A Million Worlds With You

  Romola, onto my game, is trying to wound me back. The thing is, it doesn’t work. With all my self-doubt and uncertainty, I’ve never felt like my parents didn’t love me, or that I didn’t deserve to be loved. Only in these past few days, as I’ve realized how that sense of inferiority has gnawed at Wicked—and at Paul—have I fully appreciated how the lack of love can twist someone inside.

  If you know you’re loved, deep down know it, something deep and precious inside you will always be safe. If you don’t have that love—or don’t know that you do—then you’re vulnerable. Unshielded. Exposed to all the hardness and horror of the world.

  “You don’t understand half as much as you think you do,” I tell Romola.

  “And yet I still seem to understand more than you.” With that, Romola leans forward and activates Victoire’s Firebird for a reminder. The jolt isn’t visible; however, the pain it causes Victoire is. She jumps in her seat, twists around—and goes deadly still.

  Wicked’s back.

  “Good try.” Her smile is as sharp as a shard of a broken mirror. “But, as usual, not good enough.”

  Instantly Wicked’s hand goes to her Firebird, as does Romola’s. The lockets seem to vanish, leaving both Victoire and Romola there looking stupefied. Romola takes a couple of steps backward in utter confusion, then gasps in shock at the gun in her own hand. “What’s going on?”

  “Romy?” Victoire says. “Are you yourself again?”

  Paul steps forward and carefully takes the weapon from Romola’s hand, showing no sign of the homicidal anger that nearly consumed him only seconds ago. “Sit down. We’ll explain later.”

  “Who is that?” says Warverse, from the corner where she and the others have huddled. “I’ve never laid eyes on her in my life.”

  “Her name is Romola Harrington.” Mafiaverse answers, and I realize she looks paler and sicker than anyone else in the room. “In my universe, she works for Wyatt Conley.”

  “Here, too,” says one of the clones who’s already rid of her visitor from another dimension—Elodie, I think. “Conley funds Mum and Dad’s cloning research. Romy’s one of his assistants, so she lives here and handles PR, transfers of funds, that kind of thing.”

  “And she’s one of our friends.” Victoire goes to the very confused Romola’s side in a show of solidarity. “She’d never hurt us.”

  “Neither would mine,” Mafiaverse says.

  “That’s great. You guys got way nicer Romolas than we did. Maybe when you get back to the Mafiaverse, you could ask yours to help out?” Frustration is making me snarky. “I’m sorry. It’s just—as soon as we take care of one threat from the Home Office, another one takes its place. I don’t know what to do.”

  “We stick to the plan.” Paul tries to sound logical and confident, like he’s only talking good sense. Yet he won’t meet anyone’s eyes, and he keeps glancing over at the cleaver he very nearly used on Romola. “Protect our own dimensions, continue to work together, move on quickly. This next world is important—”

  “I’ll go there,” I say. Up until now, I’ve been following in Wicked’s footsteps. With this step, with Paul resetting my Firebird to strike out in new directions instead of only trailing behind her, maybe I can finally beat her to the punch. “Right away. As long as I keep her out, the dimension will remain safe until you can meet me there.”

  Paul opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. He was going to object.

  I beat him to it. “I mean, you or whoever can reach me. Whoever is closest in that dimension.”

  Because I don’t know anything about this next world. Where I once assumed Paul and I could always find each other, now I know the multiverse has a million different ways of tearing us apart.

  “Okay,” I murmured one night in late February as Paul and I snuggled in his dorm room, listening to his beloved Rachmaninoff. The piano notes rippled down around us like raindrops on a windowpane during a storm—cascading, endless. “So you can mathematically prove the existence of fate.”

  “I hope so. If not, my chances of successfully defending my thesis are poor.”

  “But you can.” I lay on my side, Paul spooned around my back. His hand splayed across my stomach, two of his fingers touching the bare skin exposed between my top and my jeans. “You can actually look into this snarl of equations and read what our destiny is fated to be.”

  “No, that’s going too far.” Paul kissed the back of my neck, as if apologizing for having to correct me in any way. “Yes, there are parallels in the equations that suggest parallels in the outcomes. But it’s not as though one number tells me we get married, or another number tells me we never meet. It would take a lifetime of exploration and evaluation to even begin understanding how to interpret those findings.”

  “Do your equations explain why there are all these parallels? Why you and Theo work with my parents in so many worlds, or why you and I seem to manage to find each other every time?”

  “I could only posit a theory.”

  After growing up with my parents and their menagerie of grad students, I was used to their jargon. Smiling to myself, I said, “All right, posit away.”

  “Have you ever eaten Pringles?”

  It was such a non sequitur that at first I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Pringles? Like the potato chips?”

  “Yes,” he said earnestly. “They’re very good.”

  “I know. I’ve had Pringles. I mean, obviously. But this is the first time anyone’s ever used them as part of a cosmological theory.”

  Paul hugged me more tightly. “They all have to be shaped the same to fit into the can. If they were too irregular, they couldn’t be packed together.”

  “You mean—dimensions are like potato chips in a can.” It began to make sense to me, which was either a breakthrough or possibly proof I’d been hanging around physicists way too long. “They have to be shaped the same, at least a little, or they couldn’t co-exist.”

  “Exactly. See, we might make a scientist of you yet.”

  “You wish.”

  “No, I don’t. I would never want you to be anyone but yourself.” Paul kissed the back of my neck again, slowly this time, so that I felt the warmth of his breath on my skin. I took his hand and slid it up my body, inviting him to explore. It seemed like we had become our own tiny universe of heat and light and love, needing nothing else. . . .

  And now Paul and I stand here, terrible bleak tension between us because he no longer has faith that our fate brings us together.

  But if he can no longer believe in us, I want him to at least believe in himself.

  I step to his side and keep my voice low. “You stepped away from Romola, okay? You thought of me first. The splintering didn’t get you.”

  “I only stopped because Romola threatened you.” Paul stares at an empty corner, again avoiding my gaze. “I nearly committed murder.”

  “Nearly doesn’t count! You hung on and controlled yourself. You can win this fight.”

  “But it will always be a fight. Always.” He shakes his head as though he were about to pronounce a death sentence.

  “And you can always win.” I put one hand on his arm.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He steps away from me. Maybe the breakthrough is just too new, or maybe his despair runs even deeper than I thought.

  As badly as I want to make things right with Paul, we have a multiverse to save.

  “You’ve input the coordinates for this important dimension?” I take my Firebird back, determined to carry on. “I’m cleared to go?”

  “I’ll follow as soon as I can. If I can,” Paul promises. Still he doesn’t meet my eyes.

  The Grand Duchess Margarita of all the Russias watches us in dismay. Although I see her eagerness to speak, she has far too proper manners to ever intrude. How angry she must feel, seeing me blow my chance to be with my Paul after she tragically lost hers.

  But now I’m thinking about Lieutenant Markov, whose memory always makes me cry, and I can’t
afford to break down. So I just look around the room at my other selves, whether visitors from other dimensions or this world’s clones. “These might not be the best circumstances, but I’m glad I met all of you. Seeing all these lives we could lead, and all the different ways things turn out—”

  “It proves anything is possible,” says the grand duchess.

  I nod at her, then look again at Paul, who finally returns my gaze in the instant before I hit my controls and—

  —I wobble, because I’ve slammed into a world where I’m currently on top of a very tall ladder. I manage to recover my balance in time, saving me from tumbling to the tiled floor below. But I’m even more afraid. Because the one thing I know about this dimension is that somewhere, very close, a bomb just went off.

  The only other time I’ve been near a massive explosion was during an air raid in the Warverse. One of the fighter planes dropped a bomb nearly on top of our shelter, and for a couple of minutes after that, the only thing I could hear was a dull roar, almost exactly like the one ringing in my ears now.

  Did Wicked get here before me after all? Did she set off an explosive device, trying to frame me as a terrorist? But she hasn’t had time for anything that elaborate, and besides—I don’t smell smoke. I don’t see any damage. A few people walk along on the tiled floor beneath my ladder, all of them headed in one direction but in no particular hurry. Their clothes look roughly modern, if kind of drab. A drop cloth is spattered with red, but the drops look more like paint than blood.

  How can nobody care about the bomb? I look to my other side and see Paul’s face, larger than life on the wall by my shoulder, the paint still wet. Clipped to the ladder is a box of paints, and I realize I’m wearing a smock.

  From the corner of my eye I catch some movement and look down again to see a middle-aged man holding up a paintbrush. He looks irritated, and he has a blue-gray stripe across one cheek. I must have dropped my paintbrush on him. And he’s way more interested in that than the freakin’ bomb.

  The man waves at me again, signaling for me to come down. But he doesn’t want me to evacuate. I can tell he just wants me to get my brush back.

  Usually I try to piece together the most important clues about a universe on my own, but this time, I’m going to need some help. So I say to the man below, “What’s going on?”

  But I don’t say it with my voice.

  Instead, automatically and unconsciously drawing on the language information rooted deeply in this Marguerite’s brain, I respond in sign language.

  Oh. I’m deaf.

  23

  I THOUGHT BEING DEAF WOULD BE . . . QUIETER.

  The man beneath the ladder signs back, but badly. “Brush. You. Get.”

  Shaking off my bewilderment and the dull roar in my ears, I head back down the ladder. My shoes are kind of clunky—lace-up boots—but not so much that I have to worry about falling. When I get to the bottom, this man hands me the brush. But then he smiles and shrugs, like you do when you realize you’re in a bad mood for no reason.

  “Work stop. Night. Goodbye.” After this primitive farewell, he begins packing up brushes and such, even heading up the ladder to collect the paints, which must belong to him. I back away from the dropcloth, looking up at the mural above us. Yes, that’s Paul’s face, but I’m painting him as one of a group of hardy peasants, marching through a field of wheat, being led by Vladimir Lenin to a glorious tomorrow.

  I always likened Paul’s build to the idealized, masculine ones shown in Soviet propaganda. Now I’m apparently painting him into it. This might amuse me a little if I weren’t trying to adjust to the staticlike sound in my ears that erases all other noise. It’s just so strange—people walking by me without the thump of their footsteps, no echoes of any kind against the tile, mouths moving during conversation as silently and meaninglessly as koi fish in a pond—

  A hand waving at the corner of my vision startles me. I turn to see Josie, wearing a long black coat and a knitted cap. She smiles and signs—fluidly and fluently—“We got off work at the same time! Good, we can head home together.”

  “Great,” I reply. “Let’s go.”

  I wait for Josie to start walking in the right direction, but she stands there for a minute before scrunching her nose in confusion. “You don’t want your bag and your coat?”

  When I turn around I see, in a small pile next to the dropcloth, a dark blue coat and embroidered scarf that seem more likely to belong to me than to my supervisor. I put them on, uncovering a knapsack smudged here and there with dried paint. In my pockets are two cloth gloves. To judge by Josie’s warm hat, I’m going to want to wear these.

  By the time I return to Josie, she’s shaking her head in affectionate chagrin. “You’re in a dream world today.”

  “I’m sorry,” I reply, slightly amazed at how readily my gloved fingers form the shapes. “I’m a little lightheaded this evening.”

  Josie laughs. “Not again already!”

  Oh, no. Maybe Wicked has been here. But if so, did she just . . . drop a paintbrush on my supervisor and leave? That makes no sense.

  When Josie sees my bewildered expression, she pats my shoulder with her free hand. “I was just kidding, and I should know better than to joke about that. Come on, let’s get you home.”

  She doesn’t seem set on continuing our conversation, which is good, because I need a minute.

  I always believed deafness would mean profound, permanent silence. Apparently I was wrong. For me at least, now that I’ve had time to begin getting used to this, it sounds less like an explosion’s aftermath and more like having a large seashell clapped to each ear—a rushing-roaring-ringing that never gets any quieter or louder. I’m constantly surrounded by white noise, basically, which either drowns out everything else I could hear or is simply the best my eardrums can do in this dimension.

  Was I born deaf here? Possibly. But I also remember my father talking a few days ago about the time I had meningitis when I was two years old. Both he and Mom have told that story several times, either to emphasize how much they love me—which is sweet, if melodramatic—or to laugh about how they knew I was feeling better when I started spitting my hospital Jell-O at the nurse. I’m almost positive meningitis can cause deafness. Maybe, in this dimension, my parents took me to the hospital a few hours later, or the antibiotics were slightly less effective. This dimension’s Marguerite survived just like I did, but her hearing didn’t.

  Thankfully this Marguerite learned sign early enough in life to have deeply internalized the language, so I have it too. And I have a little more time to catch up on the situation here, since for once I don’t have to thwart either a murder attempt or a crashing dimension. Nor do I have to search for Paul, who is obviously in my life in this world too. My job is protecting this universe, which simply means staying here and keeping Wicked out. All I have to do is get along well enough for the hours it takes Paul to join me here and start building the stabilizer. So I only need to study my surroundings, and my hearing isn’t necessary for that.

  To judge from the scale of the mural and the tiles on the floor, I had assumed I was painting in some kind of civic building—whatever would come closest to a city hall here. But this turns out to be a train station so opulent it makes the BART look like a garbage dump. As we get closer to our track, the crowds thicken. Apparently we got here at the very top of rush hour. The train itself is clean, but sort of old-fashioned. No ads. Josie and I are crunched in together so tightly that there’s no chance to talk. I’m not even sure I could get my hands in front of my face.

  We hop off after only two stops, and I take careful note of the station and the directions, in case I have to navigate this on my own later. Then I follow Josie up onto the street.

  Josie and I turn the corner, and I see a statue of Lenin, several stories high, seemingly standing against a powerful wind and pointing forward. When I let my gaze follow the direction of his finger, I glimpse the distant, multicolored onion domes of St. Basil
’s Cathedral.

  Russia, I think, a wave of nostalgia washing over me. I’d known it might be as soon as I recognized Lenin in the mural, and the style of it, but something similar might have been painted in any Soviet Bloc nation since the Revolution. I could’ve walked out anywhere from Estonia to the Ukraine—and, since this is a new dimension with new rules, potentially even San Francisco itself. But no. I’m back in this country that has come to mean so much to me.

  However, this is a very different Russia. Instead of beautiful, elegant Saint Petersburg, I appear to live in Moscow—and I bet in the universe ruled by Tsar Alexander, Moscow looks better than it does here. All the buildings constructed in the previous century are plain concrete, the architecture so dull and uninspiring that the effect has to be deliberate. The elegant subway stations testify to an earlier age, one that wanted its public places to create awe. Apparently that sentiment died out a long time ago. The cars moving past us are so square and squat they could be shrunk down to fit in with a Lego set. Mom told me the Soviet Union didn’t believe in capitalist decadence, and decadence apparently included manufacturing automobiles in any style besides “ugly.”

  It’s twilight. Josie must be tired after a day at work, but her attention is all for me as she asks, “Do you want me to walk with you all the way to your place? I don’t mind.”

  The sunset light catches a glint on her finger as she talks to me, and I realize she’s wearing a slim band of gold. A wedding ring? Oh, please don’t let her be married to Wyatt Conley in this universe. After the carnage of that final, fatal car wreck in the Triadverse, I will never again be able to see his face without remembering what it looked like after it had been split open. And even the worlds where he’s an okay guy, where his love for Josie is true and good, remind me that his grief for her is fueling the Home Office’s brutal slaughter of the dimensions.

  “Hey.” Josie frowns. “Did you catch what I said?”

  “Yes, sorry. I’m really not feeling well. If you could walk me home, I’d appreciate it.” My smile probably looks pretty weak, but Josie will assume that’s because I’m tired, or coming down with something. Sure enough, she offers her arm to me so I can hold on. It’s an oddly formal gesture, yet an affectionate one—something Josie wouldn’t do at home, even while she fussed over you. Maybe it’s something distinctly Russian, or maybe it belongs to this dimension, which I hereby dub the Moscowverse.