by Claudia Gray
“Please,” Paul shouts over the ever-louder roar. “Trust me, Marguerite. Believe me.”
And I do. I believe him.
I duck my head for the Firebird. He drops it around my neck and wraps one arm around me to steady me against the tremors. “Take hold of the Firebird and hit the controls on my mark. Ready?”
“Yes.” Lines of fire have begun to race along the ground in intricate spirals, rising ever higher into an apocalyptic blaze. Smoke and sulfur bellow from the tears in the earth. William Blake couldn’t have imagined this hell.
“Now!” Paul shouts, and I leap away, leaving the end of the world behind.
14
I SLAM INTO MYSELF AND STUMBLE INTO THE WALL. SHAKING, I brace myself with both hands long enough to take a few deep breaths. I’m alive. I made it.
Paul—whichever Paul that was—rescued me from a world on the verge of collapsing into eternal nothingness and brought me here. But where is “here”?
Wherever it is, gravity works, the sky isn’t spiraling into fire, and the earth isn’t caving in with lava-filled crevasses, so I’ll take it.
I’m inside, out of any rain or wind or unholy flame. Lights are on, and I’m not in pain, and never before have I been so keenly aware that this is all anyone really needs. Everything else about human existence is merely . . . extra.
But I still need to understand exactly where I’ve been brought, and why.
My attention turns first to the Firebird hanging around my neck. The metalwork on this one has been more crudely fashioned—it has rough edges compared to the ornate curls of my parents’ handiwork at home. The locket hangs shorter, too, thanks to a more compact chain with thicker links. Even the weight is different—heavier, both the Firebird and the chain. What universe’s creation is this?
I step away from the wall and look around the room I’m in. First I see a bed, a simple metal frame with a plain black blanket, but nearby there’s a desk of battered wood, atop which sits an old-timey electric typewriter, connected to the wall with an absurdly thick black power cord. In one corner stands a metal filing cabinet. To judge from that and the uninspiring fluorescent light tubes overhead, I’d guess this is an office repurposed to serve as a bedroom. But why?
One door. I go to it and try the knob. It’s locked. At first I think I must have locked someone out, but that’s not how door locks work. Someone else has shut me in. Why?
The final step is studying myself, though there’s not much here to go by. I’m wearing slightly clunky black shoes, a plain, dark blue skirt that hangs just past my knees, a button-up shirt of cheap cloth, and—I lift my hands to my curly hair—a shorter style this time, maybe a bob.
This feels familiar. . . .
Two sharp raps on the door make me jump, but I pull myself together quickly. Whoever is on the other side of the door must be my captor. “Come in.”
Paul steps through, wearing a military uniform I recognize. As he looks at me, his expression shifts from the deepest relief to what he must hope looks like calm. “You made it.”
“We’re in the Warverse,” I say. “Where Theo and I came a couple of weeks ago.”
“You remember me.” Paul can’t meet my eyes any longer. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It hasn’t even been a month. . . .” My voice trails off. He didn’t literally believe I would have forgotten him so soon. He just thought I wouldn’t care enough to think back on him often, if at all.
When Wyatt Conley splintered Paul’s soul, sending each part to another dimension as blackmail for me to do his dirty work, he sent one sliver here. While the Warverse possesses technology as advanced as our own, all that tech has been turned to military use. This nation—whichever it is, because I never learned the name—it’s embroiled in a desperate global war and has been for decades. The overall impression I got of the Warverse was that it felt like World War II would have, if it had lasted for fifty years.
Conley sent me here to sabotage this universe’s Firebird project, which was on the verge of success. In this world my parents are top military scientists, Paul is one of the researchers working with them, Josie has become a bad-ass fighter pilot . . . and Theo is the guy Warverse me apparently fell in love with. But Warverse Paul cares for me, and I realized I might be able to use that to my advantage. Believing I had no other choice, I let Paul take me out for a romantic night on the town, flirted and talked with him, and even wound up kissing him passionately on the streets of San Francisco.
Our kiss lasted until the moment Paul recognized my Firebird, and I was busted.
In the end, I negotiated a truce: We manufactured fake evidence of sabotage while actually giving the Warverse the data they needed, and in return I got my Firebird back. But Paul was angry and bitter about my deception to the very end. I thought he hated me and would forever.
Instead he just risked his life to save mine.
“Thank you,” I say very quietly. “What you just did— what that meant—”
“This isn’t only about you.” Paul averts his gaze from my face. “It’s about Triad, too. Come on.”
I start toward the door. “Where are we going?”
“A Firebird project staff meeting.” Paul steps aside from the doorway as I walk through it, making sure our bodies don’t brush against each other. “Time to come clean.”
From the way Paul says that, I expect my parents to feel as betrayed as he does. When he shows me into a small conference room down the hall, however, my parents in their stiff military uniforms look up from their work spread on the table and smile.
“You’re the other one?” Dad says, in the same tone of voice I would expect him to use if he someday recognized Paul McCartney on the street. “The Marguerite who visited our world recently?”
“I—uh—yeah.” This is not a situation I prepared for.
My mother shakes her head, smiling in her you-silly-thing way. “Why didn’t you just tell us who you really were? We’d have been so delighted to speak with you!”
“I thought I had to sabotage you,” I admit. “It didn’t seem like the beginning of a great relationship.”
“Fair enough.” My dad drums his fingers on the edge of the table. “But you and Lieutenant Markov here found a way around that, didn’t you? Now we’ve got our own Firebird technology and have been able to put it to good use.”
“But I was here only a week or two ago!” Honestly, I’ve lost track of the days, especially while I was in outer space, but I’m positive it hasn’t been that long in “real time” since I left the Warverse. “How do you have Firebirds already?”
“Two reasons,” Paul says. Although I’ve gratefully sunk into a chair at the conference table, he remains standing at the door, more as if he’s guarding this meeting than taking part in it. “One, we were almost there to start with. We had the materials on hand. We had most of the know-how. All we needed was a boost, which the information from your Theo Beck provided.”
If they hadn’t been close to success, Conley wouldn’t have wanted to sabotage them in the first place. “Okay,” I say, “but what’s the second reason?”
My parents give each other a conspiratorial smile as Mom says, “Well, for the past few days, we’ve been having some very interesting conversations with others who have built Firebirds of their own.”
“Others?” What, are there tons of people in the Warverse on the verge of dimensional travel? That sounds completely unbelievable. “How many scientists are working on this here?”
“No, no, sweetheart, not here.” Dad sighs. “We’ve been speaking to our own other selves from various universes, including yours.”
Conversations between dimensions? Of course—the Cambridgeverse! They were working toward this ability, and the very last thing I did before leaving that world was internally ask my other self to please, please try to reach out to the other parallel dimensions.
She actually listened. They did it. And now . . . “We’re joining forces.” I feel a smile
dawn on my face. “We’re all going to work together against Conley and Triad.”
“Exactly.” Mom leans across the table, so pleased with herself I’d call her “smug,” if it weren’t for the fact she has every reason to be this proud. “The counter-conspiracy to defy Triad has already been born.”
If someone set off all the fireworks from the Fourth of July right now, the spectacle still wouldn’t be fabulous enough to express how completely freakin’ ecstatic this makes me. We’ve done it! We’re finally, finally ahead of Triad, ahead of Wyatt Conley. We can stop reacting and start acting.
And as one of the very few perfect travelers in the multiverse, I just went from being a pawn to being a weapon.
Being a weapon is going to be lots better.
“We can defend the universes now,” my mother says. “Experiments conducted by the Berkeleyverse Paul—”
I hold my hands up in the time-out signal. “Wait. Berkeleyverse?”
“Well, the different universes have to have different names.” My dad says this so smoothly you’d think he was the one who’d been traveling between worlds for months instead of me. “It helps keep things straight, especially since we’re mostly communicating with other versions of ourselves. Can’t really address a message to ‘Henry’ when I am one of the Henrys, can I?”
“Mostly we adopted the names you chose,” Mom adds.
Okay, but there’s one name I’m sure I never chose. “Which dimension is the Berkeleyverse?”
Paul folds his arms in front of his chest as he leans against the wall. “Yours.”
“But—” My first impulse is to say something like, but my world is the real one, which makes no sense. Everyone’s dimension is as true and valid as any other. No one universe is the center. Now that we’re all talking, my home dimension needs a name too. Still, though—Berkeleyverse? “My parents teach at Berkeley in lots of universes.”
Dad raises an eyebrow. “I feel bound to mention that lots of universes also have wars, and yet we are the Warverse. Sophie and I also teach at Cambridge in many quantum realities, but there is only one Cambridgeverse. And while absolutely every dimension discovered so far has an ocean, we have nonetheless designated an Oceanverse. In other words, my darling girl, the names are all sort of arbitrary and rubbish and it’s not worth making a fuss over, is it?”
“I guess not.” Berkeleyverse is going to take some getting used to, but I’ll deal with that in my own time.
“As I was saying,” Mom continues, “experiments conducted by the Berkeleyverse Paul Markov indicate that we can, in fact, use the Firebird to stabilize dimensions past Triad’s ability to destroy them. So far, two such universes have been protected: someplace called the Spaceverse, where we first contacted him, and also the Londonverse.” She frowns and looks over at my father. “Those are the right names, aren’t they, Henry?”
“They are,” I reply. Paul kept his word—he protected those worlds first. The two Marguerites slaughtered by Wicked and Triad—we’ve repaid their losses in the only way we ever could. “And the Egyptverse?”
“He’s there now,” Dad says. “Harder to build a stabilizer device there, it seems. Markov’s working on it.”
It helps me to know where he is, to be sure he’s safe. However, I can only feel so much relief with the acrid smell of smoke from a dimension’s death still fresh in my mind. “But—the Romeverse—you didn’t save that one.”
“By the time we tracked you there it was too late.” Dad’s smile fades. “We barely had time for Lieutenant Markov here to leap in and rescue you. Another ninety seconds and it would’ve been too late.”
Ninety seconds. That’s going to give me nightmares—but what part of the death of the Romeverse won’t? I force myself to focus on the thing Dad said that I didn’t already know. “You tracked me?”
Mom explains, “Our dimension was ahead of yours in only one respect: We had already projected how to track travelers through the multiverse, both their Firebirds and their unique resonance patterns. Once we had learned the correct resonance for you, we were able to determine precisely where you were. Then we saw your Firebird leave the Romeverse without you, which seemed to be, at minimum, an extremely serious problem.”
My dad chimes in: “When Markov here realized the irregularity in the signal meant your dimension was collapsing—well, you lived through the rest, didn’t you?”
My memories aren’t even fifteen minutes old, and yet already I can hardly believe them. “I saw . . . claws ripping apart the sky. And stone melting to lava. Crevasses opened up in the ground, and when I looked down, there was the planet’s core. . . .” Shuddering, I wrap my arms around myself. “That can’t be real.”
“It wasn’t.” Warverse Paul’s tone becomes more stern and forbidding each time he speaks. “The disintegration of that dimension involved a complete collapse of the laws of physics. Your brain couldn’t possibly have processed the reality of what was happening.”
“Humans simply don’t have the capacity for that sort of thing,” Dad says, more gently. “It sounds like your artistic mind supplied a few colorful metaphors, shall we say, to make sense of what was going on around you.”
Mom folds her arms. “Henry, have you considered that a purely logical mind, or one with a more scientific orientation, might quickly have become overwhelmed in such a situation? Lieutenant Markov here only endured two minutes of exposure to the chaos, but if he’d been there longer—or if you or I had become trapped there—we would have attempted to process the information rationally, and so become overwhelmed. We might well have been rendered incapable of thought or function in short order.”
“Whereas Marguerite’s aptitude for symbols and images protected her?” Dad nods. “Fascinating theory.”
“I never want to test it, okay?” My voice shakes. I can’t stop imagining the fiery, surreal end of the Romeverse. “Because I never want to see another dimension die. And I didn’t just see it—I made it happen, it was me—”
My parents both go very still. Paul straightens, pulling away from the wall. “What?”
I explain what happened, wondering if they’ll hate me for it. Instead, they all look at each other darkly. “A bloody sneak attack, that’s what I call it,” Dad mutters. “Underhanded, even by Triad’s standards.”
“It will be all right, Marguerite.” Mom leans across the table to touch my arm. “Now you know what to look out for. They won’t be able to do that to you again.”
Please, let Mom be telling the truth. “What happens next?” I ask. “Do you—take me home, take your Firebird back?”
My parents and Paul exchange glances. It’s Mom who answers. “We intend to give you this Firebird. It’s a sacrifice because we still only have the two, but it’s worth it. You alone stand a chance of saving the other Marguerites and stabilizing the universes in time. We’ve tracked the Home Office Marguerite—”
“Wicked,” I say. “Call her Wicked.”
My father’s eyebrows couldn’t be raised any higher. But my mom smoothly continues, “We’ve tracked Wicked to her next destination. As soon as she moves on, you can pick up her trail.”
At that moment, Klaxon alarms begin to wail. I cover my ears with my hands as my parents and Paul all look upward, dawning horror on their faces. In an instant, Mom has grabbed my arm to drag me behind her as the three of them rush out of the room, leaving all their work behind. “What’s happening?” I shout over the shrieking alarms.
“We’re evacuating!” Paul runs faster, getting ahead of us to open the door. “Southern Alliance troops are moving in on the Bay Area.”
Whatever the Southern Alliance is, the last time I was here, their fighter planes nearly bombed me. “They’re invading today? Now?”
“Soon.” My mother remains calm, even as she quickens her steps and tows me along. “We have orders to transfer the entire Firebird project to the aircraft carrier J. A. Quinteros within two hours. And as of this moment, Marguerite—the project includes yo
u.”
15
THE MILITARY BASE SEEMS QUIET AND ORDERLY, AT LEAST our section of it. As soon as we run from that room to begin our escape to the Quinteros, however, we are plunged into chaos.
Military vehicles crowd every roadway. Soldiers and sailors carry huge boxes of equipment if they’re assigned to help with evacuation of war materials; if they aren’t, they mostly run for their designated escape vehicles. I sit on the back of a jeep between my parents, Firebird around my neck swaying with every pothole and bump in the road. Paul’s behind the wheel, driving with what I first see as a cold-blooded indifference to the safety of anyone around us. Then I realize everyone else is driving or running the same way.
Low-hanging gray clouds mask the sunlight—hardly unusual in San Francisco. But not all of the sky’s darkness is due to the clouds. Smoke hovers at the horizon in several directions, sometimes many miles away, sometimes closer. The smoke doesn’t look like the product of a currently raging fire; instead, it reminds me of the smoldering aftermath of a wildfire. As bad as it is to see the fires consuming hundreds of acres of countryside, it’s worse to see that smoke coming from downtown, and maybe even Berkeley, too. How many hundreds or thousands of people must have died?
After the destruction of the Romeverse, though, I can’t work up enough energy to panic. Instead, I feel numb to everything but my astonishment that I am still alive—and that this world’s Paul came to save me.
The gargantuan scale of aircraft carriers is familiar to me because of the USS Midway, which is permanently docked in my version of San Francisco Bay. That doesn’t make the J.A. Quinteros any less intimidating. It towers overhead, stretches into the distance. Boarding it is going to feel a little like climbing a mountain. My parents begin commandeering some sailors to help tote equipment and files across the boarding ramp as Paul leads me onward.
“Shouldn’t you be helping haul top-secret stuff?” I nod at the guys laboring under heavy boxes.
