“Oh, now you’re worried about her.” Wicked spat the words at them. “When did you decide to start caring about Marguerite? And call off your dog Paul Markov before he—”
A heavy thump on the floor was followed by gagging and a groan. Wicked finally looked, and I saw Paul leaning over Theo, whom he’d beaten down to the floor, but Triadverse Theo grabbed the Firebird at his neck. A shudder was the only sign that he was gone. Then our Theo weakly whispered, “What the hell—?”
Tension tightened my chest. Wicked hadn’t realized Theo would bail out on her so fast. “I said, call Markov off.”
Dad wheeled around. “Paul, please, do what she—”
Paul didn’t listen. He rushed toward us, and even as Wicked tightened her grip around the letter opener, he grabbed at her.
She expected him to go for the blade. Instead, Paul yanked at the front of my cardigan, savagely ripping it open. In that instant his broad fist clutched both Firebirds in his hand, towing me closer, off-balance. The cold, terrible anger in him now reminded me too much of his Mafiaverse self—that, and the potential for violence just beneath the skin.
“Put the blade down,” he commanded Wicked, “and I’ll give you back your Firebird long enough for you to get out.”
She lifted her chin. “Let go of me or your Marguerite dies in your arms.”
The point of the letter opener pressed harder against my skin.
“You won’t do it,” Paul said. “Because if you hurt her, I’ve got the Firebirds, and that means you’ll bleed to death along with her. You might be willing to do anything else for Wyatt Conley and Triad, but I don’t think you’re willing to die for them.”
Silence. My parents hung on to each other as if they were holding each other up. Behind them, out of focus, I could just glimpse Theo pushing himself onto his elbows, head sagging. Paul’s gray eyes remained focused on mine.
“You think you know me?” Wicked’s smirk twisted my lips. “You didn’t even know yourself, until yesterday. Because you’re not a single, whole human being any longer. You’re Frankenstein’s monster, all sewed together out of pieces of other people you’ll never be again. And the stitches could rip at any minute . . .”
But Paul didn’t back down. “I don’t know whether you’re an opportunist or a sadist. I don’t know whether you’re a coward or a conqueror. But I know you’re smart enough to recognize a no-win situation—and I don’t think you’re the type to commit suicide out of spite.”
My voice dropped to a whisper as she said, “Oh, I do lots of things out of spite, Mr. Markov.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Paul whispered back. “But you do those things to other people. Not to yourself. Now get out.”
“Now I know how we’re going to play this,” she said. “Time to slam some doors.”
Wicked let the hand at my throat drop, but before I could even register relief, she slashed at Paul. Blood sprayed warm against my skin and clothes as he jerked back his injured arm, pure reflex. It gave Wicked the moment she needed to seize her Firebird. My hand worked the controls—
—dizziness swept over me again. The world went dark and swirly, but even as I swayed on my feet, I knew my body was my own again.
Wicked was gone.
“Paul, are you okay?” I reached toward his arm, and Paul jerked back from my touch. For a moment we could only stare at each other. Then I realized I was still holding the blade, now stained with his blood.
Paul had reacted instinctively. Intelligently, given that I was still holding the weapon that had injured him. But seeing him pull away from me sent a chill through my veins.
Already he’d been questioning himself, refusing to believe in our love.
Now he couldn’t believe in me, either.
4
“IF ONLY GETTING RID OF THE . . . IMPOSTORS SOLVED OUR problems,” Mom said a few minutes later. I was kneeling in front of Paul, who sat on the sofa as I bandaged the gash on his forearm. Dad, meanwhile, was trying to get Theo to drink a cup of tea. (My father is English, so he thinks tea solves everything.) “But based on what you’re telling us—the other two dimensions of Triad are now switching to a new strategy, one far more dangerous than before.”
“They’re willing to destroy entire dimensions, every one that contains a sliver of Josie’s soul,” I said. “Even this one. All to get Josie back. I still can’t believe you guys would ever do that.”
“I can,” my father said quietly. Mom gave him a look, but she folded her arms across her chest, the way she did when she got defensive, as Dad continued. “That bout of meningitis you had when you were two, Marguerite . . . the disease works fast. You were in a pediatric ICU, and the doctors told us we could lose you. The state of mind I was in then . . .” He trailed off, and when he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I would’ve made a deal with the devil. Any deal, any devil.”
I remembered my mother’s rage at Paul in a universe where he had only injured me. That alone had been enough to turn all her love for him into hate. My parents pride themselves on being rational, logical people, like the scientists they are, but maybe that’s made them more vulnerable to strong emotion. The same grief that wounds the rest of us deeply is something they can’t even begin to bear. No wonder Josie’s death had driven them mad.
“We have to act immediately.” Paul hadn’t looked me in the eyes since I’d become myself again. His head remained slightly bowed, as though he were too ashamed to lift it. “To do something to protect the dimensions in danger of being destroyed. Triad needs a perfect traveler’s cooperation to accomplish their plan quickly—but even without Marguerite, they have the Triadverse version of Wyatt Conley.”
“It didn’t sound to me like Conley was going to do any of this personally,” I said. Being a perfect traveler could be dangerous, as I’d learned. Conley talked a big game, but he preferred to protect himself and risk others. “And what does ‘slamming doors’ mean? Conley mentioned it, and so did she, but I don’t get what they’re referring to.”
My dad sighed. “Unfortunately, neither do we.”
“Wait a second.” Theo frowned as he stared down at the rainbow table. He lifted his cup of tea from the papers laid across its multicolored surface. “We have some very, very interesting equations here.”
Mom walked to his side. “What do you mean?”
“Not exactly a road map—but maybe a hint to the kinds of places they’re trying to go. The universes they’ll try to kill first.” Theo grabbed the pencil his doppelganger had left and picked up the work mid-equation.
“We know what they’ll all have in common—they’ll be the dimensions that version of Josie had visited before,” I said. “Those are the ones where the splinters of her soul are . . . buried, I guess.”
The splinters were too small to be collected with a Firebird, they’d told me. Nothing of Josie’s consciousness remained intact. She was dead, truly dead, and yet the Home Office had traced a bloody path to resurrection. By destroying the worlds in which Josie’s soul had existed, they hoped the splinters would slingshot back to their own universe—until finally enough splinters would come together to restore Josie body and soul.
Though if Paul was still so damaged from being splintered into four parts, what would Josie be after shattering into a thousand pieces?
“I’ve been thinking about the theoretical implications.” Paul sounded grateful to be dealing with math again rather than messy human emotions. “Triad will want to destroy source vectors as well—to take out multiple dimensions at once.”
All these years surrounded by scientists, you’d think I would’ve already learned every bit of technojargon I would ever need. Apparently not. I said, “What are source vectors?”
“Universes that generated many other universes valid for Triad’s purposes,” Mom said. No doubt my expression gave away my confusion, because she stopped and backed up. “For instance—in our world, and the Triadverse, and several others we’ve seen, Abraham Lincoln was assassina
ted by John Wilkes Booth. If you could find the one core universe where that event originated, and destroy that universe, you would in effect destroy all universes in which that event took place. That core universe would be a source vector. Do you see?”
“And you must understand, the timing of the significant event is completely irrelevant,” Dad cut in. “Dimensions wouldn’t just collapse. They would be . . . unmade. Even if the event took place centuries or millennia ago, destroy that source vector here and now, and it would unravel all the way back to the beginning of time.”
“Shortly after the Big Bang,” Mom interjected. We were literally talking about the apocalypse, but she still needed to be precise about when time began.
Every choice, however trivial, made a new quantum reality—another dimension unique in the multiverse. Each of the many worlds I’d visited so far, every other Marguerite I’d been: All of them would be demolished in an instant if someone found the choice back in time that led to my being born. Without that choice, that universe, none of the other Marguerites would exist. They would be unmade along with their dimensions, completely.
“Yes,” I said. “I get it. So the Home Office wants to destroy all the worlds Josie got lost in and some, uh, source vector worlds. How do we stop them? Wait. Hang on. How do they even do that? How do you destroy an entire dimension?”
The four scientists in the room exchanged glances. Their expressions looked almost . . . guilty.
I said, “Are you guys about to tell me Firebirds are way more dangerous than you ever said?”
“No!” Mom drew herself up, offended. “Honestly, Marguerite. We wouldn’t take those kinds of risks, ever.”
“Indeed not.” Dad paused, then added, “However, that doesn’t mean there’s not potential for danger with the Firebirds.”
“It’s sort of like when they fired up the Large Hadron Collider,” Theo offered. I knew all about this, even though it happened when I was hardly more than a baby. For physicists, the activation of the LHC was like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and New Year’s Eve wrapped into one, and my parents still talked about it once in a while. “Everybody was freaking out, like, ‘ahhh, the scientists are going to create a black hole.’ Which totally didn’t happen. Because, while it’s technically possible, it’s so incredibly improbable that the LHC could run for a billion years without a black hole opening in the center of the Earth.”
Theo’s explanation helped, but still, it gave me a turn—realizing I’d been carrying even a one-billionth chance of an apocalypse around my neck.
I looked down at my Firebird, which still dangled from its chain—blood-spattered from Paul’s wound, like the torn remnants of my green cardigan and the white dress exposed beneath. For me the Firebird had always meant hope, genius, adventure. But in that moment I knew I would never forget the bloodstains.
“So, how could the Firebird destroy a dimension?” Although I figured the answer probably involved an equation longer than a Harry Potter book, I felt like I had to say something.
But Paul had learned how to translate the hidden poetry of science for me better than anyone else ever had. “Remember what I told you when we went to see the redwoods? About the fundamental asymmetry of the universe?”
I could never forget that day. Muir Woods’ beauty made me feel like Paul and I had stepped into our own precious sliver of eternity. But I remembered the physics-lesson part of it too. “Most forces in physics are symmetrical. But somewhere in the nanoseconds after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter got thrown out of whack somehow, and nobody has any idea how. That asymmetry between matter and antimatter is what makes the universe possible. Is that right?”
“. . . close enough.”
My artist brain doesn’t wrap itself around the science stuff as easily as Paul’s does. He’d never make me feel bad about it on purpose—but tact is not exactly Paul’s wheelhouse.
Hastily he added, “It’s important because the Firebirds could restore the symmetry between matter and antimatter.”
“What? How?” My mind was reeling. “Why would you ever make a device that could do that?”
Theo had overheard us. “Marguerite, that’s close to how Firebirds work in the first place. The dimensional resonances we’re always talking about, the ones that make your eyes glaze over? Those are the imbalances specific to each universe. The Firebird basically . . . surfs that imbalance, finds where it’s supposed to be, and brings you along. Tune the Firebird to attack that imbalance instead of detecting it, and . . .” Theo’s voice trailed off, and he just spread his hands outward, as if miming an explosion.
Paul, of course, couldn’t let a gesture end a scientific explanation. “The rest would take care of itself. Dimensional collapse would fold outward wthin—no. There’s no point in saying how long it would take, because the collapse would even destroy time.”
“But the Firebirds could also increase the asymmetry!” Dad said, lighting up. “It would be trickier, by a measure, but still, we could do it. The Firebird’s power might require a booster, of course . . .”
“It would.” Mom’s quicksilver mind was already a few steps ahead. “But if we could enhance the Firebirds’ power, through a fairly simple device—some sort of stabilizer we could construct in each universe, then we could increase the asymmetry in each universe. That would make it much more difficult for Triad to collapse those universes. We could slow down Triad’s work. Maybe even stop them altogether.”
It made more sense to me then—the potential within the Firebirds. Their power could unmake a world or preserve it forever. Infinite good and infinite evil, all enclosed within one locket that hung right above my heart.
By that point, Mom, Dad, and Theo were deeply embroiled in the equations. I wanted so badly to steal a few moments of privacy to talk with Paul. He needed to remember who he was, to shake off the melancholy and fatalism that still haunted him.
If he couldn’t overcome it, I hadn’t actually saved Paul. I’d only put together the pieces of a man broken beyond repair. Even thinking that made me want to hug him tightly, as if I could sink into him so deeply that my love could seal all the cracks, heal him, make him whole.
But like I said—I had more urgent problems than my love life. So did the rest of the multiverse.
“I have to go after her,” I announced. “Don’t I?”
Everyone else exchanged worried glances. I realized they’d all independently come to the conclusion that I’d have to go back into danger, but nobody had wanted to be the first to say it. Dad replied, “Sweetheart—as much as I hate this—we need to know which worlds they’re targeting. For certain. Theo’s equations will help, but the only way to be certain which dimensions are most in danger is for you to check them out.”
“I could go.” Paul’s voice was rough. “Theo too. Or the two of you. It doesn’t have to be Marguerite.”
“Yes, it does,” I insisted. His protectiveness moved me, but I couldn’t let him get away with it. I was the perfect traveler, which made me the one who slipped into each universe most easily. The one who could retain focus and control throughout. For any other trip, that might be no more than a matter of convenience. But for this? We had to respond as powerfully and quickly as we could. That meant me. I turned to my parents. “My Firebird should be able to track hers, right?”
It was Theo who finally managed to answer. “Yeah. Your two Firebirds were together for a while—we could pick up on her traces fast.”
“Do it.” I held the Firebird out to Paul. Although he hesitated, he got to work.
My mother said, “Your counterpart can’t collapse the universes without killing herself. But she could be . . . laying groundwork. Preparing each world for your eventual cooperation, or for suicide missions by others.”
If the Home Office versions of my parents and Wyatt Conley were willing to destroy entire dimensions to get Josie back, they’d think nothing of asking one person from their own world to die too. For a moment it hit me with dizzying for
ce: Literally trillions of lives were at stake, and I was the only person with the power to save them. But I held on. “Wait. Wouldn’t the universe’s destruction slingshot her home? That’s what your Home Office selves think will happen to the splinters of Josie’s soul.”
Dad nodded. He looked as if he’d aged five years in an hour. “That’s probably what would happen to a perfect traveler—you or the Home Office’s Josie—but not to your other self or to anyone else trying to destroy a universe with a Firebird. That destruction has consequences. It forges chains. It’s as if . . . as if you were freeing a ship from anchor, but the only way to do it was by taking hold of that anchor yourself. While the ship sails free, the anchor drags you down to the bottom of the ocean. A perfect traveler would be able to overcome that, with the Firebird’s help. But anyone else would be done for.”
As unnerved as my parents were at the prospect, I felt slightly reassured. Maybe that should’ve embarrassed me—the fact that I could kind of handle the idea of an entire universe’s death if I knew I could escape. But traveling between dimensions involved enough danger already; any protection at all made me feel safer. So I let my parents show me how to use the Firebird to stabilize a universe. I refused to learn how to destroy one, because that was not a thing I was ever, ever going to do. Paul remained nearby, grave and quiet, still not looking me in the face.
It was Theo who raised a question I hadn’t considered. “Are you even going to be able to follow her?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“If she’s not in her own dimension, then she’s already occupying a version of her in another world. Can two people leap into the same host?” He shrugged. “Seriously, no clue.”
Mom made a face. “I knew we ought to have run simulations on that.”
It didn’t seem like a big deal. Either I’d be able to do it or I wouldn’t, and if I could, I’d be in charge, because I was the perfect traveler, not Wicked. Then a ghastly possibility occurred to me. “We wouldn’t, like, fuse together or something, would we?”