A Million Worlds With You

  That catches me short. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. The profoundness of the violation—the intimacy and brutality of it—makes me shudder. “You’re back together now. I know it was terrible, but you’ll get better.”

  “This isn’t a cut you can fix with a Band-Aid. It goes deeper.” Clearly struggling for the right words, Paul remains silent for a few long seconds before he speaks again. “My thoughts don’t unfold the way they should. My feelings control me too much. From as far back as I can remember, I fought to be a different kind of man from my father. But sometimes I find myself wanting to react the way he would. Other times, the anger or sorrow seems to come out of nowhere; it doesn’t have anything to do with me but it takes me over.”

  “You’re not going to turn into your father.” This much I believe absolutely.

  “Maybe not. But I have no idea what I am going to turn into. Only one thing is certain. I’m not the same person you fell in love with. I’ve changed more than you could ever realize. And I will never be the same again.” His gray eyes finally meet mine. “You should get out while you can.”

  He walks away, so now we are both in despair, both alone.

  After a moment, I decide to stay in the tomb.

  I wasn’t lying when I told Theo my work would be the ideal distraction. That day, I remain in the passageway for hours, sketching as delicately and accurately as I can. The beauty of the paintings on the walls touches me even through my misery, and I imagine my long-ago counterpart, no doubt wearing the thin white cotton robe and elaborate beaded collar they always show in movies about ancient Egypt. Copying that person’s work with every detail, every highlight, is the highest tribute I can pay to the original artist. And getting it right lets me feel like I’ve succeeded at something amid all this failure. I need that feeling more than I should.

  The only time my work becomes difficult is when tears blur my vision. But I dab them away and keep going.

  Although I want to go after Paul, I don’t. As badly as he’s hurting, maybe right now that’s what he needs. When we’re in pain, people are too quick to say, Get over it, move on, it’s not that bad. But we don’t get over grief by denying it. We have to feel it. We have to give it its due. Sometimes that means doing the exact opposite of “moving on.” We have to dive down to the very depths of our sorrow, relive every terrible moment, and endure the torture of asking what could have been—and what will now be. We have to bleed out before our hearts can start beating again.

  That’s what Paul is doing now. Bleeding out.

  After a few hours, I finally hear footsteps in the stone passageway. Hope lifts me away from my work, and I look in that direction, eager to see him. Instead, Theo walks in. It takes all my self-control not to let my disappointment show.

  “How’s the work going?” Theo steps closer, hands behind his back. “Our Russian friend seems to be in a terrible temper. Has been ever since he left you behind.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about it.” This Theo probably believes Paul and I had a spat, and this is his big opportunity. I have exactly zero patience to deal with that.

  He wipes his brow, which has a fine sheen of sweat. “The only escape from the damned heat is in the homes of the dead. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Never thought of it that way.” The air is cool and musty in here, which wouldn’t seem like such sweet relief if the alternative were anything but the scorching sun of the desert. “I should probably go back to the campsite, huh?”

  “No rush. Take your time, Meg.”

  Meg.

  No wonder he sounded so familiar. The Triadverse Theo has followed me here.

  I turn to look at this Theo—the one who kidnapped my father, framed Paul for murder, and helped Wicked hijack my body. When he sees the recognition in my eyes, he sighs. “I knew it. Am I really the only one in the multiverse who nicknamed you Meg?”

  “Yes. Are you here to inject me with Nightthief again?” I demand.

  “No,” Theo says as he steps closer. Now I can see that he’s pale, and his movements have become slow, reluctant. Whatever he’s here to do is bad.

  My only potential weapons are a box of colored pencils and a sketchpad. But I bet a pencil to the eye would stop almost anyone.

  “Listen to me.” He holds up his hands, and I pause, unsure what he’s going to pull next. “I know you’re angry with Conley and Triad, and I don’t blame you. But don’t let your temper blind you to what’s really going on here. You can turn this whole thing around in a second, just by agreeing to cooperate.”

  “Stop trying to negotiate with me!” I back away from him, although this only leads me farther into the tomb, away from the exit. “When will you guys at Triad get it through your thick skulls that I’m never, ever working for you? How do you not see that this is crazy?”

  “Actually, yes, I do see it,” Theo says, and this may be the first time he’s ever told me the entire truth. “If I’d known at the start this was what I was getting into, no way in hell would I have signed up. But now I’m here. Now I know. And if any universes are going to be destroyed, I intend to be in one of the ones left standing.”

  I can’t argue with his goals, but I have a big problem with his methods. “This isn’t just about saving your skin. It’s about saving trillions of lives. Literally! How can you not fight this with everything you’ve got?”

  “Because everything I’ve got isn’t enough to stop them! Meg, will you calm down and think? It’s too late. Triad is too far ahead. You want to start running a race with them while they’re about an inch short of the finish line. How pointless is that? Conley and Triad still want you on their side, despite everything—”

  The sound I make can only be called a snort. “Oh, yeah, they’ve got so much to forgive me for.”

  Theo grimaces in exasperation. “Dammit, why are you doing this to yourself? There’s still time for you to save your whole dimension! Billions of people there, every animal, every plant on the entire Earth—you’re risking them all in this crazy chase. Don’t you owe them your loyalty first?”

  I never thought about it in terms of loyalty. If I could only protect one dimension, wouldn’t it have to be the one I call home?

  But I refuse to let Theo turn this around on me. “I’m not the one putting my universe in danger. That’s Triad’s responsibility.”

  “All I’m saying is, your actions have consequences.” Theo’s face is heavily shadowed in the dim passageway. He has yet to take up the heavy flashlight dangling from his belt. “Those other universes could be no more than—choices nobody ever made.”

  For the length of one breath, I am no longer in Egypt. Instead, I lie beneath warm furs in a dacha in Russia while a snowstorm rages outside and Paul holds me close. At the same time, I sit in an opulent Parisian hotel room, hand splayed across my belly, dizzy with the new knowledge that in that dimension I carried Paul’s child.

  I have regretted making that choice for the grand duchess ever since—and yet it would be infinitely worse to erase that choice, all those lives, that dimension forever.

  “Those people deserve a chance to live,” I tell Theo. “They have the right to create their own destiny.”

  “You haven’t always respected your other selves’ choices so carefully, have you?” Even in the darkness I can see the spark of anger in Theo’s eyes.

  “I’ve messed up,” I admit. “More than once. But what you’re talking about is different.”

  Theo shoots back, “So where do you draw the line, Meg? Anywhere you like, as long as I’m on the wrong side of it?”

  I could scream. “Cut out the stupid word games! I made a mistake, but you’re deliberately committing genocide! That is way, way off the scale of anything I would ever do. And you know what else? My Theo wouldn’t ever do that either. So how did you get so screwed up?”

  He lunges toward me. His tackle catches me under the ribs, knocking the breath out of me and sending my pencils flying. I claw at his face as Theo g
rabs my lace scarf, which comes loose from my hat. His knee presses down my left arm as he straddles me and fumbles around my throat.

  The Firebird! He’s going to steal the Firebird! I struggle to get him off me, but I can’t, not even when I realize he isn’t going for the Firebird at all. Not even as the lace scarf tightens around my throat.

  I can’t breathe.

  Theo is strangling me.

  My larynx feels like it’s being smashed into my spine. My pulse is fast and hard and with every beat the scarf seems to be cutting into my skin.

  “Jump,” Theo says. He’s crying; tears trickle down the cheek he’s turned toward me so that he won’t have to see my face while he does this. “I left you one hand free. Grab the Firebird and jump.”

  I could do it, but then this Marguerite—and maybe this entire dimension—dies.

  Desperately I thrash beneath him, or try to thrash. I paw feebly at his tense arms. It’s no use. Theo has me pinned with all his weight and strength, and I can’t breathe. Dizziness floods me. My tongue feels too thick for my mouth. I can hardly hear over the roar of my own blood in my ears.

  “Meg, please!” Theo sobs once. “Please, don’t make me kill both of you.”

  I’m about to black out. With my last strength, as Theo begins to blur and darken above my eyes, I hit the controls on the Firebird and—

  I am surrounded by the void.

  Complete darkness. Complete silence. I have no weight, no body.

  Oh, God.

  I’m dead.

  8

  I CAN’T BE DEAD.

  I mean it—I can’t. My heart beats in my chest, harder and faster as it responds to the mortal fear of another dimension, another Marguerite. So I must have leaped through dimensions. But I can’t feel where my arms and legs are. There’s no up, no down.

  Before I jumped, I had no chance to ask myself whether or not I could. If Wicked hadn’t moved along, I would’ve been stuck there with Theo strangling me to death . . .

  I shudder. I must be alive, if I can shudder. And yet now I remember how it feels to die.

  Did I leap into the same body as Wicked after all? I know that’s impossible, but I can’t come up with any other explanation for why I’m here in a total void. Am I just stuck in the corner of this Marguerite’s mind until Wicked moves along? Maybe this is how it feels to exist only in someone’s imagination.

  Something brushes against my cheek, and I startle. The hands I couldn’t sense a couple of seconds ago automatically come to my face to check. Turns out my curls are floating around me as if I were underwater. Okay, body parts intact equals good, but what the hell is going on?

  Metal begins to clank and whirr, the unmistakable sounds of machinery at work. Light filters in from behind me, dim at first, then brightening. Turning around is difficult; I have to writhe with my whole body to do it, and by now nausea has begun to wring my stomach. Finally I manage to get a look at what’s going on. Enormous plates are shuttering upward as if being folded, and as they fold they reveal—

  —Earth. As in, the whole planet. Which I am not currently on.

  Outer space. You’re in outer space. Deep breaths. I can’t talk myself down. Oh, my freaking God I’m in outer space! There’s no oxygen in space!

  Of course there’s oxygen here—wherever this is—because I’m breathing. But for how long?

  Never, ever have I liked heights. I’m not phobic or anything, but I’m one of the ones you have to tell not to look down no matter what. Now there’s nowhere to look but down.

  Red lights begin to flash, and I hear a female computer voice say, “Warning. Plasma venting in four minutes.” A male computer voice says something else afterward in another language, one I can’t identify, because I’m facing my second life-or-death crisis in five minutes and this is the closest I’ve ever come to passing out from terror.

  Pull it together! Nobody’s going to save me but me. Now that there’s enough light in this chamber, I can see tons of openings—most of them square and small, as well as a single, large, round one that looks like it might be some kind of door. Please, let that be a door. It’s the only chance I’ve got.

  I try to move toward that opening, basically attempting to swim through whatever air is in here, but that doesn’t work. It leaves me simply flailing in space, barely moving forward at all. Quickly I scan the area being revealed around me, this section of whatever enormous machine contains me now. If I could touch one of the walls, I could pull myself along the surface until I reached what I really, truly, sincerely hope is a way out.

  The closest one is beneath me, if “beneath” has any meaning up here. So I wriggle in that general direction, moving so slowly I want to scream.

  “Three minutes to plasma venting,” intones the computer voice, with her male echo just after. Three minutes isn’t long enough—at least fifty feet separate me and that opening, and I don’t even think I’ll be able to touch the nearest surface before then.

  Another voice echoes through the chamber. “Marguerite? What are you doing?”

  “Mom!” Where is she? I can’t see her, but it doesn’t matter. She can see me. “Get me out of here!”

  The metal plates stop moving. My vista on planet Earth gets no wider. The computer voice intones, “Plasma venting aborted.”

  I should be happy. I should be cheering and laughing, especially now that a mechanical tow arm is unfolding from the wall to bring me in.

  Instead, I want to cry.

  I lost the Egyptverse Marguerite too. I had chances to save them and failed. And this time Theo was the one who did it—Theo—

  Will I be able to save anybody? How many Marguerites have to die?

  “What were you thinking?” My dad is questioning my sanity for the second time in two days, and I don’t blame him. Wicked leaves a trail of crazy wherever she goes.

  Dad and Mom sit on either side of me in the space station Astraeus—at least, that’s the symbol and name stamped on the sleeves of the pale blue coveralls we wear. Mercifully, this place has gravity, or at least a good approximation of it, in its rotating central sphere. This appears to be the safe area where scientists and their families work and live. The four huge fans that spread out around it collect solar energy; the pods beneath the fans collect unnecessary plasma (whatever that is), the better to vent it into space.

  I was less than three minutes from being shot into outer space along with the plasma when Mom picked up on some odd readings in the atmospheric chamber.

  “The sensors in there don’t warn us about human intrusion, because no one’s supposed to bloody go in!” Dad only gets this angry when he’s scared. “What possessed you?”

  Possessed. That’s closer to the truth than he can ever know. And it tells me how to play this. “Dad, something’s wrong with me. I mean, mentally. I’ve been doing this stuff I can’t understand, and sometimes I don’t even remember doing it. This time I could’ve gotten killed. What happens next time?”

  Mom’s and Dad’s eyes both widen, and Mom puts her arms around me. “She may need medication, Henry. Certainly she needs to see a doctor.”

  “On Earth?” I say hopefully. Maybe I should think it’s supercool being in outer space, but I want to be back on the ground. I want all the air I can breathe. I want real gravity. I want a sky. I want to stop thinking about Theo strangling me to death.

  “It won’t come to that. You can stay on the station.” Mom seems to think that will make me feel better. “We’ll take you off-duty for a few days and let you rest. Get some sleep.”

  What kind of duties could I possibly have on a space station? Probably it’s a little like the deep-sea station from the Oceanverse, where everyone has to help out—but there I only had to check some weather readings and tie down some cables. The potential for screwing up seems way, way higher in outer space.

  “You have been behaving strangely of late,” Dad admits. His hand brushes through my hair. “Yesterday you were in such a mood—and you didn’t se
em to remember who the Beatles were, which makes no sense whatsoever.”

  I laugh despite myself. The Beatles appear to be another universal constant: If they can exist, they will. And if the Beatles exist, my father will be their number-one fan. “I remember them now. But I don’t remember not remembering them, if that makes sense.”

  My parents exchange worried glances. They’re probably afraid I’m on the verge of some kind of psychotic break. Good. Because they need to keep an eye on this Marguerite until I stop Wicked, who could come back at any time and try to finish what she started.

  But other dangers chase us, too. I put one hand to my throat, haunted by the memory of pain.

  Mom gets to her feet, towing me with her, and Dad follows suit. I can feel the difference from Earth gravity. I’m slightly lighter here, which adds a surreal edge to every moment, every move. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get you checked out.”

  The Astraeus turns out to be neither as cramped as the real space stations I’ve seen on TV in my dimension nor as roomy and comfortable as they are in the movies. The walls and floors are made of brushed metal, slightly dinged from long wear. The ceilings are black and lined with small, faint lights. Handles jut out from odd places—up high, down near the floor, etc.—but the handles don’t seem to lead to anything. Huh. The few windows are small, revealing only the smallest circles of blackness; I make it a point not to look through any of them. Corridors are short and lead to broader spaces, which aren’t divided like they would be in an office but clearly have defined roles—various scientific stations. My parents both wear small Canadian flag emblems at their collars, and I bet I do too, but I also glimpse the flags of Mexico, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and what I think is the flag of India. Some flags I can’t identify, but this definitely seems to be an international setup.