“What the hell—” Theo starts to say, but then Dad dashes into the living room in his pajamas.
Instead of asking why Theo’s here after midnight, particularly with both of us this rumpled, my father yells, “Come on! We’ve no time to waste!”
Mom runs behind him, a plain beige robe knotted over her nightgown. She goes for the desk and slides open a panel on the computer to withdraw the hard drive. “What are you two waiting for?” she says. “Move!”
I start running after them, Theo only steps behind as we exit the house. Josie’s the last one out of the house, racing past us with a helmet under one arm. “I’m headed to the base!” she yells, racing for a small black car that must be ours. “I love you!”
“We love you, too!” Dad says, looking back over his shoulder for only an instant.
By now dozens of people have joined us on the sidewalks, all of them running like hell. Parents hold their small children in their arms, to make better time; one little boy, maybe nine years old, clutches his kitten to his chest. Nobody has changed out of their nightclothes. Nobody has brought any physical object, except Mom and her hard drive. And everyone’s headed in the same direction.
“What the hell is going on?” Theo yells, his voice almost lost in the shrieking of the sirens.
“I’m not sure,” I say, “but I think—I think it’s an air raid.”
“What?”
That’s when we hear the buzzing overheard. Thunder that is not thunder. Fire in the sky illuminates the clouds so that we can see the outlines of airplanes overhead.
Bombers.
I realized as soon I saw the gas mask—this is a world at war.
7
I’M RUNNING AS FAST AS I CAN, BUT IT’S NOT FAST ENOUGH.
Shouts and even screams echo through the streets as we race toward whatever counts as safety. By now hundreds of people have joined the stampede. If I stumbled and fell right now, I’d get trampled to death.
Worst of all, over the din, I can hear the distant thunder of bombs.
“What do we do?” Theo yells.
“Follow Mom and Dad!”
“I mean—do we stay here? Do we leave? What?”
He’s hoping I’ll say we should leave this universe altogether, leap away and escape the consequences of the bombing. Go home.
When I’m the reason one of my other selves is in trouble, I feel obligated to stay so they don’t have to face the consequences of my actions. Here, though, this Marguerite would be screwed no matter what. I didn’t endanger her in any way; this is just the reality of her world.
But if we leave this dimension without completing Wyatt Conley’s work—without retrieving this splinter of Paul’s soul—then Paul is lost to us forever, and Theo might die.
“Keep going!” I shout back to him. “Hang on!”
If this gets bad enough, I’ll send Theo back to safety, and face whatever comes.
The sirens scream louder now, sound reverberating from every building until my ears hurt. I’d had a vague impression of this street as derelict, run-down; only now do I realize that these buildings haven’t fallen apart over time. They’ve been bombed.
“Come on!” shouts a man standing at the door of what looks like a warehouse. He wears a bright red armband and a helmet, which I hope means he knows what he’s doing. “We’ve got to seal the doors in four minutes!”
People press in desperately. Mom tries to reach for me, but the crush pulls us apart. Suddenly I’m wedged in among dozens of strangers in nightclothes, in regular outfits, even a few in their underwear; I’m not even facing forward anymore, being carried along by the tide of bodies around me. It’s hard to breathe. Gasping, I try to push myself toward the doors, only to get an elbow to the chin from someone who didn’t even realize I was there.
“Hey!” Theo’s voice cuts through the shouts. I crane my neck to see him shouldering his way toward me. One of his arms hooks around my waist, so tightly not even this crowd can tear us apart. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Which is not even close to being true, not with bombers flying overhead, but thanks to Theo, I can at least stay upright.
I shove myself forward and somehow manage to slip us through the doors. Then it’s a mad scramble down concrete steps, into a basement. Though the space is enormous, it’s crammed full of people—all of them breathing hard, sobbing, or both—and more are behind me. The only thing we can do is try to reach one of the walls so we won’t be knocked over.
Once my shoulder makes contact with one of the cinderblock walls, I take a deep breath. Stay calm. There’s nothing you can do now but hang on.
“There.” Theo points farther down the wall, where my parents huddle together. Mom slumps against Dad when she sees us, as if she’s weak with relief. But this air raid hasn’t ended, so I don’t know what she’s so relieved about.
Just that I got in, I guess. That I have a chance.
I expect instructions on what to do, but in this situation there’s only one thing we can do: wait.
We all huddle together, catching our breath; a few people are still crying, and others are attempting to hush upset children. One man nearby is whispering a prayer. The outdoor chill of early-spring air has vanished in the heat of hundreds of bodies pressed too closely together. Theo still has his arm around my waist. I wonder if he’s trying to comfort me, or taking comfort himself.
I’ve been afraid for my own life before. It’s terrible—a cold knot in your gut, your heart hammering at your ribs. Movies show people panicking and screaming like idiots. In reality, it’s nothing like that. When you fear for your life, you’re overcome by this ghastly clarity. You calculate your odds every instant. You invent options and see possibilities you wouldn’t have considered at any other time. You realize as never before that your life is the only thing that is absolutely, truly yours. There is strength within us that we can’t even comprehend until it’s called upon. We are, at our core, built to survive.
Worse by far is being afraid for someone else. We can face our own risks with an unbelievable calmness. Risks to the people we love? They turn us stupid. Drive us mad. Fear and hope take turns telling us lies, each more improbable than the last. Our imagination kills the one we love in our mind, over and over again, and we have to witness. Yet somehow even that isn’t as unbearable as the foolishness of hope. It’s hope that makes us believe in miracles that haven’t come to pass. Hope that crushes us with the unbearable truth.
No danger I’ve faced torments me as much as knowing the people I love are in danger. Mom, Dad, Josie, and Theo—any one of them could be blown to shreds in front of me and there’s nothing I can do. And Paul, wherever he is in this world, is in the greatest danger of all.
Standing here, waiting to find out if we’ll get blown to bits, is the most helpless, frustrating, frightening feeling in the world. Theo’s presence is my lone comfort, but even that only helps so much. After a couple of minutes, I can’t bear it anymore. Okay, so, use the time. Look around, and see what you can learn about this world.
Observing the people around me doesn’t help much, because everyone’s upset, and nobody’s dressed normally. But I notice one old woman wearing a military jacket too big for her, something she must have grabbed on her way out the door. The flag stitched on the sleeve isn’t the American stars and stripes, or any other nation’s flag I’ve ever seen before. Apparently the geopolitical situation in this universe is dramatically different. I make a mental note to find a history book.
I light up as I see that a man near me has tucked a newspaper into the pocket of his bathrobe. “May I look at that?” I ask him, pointing at the rolled newspaper. A few people stare; no doubt they think a bombing raid is a weird time to catch up on current events. But the guy hands me the paper, hardly even glancing away from the ceiling.
“Good thinking,” Theo murmurs as I open it. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”
The front page reads SAN DIEGO STANDS STRONG: SOUTHERN ALLIANCE
REPELLED AT SAN YSIDRO MOUNTAINS. A grainy monochrome photograph shows the SoCal shoreline—but instead of the usual parasailers and beach umbrellas, dead soldiers lie on the sand. It’s so graphic that I can’t believe they would run it in a newspaper, period.
But I’m in a world where virtually every person is caught up in this war. Images like this have lost their power to shock.
What the hell is the “Southern Alliance”? Theo gives me a look; I know he’s wondering just as much as I am, but that’s not the kind of question we can ask out loud without immediately tipping off everyone around us that something’s up. Flipping through pages turns up no answers. Of course not. Everyone here knows about the Southern Alliance. It’s too obvious a fact to print in newspapers; it would be like going onto the CNN home page to find a big article explaining what France is.
This newspaper is a lot more . . . news-focused than most of the ones I’ve seen. No sports section; no horoscopes. They do print movie listings, though, and I smile as I see an ad for some big melodramatic romance starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Keira Knightley. People tend to find their destiny, no matter what world they’re in.
That means Paul has to be a physicist, at least a scientist of some kind. Mom and Dad must have heard of him—or they’re going to. Maybe I could ask them to find out about him. What excuse can I come up with for that? I’ll think of something.
Weirdly, there are articles about technology, about how the military is expanding its use of wireless internet, building drones for combat, and improving satellite navigation to better direct the troops. All of that sounds totally modern.
Theo, reading the article over my shoulder, whispers, “So how come their phones are still connected to the wall?”
The same reason they have to grow their own vegetables, I suspect. The same reason eggs are rationed and paper is too thin. This war must require every person, every resource. They’ve made many of the same advances we have, but that technology is reserved for military use.
My parents have access to that; they’re doing Firebird research. Which means that in this world, my parents are doing the exact same thing Wyatt Conley is doing in ours: trying to find technology that will allow them to dominate. To control. To win.
Conley’s only doing it for profit, I think. My parents are probably just trying to keep their country from being destroyed. Big difference in motives.
A deep boom shudders through the room, and several people moan in dismay. It wasn’t much of a shake, though—more like one of those earthquakes you hardly notice until it’s over. The planes aren’t too close to us. Yet.
I try to imagine what’s happening out there. All the pictures in my mind come from bad movies or old World War II newsreels; none of them help me wrap my head around it. I only realize I’m shivering when Theo hugs me more tightly. Closing my eyes, I lean my forehead against his shoulder and take slow, deep breaths.
Another boom, louder and deeper. Cement dust falls from the ceiling and cinderblocks, and the impact jars us so much that some people fall down. Theo keeps us on our feet, but barely.
Where is Paul right now? What if he’s not a scientist? The Paul in this world might have to be a soldier, too. He could be in this same battle—his life in danger, even now.
If he’s killed with part of my Paul’s soul inside him, that splinter will be forever lost. I could never re-create his soul, reawaken him. It would be like he died too—
It’s less like I hear the explosion, more like the sound takes over the whole world. The floor convulses beneath our feet. I’m horizontal before I know it, one in a tangle of frantic, disoriented people. As I struggle to get up, towing Theo after me, water flows over my foot. A main must have broken. I imagine the entire room filling up, all of us struggling to swim and breathe the last inch of air.
But the water isn’t flowing that fast. Even though much of the crowd is still crying or screeching, I can tell the shelter remains more or less intact. That was a close one, but we’re okay for the moment.
Theo gives me a look. “Are you sure we should stick around?”
“We have to!” I whisper.
“Marguerite, we can’t save Paul if we die here.”
“Keep one hand on your Firebird. We don’t leave unless we absolutely have to. The absolute last second. All right?”
“Yeah. Got it.”
Then I hear the planes through the cement, from underground. The sound could only reach us if the bombers were directly overhead.
I turn toward Theo; his eyes meet mine. He grips my hand tighter and says, “Just in case—I love you.”
And the world turns white, and disappears.
All those movies you see, where action heroes coolly stroll away while buildings explode right behind them? They’re total crap.
When something explodes near you, a wall of hot air hits you so hard it feels like stone. Your eardrums seem to shatter, like the bomb’s gone off in your head; you can’t hear anything but a dull roar, and a ringing. The explosion knocks you down, sears your skin.
I manage to push myself up on my elbows, above most of the dazed people lying around me. Smoke lingers in the air, and I look up to see the exposed night sky, ringed by rubble that must have been the building we ran into before. Fire flickers up there, but nothing’s burning down here. My palms sting, scraped and bloody, but I don’t think I’m hurt worse than that. Next to me, Theo’s lying on his back, coughing so hard from the smoke that he clutches his gut. Nearby I see Mom sitting upright, shaking her head like she’s trying to clear the ringing from her ears. Dad brushes stone dust from his hair.
As the air clears slightly, I see the people on the other side of the room—torn skin, unnaturally bent limbs, and blood. So much blood.
“We need help!” someone shouts. It’s not like I have any idea how to handle medical emergencies, but it’s impossible to look at this and not feel the need to do something. By the time I reach some of the injured, a few nurses and one doctor are already working to help, so I fall in with them and follow their lead. The next several minutes are a blur: ripping apart spare pieces of clothing to use as bandages, bracing people in whatever posture will allow them to protect their broken limbs and experience the least pain. One elderly woman seems to be having a heart episode, but with no drugs to give her and no ambulance to call, all I can do is sit by her side and talk her through it. “Deep, slow breaths. Try to calm down.”
She gives me a look like I am a total dumb-ass. Yeah, I get that “calm” isn’t really an option with bombers circling overhead. But we have to try.
When she’s as settled as she can be, I look around to find Theo standing behind me. “Anything I can do?” he calls over the clamor and the crackling of flame overhead.
Surely there is, but the way wounded and panicking people are crushed in here reminds me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting: nonsensical and grotesque. Who can tell what we should or shouldn’t do? “Just hang on.”
The air whistles as I hear another bomb fall. Theo and I look at each other in panic, and I clutch his hand. But the next impact is farther away. The one after that is even more distant. We begin to breathe a little easier, and the people around us visibly relax. Theo murmurs, “Does this mean we made it?”
“I hope so.” Only then do I realize we’re still holding hands, and I let go. We don’t look each other in the eye.
Near us, a little girl asks her mother, “Is it over?”
“We’ll get the all-clear soon enough,” the woman says. “You wait and see.”
From the weird glances she gets, I can tell not everyone is as optimistic as she is, but as long as I can’t hear bombs, I’m taking it as a positive sign.
I keep offering what makeshift nursing I can, which isn’t much. Within the hour, a doctor who’s taken charge tells me to take it easy for a few moments. With a sigh, I lean back against the wall and slide my hands into my pockets.
Something’s in my left pocket. I pull it out to see that it’s a photog
raph, bottom up in my palm so that I see the back and the words written on it: With all my love forever.
I turn the picture over to see Theo in full uniform, smiling up at me.
“What’s that?” Theo says from his resting spot nearby. He hasn’t really glimpsed it; he’s just trying to make conversation.
“Nothing.” I put the photo back in my pocket.
We don’t get the all-clear until hours later. By then my whole body is stiff, I’m starving, and the sunlight outside is so bright it feels like it could burn my eyes. I stumble around the street, squinting at the scene around us. Most of the neighborhood looks the same—except for the areas that have been instantly, totally obliterated. What were buildings are now smoldering holes in the earth. In the distance I can see smoke spiraling up from several new fires.
Through a megaphone, Red-Armband Guy shouts, “All commercial and manufacturing work is suspended for the day. Return to your homes and await further instructions.”
“Thank goodness this happened at night, instead of during the day when you were at work,” Mom says as we walk home along the ruined streets. All around us, smoke darkens the dawn sky. “I wouldn’t like the thought of you at the munitions factory at a time like this.”
My job in this universe is building bombs? How am I supposed to bluff my way through that? At this moment, I can’t imagine anything I’d less want to do than make even one more bomb in this world.
Buildings I saw only an hour ago now lie in pieces on the street, having crumbled into smoldering piles of brick and rebar. Most of those houses were empty, surely, because of the air-raid siren, but I can’t be sure. When I see a tricycle upside down in some rubble, I have to close my eyes tightly for a moment.
As the four of us reach our house—intact, untouched—Dad glances at Theo. “You know, Private Beck, during wartime, emotions run high. We live as if there’s no tomorrow. So we overlook things we normally wouldn’t, such as a young man sneaking out of our daughter’s room in the dead of night.”
For once, Theo is speechless.