A Million Worlds With You

by Claudia Gray

  “Then why did you not stop her from painting this abomination? To depict Adam alone at the Creation, without Eve, mother of humanity?” Pope Martha waves some kind of golden staff around the enormous space enclosing us.

  Finally it hits me that this is the Sistine Chapel—only now coming into existence, only now turning into a masterpiece. Instead of Michelangelo, another painter has the honor of creating this work, and apparently I am one of that painter’s apprentices. Awestruck, I roll onto my back again and stare at this painting, which I now recognize as a wholly original interpretation of the creation of man, the moment Adam receives the spark of consciousness from God. I get to help paint the Sistine Chapel! That makes this absolutely, utterly, the most magnificent universe I’ve ever been to. My misery about my split with Paul evaporates for one beautiful moment, leaving me to feel nothing but pure wonder.

  “Still you refuse to answer!” bellows the pope, which reminds me to move.

  “Forgive me, Your Holiness,” I call. “May I come down and address you directly? With, uh, the respect you deserve?” That sounds like the kind of thing you might say to a pope.

  After a moment’s silence, Pope Martha III replies, “It shall be permitted.”

  Turns out this scaffolding was built by people with hugely exaggerated ideas of how acrobatic most artists are. It takes me a while to work my way down, and I’m panting by the time I do. But I use that time to think about how I can possibly answer her question, since I have no idea who my “mistress” is, why the pope isn’t bitching at her directly, or the reason behind any of the artistic choices she made.

  Pope Martha can’t be taller than five foot two. She’s older, nearly elderly, and her shoulders have begun to stoop. But a sense of power radiates from her as surely as any light. This woman knows her anger can make emperors tremble—and right now, she’s angry with me.

  “Your Holiness,” I begin. Should I curtsy? Can’t hurt. So I do it, then start talking fast. “As I understand it, my, um, mistress plans to paint the creation of Eve as an entirely separate panel. She wants to individually portray the Father and Mother of humanity before she brings them together to tell the rest of the story of the Creation.”

  Pope Martha says nothing, and I find her silence ominous. If Wicked somehow figured out how to frame me for heresy in medieval times—well, I’d have to give her points for creativity. But I don’t think that’s it. Honestly, I don’t seem to be in any danger at all.

  Instead of fear, I feel only the quiet anguish of knowing that Paul and I have been divided from each other . . . maybe forever.

  The pope finally proclaims, “If true, that explanation is satisfactory. But I shall expect a full accounting of her plans for the ceiling when Mistress Annunziata returns from the Dolomites.”

  I nod. “Absolutely. Your Holiness.” Gotta remember to add that every time.

  “She keeps her plans secret, and still has the audacity to complain about what she is paid!” Pope Martha begins to pace, and her elegant flock of courtiers moves back, with rustles of silk, to give her room. “Does she dare to dicker with her pontiff? I have seen her wearing golden chains, fine dresses, even jewels.” The pope’s hand goes to her throat, like she’s pantomiming some necklace she saw on Mistress Annunziata. Then her eyes focus sharply on me, and she cries, “Look at this! She is so generously compensated that even her apprentices can wear chains!”

  With that, she grabs the chain of the Firebird and yanks it off my neck.

  Damn! Most people from this dimension would never see the Firebird unless their attention had been drawn to it, but Pope Martha was thinking about the exact right thing at the precise moment her eyes focused on me. Since she was thinking about what someone wears around her neck, she saw what was around mine.

  My first instinct is to tackle her and get it back, immediately, but my guess is that physically attacking the pope would not end well. I try to think of an explanation that might work. “That isn’t something I bought,” I manage to say. “It’s a—a family heirloom, Your Holiness. My mother handed it down to me.” Which is more or less the truth, actually. “Please, I—”

  “Her Holiness would never wish to deprive a lowly apprentice of her one valuable possession,” murmurs one of the courtiers as she steps forward. “Her mercy and generosity are praised throughout Christendom.”

  I’ve seen this courtier before, in this world and several others: It’s Romola Harrington. My entire body tenses, because in the Home Office, she’s one of Wyatt Conley’s many underlings. She’s slipped into various dimensions to interfere with me before. And yet I’ve also run across her in worlds where she was only herself, and even where we were friends. She’s someone on the very farthest reaches of the orbit that contains my family, Paul, Theo and Conley—someone who might be tied to us, or might not.

  Has the Home Office’s Romola come here to entrap me? Or is this merely the Romeverse version behaving the way she normally would?

  “You should ask forgiveness for doubting your pontiff’s charity,” Romola says. She’s supposedly scolding me, but I can tell she’s actually playing to Pope Martha’s vanity to make sure I get the Firebird back.

  “I do. Please forgive me, Your Holiness.” I drop another curtsy, just in case.

  Pope Martha airily holds out the Firebird and gives it to Romola. “Return this trinket to the girl, Lady Romola.”

  Oh, no. Romola’s got the Firebird. If this one is working for Conley, there’s no way she’ll ever give it back. But I could tackle her, at least once we’re no longer in the pope’s presence . . .

  No need. Romola only runs her hands over the Firebird in a show of admiration—over and over, almost creepily—but then smiles and hands it back to me. “What an interesting necklace. How good of your mother to give it to you.”

  I manage a smile as the locket settles into my palm. “Yes, milady.”

  Maybe “milady” is laying it on a bit thick, but I don’t care. I’m swimming in the relief of knowing this Romola is the one who belongs in this dimension, and having the Firebird once again around my neck. It’s one small victory to set against the devastation of losing Paul.

  Pope Martha dismisses me, saying, “Back to Trastevere with you, girl. And tell those lunatic parents of yours that I expect to review their planetary charts shortly.”

  “Thank you, Your Holiness.” This time I bow deeply, and with sincerity, because I really don’t want to spend any more time around a touchy pope. Yet I take my time walking out, traversing the nave at a leisurely pace. I’d be a fool to waste a single moment I can spend looking at the wonder of the Sistine Chapel, midcreation.

  When I step outside, into the late-afternoon light and the bustle of Rome’s streets, I’m able to clear my head and think.

  That wasn’t an attempt to kill me. Yeah, the pope was unhappy, but it was Mistress Annunziata she was really angry with. Besides, I don’t think she’d have had either of us executed. Michelangelo acted like a total brat with Pope Julius II for years, and I think the worst punishment he ever faced was a delay in payment.

  So why did Wicked bring me here?

  Maybe her trip to the Romeverse was accidental. Theo once told me some universes are “mathematically similar” to others, meaning that if your calculations were the smallest bit off, you might wind up in a completely different dimension. Wicked could’ve come here, realized she was in the wrong place, and hung around just to keep me trapped on the space station she’d scheduled for destruction. When she couldn’t think of an effective way to kill off this Marguerite, she decided to use this universe as a holding cell rather than a potential murder weapon.

  That makes perfect sense, I say to the Paul in my mind, as if he were here to work through this with me. In fact, that’s got to be the most likely explanation. The next universe is the one I should probably be worried about.

  Still, as long as I’m in the Romeverse, I have to stay on guard.

  My breakup with Paul should hurt more than
it does. Right now it’s as if I’m in shock—numb to the pain. They say people who have an arm or leg amputated often feel it for months or even years afterward, the nerve endings still sending signals about itches and sensations that are no longer real. A phantom limb, that’s what they call it. Maybe that’s what I’m feeling now, this sense that Paul can’t really have broken up with me, that he’s still by my side.

  He is, in the most important ways, I remind myself, squaring my shoulders. He’s working with you to save the other Marguerites and protect the multiverse. So concentrate on what matters.

  Although I’ve never visited the Vatican back home, I know from movies and TV that it’s this gloriously old-fashioned palace and cathedral, usually surrounded by flocks of tourists. St. Peter’s is, if anything, even more imposing here, where no other buildings seem to be even three stories high. Its enormous dome soars above the various earthen-colored brick buildings clustered nearby. The city keeps no respectful distance. Instead the dirt roads around the Vatican are crowded with groups of rosary-clutching pilgrims, vendors selling fruit or bread from mule carts, or intently chatting monks in their cassocks. My last journey to the Romeverse was brief and frantic, taking place entirely at night. Looking at the scene in the late-afternoon light gives me the chance to truly experience something very like our own Middle Ages.

  It doesn’t take away the fear and urgency I feel. Doesn’t mend my broken heart. But I can’t let Conley and Triad turn the Firebird into nothing more than a weapon. The chance to see other worlds is a gift—priceless and irreplaceable. Even now, I have to hold on to my sense of wonder at the knowledge that I’m standing in a whole new world.

  I walk into the crowd for a bit, mostly just to take in the sights and smells. The smells dominate. This is ye olden days, in which they had no deodorant. Also, nobody has the job of cleaning up after the mules. Even the stink is kind of interesting, though. It makes me appreciate home.

  I need to find my home here in the Romeverse. That’s not someplace I reached on my first trip, and it’s not like I know my way around the city. Nor were medieval people big on road signs. When a nun walks near me on the road, her wimple almost comically broad-winged, I stop her. “Excuse me, Sister, but I’m lost.”

  Like every other word I’ve uttered in the Romeverse, I say this in either early Italian or late-stage Latin. The language skills we learn as babies are more deeply ingrained in the memory than almost anything else, meaning dimensional travelers automatically speak whatever languages their hosts do.

  The nun smiles beatifically at me. “Can I help you, my child? Where do you need to go?”

  I want to say, To the Castel Sant’Angelo. That’s where Paul is—Father Paul, in this dimension, a priest who should not love me but so desperately does. I want to feel Paul’s love for me again.

  But if it doesn’t come from my Paul—the one I love most of all—it’s not enough for me. Not anymore.

  “To Trastevere,” I say instead, hoping I remember how Pope Martha pronounced that. “Do you know where the inventors live?”

  Finding Trastevere turns out to be easy enough. The neighborhood isn’t very far from the Vatican, nestled below the hills and right by the bank of the Tiber. Most of the city lies on the other side, including the majority of the crumbling monuments of the Roman Empire. The houses here are humble, made of whitewashed brick or stucco in various shades of earthy orange, pink, and gold.

  As for finding the inventors—the nun had no idea, but it turns out I didn’t need any extra help. Atop one of the taller buildings, I see a copper dome approximately the size of a MINI Cooper, with a wide slit in the middle. From that opening projects what has to be this dimension’s very first telescope.

  Yeah, I’m home.

  “Hello?” I call as I come through the door. “Is anyone here?”

  “We’re up here, darling!” My mother’s voice comes from above, no doubt from the observatory/attic. In one corner of the room is the wooden ladder that leads up and down. The room itself looks like one Vermeer might have painted, with its simple wooden furniture, its wide fireplace, and only a couple of images on the wall for decoration—sketches of mine, showing my family in robes and caps.

  “Just polishing the lenses.” That’s Dad, who must be beside Mom upstairs. “Tonight promises to be clear, which means we’ll finally get a good look at Jupiter!”

  My parents: always different, always the same. I want to see them wearing their medieval clothes—this could provide prime fodder for teasing later on, once we’ve gotten through all of this. I need to feel like eventually I will laugh again.

  But first we have to get through it, which means continuing the chase the very first moment I can.

  Probably Wicked won’t have moved on yet. That last scenario of hers was crafty, so I think she’s taking her time. Planning things out more carefully. Setting traps within traps. That’s not the kind of thing you accomplish in only an hour or so. (This world’s technological level allows for more sundials than clocks, so I can only estimate how long I’ve been here.) Still, I have to try. So I sit down on one of the benches by the table, take the Firebird from my robes, and hit the controls to jump.

  I don’t shift universes. Not surprising.

  But at that moment—the exact same instant—the ground lurches, sending crockery tumbling to the floor and making my parents cry out. I hear yells from outside, too. We’re experiencing an earthquake.

  As a native of the Bay Area, and therefore someone who has spent most of her life perched directly atop the San Andreas Fault, I’m familiar with tremors. The one that just shook Rome wasn’t even that strong.

  Still, it happened the very moment I activated the Firebird.

  In my head I can hear both my parents saying, as they have a hundred times before, Correlation is not causation. Just because two things happen in proximity to each other doesn’t necessarily mean one of them caused the other.

  When one of those things is a device capable of destroying entire dimensions, though . . .

  That’s incredibly unlikely. They all said so, and I know them well enough to understand that they’d never even have considered building a Firebird if it weren’t absolutely true.

  Unlikely. But not impossible.

  The ground shudders again, longer this time. Longer earthquakes are more powerful.

  What if—what if this was Wicked’s plan? What if she came up with a way to destroy this dimension without my help, set it in motion, and fled?

  This time she might not be murdering me. She might be murdering this entire world.

  12

  COME ON, I SAY TO MYSELF AS I SWEEP THE PLANK FLOOR after the shaking dies down. If this dimension were collapsing, it probably would be a whole lot more dramatic than an earthquake that’s barely a five on the Richter scale. And I didn’t do anything unusual or weird with the Firebird, just hit the exact same function I’ve hit dozens of times before.

  Besides, the tremors have stopped. It’s been at least twenty minutes since the earthquake. That’s long enough for my family and the rest of the neighborhood to start cleaning up.

  “If we could only understand the principles that cause these tremors,” Mom says. She’s wearing what looks like a workday dress of brown cloth, and her hair is tied up in a kerchief much like mine. Given how haphazardly she dresses at home, honestly, this getup doesn’t even look that much different. “But I have never hit upon an explanation that could satisfy all the possibilities. People are so willing to declare them the work of God, without ever asking how God accomplishes his will on Earth.”

  Dad has on breeches, a loose white shirt, and a cap that looks so much like an elf’s that, despite everything, I nearly laughed out loud when I first saw it. As he examines the plates on the floor for chips or cracks, he says, “I feel certain it is connected to mountains, somehow. Does not the terrain rise or fall after some earthquakes? Are not new crevasses cut into the ground?”

  “It’s definitely connec
ted to mountains,” I babble as I brush the dust over our threshold, into the street where neighbors are mending shutters or soothing startled horses. Right, yes, think about the textbook explanation of an earthquake. That’s the reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with your Firebird. Not a thing. “I’m guessing that, uh, the surface of the earth is made up of enormous tectonic plates that cover large sections of the globe. When the plates move together or apart, they create earthquakes. Over time the friction between plates builds mountain ranges. Volcanoes, too.”

  There is nothing more priceless than the looks on my parents’ faces as they stare at me. For once, I actually know more science than they do. If only I could enjoy this more, instead of struggling to swallow my panic.

  “Remarkable,” my mother finally says. “When did you begin to draw such conclusions?”

  Oh, man. How did people figure out plate tectonics again? “Um, logic, I guess. And it’s not like you can’t see on a map how Africa and South America used to fit together.”

  My parents exchange confused glances, and Dad asks, “What is ‘South America’?”

  Whoops. “Oh! That’s just—it’s irrelevant. But you should look into the whole plate tectonics thing. I bet my theory checks out.”

  Mom’s and Dad’s big genius brains go into simultaneous overdrive, a state of mind that can leave them in conversation for hours, their words and thoughts overlapping so fast that nobody else could ever understand.

  My mood darkens again as I recall the first tremor, and the way it exactly followed my attempt to use the Firebird. No matter how convincing the plate tectonics explanation is, this coincidence is too neat for me to dismiss. Nor have I tried to leap out of this dimension again. It’s going to be a while before I feel safe doing that.

  Not causation, I think. But correlation can be meaningful in other ways. Maybe my Firebird didn’t cause this. Maybe my device and the earthquake were just . . . linked, somehow.