A Million Worlds With You

by Claudia Gray

  Apparently Josie and I don’t live in the same home anymore. Well, if she’s married, no wonder. She must live with her husband, Mr. Anyone Who Is Not Wyatt Conley. Now that I take a good look around, I can see a number of other people her age, and even my age, who definitely seem to be coming from work instead of school. The schoolkids all wear uniforms, complete with red neckerchiefs or ties with a Lenin pin at the center, and they’re all at least a couple of years younger than I am. Since I’m already painting for a living, my school days are probably over. People must be expected to grow up a little faster here.

  To judge by the cars and the trains, the technology level seems to be roughly what ours was in the early 1980s. So my parents won’t be anywhere near developing Firebird technology of their own. But if they’re leading scientists in the Moscowverse, as they are in most worlds, then they’ll have access to the kinds of materials Paul will need to build a stabilizer. We can keep this dimension safe.

  My apartment building turns out to have been built pre-Revolution. At first I’m happy to see that I live someplace that isn’t spitefully drab, even if the paint is flat gray and the original decorations that would have ringed the doors and windows have been chipped or filed away. When it’s bright outside, light must stream through the large windows, illuminating the large entryway and wide halls. Then I discover that old doesn’t just mean “pretty and full of character”; old also means “stairs.” Thank goodness I’m only on the third floor.

  As we go through the front door of my apartment, I take off my hat and begin unbuttoning my coat, eager to settle in and explore. The first thing that hits me is that this place is pretty small for me, Mom, and Dad to live in. Josie and I walk into the kitchen, which is tiny, with ancient appliances and no microwave, but it’s all in white and pleasantly cozy. The living room is also small, and the walls are painted a deep, vivid green that somehow seems more lively than overpowering. No rug covers the wooden floor. A small table is pushed to one side of the room and covered with a white tablecloth that has red flowers embroidered along the hem. Portraits I’ve painted of my parents, Josie, people who must be friends, and someone’s child are on the walls alongside framed black-and-white photos. A compact, rather faded sofa sits in front of the old-fashioned, boxy TV, which has a screen hardly bigger than a laptop’s. Overstuffed bookshelves cover almost all the remaining wall space. Sure enough, tons of science texts crowd the shelves, interspersed with novels and poetry that must be mine. Even though I’ve never seen this apartment before, on some deep level, it does feel like it could be my home.

  A tap on my shoulder makes me jump. Josie is standing right behind me. I’d forgotten I wouldn’t hear her walk up. “You’re sure you’re all right?” Josie cocks her head, studying me. “You’ll be okay here by yourself for a while?”

  “Definitely.” Mom and Dad must still be on their commute back from work. “I’ll take a nap. That always helps.”

  “No doubt you could use one.” Josie kisses me on the cheek—another sign of affection she wouldn’t show in our own world. “Thank goodness it’s not your turn to get Valentina home. You need your rest.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Really.” Do we have a third sister in this world? Or maybe Valentina is a coworker I share my commute with from time to time. As long as it’s not another clone, I can deal. “Josie, you should head home. Your husband will wonder where you are.”

  “Yuri’s hockey team is playing tonight, remember? But if I’m going to get to the game, I should hurry.” Josie bustles out the door. “See you tomorrow!”

  I wave just before she vanishes behind the door, then breathe out a sigh of relief. Yuri. While I have no idea who Yuri is, he isn’t Wyatt Conley, and that’s good enough for me.

  Slipping off my heavy coat, I hang it on one of the wall hooks along with my cap. Then, as I tug off my gloves, I venture into the back of the apartment—which seems to have only one bedroom. That can’t be right. Once I’m in the bedroom, I see a pair of men’s shoes by the closet, so this is obviously where Mom and Dad sleep. There’s one more door though, by the corner in the very back.

  I wrinkle my nose. If I remember correctly, neither walk-in closets nor en suite bathrooms were big features of Muscovite life in the Soviet era. Instead, people had to deal with a serious lack of privacy. Can I only get to my bedroom by walking through my parents’ bedroom? Wow, the potential for awkward is infinite.

  Get used to it, I tell myself, and I open that door.

  The first thing I notice is my own left hand on the doorjamb, bare of its glove—with a ring of my own on the fourth finger.

  The second: this tiny back room, which is hardly bigger than a closet, contains a baby’s crib.

  Wait. Whoa. Wait.

  A light blinks in the corner, startling me. What is that? Then I remember—some deaf people install signals like that to alert them to when the doorbell is ringing or someone opens the door.

  Dazed, I go to check, hardly able to look up from my hand until I reach the living room, peer through the opening to the small kitchen, and see Paul standing there with a baby in his arms.

  Our baby.

  24

  PAUL SMILES AT ME, AS SHY AS HE HAS EVER BEEN IN ANY world, even holding the baby. With one hand he clumsily signs, “Look, Mama’s home.”

  This must be Valentina—my daughter with Paul.

  I sink down heavily onto one of the chairs by the dining table, and Paul frowns in concern. He puts Valentina down on the floor. She’s big enough to crawl and happy to do so while he comes to my side. “Are you all right? You look pale.”

  “I feel faint. Josie walked me home.” And now I’m going to pass out from shock. The fate of the Grand Duchess Margarita flashes through my mind. First I find out I’m pregnant, then two weeks later, I have a kid.

  Obviously I understand these are different universes, different Marguerites, different babies. But on every emotional level it feels as if I went from conception to delivery in two weeks.

  Paul slips off his own gloves and holds one hand to my head before pulling it back to sign, “Do you think you have a fever? It’s not the flu, is it?”

  “Honestly, I think all I need is sleep.” Plus some time to get used to this.

  “No wonder. She’s been doing so much better, but last night was just like she was six weeks old again, wasn’t it? Up every hour.” He sighs, and I realize he’s tired too. But Paul lays his own weariness aside. “We’ve got some of the soup left over. I could heat that up, plus the bread and cheese. Does that sound good?”

  He wants to make dinner for us, so I can rest. Our daughter is playing on the floor, and this cozy little apartment is ours. At least in one world, it got to be just this simple, this sweet. We fell in love. People marry young here, so we did too. And now we have a family. We share a life.

  “Are you crying?” Paul touches my hands before kneeling in front of me.

  I shake my head no, even though tears are in my eyes. “I’m fine. Everything is so much better than fine.”

  He gives me a look, obviously wondering where that came from, but after only a moment he kisses my forehead and goes into the kitchen to get dinner started.

  The next couple of hours pass in a blur, a mixture of the mundane and the sublime. For a while, as Paul cooks, I play with Valentina on the floor. In one moment, it feels like babysitting a stranger’s child. In the next, it hits me all over again. This is our daughter. Paul’s and mine, together.

  Will the grand duchess’s child look like this? Valentina has big gray eyes like her daddy, but the few wispy curls atop her head tell me she’s inherited the lunatic Kovalenka hair. She’s beautiful, in the way most babies are beautiful, but the longer I look at her, the more individual she seems. I see a glimmer of my father’s smile, then Paul’s stubborn chin. In her I recognize parts of most of the people I’ve loved most in my life.

  My parents would call it genetics. To me it seems like alchemy—the luminous space between science a
nd magic.

  Even diaper duty isn’t enough to make me feel less awed by this. When I scoop Valentina back into my arms afterward and smell her head, a warm little shiver passes through me, and I feel like I could hold her forever.

  Once we’ve eaten, Paul insists on looking after Valentina himself. He settles in with her for yet more block-stacking action as I lie on the couch, when suddenly another small blinking light goes off. Paul winces. “I forgot Mom and Dad were coming by.”

  “That’s okay.” I sit up and smile. “I want to see them.” What mad scientists will come through the door this time?

  But when Paul lets our visitors in, I don’t see my parents. I see Leonid Markov and the woman who must be Paul’s mother, Olga.

  The last time I laid eyes on Leonid Markov, he killed a man in cold blood not three feet from my face. He debated the pros and cons of keeping me alive. And I saw the cruelty and control he used to batter his son into leading a life that would slowly poison Paul’s soul. Olga was unknown to me until this moment. All I knew was that she supported her husband’s criminal enterprises, and she ostracized Paul for refusing to join the “family business.”

  Tonight, however, Leonid wears a plain brown overcoat and suit. Olga’s hair is piled atop her head in an old-fashioned way, and her dress is a ghastly plaid. But they look, well, normal. They’re happy to be here. Most astonishingly, Paul smiles as he lets them in.

  “Hello,” Olga signs. “Good to see you.” Her technique is clumsy, but I can still tell what she means. Obviously she doesn’t know much more sign than that, because she then starts speaking to Paul.

  He seems used to serving as translator. “Babushka says Valentina grows prettier every day,” then signs as he replies to her, so I’ll understand too. “Beautiful, but the little tyrant was up all night. Marguerite is exhausted. Tonight isn’t good for a long visit.”

  Leonid nods, smiling. As he talks to his son, Paul signs for me. “The party meeting was tonight, and my parents are tired too. Can they take the baby for a while this weekend instead? It would give you a chance to rest.” With a significant look, Paul adds something only for me: “Imagine having hours to ourselves.”

  I remember the bedroom we share. Oh, I can imagine lots of things. “If it’s okay with you,” I reply. Paul’s smile widens, and he nods as he tells his parents of course, Valentina always loves spending time with her grandparents.

  Slowly I begin to put it together. In this world, Leonid isn’t a mobster. Instead, he’s a loyal member of the Communist Party. Maybe that’s what he draws his sense of power from—that gives him the sense of authority he so craves. The USSR prized its top science students and gave them the best of everything, which meant that in the Moscowverse, Leonid supported Paul’s ambitions. He’s proud to have a scientist son.

  I feel sure there’s a darker side to this. Leonid Markov is the last person who should ever have authority in a police state, and Paul is intelligent enough to have seen that for himself. But that doesn’t change the core fact that in this world, Paul grew up valued, supported, and cared for.

  He has no reason to believe he will never be loved, and so, when we met, nothing held him back.

  Olga and Leonid coo over Valentina a while longer as Paul serves them a quick cup of tea, but it’s not half an hour before they leave and our tiny family is alone again. Valentina fusses a little, and Paul bends down to kiss her head. “She’s tired too.” He smiles up at me. “No wonder. I’ll give her a bath, get her in bed.”

  “I can help—”

  “No, no. Rest.” Paul looks skyward. “And hope tonight she decides to sleep.”

  Although I sneak a peek of him sitting beside the bathtub with her, laughing as she splashes, mostly I explore the front room even more avidly than before. I find a photo album, the kind I remember from my grandparents’ house with sticky adhesive pages and old, slightly discolored photographs. Here, though, most of the snapshots are in black and white. This album must have been put together by Olga, then given to us as a wedding gift, because the initial pages show Paul as a little boy—smiling more eagerly than he probably ever did in my own universe. After a few scholastic honors (scarlet ribbons emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, or portraits of Lenin again), the first photo of me shows up. Despite the dowdy school uniform I’m wearing, I grin unabashedly at the camera, both my arms around Paul’s waist. It looks like we hooked up here when we were maybe thirteen and fourteen? Maybe even a year younger than that.

  A couple of pages later comes the wedding photo. Without a huge commercialized bridal industry to egg them on, brides and grooms keep things simpler here: Paul is wearing a regular suit, and I’ve got on a knee-length dress with only a couple of flowers in my hair. But there’s no mistaking the joy shining from our faces.

  I look up from the photo album when Paul walks in carrying Valentina, who is now wrapped in a soft yellow blanket. She yawns, which is insanely cute—her tiny mouth opened wide, her teeny fists. When Paul sees what I’m looking at, he raises his eyebrows—the question he can’t ask while his hands are busy holding our daughter. Why have you pulled that out?

  “I’m feeling sentimental,” I tell him.

  He sits down in the big chair, cradling Valentina against his chest. At first I think he’s talking to her, but as I walk across the room to place the photo album back on the bookshelf, I realize that he’s singing.

  To my surprise, I haven’t actually missed being able to hear since those first few seconds of confusion. Right now, though, I wish I could listen to Paul’s lullaby. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s enough to watch the expression on his face, the complete tenderness, as he sings our daughter to sleep. No song could be sweeter than that.

  Then he jumps slightly, enough to startle Valentina for a moment before she yawns again. Paul’s eyes widen, and so do mine, when I see the Firebird around his neck. My Paul has caught up with me at last.

  He looks at the baby, then up to me, then at the baby again. I pick up a pen and notebook on the table and write one word in huge letters before holding the page up for him to read: Surprise.

  My world’s Paul Markov knows only a handful of signs. The Moscowverse’s Paul, despite his fluency, must have learned later in life, because his knowledge isn’t ingrained deeply enough for my Paul to access it. I can speak—my voice wasn’t affected by the meningitis, and although it’s weird to have to deliberately think about how to shape my mouth for each sound and syllable, I can do it. But he can reply only in writing, and the back and forth between his notes and my unheard speech makes the conversation awkward, so it’s not long before I stop trying to talk at all. We wind up communicating via a sheet of paper.

  Paul writes, Do you have any idea what your parents do for a living here? What kind of science they specialize in?

  We’re sitting on the kitchen floor while Paul sifts through the various cleaning products and medicines, trying to assemble the ingredients for Nightthief. Although being a perfect traveler has involved a lot of danger and drama, I admit I’m not sorry I don’t have to inject into my veins any substance more commonly used for unclogging drains. I jot down, I haven’t checked, but if you go through the books on the wall, you’ll probably be able to put it together. I pause before writing the next. We met when we were lots younger here, so you must have studied with Mom and Dad from an early age.

  Paul stops his chemistry experiment for his next lines. Do you know where they live?

  Josie and I didn’t go to their place, I reply. You and I have an address book, though, so we can find them in the morning. Once we explain what’s going on, they can help us get started. He nods without ever looking me in the eye. I quickly add, Why don’t you just use the reminders?

  I nearly ran out of charge in the Egyptverse, he replies. If he had, he would’ve wound up marooned there, unable to awaken or escape. Not worth the risk. Will we have to call in sick to work, wherever it is we have jobs? Or is tomorrow Saturday? By this point, my concept o
f time has been thrown completely out of whack. Probably not a big deal, but even the little complications can sometimes trip things up.

  When Paul pours another couple of fluids together, the mixture finally turns the telltale emerald green of Nightthief. Sometimes the hardest part is finding a needle, he writes. It’s the first thing he’s said that is more than strictly necessary. The Triadverse and Home Office actually build small injectors inside their Firebirds. We should do the same.

  Don’t you feel weird using Nightthief, given how bad it is for people? I write back.

  No, Paul writes. This is a lot like arsenic. People can take small doses without it being toxic. But if you keep exposing the body to arsenic over and over again, eventually it builds up and it becomes deadly. Two or three doses of Nightthief won’t have any effects worse than maybe some temporary short-term memory loss because of the inability to dream while on the drug. And those doses are more than enough for what we have to do.

  Two or three doses. Triadverse Theo stayed in our Theo for months. But he gave his life to atone for those sins, so somehow I have to learn to let them go.

  Paul puts the bottle of green stuff on the counter as he gets up and heads back to the bathroom, hoping no doubt to search the medicine cabinet. Maybe he says something to me as he walks out, forgetting I can’t hear, but the feeling of being left behind is too clear. He even had me put Valentina to bed by myself, although I managed it pretty easily, since she’d already been sung half to sleep.

  Enough, I decide. I’m not going on like this anymore. I can’t make Paul believe—but I can make him listen, even without my voice.