by Anna Jarzab
Sense? None of this made any sense, really, but it wasn’t so far off from things I’d heard Granddad talk about in the past. “Your basic ripple effect,” I supplied.
“Exactly. At least, that was how it was explained to me.” Thomas fixed his eyes on me, and I could’ve sworn they were brighter than before. “It doesn’t even have to take that long. It’s only been a couple hundred years since the Aurora-Earth LCE and look how different our two worlds already are.”
“LCE?”
“The Last Common Event,” Thomas said. “The moment where the timelines on Earth and Aurora fully separated.”
“What was that?” Granddad would’ve been fascinated by all this information; so would my parents. They had spent their entire careers searching for proof of alternate universes—they would’ve been amazed to find out just how right their theories were.
“George Washington was killed during the Revolutionary War,” Thomas said. “Or, as we call it, the First Revolution. There was a Second Revolution in 1789, this time led by a British nobleman named John Rowan who used his power as the governor of the New York Colony to raise an army against the Crown. After he succeeded in overthrowing British rule, he crowned himself king and renamed the country the United Commonwealth of Columbia, after Christopher Columbus. He established his capital in New York and renamed it Columbia City.” Thomas smiled. “Aurora 101.”
“So what you’re saying is, even though Juliana and I look the same, we don’t have the same parents, or backgrounds, or anything?”
“Juliana’s a different person,” he said with a helpless shrug. “Wholly and completely. I’m not a physicist; I can’t explain it more than that.”
“But my parents do have analogs in Aurora, don’t they? Even if they’re not Juliana’s parents, they still exist?” Thomas drew in a deep breath. “You know who they are, don’t you?”
“Your mother’s analog is a schoolteacher in Virginia Dominion,” Thomas told me. “She’s got three kids, two boys and a girl.” I blinked. Three kids? I would’ve given anything for just one sibling—sister, brother, I couldn’t have cared less, as long as I had someone who understood, who knew what it meant to have had my parents and then lost them.
“And my dad?” I asked, trying to keep all emotion out of my voice but hearing a tremor in it nonetheless.
Thomas sat up straight and rubbed the back of his neck. “Your father doesn’t have an analog in Aurora. Sometimes that happens. Nobody knows why, but it’s more common than you might think. We don’t all have analogs in every universe.”
“Can I see her?” I asked. Please, please, please just let me see her, I thought desperately. Even though I knew my mother’s analog wouldn’t actually be my mother, I needed to know what she would’ve looked like now, if she had lived.
He shook his head. “Virginia’s too far. There’s not time.”
I nodded. I should’ve known better than to believe something good might come from this experience. Aurora seemed to delight in crushing every faint flutter of hope I dared to have.
“All right, that’s enough,” Gloria interjected. I started at the sound of her voice; I’d forgotten she was even there.
“It’s—” Gloria consulted her tablet. “Four-thirty-seven a.m., so we don’t have much time. Juliana rises precisely at seven thirty every morning when she’s at the Castle, unless she has an early engagement; I come in at eight o’clock on the nose to go over her schedule for the day and she eats breakfast while she’s being prepped.”
“Prepped?” I repeated, my voice hollow. “Prepped how?”
“Clothes, hair, makeup,” Gloria said, as if this was all self-explanatory. It made sense; clearly, as a public figure, Juliana had to look her best every day. But the thought of being primped like some kind of life-size Barbie made me slightly ill. I already felt like an object in this world, a curiosity rather than a person in my own right. To them, Juliana was the real one; I was just a stopgap illusion they had no choice but to tolerate. “Juliana often changes several times a day, and her stylists are on call around the clock to make sure the princess is always perfectly presentable. I manage Juliana’s staff and master calendar, and act as a sort of … turnstile in the princess’s life. I control access to Her Highness; nobody outside the royal family gets to her without first going through me.
“Of course, that still leaves the matter of the queen and her children,” Gloria continued. “As Thomas may have told you, Juliana and her stepmother don’t play well together. They never have, not even when Juliana was a child, and things have only gotten worse since the regency.”
“Why?” I vaguely remembered what a regent was from my sophomore year European history class; they took over the throne of a country when the real monarch was for whatever reason incapable of ruling on their own.
“When the king was shot, it became clear very quickly that he was never going to recover his mental faculties,” Gloria said, her shoulders tensing when she said the word shot. “A regent had to be found to replace him.” Gloria went on to tell me that, under normal circumstances, the heir apparent would automatically become regent, but at sixteen Juliana wasn’t of age. She had to be seventeen to take the crown. So Congress had convened out of session to choose a regent. On paper, the queen had been the natural choice, but Juliana ran a very aggressive campaign against her, backing the president of the Congress—Nathaniel Whitehall—for the spot, and she almost succeeded. The faction that supported the queen won by a very narrow margin. “The queen has always felt threatened by Juliana, and that only made it worse. They’re civil to each other in public, but in private … well, I suppose you’ll see for yourself very soon.”
“Comforting,” I muttered under my breath. The last thing I needed was a woman who had known Juliana for years watching my every move with a distrustful eye. I looked over at the window and once again caught my reflection in it. “I just don’t think I can do this. I can’t pretend to be somebody I’m not. They’ll know.”
Thomas shook his head vehemently. “They won’t. You look exactly like her, right down to the freckle on your left earlobe.” I touched my ear, wondering how in the world Thomas had managed to notice that. “Sasha, I watched you for a week before I—before we first talked, back on Earth. I did my research. You can do this. People want to think you’re her. What’s the alternative? That you’re a double from an alternate universe? I don’t think we could convince anyone of that if we tried.”
“Libertas has the real Juliana,” I reminded him. “They’ll know I’m not her. What if they go public with that information? Everything will be ruined. What’ll the General do to me then?”
“They won’t,” Thomas assured me. “Libertas is just as in the dark as everyone else about the multiverse. If anything, they’ll think we found a look-alike, someone who just happens to resemble Juliana. But who’s going to believe that, when Juliana is standing on the Grand Balcony, waving to thousands of people? No one.”
“You really think people are that stupid?”
“Not stupid,” he said. “Ignorant. And yeah, I do.”
Thirteen
“Oh my God,” I said as I stepped inside Juliana’s bedroom four hours later.
“Royalty does have its perks,” Thomas said, with a trace of irritation in his voice. He was trying to teach me how to use the security device on the door. All the doors in the Citadel—including the Tower, where we’d just been, and the Castle, where we were now—were controlled by panels with biometric scanners similar to the one I’d seen him use on the car door back in Chicago; they required a handprint and a six-number code to gain access if they were locked. Juliana and I didn’t have the same handprint; Thomas had replaced mine with Juliana’s in the security database. But ever since the door slid open to reveal the room beyond, I was having a hard time focusing on what he was saying.
It wasn’t because the room was opulent to near-Versailles proportions, although it was. In fact, Juliana’s bedroom was the most beautifu
l, luxurious, impeccably decorated room I’d ever stood in. An enormous four-poster canopy bed with a blue satin goose down comforter and mounds of pillows took up a portion of the right wall. All the furniture was made of beautifully carved mahogany wood. There was a sitting area with a sofa and two armchairs upholstered in bright, cheerful cornflower blue brocade and embroidered with tiny, perfect pink rose petals. The adjoining bathroom was done all in silver and marble, and the cavernous walk-in closet was filled with every item of clothing and accessory that a girl could possibly want. Floor-to-ceiling French doors opened on to a huge stone terrace that looked out onto the gorgeous landscaped garden over which the sun was rising, bathing everything in a butter-yellow glow.
But it wasn’t the suite’s beauty that had stunned me—it was the fact that I had seen it all before. I was just as comfortable in this room as I was in my own back at home, a bizarre sensation I wasn’t prepared for. It all felt like it belonged to me, and I had to remind myself very sternly that it didn’t, that it never would, and that in six days I would be gone. My eyes landed on a painting hanging on the wall; it depicted a country house, large and sprawling, set against a beautiful emerald wood, with a glittering lake in the foreground.
Someone had fastened back the curtains and opened a few of the doors; the smell of roses and lilacs wafted in on a breeze, and a fountain gurgled somewhere in the distance. I stepped onto the terrace and stood at the railing; the garden was filled with sculptured topiaries, painstakingly cultivated flower beds, and rows of trimmed rosebushes. A manicured lawn stretched out at my feet like a verdant carpet. Juliana’s bedroom—my new, very pretty prison—was situated in the northernmost point of the star-shaped Castle, on the third floor, facing inward toward the gardens—and the Tower. Taller than any of the surrounding buildings, the Tower was visible from practically every vantage point, a not-so-subtle reminder that wherever I went, whatever I did, the General was watching. I went back into the bedroom, letting the imposing Tower recede behind a filmy curtain.
Gloria started to say something, but was interrupted by a sweet chime emanating from the LCD panel on the inside of the door.
“Breakfast,” Thomas said. He pressed a button on the panel that slid the door open, and in came an attendant wheeling a cart. The smell of eggs and toast reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since prom night. It took a great deal of effort not to dive for the cart before the attendant even had time to lift the cover off the plate.
“You’re excused,” Gloria told the attendant. He nodded and left the way he came.
“That was rude,” I said, eyeing the plate. My stomach rumbled with hunger, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Could I just sit down at the little table in the corner and start eating, or was there some sort of rule I needed to follow?
“None of that,” Gloria said. “We have a system here, Sasha, protocol that must be adhered to. The domestics aren’t your friends; they’re your employees. You tell them if you need something and they get it for you. That’s it. No chatting. Juliana wouldn’t do that.”
“She doesn’t say thank you?” A thought struck me—if I were ever to meet Juliana in person, would I even like her?
“She thanks them with a paycheck,” Gloria said. “What are you waiting for? Tuck in, the food’s getting cold.”
I glanced over at Thomas, wondering where he stood in all this. Gloria was clearly more than just a secretary to Juliana; she was a protector, a caregiver, a confidante. But what about him? As Juliana’s bodyguard, it stood to reason that he would be considered an employee. But from the way he kept talking about her, I’d started to wonder if Juliana and Thomas were friends. Maybe even more than friends, although Thomas would never tell me if they were. I kept wishing I could figure him out, but whatever training he’d undergone to do this age-inappropriate job, it was damn good.
Gloria drew out her glass tablet and used it to pull up the schedule for the day. “It’s nearly nine o’clock now. Hair and makeup will arrive shortly, so we ought to get you showered. Then at ten you’re going to go visit the king.”
“The king? But I thought he was …”
Gloria nodded. “The king is ill. He was in the hospital for over a month after he was shot, but once his condition was declared stable, the queen moved him here to the Castle. His bedroom is down the hall. Juliana visits him every day. You must do the same. She usually sits with him for about an hour. After that, you have an eleven thirty interview with Eloise Dash from the CBN, and then—”
“Hold up. An interview? With a reporter?” The familiarity of the Castle, and particularly this bedroom—which, of all the places in the visions Juliana had inadvertently sent me from her world, felt the safest and most comfortable—had started to make me feel that I might be able to do what I was brought here to do. But this new wrinkle shook my certainty, and again I was plagued with a fear of failing, and all the consequences that came with it. Six days, I told myself, repeating it over and over in my head like a mantra. Just six days until I can go home. But the more I told myself that this was all temporary, the less power the words had to console me.
The truth that I’d been trying to keep at bay swept through me like a harsh wind: I had to find my own way out of Aurora. I couldn’t just go along with the General’s plans in the hopes that if I fulfilled his demands I would be returned home. It was possible—even likely—that he wouldn’t keep his word. I needed a plan B, in case six days turned into far more.
“Yes,” Gloria said. “Juliana rarely does interviews, but Libertas may at any time decide to make an announcement regarding the fact that they have her prisoner. We can’t sit around and wait for that to happen; we have to be proactive, to disprove their claims before they’ve even made them.”
Thomas spoke up then. “Libertas has its fair share of supporters in the UCC. They’re a fringe operation, but they’re not unpopular across the board. There’s been a fair amount of unrest in the country, and not just in the Tattered City. If they go public with the information that they’re holding Juliana hostage, not everyone would be sorry to hear it.”
“Are there really people who would think the kidnapping of a sixteen-year-old girl is justified?” I asked. I hadn’t been talking about myself, but I couldn’t help but think about it, once I said the words. Thomas’s jaw tightened, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing.
“To stop the marriage of Juliana to the prince of Farnham and the joining of our two countries with blood?” Thomas nodded. “Definitely. Not everyone wants us to stop fighting them.”
“Then what do they want?”
He shrugged. “Different things. Some want a fortified wall built along the border, with no passage in and out and armed guard stations every twenty yards. Some want us to take over Farnham—the land once belonged to the UCC, and there are groups that would like nothing more than to see us roll into their capital with our tanks and occupy the whole damn country.”
“And Libertas? What do they want?”
“They want to bring down both monarchies and create a transcontinental republic,” Thomas told me. I remembered the Monad’s speech back in the Tattered City—the only path to true peace is overthrowing both monarchies and forming one republic, of the people, by the people, and for the people. I realized now why it sounded so familiar—it was a bastardized version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But Lincoln, being so post-LCE, probably never existed in Aurora.
“Curious,” I said softly, not really meaning for anyone else to overhear.
“What?” Thomas pressed.
“Nothing. I think their methods are awful, but I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.”
“Yeah, well, you’re an American,” Thomas said. “You would think that. But this isn’t—”
“My world. I know. I’ve been informed.”
Gloria looked back and forth between the two of us, confused. “What’s an American?”
“Never mind,” Thomas and I said in unison.
> Gloria, who didn’t seem to enjoy having less information that anybody else in the room, said testily, “While I’m sure this has been illuminating for Sasha, I think it might be time for you to leave, Thomas. The team will be here soon, and since you’re not in the habit of attending the princess’s toilette, I don’t suggest you start loitering around now.”
“Actually,” I interrupted. “Can you both leave? Just for a couple of minutes,” I added, when Gloria shot me an irritated look, although I don’t know why I was expected to make apologies. After all, I was the one being held in a foreign universe against my will. Still, I was growing to like Gloria’s no-nonsense, domineering way of handling this strange situation—it was comforting to know that someone had some part of this circus under control, insofar as that was even possible—and her bossiness didn’t bother me. Much. But I need a little time alone.
“I suppose,” Gloria said. “We’ll be right outside. Just a few minutes, okay? We’ve got to stick to the schedule.”
I nodded. It wasn’t until the door had slid shut behind them that I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out in a slow stream. Then I lowered my face into my hands and massaged my temples with my fingers, which were shaking. I forced my mind to go blank and kept breathing in the steady, rhythmic way Gina had taught me when she was going through her yoga phase. Gina, I thought suddenly, but I beat it back before thoughts of home could provoke me to panic. If I was going to step into Juliana’s life and convince a whole bunch of people who actually knew her that I was her, I had to stop torturing myself with memories of my own past. Otherwise, despair would paralyze me, and I wasn’t about to let that happen, not while there was still a chance of returning to my real life.
