Tomorrow, no doubt the crown princess will appear just in time for her coronation. Tomorrow, the real fireworks of this plan begin.
The only people in this cabin with me are Dominica and a middle-aged man who treats her with enough familiarity that I’m wondering—uncle? Neither of them has said. I haven’t asked. I was too busy shivering in my drenched underthings until Dominica threw some towels at me and told me that the entire plan would be ruined if I went and died of a chill. Her already mediocre deference-to-royalty, which was clearly an act anyway, has dwindled to a scrap.
“Tell me you weren’t lying about your brother,” I said, when I was toweling my hair.
“No, I wasn’t," said Dominica. “He was the best thing about me. He would have fought, like I’m fighting.”
My throat was thick. “My best friend would have fought, too,” I said. “She would probably have stormed out of the palace and led a rebellion herself rather than do anything involving a chocolate swan. She was much braver than me.”
All right, I was fishing. Dominica didn’t play along, but amusement looked good on her. The side of her mouth curved like the bend of a river.
“What would she say about all of this?”
I grinned. “She’d tell me to go ahead and raise hell.”
You know you would, Sami,
El
* * *
Dear Sami,
Today has lasted at least five years and also I don’t think I’ve taken a single conscious breath. No way to put this down except step by step.
There’s an old-fashioned Ruritanian veil that covers the face—mostly worn by dowagers who want to spy on everyone from beneath them—and we disguised me with one of those. We sneaked into Jonty’s chambers when the palace was near empty, just after everyone left for the coronation ceremony, and found his multiverse gate opener tucked into a chest full of cravats. I hid the opener down the front of the red dress I was wearing; it was one of the princess’s own, smuggled out of the palace in the furor surrounding her “miraculous return.”
Dominica still had her guard uniform, and she tucked her hair up under a felt cap and marched us to the front rows of the coronation hall as if escorting someone’s grandmother who’d fallen ill and slept through breakfast.
Crown Princess Elinor made her grand, smug way to the front of the hall, to the sounds of trumpets. As soon as she was standing alone, I yanked the veil off and strode up onto the dias—between two very confused guards—to stand beside her.
It wasn’t subtle, as plans go.
“You—” the princess hissed, and was clearly raising her hand to gesture for my capture, but I grabbed her wrist and forced it down.
“An impostor!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “You shall not harm Ruritania!” I threw my other hand to my bosom in Shakespearean dismay, and retrieved the gate opener. We hadn’t found Jonty’s Agency directory, so I’d pre-set the opener to a random code on our way to the hall.
I pressed the button. A gate thwopped itself into existence and I dragged the princess through it, then closed the gate behind us before I could hear more than the beginnings of shouts and excitement. There’d been one princess, then two, then none.
Dominica would have killed to protect her country from a bad ruler. I hadn’t entirely ruled that out, but I did have other options.
This place in the multiverse looked similar to the Ruritania we’d come from, but the scent of the air was completely different. The air was warmer and drier. We were halfway up a gentle hill carpeted with scrubby grass.
“Unhand me!” the princess shouted. I unhanded her. She jabbed her finger in my face. “Take me back there immediately!”
“No. I have another offer for you,” I said. “Go back to my world. My life. You can have it.” I supposed it was too much to ask that she might have fallen in love. My looks are completely wasted on someone with a personality that unpleasant.
She hesitated, and frowned. “There are certainly some interesting aspects to your world,” she allowed. “But you have no position of influence, no significant wealth, and no friends. And an extremely rude and condescending person claiming to be your brother keeps trying to contact you. And the throne of Ruritania is mine. I have worked too hard for it to give it up now.”
I wondered suddenly and unpleasantly about the hunting accident that resulted in the death of the late king.
“It might be yours, but you’re ruining it!” I said. “You don’t care about these people!”
“How dare you, you—you tourist! I was born to lead—”
“Hereditary monarchy is a stupid system!” I shouted, and kicked her legs out from under her.
She went down with a surprised yelp. For all her ruthlessness, she’s lived a life with other people wielding swords on her behalf; I’m no expert fighter, but I did grow up with Brendan for an older brother, and at least I know how to lash out when cornered.
“And feudalism might have its sexy moments,” I went on—I was angry—“but it’s not much better. I take it that’s a no to the offer?”
I dialed another code and stepped through the gate. Scent of faintly burning wood and salt on the furious wind. A city on the horizon that took up half the sky. My hair whipped around as Princess Elinor scrambled to her feet and came through after me; what choice did she have? The opener was her only way home.
I glanced at the NCI reading on the device and repeated the process through two more worlds—one green-clouded and actively raining, smelling of unfamiliar plants, the path active with people. One city that could nearly have been my home, except that the smells of metal and smoke were off-kilter, and the buildings too tall, their colors extravagant.
That one had a fairly high NCI.
“How do you feel now?” I asked hopefully.
“Go to hell,” the princess spat. She tried to grab the opener from me but I danced away and dialed another number, and we raced through a couple more nodes of the multiverse. My hope was that in a very high NCI world, the essential romance narrative would grab at her and she’d agree to the switch.
A light on the opener flashed rapid orange. I was forcing a lot out of it and its charge was running low. And the adrenaline holding my bones was beginning to crack, leaving me shaky.
The princess must have noticed. She was breathing hard herself, and kept eyeing the opener and myself with equal venom.
“You can’t keep this up forever. If you’re going to knock me out and abandon me, stop messing around and do it.”
Sami, you said something to me once. We were sitting side by side on your hospital bed and you were kicking my ass at some video game or other. You put down the handset and said, quite suddenly, not looking at me, “It fucking sucks that you don’t realize how much you want to live until the worst possible moment.”
You were right, as usual. I’ve been ambivalent on the subject of living for weeks. And then in the moment of deciding that even the Princess Elinor deserved to live, and not be knocked out and abandoned in a world with a danger rating that could be anything, I realized—
Well, I realized I was finally looking forward to whatever came next. Even if it was going to be hard.
Back then I looked at you and you picked up the handset again and said, “Keep taking the chances you’ve got, El. Don’t waste them. Promise.”
And because I did promise, you’ll be pleased to know I entered one more gate code and stepped through. Sunny skies, paved streets, glassy green buildings; we were in an alley between two of them.
I looked at the opener, nodded, and dropped it to the ground. It took two good hops with my entire body weight for the cracked screen to go blank. Glass and bits of shattered plastic skidded across the stones.
Princess Elinor gave a little shriek. “What have you done?”
“Ruritania doesn’t need either of us, and the Agency doesn’t know where we are,” I told her. “This seems like a nice place with a high chance of indoor plumbing, and the NCI here is nearly a perfe
ct ratio. Probability is shifted overwhelmingly towards a predictable and satisfying story. Which means you’ll get what’s coming to you, based on the role you choose to play. I advise you to make better choices from now on.”
Pleased with that as a parting blow, I turned and began to walk towards the mouth of the alley. I did sneak a look over my shoulder; she’d leaned against the wall, as if to catch her breath.
I got a few yards before there was another thwop and a yellow-green gate opened in front of me. Dominica stepped through it, an intact gate opener in her hand.
I froze. Dominica saw me, and froze too. Her expression of blinding fury had a brief spat with one of equally blinding relief, before she glanced over my shoulder and lunged to grab me by the hand.
“You are such an idiot,” she snapped, and pulled me through the gate before I could respond. There was another shriek of dismay from the princess, behind me, but the sound vanished into nothing. Dominica had closed the gate when I was barely through it, and we were standing in a small corridor with the familiar wall panels of the Ruritanian royal palace. The smell was right. We were back.
Dominica tossed her opener to the ground and skewered it with her sword. It made a sad little noise and began to spark.
“What?” I said.
“I told you I wouldn’t let any harm come to you.”
New, improved question: “How?”
“I threatened Jonty,” Dominica said. “I thought he might have a way to contact the Agency and ask for someone to bring a new one of those little gate boxes, in case his own one stopped working, and I was right. And then I asked the woman who appeared if there was a way to cut this world out of the multiverse, to stop people coming here from anywhere else, and—well, she looked quite relieved at the idea, and said we weren’t going to be any more use to them now anyway. And something about wiping the coordinates from the database,” Dominica spoke the words gingerly, as if she didn’t trust the syllables, “and payments not being refundable. And Jonty decided to go back through the gate with her, which was wise of him because otherwise I would have made him very sorry.”
I stared at the smoking pile of ex-opener and didn’t doubt it.
“And you were what, going to keep putting random numbers in until you found me?”
Dominica shrugged. “Yes.”
“That could have taken years!”
“Well, it didn’t.”
I wondered what the probability was that she’d somehow managed to dial the right code on the first try. The odds must be infinitesimally small.
But very narratively satisfying.
“You can’t go home, Elinor,” Dominica said. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want to. I didn’t intend to,” I said, weakly. “I was making a gesture!”
“A gesture? Sacrificing yourself for Ruritania like some kind of—of—” And then Dominica knelt at my feet like she had the first night we met, and the kiss she gave my hand was savage, like she wished it was a bite instead.
The kiss she swept me into when she stood up was more savage again. I’d wondered if maybe she was one of those revolutionary creatures who dedicated themselves to liberty and ignored the pleasures of the flesh, but her lips were lush and confident against my own. This was someone whose flesh had definitely been pleasured before. It was fucking glorious.
“Come on, Your Highness,” Dominica said, when she’d released me and I’d shaken myself out of my kiss-glazed state. “We’d better get you crowned.”
“About that,” I said.
I gave her the feudalism-is-stupid speech. Dominica shouted at me for repeating her own talking points back to her. Then she kissed me again, and then settled into a contemplative frown when I suggested that the best course of action would be a gradual, peaceful transition to democratic government. After all, I’d already proved good at signing away my power, and I do know my way around political PR.
“I can be the last queen of Ruritania,” I said. “Sounds impressive, don’t you think?”
Dominica told me again that I was an idiot and not to be ridiculous, but her eyes were alight with fondness and I’m pretty sure only half of it was directed at liberty and democracy and all of those things; the other half was all for me. I can’t wait to hear how much she shouts when I suggest she runs for office.
Maybe somewhere in this world is a version of you, Sami. You’d be different; you might hate classical music and love blue cheese. We’d have no history. It wouldn’t be you. I’m not going to go looking. But it’s a thought to cling to: somewhere in the infinite multiverse we do have infinite chances.
I’m not going to waste this one.
Yours, always,
El
Plan Z
by Django Wexler
The starship Wild Ride blasts away from Velinx Station at an acceleration that, were it not for the various esoteric fields pervading the interior, would reduce me and my girlfriend to a thin layer of comingled paste on the rear bulkheads. We’re pursued by a desultory spatter of pulse-beams, fired by a Commonwealth weapons officer who knows he hasn’t got a hope of stopping us but needs to be seen making an effort. A few moments later, a burst of blue-white light envelops the ship as it drops into the trackless depths of hyperspace, and we’re safe.
“Well,” Ahn says, leaning back in the battered pilot’s chair and tossing the Skolig idly from one hand to another. “Chalk up another one for Plan Z?”
I’m working on my breathing, resting my head against the cracked cushion of the co-pilot’s chair in the Ride’s cockpit, looking out the forward viewport into the blue nothing of hyperspace. In and out, in and out. Keep breathing so you don’t have the chance to scream. Not from fear at our narrow escape—say one thing for Ahn, it’s that she’s good at flying and blasting, and anyway if I screamed every time I’d nearly been shot, disintegrated, asphyxiated, devoured, torn to spaghetti by gravitational forces, and generally come within a whisker of having my corporeal existence prematurely terminated over the last few years, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. Rather, it’s Ahn who is on the verge of provoking me into hysterics, because under the circumstances she has the audacity to fucking grin at me.
Plan Z, in her parlance, means, oh shit everything’s gone wrong, time to blast our way out. Plan Z means, shoot first, run for it, and ask questions probably never. Plan Z means burning away from yet another station at top speed, with nothing to show for our efforts but carbon scoring on the hull, the unwanted attention of the authorities, and an utterly priceless gemstone that is now so radioactively hot (in the stolen-goods sense) that no fence in the Commonwealth would lay a finger on it.
Ahn is extremely fond of Plan Z. To her credit, she’s an amazing shot, and has a sixth sense about diving for cover. It makes her good to have on your side when things take a sudden lurch into the shit, and utterly fucking useless when it comes to little details like keeping the ship fueled and paying overdue docking fees.
She knows she’s in trouble. I can tell by the way she’s suddenly making shiny megakitten eyes at me, like she can get me to ignore what just happened by being unutterably adorable. It’s a delicate moment for our relationship, and definitely requires a touch of diplomacy. Fortunately, diplomacy is my specialty.
“Fuck you,” I tell her, “and fuck your Plan Z.”
I turn around and stalk down the long central corridor of the Wild Ride—named by Ahn, of course, because my girlfriend’s sense of humor apparently fossilized at age twelve—kicking aside a half-eaten box of jyck-buns and snatching a pair of stray underwear from where they inexplicably adorn a light fixture. Ahn, after hurriedly checking the autopilot, comes after me.
“Come on,” she wheedles. “We made it, didn’t we? And we’ve still got the thingie.” She holds up the crystalline Skolig, which throws multi-colored sparkles from its many facets. “It’s fine!”
I turn around, waving the dirty undergarment with such vigor that she takes a hasty step back.
“Yo
u shot a Commonwealth customs officer!” I growl. A thoroughly dirty one, but still. “In the face!” I still have evidence of this, in the form of bits and pieces and fluids that had once belonged to said customs officer, smeared and drying all over my dress and in my hair.
“He had a gun to your head!” Ahn says.
“We were negotiating.”
“He was going to negotiate your brains across the wall.”
“I could have talked him down.”
“Forgive me if I wanted to protect you.”
“Protect me by getting into a gunfight with half a company of marines.” I let out a long sigh and use the underwear to mop a bit of customs officer off my forehead. “Who by now will have uploaded our descriptions, and that we were trying to sell the thingie”—I indicate the priceless Skolig Ahn is again casually juggling from hand to hand—“which has therefore gone from a billion-credit score to the galaxy’s most fabulous paperweight.”
Ahn frowns at the Skolig. “I told you this job was too complicated.”
“It would have been fine if you could keep your blaster in your pants!”
She grins again. “I thought that was what you liked about me, Princess.”
“Don’t call me princess.”
“It’s still technically true, even if your father disowned you.”
“He disowned me because I ran away with you!”
“I can’t be held responsible for the effect my roguish charm has on a certain type of girl—”
I hit her in the face with the wadded-up underwear and stalk away to slam the button that opens the door to my cabin.
“Ilya, wait!” Ahn peels the panties off and frowns at them, then holds up the Skolig. “What are we going to do with the thingie?”
The suggestion I offer is anatomically improbable, or at least extremely uncomfortable. Before Ahn can think of an appropriate retort, I hammer the control panel with a fist and the door hisses closed behind me.
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