by Claudia Gray
“Thanks,” I say, but then I can’t think what to add.
Fortunately Romola’s ahead of me. “You can make it up to me by getting the popcorn. And M&M’s! They’re so good mixed together.”
Her presence here weirds me out in a way I can’t explain, even to myself. She’s someone I’ve met before, but never known well. I thought of Romola as—an accident, a coincidence. Not a person who was supposed to mean a lot to me.
Just like Paul should be everyplace, everywhere with me, and he’s not.
The movie turns out to be one I’d meant to see at home, and Romola’s right about the popcorn-plus-M&M’s mix. So by the time we’re walking out of the theater in the late afternoon, my mood has improved. This world is no more dangerous than my own; Mom, Dad, and Josie are all alive and well; and there’s a text message waiting for me from Theo, which says only, Turns out I live in Alphabet City. Headed your way.
“Tonight’s the big dinner, isn’t it?” Romola’s smile turns almost wicked as she says it. “You have to tell me everything.”
As casually as possible, I ask, “What do you want for the highlight reel?”
“Let’s see. The absolute most awkward question your parents ask him. And oh, if he looks intimidated or even unsure at any moment, get a photo if you can, would you? I can’t wait to see my big, bad boss being interrogated by your parents.” She’s joking, but not; her glee at the thought of this dinner is real.
So in this world, we met through her boss? Maybe she works for some other world-class scientist; that might explain how Romola and I keep coming together. Right now she’s looking at me for a reply, one I’m not sure how to make, so I bunt. “Oh, sure, I’ll film the whole thing, zoom in on his face. He won’t notice that.”
The sarcasm covers my ignorance well enough. Romola just laughs. “All right, all right, we’ll talk next week, and you can tell me all about it.”
“Okay.”
Romola hugs me before she leaves. Somehow I manage to return the hug without stiffening up. Then I walk to the closest subway station and spend a while searching on my smartphone until I find an app that will tell me how to get to any address via public transit.
For the record: the New York subway is even more disgusting than Bay Area Rapid Transit. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s faster, though, because within ten minutes I’m staring up at the high-rise apartment building where I apparently live. A uniformed man at the door smiles at me. “Miss Caine. Welcome back. How was your day?”
That must be the doorman. “Great, thanks,” I manage to say before ducking inside; it doesn’t look like any more conversation is required.
Apartment 28G ought to be on the twenty-eighth floor, so I head up in the elevator. As I walk toward the apartment door, I hear the faint strains of “Here Comes the Sun” in the hallway, and I grin. Dad’s home.
I walk into an apartment that’s even smaller than the house we had in the poverty-stricken war dimension—but unlike that place, this is immediately recognizable as our home. A houseplant hangs from a hook in one corner, with its long vines trailing along the tops of the windowsills. Piles of books and papers sit on the table and in the corners. The walls are painted a sunshiny yellow, and on the leather sofa sits my father, laptop on his knees, typing away.
“There you are,” Mom says, as Dad glances my way just long enough to smile. She walks out of what must be her bedroom wearing a dark blue sheath dress—simple enough, but pretty fancy for someone who normally sticks to jeans and threadbare sweaters. Head tilted, she puts on an earring as she says, “I didn’t think you’d make it back before dinner.”
“Here I am. Hey, you look nice.”
Mom sighs. “I don’t want Josie to think we’re not taking this seriously.”
“I only wish I could believe she wasn’t taking this seriously,” Dad says without looking up from his computer. “Honestly. After only two months?”
“Now, Henry. We made up our minds after less than a day.” My mother rests one hand on my father’s shoulder, and he closes his laptop to smile at her. She continues, “The speed of their courtship isn’t the issue. Or it wouldn’t be, if I had a stronger sense of who he is. But—there’s something elusive about him. Something hidden. I don’t like it.”
“Tonight’s our chance to question him,” Dad says. “Don’t think I don’t intend to make use of it, no matter how la-di-da this restaurant is.”
“You sound like a police investigator going after a suspect.” Mom leans down and kisses his forehead. “Good.”
The dots aren’t difficult to connect. Josie’s dating someone seriously—Romola’s boss, from the sound of it. This isn’t as remarkable to me as the fact that Josie’s either engaged to him or about to be. Normally my sister seems to go for quantity over quality with her boyfriends; she’s not a party animal or anything, but lots of guys love the same adrenaline sports she does, so she meets someone new all the time. Josie always swore she’d only get serious about a guy after she had some idea where she’d end up, professionally speaking. I don’t want to sacrifice my dreams for anybody, she said once. And I don’t want him to have to sacrifice his dreams for me. That’s kind of hard core—but that’s Josie.
Here, however, some guy won her over in just two months? This man I have to see.
“How long until we leave?” I ask.
Dad says, “Thirty minutes or so. I ought to grade a few more midterms, shouldn’t I? Say no.”
“Yes,” Mom calls from her room. Dad sighs.
I find my room on the first try—and exhale in relief as I see my paintings on the walls. My style here is much the same as at home: very realistic, except for my use of color. Here, I stick to a muted, limited palette for each portrait, giving the finished work a definite mood. Josie’s picture glows with reds and pinks; Mom’s reflects cerebral silvers and blues; Dad’s has soft sunny golds; and . . . then there’s Theo.
For his portrait I used bronze, orange, burnt sienna—colors both grounded and yet somehow electric. His dark eyes seem to shine as he looks out from his picture.
I don’t see a portrait of Paul.
Frustrated, I run a search on my tablet. “Paul Markov, physicist” comes up with zero results. So does “Paul Markov, scientist.”
My fear comes rushing back. Wouldn’t Paul be a scientist in any world he possibly could? In a dimension so much like our own, wouldn’t he go into physics, just like before? It seems as if nothing could keep him from that destiny, unless he’s seriously ill, or his parents never emigrated from Russia.
How am I supposed to find him if he’s in Russia? Over there, his name is so common he might as well be called John Smith. Besides, how would I even get there?
I try again, with his name and his birthday. Then an image shows up—something from a school webpage, some years old now—but I smile as I see it. That kid in a plaid shirt, surely no more than ten years old: I’d know him anywhere. Paul doesn’t keep any photos from his childhood, so I’ve never seen him as a little boy before. Of course he was completely adorable. My fingers trace over the screen, outlining his baby face.
Then I realize that the school is one here in New York City, and I laugh out loud in relief.
Encouraged, I search a little more online. He doesn’t have a Twitter account or anything like that, but he doesn’t in my world either. None of the universities list him as a student. He doesn’t seem to participate in any of the rock-climbing or hiking clubs I can find in the area either.
Finally I locate a Facebook page, which is set to private. The one photo I can see shows him from the side, looking away from the camera; it’s like Paul clipped the image from the background of a photo of someone or something else. Bad as the picture is, I’d recognize him anywhere—even here, when he’s wearing a tailored leather jacket that seems entirely unlike anything he’d own. Same gray eyes; same broad shoulders. I look closer, seeking that lost, lonely expression that always touches me—but the shadows in the picture render
his face unreadable.
It’s easy for me to imagine this picture as an image of the Paul from the Warverse; something about the lines of the leather jacket reminds me of his military uniform. His stricken face as Theo and I walked away . . . I hurt him so much, giving him hope and then crushing it. Maybe I had no other choice; maybe the situation worked out for the best. Doesn’t make it any easier to think about wounding Paul after Paul, in world after world.
Try not to screw it up this time, I tell myself.
Easier said than done. Without any school or job listed for Paul, I have no way of arranging an accidental meeting. Somehow, I have to get him to reach out to me.
Inspiration strikes, and I open a quick Facebook message to Paul. After chewing on my bottom lip for a moment, I type: Hey, we’ve never met, but we have mutual friends.
Alternate versions of him in other dimensions count as “mutual friends,” right?
Basically, everyone says you and I should meet sometime. So how about this week? We could get together—
Where? I don’t know New York City very well yet. But I know where my parents teach without even having to ask. Growing up surrounded by physics grad students means you’re constantly looking over postdoc applications to the best schools in the world.
—on the Columbia campus and grab a coffee, if you wanted. Hope this is the right Paul Markov. If it’s not, sorry for the mistake!
That works. Even if Paul’s not intrigued by the idea of the blindest blind date of all time, he’ll probably write back, if only to ask which one of his friends is trying to set him up. Then I’ll keep the messages coming, ask a few casual questions that will tell me something about this world’s Paul, and I can use that information to find him.
And who knows? Maybe he’d like the idea of a blind date.
I hug my knees to my chest, but my smile fades as I remind myself of my other reason for being here. Wyatt Conley didn’t send me to this dimension to look Paul up for a latte. Not even to retrieve the next splinter of Paul’s soul.
He sent me here to betray my parents, and this time, I can’t take the risk of faking it. This time, I hurt them for real.
My dark errand weighs heavily on me as the three of us ride down in the elevator, on our way to eat dinner with Josie and the guy in her life. Apparently we’re being treated to someplace fancy, because normally my father would never wear a tie for anything less than a wedding, a funeral, or a pitch meeting for a big research grant.
“We should’ve insisted on picking the restaurant,” Dad says during the taxi ride across Central Park. “The Vietnamese place around the corner, maybe. We’d all be more relaxed, and ten-to-one I’d like the food better.”
“If he’s treating, then logically he should be the one to determine the restaurant.” Mom looks out the car window at the darkening sky above. Day has begun fading into night. “We learn about people by observing their choices, Henry. The more control we surrender in this situation, the more we’ll learn about him.”
I’m wedged between the two of them in the middle of the backseat of the cab, with some obnoxious taxi-only TV channel playing on the same screen my knees are jammed against. “How much farther is it?”
“No idea,” Dad grumbles. “Never bothered going anyplace so ritzy in my life, and my great-uncle was a viscount, you know.”
Mom smiles. “Look at it this way, Henry. Now we know where to take Susannah the next time she visits Manhattan.”
I feel a completely illogical leap of surprise at the news that Aunt Susannah—dead in the Warverse—is alive and well here. And of course they need to take her to the fanciest restaurant in New York. The more pretentious and overpriced something is, the greater chance Aunt Susannah will love it. I manage to hold back a giggle, but barely.
But being with my parents while they’re acting like themselves—dorky and silly and so crazy about each other it’s almost embarrassing—that only makes it more difficult to think of the task ahead.
I hug myself and shrink down farther in the seat.
The restaurant turns out to border Central Park. It’s located in a stately, cream-colored building from the 1910s, one that doesn’t proclaim its status so much as it quietly suggests it. As we walk to the front door, I see someone standing nearby, waiting; when he turns, I recognize Theo.
“Hey,” I call. I’m about to lift my hand to wave when it hits me: What if Theo’s here because he’s Josie’s fiancé?
That’s crazy. They’ve never seemed like more than friends, not ever, even if he is closer to her age than mine. But this is a new dimension, with new rules. Is that why he’s in my phone contacts? Because I’ve made friends with my future brother-in-law?
Then Mom smiles at him. “Theo. So glad you could make it.”
“Glad to be here,” Theo says. I can tell he’s winging it, trying to figure out how well he knows my parents in this dimension.
The answer comes as Dad slaps him on the shoulder. “You needed to take a break from your dissertation—and besides, we’ll need an objective point of view. Nobody we’d trust more than you.”
Theo gets that oh crap I have no idea what they’re talking about look. So I provide an assist, saying, “We can’t let Josie marry just anybody, you know.”
He visibly stifles a laugh, as astonished as I am at the thought of commitment-phobic Josie getting engaged. My parents don’t see; they’re already walking inside. Once again, Theo crooks his arm for me, and I take it. He whispers, “Seen Paul?”
Only on a computer screen. I shake my head. Explaining my plan will have to wait for later.
We enter a hushed space, so carefully lit and perfectly decorated in cream and gold that I’d know it was crazy expensive even if Dad hadn’t told me already. The carpet beneath my shoes feels as plush as if I were walking on clouds. Theo uses his free hand to straighten his mega-ironic ’80s tie with the piano keys on it; this place is fancy enough to make even him self-conscious.
In the corner Josie rises from her seat to greet us. She’s wearing flowing silk pants and a cowl-necked sweater—which, despite their elegance, still look like something my sister would choose to wear. So Josie’s herself here, I think—and then I stop short. Theo sucks in a sharp breath as we see who’s by her side—
—my sister’s fiancé, Wyatt Conley.
14
JOSIE TAKES CONLEY’S ARM, HER FACE GLOWING. “EVERYONE, this is Wyatt. And Wyatt, may I present my parents, Dr. Sophia Kovalenka and Dr. Henry Caine; plus my sister, Marguerite; and my parents’ graduate assistant, Theo Beck.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Kovalenka, Dr. Caine. And Marguerite and Theo. I’m so glad you could make it tonight.” Conley’s manners are better than usual. If I didn’t know what a manipulative, power-hungry snake he actually is, I could believe my sister had gotten engaged to a nice guy.
As my parents get through some small talk with the “happy couple,” Theo and I take our seats. I lean toward him and whisper, “What’s Conley doing?”
“From this angle, I can see what your parents can’t see, namely that he’s letting your sister grope his ass.”
Somehow I manage not to gag. “I mean, why is he going after Josie? What’s his game? And if Conley’s got such a good in with my family in this dimension, why did he send us here?”
Theo raises an eyebrow. “Now that’s a good question.”
I look carefully at Conley, studying his neck and chest in particular. He’s wearing a suit, one that’s not closely tailored, so it still fits his “Bad Boy Wonder of Silicon Valley” image—but the subtle sheen of the fabric makes it clear his jacket alone probably cost as much as some cars. What interests me most is the lack of any rumples or wrinkles along his shirt, no telltale bulge beneath his silk necktie.
He’s not wearing a Firebird.
Conley wouldn’t necessarily have to wear it at all times; once you’ve stabilized in a dimension, you can take the Firebird off and put it aside almost indefinitely. But I’ve never rem
oved my Firebird for more than a couple of seconds when I didn’t absolutely have to, and neither would anyone else traveling through the multiverse.
Besides, he showed no flicker of recognition when he saw us. Conley loves to lord his power over people, to show off when he’s got the advantage. So my guess is that we’re sitting down to dinner with this world’s Wyatt Conley—no passengers from other dimensions involved.
That would mean his romance with Josie is for real.
Everyone settles in. I hesitate before unfolding my napkin, which has been done up into some kind of origami swan. This tablecloth is made out of better fabric than most of my clothes. And when the waiter gives us the menus—gliding in and out almost unnoticeably, like a spirit—no prices are listed.
Theo murmurs, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
I’d laugh, but I’m too busy watching Conley and Josie.
“Well, I told you, Wyatt and I met when I agreed to help with his latest gaming system.” Josie beams. Since when did she get into programming? Her next sentence answers that question. “The company needed someone to surf in a wave pool, so they could study the body kinesthetic, the kinds of motion, all of that. They’d already had a guy come in, but when they advertised for a female surfer too, I figured, what the hell. I’d been wanting to visit the Bay Area again, and I thought I might as well get paid for doing what I’d do for fun on the weekend anyway.”
Conley cuts in. “And I was there just to see how the project was getting on.”
“You had time for that?” Dad says, amiably enough. He’s the only one of us totally at ease in these sophisticated surroundings—well, aside from Conley himself. My father’s English-nobility background is showing. “I’d think running ConTech would keep you far too busy for that sort of thing.”
I make a mental note. His company isn’t Triad here; it’s ConTech.
