“Yeah, well, I exaggerate a lot. You must have realized that by now.” Theo may be full of it, but I give him this: at least he knows he’s full of it. “And besides, that was before I got to work on them. The Firebirds are better now than ever before.”
It wasn’t like I made a decision at any one moment. When Theo came to sit with me on the deck, I felt powerless against the tragedy that had ripped my family in two; by the time I spoke, I’d known exactly what I intended to do for what seemed like a long time. “If you’re that sure, then okay. I’m in.”
“Whoa. Hang on. I never said this was a trip for two.”
I pointed at the Firebird lockets. “Count ’em.”
His fist closed around the Firebirds, and he stared down at his hand like he wished he hadn’t brought them both and given me the idea—but too bad, and too late.
Quietly I said, “You’re not to blame. But you’re also not talking me out of it.”
Theo leaned closer to me, and the smirk was gone. “Marguerite, have you thought about the risks you’d be taking?”
“They’re no worse than the risks you’d take. My dad is dead. Mom deserves some justice. So Paul has to be stopped. I can help you stop him.”
“It’s dangerous. I’m not even talking about the dimension-jumping stuff right now. I mean—we don’t know what kind of worlds we’ll find ourselves in. All we know is that, wherever we end up, Paul Markov is there, and he’s a volatile son of a bitch.”
Paul, volatile. Two days earlier, I would have laughed at that. To me Paul had always seemed as quiet and stolid as the rock cliffs he climbed on weekends.
Now I knew that Paul was a murderer. If he’d do that to my father, he’d do it to Theo or me. None of that mattered anymore.
I said, “I have to do this, Theo. It’s important.”
“It is important. That’s why I’m doing it. Doesn’t mean you have to.”
“Think about it. You can’t jump into any dimensions where you don’t exist. There are probably some dimensions I exist in that you don’t.”
“And vice versa,” he retorted.
“Still.” I took Theo’s free hand then, like I could make him understand how serious I was just by squeezing tightly. “I can follow him to places where you can’t. I extend your reach. I make the chances of finding him a lot better. Don’t argue with me, because you know it’s true.”
Theo breathed out, squeezed my hand back, let it go, and ran his fingers through his spiky hair. He was restless and jumpy as always—but I could tell he was considering it.
When his dark eyes next met mine, he sighed. “If your mother had any idea we were talking about this, she’d skin me alive. I’m not being metaphorical about that. I think she could actually, literally skin me. She gets the wild eyes sometimes. There’s Cossack blood in her; I’d bet anything.”
I hesitated for a moment, thinking of what this meant for my mother. If something went wrong on this trip—if I turned into atomic soup—she would have lost both me and Dad within the space of two days. There weren’t even words for what that would do to her.
But if Paul got away with it, that would kill her just as surely—and me, too. I wasn’t going to let that happen. “You’re already talking about Mom’s revenge. That means we’re doing this together, doesn’t it?”
“Only if you’re absolutely sure. Please think about this for a second first.”
“I’ve thought about it,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true, but it didn’t matter. I meant it then as much as I mean it now. “I’m in.”
That’s how I got here.
But where is here, exactly? As I walk along the street, crowded despite the late hour, I try to study my surroundings. Wherever I am, it’s not California.
Picasso could have painted this city with its harsh angles, its rigidity, and the way dark lines of steel seem to slash through buildings like knife strokes. I imagine myself as one of the women he painted—face divided in two, asymmetrical and contradictory, one half appearing to smile while the other is silently screaming.
I stop in my tracks. By now I’ve found my way to the river-side, and across the dark water, illuminated by spotlights, is a building I recognize: St. Paul’s Cathedral.
London. I’m in London.
Okay. All right. That makes sense. Dad is . . . he was English. He didn’t move to the United States until he and Mom started working together. In this dimension, I guess she came to his university instead, and we all live here in London.
The thought of my father alive again, somewhere nearby, bubbles up inside me until I can hardly think of anything else. I want to run to him right now, right this second, and hug him tight and apologize for every time I ever talked back to him or made fun of his dorky bow ties.
But this version of my dad won’t be my dad. He’ll be another version. This Marguerite’s father.
I don’t care. This is as close as I’m ever going to get to Dad again, and I’m not wasting it.
Okay. Next step: discover where this version of home is.
The three trips I’ve taken to London to visit Aunt Susannah were all fairly quick; Aunt Susannah’s all about shopping and gossip, and as much as Dad loved his sister, he could take about six days with her, maximum, before he lost it. But I was there long enough to know that London shouldn’t look anything like this.
Even as I walk along the street by the South Bank of the Thames, I can tell computers were invented a little earlier here, because they’ve advanced further. Several people, despite the drizzling rain, have paused to bring up little glowing squares of light—like computer screens, except they’ve appeared in thin air in front of their users. One woman is talking to a face; that must be a holographic phone call. As I stand there, one of my wide bangle bracelets is shimmering with light. I lift my wrist closer to my face and read the words, written on the inside in small metallic type:
ConTech Personal Security
DEFENDER Model 2.8
Powered by Verizon
I’m not quite sure what that means, but I don’t think this bracelet is just a bracelet.
What other kinds of advanced technology do they have here? To everybody else in this dimension, all this stuff is beyond routine. Both the hoverships above London and the no-rail monorail snaking along overhead are filled with bored passengers, for whom this is just the end of another dull day.
There’s no place like home, I think, but the feeble joke falls flat even inside my own head. I look down again at the high heels I wear, so unlike my usual ballet flats. Ruby slippers they’re not.
Then I remind myself that I’ve got the most powerful technology of all—the Firebird—hanging around my neck. I open the locket and look at the device inside.
It’s complicated. Very complicated. The thing reminds me of our universal remote, which has so many keys and buttons and functions that nobody in my household—which contains multiple physicists, including my mother who is supposed to be the next Einstein—none of us can figure out how to switch from the Playstation to the DVR. But just like with the universal remote, I’ve learned a few functions, the ones that matter most: How to jump into a new dimension. How to jump back from one if I land somewhere immediately dangerous. How to spark a “reminder,” if needed.
(The idea was that people who traveled between dimensions wouldn’t remain fully conscious throughout—that they’d be more or less asleep within the other versions of themselves. So you can use the Firebird to create a reminder, which would leave your consciousness in control for a while longer. Well, so much for theory. As far as I can tell, the reminders aren’t necessary at all.)
As I look down at the glittering Firebird in my palm, I remind myself that if I learned how to work this thing, I can handle anything this dimension has to throw at me. Re-energized, I start observing the people around me more closely. Watch and learn.
A woman touches a metal tab clipped to her sleeve, and a holographic computer screen appears in front of her. Quickly I run
my hands over my own clothes; this silver jacket doesn’t have anything like that on the sleeves, but something similar is pinned to my lapel. I tap it—and jump as a hologram screen appears in front of me. The hologram jumps with me, tethered to the metal tab.
Okay, that’s . . . pretty cool. Now what? Voice commands, like Siri on my phone? Can something be “touch-screen” if there’s no screen to touch? Experimentally I hold out one hand, and a holographic keyboard appears in front of the screen. So if I pretend to type on it . . .
Sure enough, the words I type appear on the screen, in the search window: PAUL MARKOV.
As soon as the eighty zillion results pop up, I feel like a fool. Markov is a fairly common last name in Russia, where Paul’s parents emigrated from when he was four; Paul, which has a Russian form too (Pavel), is also popular. So thousands and thousands of people have that name.
So I try again, searching for Paul Markov plus physicist. There’s no guarantee Paul would be a physics student here, too, except that I have to start somewhere, and apparently physics is the only human endeavor he remotely understands.
These results look more promising. Most of them focus on the University of Cambridge, so I pull up the one titled “Faculty Profile.” It’s for a professor with another name altogether, but the profile lists his research assistants, and sure enough, there’s Paul Markov’s photo. It’s him.
Cambridge. That’s in England too. I could get there within a couple of hours—
Which means he could get here within a couple of hours.
We can track Paul, because the Firebirds allow us to know when a dimensional breach occurs. But that means Paul can also track us.
If this is the right dimension—if this is where Paul fled after cutting my dad’s brakes and stealing the final Firebird—then Paul already knows I’m here.
Maybe he’ll run away, fleeing to the next dimension.
Or maybe he’s already coming after me.
3
I HUG MYSELF AS I WALK THROUGH THE MIST. IT FEELS AS though I’m splintering into a dozen directions at once—grief, then rage, then panic. The last thing I need right now is to lose it. Instead I force my mind to go to the place that always calms and centers me: painting.
If I were going to paint the dimension I see in front of me, I’d load my palette up with burnt umber, opaque black, a spectrum of grays—nothing brighter than that. I’d have to grind something into the paint with my thumb, some sort of grit or ash, because the grime here goes deeper than surfaces. Even the air feels dirty against my skin. There’s less old stone in this London than I remember, more hard metal. Fewer trees and plants, too. The chill in the air is sharp; this is early December, and yet I’m wearing only a short black dress and a flimsy jacket brighter than tinfoil.
(Yes, it’s definitely December. The devices allow dimensional travel, not time travel. “That’s another Nobel Prize altogether,” Mom once said cheerfully, like she might turn to it whenever she got a spare moment.)
Imagining painting helps a little, but my freak-out only halts when my ring starts blinking.
Startled, I stare down at the silvery band around my right pinky, which is shimmering in loops. My first thought is that it’s some kind of LED thing, meant for showing off in nightclubs. But if metal tabs on my jacket create holographic computers, what might this do?
So I reach over and tentatively give the ring a tap. The glow swirls out, a miniature spotlight, and a hologram takes shape in the space in front of me. I’m startled for the one instant it takes me to recognize the face painted in the silver-blue shimmer: “Theo!”
“Marguerite!” He grins, relief shining from him as brilliantly as the hologram beams. “It is you, right?”
“It’s me. Oh, my God, you made it. You’re alive. I was so scared.”
“Hey.” His voice can sound so warm, when he wants it to; for all Theo’s faux arrogance—and his real arrogance—he sees more about people than he lets on. “Don’t waste any more time worrying about me, okay? I always land on the right side. Just like loaded dice.”
Even in the middle of all this, Theo is trying to make me laugh. Instead I feel a sudden lump in my throat. After the past twenty-four hours—a day in which my father died, my friend betrayed us, and I leaped out of my home dimension into places unknown—I’m running on empty. I say, “If I’d lost you, I don’t think I could have taken it.”
“Hey, hey. I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. See?”
“You sure are.” I try to make it flirtatious. Maybe it works, maybe not. I kind of suck at flirting. At any rate, the attempt makes me feel steadier.
He becomes businesslike, or at least as businesslike as someone like Theo can get. His dark eyes—strangely transparent through the hologram—search my face. “Okay, so, you recently had a reminder, because you remember me. That or I’m making one hell of a first impression.”
“No, I didn’t need a reminder. I remembered everything anyway.”
“You said you remembered yourself anyway?” He leans forward intently, temporarily distorting the holographic image. “No periods of confusion?”
“None. Looks like it’s that way for you too. Guess Mom was wrong about dimensional travelers forgetting themselves.”
But Theo shakes his head. “No. I needed—you know, I used a reminder right when I got here.”
“Weird.”
Theo seems slightly freaked by the fact that I remember things so easily. That works against all Mom’s theories—and, apparently, his own experience—but I guess traveling between dimensions is different for different people. Theories only get refined through experimentation. Mom and Dad taught me that much.
He says only, “Well, about time we caught a lucky break, because we were seriously overdue.”
“Where are you?”
“Boston. Looks like I’m at MIT in this dimension. I’m doing my best not to acknowledge all the Red Sox shirts in this closet.” Theo doesn’t care for sports at all—at least, in our dimension. “I thought I’d gone a long way, but damn, Meg. You landed all the way in London.”
Theo started calling me Meg a couple of months ago. I’m still not sure whether it’s annoying or cute. But I like how he always smiles when he says it. “How did you track me down so fast? Did you hack my personal information, something like that?”
He raises one eyebrow. “I searched for you online, found your profile, and put through a call request, which the local equivalent of Facebook offers as an option. When I called, you answered. Not exactly rocket science, and I say this as someone who seriously considered rocket science as a career.”
“Oh. Okay.” Well, that’s a relief. Maybe not everything has to be hard. Maybe we can catch the occasional break, and get lucky like we did this time.
Even though our devices are both set to follow in Paul’s footsteps, there are no guarantees. We could be separated at any jump. Not this time, though. This time Theo is with me. I look at his face, hazy in the ring’s glow, and wish he were here by my side already.
“Have you managed to . . .” Then my voice trails off, because for the first time I’m calm enough to realize I have an English accent now. Just like Dad’s.
Which makes sense, of course, because I live here. I guess speaking is a kind of muscle memory that lingers even while the other Marguerite’s consciousness is in the passenger seat, so to speak. But it hits me as the weirdest, coolest, funniest thing imaginable.
“Bath,” I say, relishing the short A of my new accent. “Baaaath. Privacy. Aluminium. Laboratory. Tomato. Schhhhhhedule.”
The giggles come over me, and I stop right there, hand against my chest, trying to catch my breath. I know I’m laughing mostly because I refuse to give in and start crying. The grief for my father has nowhere to go and is twisting every other mood I have into knots. And . . . tomahhhhto. That’s hilarious.
As I wipe away tears of laughter, Theo says, “You’re kinda shaky right now, huh?”
My voice is all squeaky as
I try to hold it in. “I guess.”
“Well, if you were wondering, you sound adorable.”
The silly moment passes as soon as it came, replaced by anger and fright. This must be what the brink of hysteria feels like; I have to hold on. “Theo, Paul’s very close to London. If he knows we’ve come to this dimension, he could be on his way here, now.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“You’re not the only one who’s used a computer before, you know. I tracked Paul down at Cambridge.”
I look through the night at the harsh cityscape across the river, where the jagged dark outlines of skyscrapers dwarf the dome of the cathedral. Paul might be here already. How long would it take him to reach London?
Fiercely I remind myself that if Paul’s chasing me, it saves me the trouble of chasing him. The next time we meet, one of us is going to be sorry, and it won’t be me.
I must look murderous, because Theo says, “We have to remember one thing, okay? There’s a slim chance I calibrated wrong. We could have jumped into the wrong dimension. The Paul Markov in this dimension might not be our Paul. So we can’t overreact until we know the facts.”
What he’s really saying is, I can’t kill an innocent man. I’m not even sure I can kill the guilty one, though I mean to try. My limited skills with the Firebird mean I can’t tell the difference between our Paul and any other; it’s just one more reason I need Theo with me.
“How fast can you get here?” I ask.
Theo gives me that sly grin of his. “Already bought my ticket, Meg. Couldn’t take my pick of flights, traveling last minute—gotta go all the way to Germany and back again, so thanks, Lufthansa—but I should be there by midnight tomorrow. Fast enough for you?”
He’s already crossed a dimension to help me; now he’s going to cross half the globe, as fast as humanly possible, and the one thing Theo asks is whether he’s doing it all fast enough. I whisper, “Thank you.”
“We’re in this together,” Theo says, like it’s no big deal. “Listen, if I’ve figured these ring-phone things out, and I think I have, you can give me tracker access.”