Paul returns with an actual syringe. I walk out of the kitchen as he prepares to inject the stuff, and I take my seat on the sofa with a couple of fresh pieces of paper. Only the slightest tension in his shoulders betrays the moment the needle enters his skin, and he’s done with the shot in an instant. Almost as soon as he puts the syringe down, though, he starts to shiver.
I pull him onto the sofa, fearing another full-fledged overdose like Theo had in the Londonverse. But it doesn’t get to Paul that badly. He only trembles for a few moments, his pupils dilated, as he attempts to shake it off. I rub his shoulders, stroke his hair.
When the reaction passes, Paul tries to stand up again—but I grip his shoulders and force him back onto the couch beside me. He gives me a look, then writes, I’m all right now.
I write back, I know. But we have to talk. You keep avoiding me, but now you’re in a world where we share a home and a bed, so it’s time.
There’s nothing else to say. We don’t share a destiny. By now we’ve proved that. One world like this, where we’re . . . Paul’s hand stills, and I see him glance back toward Valentina’s room. Then he starts over again. One world is only one outcome. It doesn’t mean we’re fated to be together.
It doesn’t mean we’re not. I take his hand as I search for the right words, so he can’t move away.
But he takes the pen back first. You know what the splintering has done to me. Do you think I could go on with you, realizing I’ll never be the same?
Yes! I answer. So you got hurt. So you’ve been changed. If you were a danger to me—then yes, I would let you go. Both because I would always protect myself and because I know you’d rather be alone than ever cause me harm. But you aren’t a danger to me. You were able to control yourself with Romola, weren’t you? You aren’t broken. You only have new scars, and I would always love you despite any scars. Wouldn’t you love me if I were scarred, or sad, or hurting?
Paul hesitates. Am I getting through to him? He writes, Of course I would, but this is different. You won’t see that, because you still believe in some mystical fate—
I snatch the pen from his hands to stop him right there, and so I can say the most important part. Paul, fate doesn’t guarantee us a happy ending. We’re not promised to be together no matter what. But in dimension after dimension, world after world, fate gives us a chance. Our destiny isn’t some kind of mystical prophecy. Our destiny is what we do with that chance.
I don’t dare look up. I don’t dare stop writing. It’s pouring out of me now, the one thing I feel I’ve learned for sure.
You said it yourself. Each new quantum reality splits off when someone makes a decision. Every single world we’ve visited isn’t just random—it’s the result of countless choices, all of them combining to create a new reality. You and I have been given an infinity of chances, and that’s so much more than most people will ever get—but in the end we get to live in only one world, and that’s the world we make. I want us to create that world together.
My eyes feel hot. My throat tightens up. When I look over at Paul, I see that he’s even closer to the verge than I am. I’m forcing us both to confront the fact that one of our most beautiful dreams was a lie.
We both believed in destiny as a kind of guarantee—a promise from the cosmos that we would have our time together in virtually every world we shared. But now I see that believing only in destiny means giving up responsibility. We fooled ourselves into thinking happiness was a gift we would be given time and time again. It’s so much scarier to admit that our lives are in our own flawed, fallible hands. Our futures are not kept safe for us in the cradle of fate. We have to hack them out of stone, dig them out of mud, and build them one messy, imperfect day at a time.
By now my hand is shaking so much that my letters are a mess, but hopefully Paul can still read what I have to say. You grew up believing nobody could ever love you unconditionally. That you didn’t even deserve to be loved. But everyone deserves to be loved, and there’s so much waiting for you. You don’t need fate to give you a friend like Theo, or mentors like my parents. They chose you. The more they knew you, the more they understood who you really are, the more they loved you. And it took me so long to see you because you hide yourself so well, but I see you now, Paul. I see you and I love you so m—
The pen falls from my fingers, my words trailing into a scrawl, as Paul pulls me fiercely to him. I slide my arms around his neck and hug him back, willing him not only to understand what I’ve been saying, but to believe it, too. He kisses my forehead, my cheek, and finally my lips, both of us slowly opening our mouths as we drink each other in.
I swore that I would never make another mistake like I did in the Russiaverse, never again assume what kind of choices one of my other selves might make with her body. But we are within a Paul and Marguerite who share a bed, a life, and a child. What we feel is not so different from what they feel.
We’re in our home. We, and this world, are safe. We have the entire night.
I’m the one who gets off the couch, takes Paul’s hand, and starts leading him to the bedroom. He’s the one who picks me up in his arms to carry me the rest of the way, lays me down on the bed again, and covers my body with his own.
But we each help the other struggle out of our clothes. We each call on our memories of that one night in the dacha. We each reveal ourselves completely, bodies and souls, as we never have before. Paul and I are united in shadow and silence. What we create, we create together.
25
I AWAKEN FROM A DREAM I CAN’T REMEMBER, EXCEPT THAT sounds were a part of it. The seashell roar in my ears jars me only for the first instant. After that, I have more important things to think about.
Paul lies on his side next to me, his gray eyes gentle. How long has he been watching me sleep? I hope I didn’t drool or something. Maybe not, because as he sees me blink and stir, a small smile dawns on his face. When I smile back, he traces along my hairline with one finger. His touch warms me like a sunbeam as we lie side by side amid the rumpled white sheets.
We spent one other night together, in the dacha in Russia, but he was Lieutenant Markov then—both my Paul and someone else entirely new. This time, even though we inhabit other bodies, we were no one but ourselves. Despite the tremendous emotion between us then, this is even more intimate. Maybe it’s our true beginning.
Or maybe not. Paul’s eyes remain sad, his smile wistful. Does he believe in what I wrote last night? Or does he still doubt himself, and believe his splintering will shadow him forever? Does he think destiny is something we can create—or something we’ve lost?
To ask these questions, or at least get the answers, I’d have to find a pen and a sheet of paper. But maybe it’s for the best that communicating isn’t as easy between us here. Instead of plunging back into doubt and angst, or having some awkward, irrelevant conversation about anything but what’s most on our minds, we simply lie together in this fragile, stolen moment.
Paul startles and turns toward the door in the back of our bedroom, the one that leads to the nursery.
Oh, right. We have a baby, and babies cry.
The rest of the morning is not as romantic.
What else can she want? Paul writes at one point, after the mashed sweet potato becomes the third potential meal Valentina has thrown at us.
I shrug, feeling helpless. My chest is as flat as usual in this universe, so I’m obviously not breastfeeding her. (Which I’m selfishly grateful for, because that would be deeply weird.) We changed her. We tried to feed her. We burped her. Now we’re trying to feed her again. That’s pretty much all there is, right?
Valentina, however, seems positive there is something else we should be doing, parent-wise, that we have shamefully neglected. Tears run down her flushed face as she pushes the rest of the mashed sweet potato away. She looks so miserable that it’s impossible to feel angry or annoyed. Instead guilt bears down on me. This little girl needs her mommy. Maybe she senses that’s not really me.
Paul must be thinking the exact same thing. As I brush orange mush off the loose white nightgown I tugged on this morning, he writes, I shouldn’t have taken the Nightthief. Then her father could care for her most of the time.
I shake my head no and take the pen. We need to get the stabilizer built as fast as possible. The sooner we do that, the sooner she gets her parents back. Which is all true, and I know it, but I still feel so ashamed as I look at Valentina—
—who says “Milk?”
With her hand, in sign.
“Milk?” I sign back. Valentina brightens, going from looking miserable to hopeful. I open the one small cabinet for dishes and see, on the highest shelf, a collection of bottles and nipples. By the time I turn back around with the fixed bottle of milk, Valentina is already holding out her chubby little hands. When I give it to her, I’m rewarded with the briefest of smiles before she pops it in her mouth.
Of course this Marguerite is teaching her daughter sign language, just like Paul must be teaching her how to speak. The baby is too young to talk, but apparently kids can start signing a little earlier. Paul sags against the small fridge in relief, and I can’t help laughing.
An instant later one of the small lights blinks in the corner. Frowning, Paul goes to open the door, but he smiles when he sees who’s come to visit.
“Good morning!” my mother signs to me, then stops as she takes in my nightgown, Paul’s T-shirt and boxers, and Valentina’s flushed face. Behind her is Dad, who only has eyes for his granddaughter. My parents look basically the same as if they’d come in from our living room back home, if Dad stopped to pick up a really unattractive pair of plastic-rimmed glasses along the way. Mom’s idea of dressing up is using bobby pins to hold her bun back instead of pencils. Dad’s scarf is a bold shade of blue that probably stood out like a beacon on the streets of Moscow.
I’d be touched by the way my father brushes his hand over Valentina’s head if it weren’t for what he signs next, which is approximately, “Baby pretty very. Josie said sick you?”
Mom asks, “Sick you also Paul?”
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Grammar, in sign language, turns out to be three-dimensional; the meaning and sentence functions of the individual gestures are determined not only by the shape of the fingers or the order they come in, but the positions and movements of the hands, too. Facial expressions matter, as do the sharpness and clarity of finger movement. My parents, the mega-geniuses, have no clue about these parts of signing. Obviously they didn’t learn until they were already adults, so they never got very good at it—and as a result, now they talk to me like cavemen.
Well, I got the gist of what they were asking. “I’m fine. Lots better.” They don’t seem to have come over to check on me, though. Apparently we invited them over for breakfast, or maybe this is just something we do as a family on our days off. “But it took Valentina a long time to decide what she wanted this morning.”
Obviously my mom and dad understand sign language better than they can use it themselves. Mom smiles and leans over to kiss the top of her granddaughter’s head as Dad tells us, “You clothing we baby storage. Happy to storage.”
Storage is as close as they can come to saying keep. I beam at Paul, who is staring blankly at the people using sign. “Thanks for keeping Valentina for a little while, Mom and Dad. We’ll be right back.” With that I take Paul’s arm and pull him into the back of our apartment.
We dress in a hurry, making a mess as we go through closets and drawers to figure out where all our stuff is. As I roll thick socks up my legs, Paul pauses buttoning his shirt long enough to write, We shouldn’t tell them about the Firebirds right away.
I shake my head. No. I’m done lying to the other universes. In this one, they might even be able to help us!
This is the USSR, Paul writes. It’s a police state. Friends report on friends, and paranoia reigns. If I come across as an intruder instead of someone offering knowledge, your parents could report me.
I want to tell him they’d never do that—but Mom and Dad are profoundly shaped by their own worlds. While I think they would never betray me, I can’t be sure they’d do the same for Paul.
I could wind up in a gulag, Paul insists. I need to introduce the topic slowly. So, for a while, they need to think I’m this world’s Paul. I can talk to them in Russian—that’s the language they said hello to me in—but what if they notice I’m not signing with you?
Oh, good catch. Let’s say you hurt your hand yesterday. Nothing serious, but you need to give it a rest. That ought to work.
Neither of us acknowledges the bed filling our room, its cover and sheets still crumpled, the pillows still softly sloping in where our heads lay. What we did last night, what I said—it almost feels like a dream I had, one I wished into being. Does Paul believe me about our infinite chances, our one world? Or do the scars of his splintering, and his own terrible past, run too deep?
When we emerge, Mom and Dad are standing in the middle of the room, the weirdest expressions on their faces—somewhere between shock, fear, and amusement. Mom is holding Valentina, but at arm’s length, like she’s something they found unexpectedly. They both startle to see Paul and me, and Mom says something out loud. I don’t have any idea what. Lip reading is especially hard when you don’t know which language someone is speaking in.
Paul takes a step back, jaw dropping in surprise, which is when I see the glints of metal at my parents’ necks. Those are Firebirds. Which means the Mom and Dad from this universe just became my mom and dad, who have traveled through the dimensions at last.
Quickly I grab the pen and paper from last night, flipping over the private things I said to Paul, and write, This is Moscow. Paul and I live here and that’s Valentina. I’m deaf.
Mom and Dad look stricken, and Mom’s hand reaches toward me. Why are they so upset? They recover quickly, though. After a second my father takes the pen and writes, Is this your baby or ours? I’m not sure which possibility is more terrifying.
I laugh. Ours, which is terrifying enough.
Dad shows this to Mom, and the two of them get this gooey-sweet expression as they look at Valentina—like they’re melting inside at the mere sight of their almost-grandchild. Meanwhile Valentina stares at all of us with suspicion. I think she’s figured out we’re a bunch of impostors.
Mom shifts Valentina onto her hip with practiced ease, and the four of us sit down at the table with the embroidered cloth, paper and pen at the ready to explain what’s going on.
My father begins, with his chicken-scratch scrawl, Once we had enough Firebirds collected from the various dimensions, your mother and I realized we could speed the process up considerably by finally traveling ourselves. Rather than leave P and T to build all stabilizer devices to protect the dimensions, we could handle a few of them in person.
Theo has taken over communication between the universes for now, Mom writes next, her other arm wrapped around Valentina in her lap. Her handwriting is as delicate and precise as she is. He’s still feeling ill, so Josie’s come home to help him out.
Dad taps the piece of paper, wanting his say: You can imagine how appalled she was when we told her the Home Office’s motivation. She said she’d rather be dead a thousand times over—any version of her would, and I believe her—
Mom gives Dad a look as she takes the pen back. Time is of the essence. Thanks to data from the other universes, particularly the tracking information from the Warverse, we’ve determined that the Home Office has changed its plan of attack. They’re going after more source vectors now.
I suck in a breath and grab the pen. You mean, they’re willing to kill even more dimensions?
My parents nod. Paul mutters something that I don’t have to lip-read to understand is profanity. The enormity of the Home Office’s crimes already stretched almost beyond my ability to comprehend it, and yet they can still become worse. Is there no end to this? How can we ever stop these dark
versions of my parents and Wyatt Conley, all of whom are just as smart and several technological steps ahead?
We can’t, whispers a traitorous voice in my head, the memory of sound amid the constant rush of white noise.
It’s Paul who resumes writing. Although we should start building the stabilizer for this universe immediately, I have a theory we should explore about using the Firebirds themselves instead. We could link two Firebirds together. If one device were directed to increase the matter-antimatter asymmetry in a dimension, and the other were set to overload—he pauses writing to mime, on his own Firebird, exactly how that might be done—the overload might provide as much power as any stabilizer. Meaning two travelers could save a universe, though of course one Firebird would be sacrificed, stranding the traveler there for the time being. But in a worst-case scenario, this option could help us.
Dad takes the pen next. Fascinating stuff! But we should stick to what we know works, for now. We can all split up as soon as we’re sure things are underway here, and then we’ll find out which dimensions to target next. Where can we get the raw materials for the stabilizer?
Paul responds, Marguerite and I got here last night, so we haven’t had much time to figure out where we study or work.
I notice the pause between his writing so and we—the unconscious acknowledgment of what we did spend last night doing. Before Mom and Dad can pick up on that, I grab the pen. Actually, I work as a muralist for the Communist Party. When I got to this dimension, I was painting Paul as a peasant following Lenin to the socialist paradise of the future. This is amusing, but irrelevant, so I add, I’m calling this the Moscowverse.
They start going through their pockets and our mail to see what clues they can pick up. The USSR Academy of Sciences turns out to be not far away, and Dad, Mom, and Paul all have IDs (plain paper, filled out by typewriter, no photos). Before long, Paul and my father have also found a map of Moscow and start trying to figure out how far the university is from here.