’s fatal to anyone not in their home dimension. We didn’t want anybody doing this accidentally while they were traveling.”

  As I watch Theo’s hands go through the sequence, over and over, I think of it again—the reality that I’m going to kill someone. An actual person, even if he’s not in his own body at the time.

  He’s in someone else’s, I remind myself. You’ll be setting this world’s Paul free. But I can’t work up much righteous indignation while I’m shanghaiing someone else’s body myself.

  And it’s not some anonymous stranger. It’s Paul. The one who looked like he’d never received a nicer birthday gift than the lopsided cake Mom baked for him. The one I once teased for buying all his clothes at thrift stores—and then felt so bad when I saw that he was embarrassed, because he didn’t shop there to be a hipster, he did it because he was poor. Paul, with his gray eyes and soft laugh and lost look, the one who held me against his chest when I was afraid . . .

  Paul was able to look at all the good in my father, all the love Dad had given him, and go on to murder him without blinking an eye. Why can’t I do the same? Why can’t I be as hard as he is? I’m the one who has a reason, the one with a right to kill. I shouldn’t be the one who feels guilty and horrible and sick.

  For Dad, I tell myself, but for the first time it rings hollow.

  My stomach churns, and the monorail car feels too warm. I suck in a deep breath, attempting to steady myself, and Theo glances over. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say shortly. “I think I’ve got it.”

  “Be careful when you go through the process,” he says, clicking my Firebird back into its proper configuration, all the thin metal layers folding in on one another like an insect’s wings. “We built this thing to be easy to repair and customize, so when you have it all spread out like that, it can pop apart. Simple enough to fix if you know how—but that’s something I can’t teach you in an hour. Or a month.”

  “Right. It’s complicated. You don’t have to keep reminding me.”

  Theo’s brown eyes meet mine, warm and knowing. “Somebody’s in a mood.”

  “We’re going to kill a man. Should I be perky?”

  He holds his
hands up, like, I surrender. “I know this is hard, all right? It’s not easy for me either.”

  Little brother. Theo used to take Paul out for what he called “Remedial Adolescence”—trying to introduce him to music and clubs and even girls, all the stuff he missed out on when he started doing higher physics at age thirteen. Of course, Theo did that partly to soak up the hero worship, because Paul thought Theo was about eighty times cooler than anyone else on earth.

  Or we believed he did, anyway. In the end, Theo was as deeply deceived by Paul as the rest of us. As bitterly betrayed.

  “I’m sorry.” I lean my head back against the plastic seat and stare upward at the shiny holographic ads squiggling above us, begging me to buy products I’ve never heard of. “I know I’m acting like a bitch. I’m tired is all.”

  “It’s not easy,” he agrees. “We can save ‘nice’ for later. After.”

  “Right.”

  The monorail comes to our stop. Theo and I step out of the car side by side, without saying another word to each other. Maybe he’s still thinking that nice comes later. Maybe that’s what I should be thinking too. Instead my mind is clouded with uncertainty about what we’ll find when we see Paul, whether we’ll see him at all, and, worse, with doubts about my resolve.

  I can’t even look at Theo, lest he see how worked up I am. So I glance around at the crowds rushing by us in this station of metal grids and holographic signs, hoping for a moment’s distraction from the dark work ahead.

  One figure halts in his tracks. A large man in a long black coat, stopping midstep to check a holographic map of the area floating overhead. As the motion flickers in the corner of my eye, I turn toward it and my first thought is, He’s having a heart attack.

  Then I see who it is.

  I’ve chased Paul Markov across dimensions. Now he’s only twenty feet away.

  8

  I PUT MY HAND OUT, TRYING TO WARN THEO, BUT NO WARNING is needed.

  “Son of a bitch,” Theo whispers.

  He starts forward, but I grab his shirt in my fist. “Don’t. Theo, don’t.”

  “What do you—” At first he’s angry I’ve stopped him—so angry it shocks me—but then Theo visibly relaxes. “Right. Not exactly the place for this confrontation. Probably security cameras and transit cops around every corner.”

  That’s not why I stopped Theo. It’s because seeing Paul has taken me back to the first moments after I heard the police say his name, call him a suspect in Dad’s death. Bizarrely, I didn’t get angry right away; I was too dazed for anything as coherent as anger. I kept thinking that this couldn’t be right. That the horrible things I was hearing couldn’t be real.

  While the police were standing in our living room, and Mom cried into her hands as they talked about Paul’s “suspicious activity,” I kept thinking I should call him, so Paul could explain what was really going on.

  And right now, as I look at him, I don’t see my father’s killer. I see the Paul I used to know.

  The one who made me feel like I might finally fall in love.

  Thanksgiving at our house is always a little weird. We don’t have much family aside from Aunt Susannah, who seems to think Thanksgiving is some barbaric American custom that would give her the cooties. So my parents invite along a motley crew of physics students, other professors, and neighbors. The grad students always contribute a dish, and they come from all over the world, which means we might have kimchi or empanadas along with the turkey. One time Louis—who was from Mississippi—brought something called a turducken; personally I don’t think any food should have the word turd in its name, but it turned out to be a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey, and I have to admit it was delicious. The turducken was one of the better offerings, really. Sometimes they’re almost sad, like this year, when Theo brought cupcakes we all pretended hadn’t been bought from a store.

  Paul asked to borrow our kitchen, because he didn’t have access to a stove. So I was there to witness him cooking. “Lasagna?” I boosted myself up to sit on the counter. “Just like the Pilgrims used to make.”

  “It’s the only thing I know how to cook.” Paul frowned down at the tomato sauce in its pot, as though it had done something to offend him. “The only thing worth bringing, anyway.”

  I resisted the urge to point out that if he was cooking at our house, he wasn’t precisely bringing it anywhere. We had finally reached the point where I was starting to get comfortable with him—where I was starting to believe I might be able to get beneath all the quiet and awkward to figure Paul Markov out.

  Mom and Dad were at the university; Theo was out partying; Josie wouldn’t fly in from San Diego until tomorrow morning, apparently because she’d spent the day surfing with her friends. So Paul and I were alone for a change. He wore his usual faded jeans and T-shirt. (I swear it’s like he doesn’t know people are allowed to wear anything besides black, white, gray, and denim.) Yet somehow he made me feel overdressed in my tunic and leggings.

  “Why aren’t you going home for Thanksgiving?” I managed not to add, like a normal person. “Don’t you want to see your parents?”

  Paul’s lips pressed together in a thin line. “Not particularly.”

  “Oh.” If only I could have grabbed those words back, but I couldn’t. Very quietly I added, “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” After another moment of uneasy silence between us, he added, “My father—he’s not a good person. My mother doesn’t stand up to him. They don’t understand the life I’ve chosen to lead. They’re glad I have scholarships, so I don’t cost them any more money. There’s not much else to tell.”

  Which was obviously a big fat lie—how is there not more to tell about that story?—but I wasn’t going to compound my rudeness by prying. I’d just have to wonder what kind of loser parents would have a problem with their son being a brilliant physicist. Or how much might lie behind the phrase “not a good person.”

  I tried to figure out how to move the conversation on to a new subject. “So, um, what music is this?”

  “Rachmaninoff. The 18th Variation of a Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” His gray eyes glanced toward me warily. “Not very current, I realize.”

  “Theo’s the one who teases you about your classical music, not me.” Since Theo wasn’t around, I finally admitted, “I like it, actually. Classical music.”

  “You do?”

  “I’m not an expert on composers or anything like that. But I learned a little through my piano lessons,” I hastened to add. “Just—when I hear it, I think it’s pretty.” The Rachmaninoff was sort of amazing, actually, piano notes tumbling over and over in endless crescendos.

  “You always apologize for things you don’t know.” Paul didn’t even look up from the bowl where he was stirring together mozzarella and cottage cheese. “You should stop.”

  Stung, I shot back, “Excuse me for not being born already knowing everything.”

  He stopped, took a deep breath, and looked up at me. “I meant that you shouldn’t feel ashamed of not knowing a subject. We can’t begin to learn until we admit how much we don’t know. It’s all right that you’re not familiar with classical music. I’m not familiar with the music you listen to, like Adele and the Machine.”

  “It’s Florence and the Machine. Adele is a solo performer.” I gave him a sly glance. “But you knew that, didn’t you? You just wanted to make me feel better.”

  “. . . okay,” Paul said, and I realized he’d gotten it wrong for real.

  Before I could tease him about that, he frowned down at his pan of lasagna like it was a science experiment gone wrong. The noodles he’d layered at the bottom of the dish were curling up, as though trying to escape.

  “You bought the no-cook pasta, didn’t you?” I said, jumping down from the counter. “It does that sometimes.”

  “I thought it would be faster!”

  “You can put the other noodles in there without cooking them anyway—oh, hang on.” I grabb
ed one of the aprons from its hook and quickly tied it on. “I’ll help.”

  For the next several minutes, we worked side by side: Paul layering in cheese and noodles and sauce, me using wooden spoons to try and hold the curly noodles down flat until we got stuff layered on top of them. Steam frizzed my hair, and Paul swore in Russian, and we both laughed ourselves silly. Before that night, I hadn’t known Paul could laugh that much.

  Just as we were getting done, we needed to cover the pan for baking, and we both reached for the tinfoil at the same moment. Our hands touched, only for a second. No big deal.

  I’d been with him virtually every day for more than a year, but in that instant, I saw Paul as someone new. It was as though I’d never understood the clarity of his eyes, or the strong lines of his face. As though his body had instantly stopped being large and ungainly and become strong. Masculine.

  Attractive.

  No. Hot.

  And what was he seeing when he looked at me? Whatever it was, it made him part his lips slightly, as if in surprise.

  We glanced away from each other right away. Paul tore off the tinfoil, and once the lasagna was in the oven to bake, he said he had some equations he needed to work on. I went to my room to paint, which actually meant me staring down at my tubes of oils for several minutes as I tried to catch my breath.

  What just happened? What does it mean? Does it mean anything?

  Ever since my father’s death, I’ve wished I could take back that moment with Paul. But I can’t.

  Paul Markov is dangerous. He killed your father. You know this. If you can’t hate him for that, what kind of weakling are you? Don’t waste another chance. The next time you see him, you don’t hesitate. You don’t think about cooking lasagna together, or listening to Rachmaninoff.