ROMOLA. AGAIN.
Worst is seeing the awful betrayal on Victoire’s face, and her sisters’ faces. They look so wounded. Even shattered. Did I look like this when I thought Paul had hurt my father?
Victoire rises to her feet, wobbly and uncertain. “Romy—what are you—”
“You can explain all this to your version of me later,” Romola snaps. “But I think you know who I’ve come for.”
She’s here to set Wicked free.
Paul, Theo, and I all exchange glances. Between the three of us and the seven other clones in this room, we could take Romola out easily—if it weren’t for the black pistol she holds. As it is, any attempt to disarm her could be deadly, and if one of the bullets hit a clone, Romola might kill two Marguerites with a single pull of the trigger. Theo’s shoulders sag in defeat. But Paul—
Paul’s eyes blaze with that cold fire I’ve found so menacing in the past. Is this the same anger he would have felt anyway, or proof of his splintering? The potential for violence deep within him has been re-armed, and it could explode at any moment.
At the moment, though, I’m nearly as angry as he is, no splintering required. It’s galling to have to point to Victoire and say, “Your Marguerite is . . . with her. Asleep, but safe and sound.”
“Very well.” Romola motions to the chair Victoire was sitting in only a few moments before. “Go on. Take your seat. I’ll handle the rest.”
“Is this about the phantom?” Victoire asks. I nod. She turns to Romola then, still bewildered and hurt. “Romy, why are you doing this?”
“I’m not your ‘Romy.’ I’m from a dimension with higher technology and more realistic priorities.”
“You’re destroying billions of lives to save one,” Paul says. Though he keeps his voice low, his anger simmers just below the surface. “Those priorities are twisted. Corrupt. But hardly realistic.”
Romy shrugs. “In all honesty, I see your point. But gaining supremacy over all the other worlds in the multiverse? That makes more sense.” Her eyes are cold as she glances at Victoire. “When is that one going to sit down?”
“Do it,” I say to Victoire, this other me who’s wearing the scratches and bruises I gave her earlier tonight. “There’s no other way.”
Trembling, Victoire takes her seat. The other two clones lean forward, as if they’ll rush Romola the moment Victoire shows any pain, gun or no gun. Unfortunately recklessness seems to be a characteristic too many of us share.
Don’t go after her, I think as I try to catch the others’ eyes. If only clones could be telepathic with each other, so I could make it clear just how dangerous this is. Then they wouldn’t do anything stupid—
—but they don’t even get the chance, because Paul rushes Romola first.
As he smashes into her, sending them both stumbling into the wall, we all scream. He’s such a huge man that the tackle would seem brutal if Romola weren’t wielding a gun. But even her tumble down to the ground doesn’t make her drop her weapon. Romola kicks away from him, skidding across the floor, and has the presence of mind to aim not at Paul but at me. “I’ll do it,” she says rapidly, not even glancing at Paul a couple of paces behind her. Her eyes remain focused on her target, which appears to be the dead center of my chest. “Don’t try me. I will kill her.”
Paul says nothing. Instead he grabs a meat cleaver from the knife block. Its blade glints in the light. The others in the room gasp, but Romola still doesn’t look up. And Paul’s standing close enough, at the perfect angle, to swing it down and split her head wide open.
Don’t. Terror rushes through me. Not for myself, despite Romola’s unwavering aim. She doesn’t realize what Paul could do. She wouldn’t even have time to know Paul was taking action before he’d stunned or killed her.
But if Paul kills Romola like this, in cold blood, he will have surrendered to that darkness within him. The damage from his shattering will be complete, if only because he’ll never again believe that he could be anything but a murderer.
I can say nothing. Do nothing. This battle is Paul’s to fight.
He stares down at her, hatred warping his expression into something I can hardly recognize. His hand tightens around the cleaver’s handle as his knuckles turn white. Within him I see all the menace I remember from the son of a Russian mafia leader. All the recklessness of the Cambridgeverse Paul, who let a moment’s temper and inattention mangle my arm forever. And I see a hard, bitter edge that belongs to my Paul alone.
Oh, God, he’s going to do it. He’s going to kill her.
At that moment Romola glances upward and sees what he’s doing. She doesn’t even flinch. “Your Marguerite is in my sights.” Her arm hasn’t wavered one millimeter. “The second I see you start for me, I fire. She’ll be dead before I will.”
Anger ripples over Paul’s face, an ugly grimace that makes me wonder if he’ll strike Romola down anyway. Instead he steps back and sets the cleaver down again.
Would he have murdered her? We can never know.
Now that Paul is no longer an immediate threat, Romola sits up and goes back into action. With her free hand, Romola fishes a second Firebird from around her neck. She prepared herself for anything, then. As she lifts the heavy chain over her head, Theo says, “Where did you get a gun in Singapore?”
“Policemen carry them,” Romola explains as she tosses the Firebird to Victoire, who puts it on with shaking hands. The other Marguerites have clustered in a corner, silent and pale, knowing they can’t help. Only watch. “Odd, given that the officer in question obviously had no expectation of being attacked.”
“I think you can get the death penalty here if you smoke a joint.” Theo runs his hands through his spiky hair in frustration. “Maybe it’s not that bad for pot, but attacking a police officer—you realize this universe’s Romola will probably be executed for this.”
She shrugs. “Not my problem.”
“You’re still just the errand girl,” I try. “You’re here to pick up your world’s Marguerite. Not to do the job yourself.”
“I took care of you well enough in the Romeverse, didn’t I?” Romola retorts.
Again the molten hell of that universe’s final moments writhes in my mind. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m still alive and well. You can’t say that for Conley or Theo in the Triadverse, can you?”
“We lost a perfect traveler, but we can always make another. You’re not as indispensible as they all seem to think. This room would seem to prove it. Infinite copies, and yet you’re still never enough, Marguerite. Never enough for your parents, never enough for anyone.”
Romola, onto my game, is trying to wound me back. The thing is, it doesn’t work. With all my self-doubt and uncertainty, I’ve never felt like my parents didn’t love me, or that I didn’t deserve to be loved. Only in these past few days, as I’ve realized how that sense of inferiority has gnawed at Wicked—and at Paul—have I fully appreciated how the lack of love can twist someone inside.
If you know you’re loved, deep down know it, something deep and precious inside you will always be safe. If you don’t have that love—or don’t know that you do—then you’re vulnerable. Unshielded. Exposed to all the hardness and horror of the world.
“You don’t understand half as much as you think you do,” I tell Romola.
“And yet I still seem to understand more than you.” With that, Romola leans forward and activates Victoire’s Firebird for a reminder. The jolt isn’t visible; however, the pain it causes Victoire is. She jumps in her seat, twists around—and goes deadly still.
Wicked’s back.
“Good try.” Her smile is as sharp as a shard of a broken mirror. “But, as usual, not good enough.”
Instantly Wicked’s hand goes to her Firebird, as does Romola’s. The lockets seem to vanish, leaving both Victoire and Romola there looking stupefied. Romola takes a couple of steps backward in utter confusion, then gasps in shock at the gun in her own hand. “What’s going on?”
“Romy?” Victoire says. “Are you yourself again?”
Paul steps forward and carefully takes the weapon from Romola’s hand, showing no sign of the homicidal anger that nearly consumed him only seconds ago. “Sit down. We’ll explain later.”
“Who is that?” says Warverse, from the corner where she and the others have huddled. “I’ve never laid eyes on her in my life.”
“Her name is Romola Harrington.” Mafiaverse answers, and I realize she looks paler and sicker than anyone else in the room. “In my universe, she works for Wyatt Conley.”
“Here, too,” says one of the clones who’s already rid of her visitor from another dimension—Elodie, I think. “Conley funds Mum and Dad’s cloning research. Romy’s one of his assistants, so she lives here and handles PR, transfers of funds, that kind of thing.”
“And she’s one of our friends.” Victoire goes to the very confused Romola’s side in a show of solidarity. “She’d never hurt us.”
“Neither would mine,” Mafiaverse says.
“That’s great. You guys got way nicer Romolas than we did. Maybe when you get back to the Mafiaverse, you could ask yours to help out?” Frustration is making me snarky. “I’m sorry. It’s just—as soon as we take care of one threat from the Home Office, another one takes its place. I don’t know what to do.”
“We stick to the plan.” Paul tries to sound logical and confident, like he’s only talking good sense. Yet he won’t meet anyone’s eyes, and he keeps glancing over at the cleaver he very nearly used on Romola. “Protect our own dimensions, continue to work together, move on quickly. This next world is important—”
“I’ll go there,” I say. Up until now, I’ve been following in Wicked’s footsteps. With this step, with Paul resetting my Firebird to strike out in new directions instead of only trailing behind her, maybe I can finally beat her to the punch. “Right away. As long as I keep her out, the dimension will remain safe until you can meet me there.”
Paul opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. He was going to object.
I beat him to it. “I mean, you or whoever can reach me. Whoever is closest in that dimension.”
Because I don’t know anything about this next world. Where I once assumed Paul and I could always find each other, now I know the multiverse has a million different ways of tearing us apart.
“Okay,” I murmured one night in late February as Paul and I snuggled in his dorm room, listening to his beloved Rachmaninoff. The piano notes rippled down around us like raindrops on a windowpane during a storm—cascading, endless. “So you can mathematically prove the existence of fate.”
“I hope so. If not, my chances of successfully defending my thesis are poor.”
“But you can.” I lay on my side, Paul spooned around my back. His hand splayed across my stomach, two of his fingers touching the bare skin exposed between my top and my jeans. “You can actually look into this snarl of equations and read what our destiny is fated to be.”
“No, that’s going too far.” Paul kissed the back of my neck, as if apologizing for having to correct me in any way. “Yes, there are parallels in the equations that suggest parallels in the outcomes. But it’s not as though one number tells me we get married, or another number tells me we never meet. It would take a lifetime of exploration and evaluation to even begin understanding how to interpret those findings.”
“Do your equations explain why there are all these parallels? Why you and Theo work with my parents in so many worlds, or why you and I seem to manage to find each other every time?”
“I could only posit a theory.”
After growing up with my parents and their menagerie of grad students, I was used to their jargon. Smiling to myself, I said, “All right, posit away.”
“Have you ever eaten Pringles?”
It was such a non sequitur that at first I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Pringles? Like the potato chips?”
“Yes,” he said earnestly. “They’re very good.”
“I know. I’ve had Pringles. I mean, obviously. But this is the first time anyone’s ever used them as part of a cosmological theory.”
Paul hugged me more tightly. “They all have to be shaped the same to fit into the can. If they were too irregular, they couldn’t be packed together.”
“You mean—dimensions are like potato chips in a can.” It began to make sense to me, which was either a breakthrough or possibly proof I’d been hanging around physicists way too long. “They have to be shaped the same, at least a little, or they couldn’t co-exist.”
“Exactly. See, we might make a scientist of you yet.”
“You wish.”
“No, I don’t. I would never want you to be anyone but yourself.” Paul kissed the back of my neck again, slowly this time, so that I felt the warmth of his breath on my skin. I took his hand and slid it up my body, inviting him to explore. It seemed like we had become our own tiny universe of heat and light and love, needing nothing else. . . .
And now Paul and I stand here, terrible bleak tension between us because he no longer has faith that our fate brings us together.
But if he can no longer believe in us, I want him to at least believe in himself.
I step to his side and keep my voice low. “You stepped away from Romola, okay? You thought of me first. The splintering didn’t get you.”
“I only stopped because Romola threatened you.” Paul stares at an empty corner, again avoiding my gaze. “I nearly committed murder.”
“Nearly doesn’t count! You hung on and controlled yourself. You can win this fight.”
“But it will always be a fight. Always.” He shakes his head as though he were about to pronounce a death sentence.
“And you can always win.” I put one hand on his arm.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He steps away from me. Maybe the breakthrough is just too new, or maybe his despair runs even deeper than I thought.
As badly as I want to make things right with Paul, we have a multiverse to save.
“You’ve input the coordinates for this important dimension?” I take my Firebird back, determined to carry on. “I’m cleared to go?”
“I’ll follow as soon as I can. If I can,” Paul promises. Still he doesn’t meet my eyes.
The Grand Duchess Margarita of all the Russias watches us in dismay. Although I see her eagerness to speak, she has far too proper manners to ever intrude. How angry she must feel, seeing me blow my chance to be with my Paul after she tragically lost hers.
But now I’m thinking about Lieutenant Markov, whose memory always makes me cry, and I can’t afford to break down. So I just look around the room at my other selves, whether visitors from other dimensions or this world’s clones. “These might not be the best circumstances, but I’m glad I met all of you. Seeing all these lives we could lead, and all the different ways things turn out—”
“It proves anything is possible,” says the grand duchess.
I nod at her, then look again at Paul, who finally returns my gaze in the instant before I hit my controls and—
—I wobble, because I’ve slammed into a world where I’m currently on top of a very tall ladder. I manage to recover my balance in time, saving me from tumbling to the tiled floor below. But I’m even more afraid. Because the one thing I know about this dimension is that somewhere, very close, a bomb just went off.
The only other time I’ve been near a massive explosion was during an air raid in the Warverse. One of the fighter planes dropped a bomb nearly on top of our shelter, and for a couple of minutes after that, the only thing I could hear was a dull roar, almost exactly like the one ringing in my ears now.
Did Wicked get here before me after all? Did she set off an explosive device, trying to frame me as a terrorist? But she hasn’t had time for anything that elaborate, and besides—I don’t smell smoke. I don’t see any damage. A few people walk along on the tiled floor beneath my ladder, all of them headed in one direction but in no particular hurry. Their clothes look roughly modern, if kind of drab. A drop cloth is spattered with red, but the drops look more like paint than blood.
How can nobody care about the bomb? I look to my other side and see Paul’s face, larger than life on the wall by my shoulder, the paint still wet. Clipped to the ladder is a box of paints, and I realize I’m wearing a smock.
From the corner of my eye I catch some movement and look down again to see a middle-aged man holding up a paintbrush. He looks irritated, and he has a blue-gray stripe across one cheek. I must have dropped my paintbrush on him. And he’s way more interested in that than the freakin’ bomb.
The man waves at me again, signaling for me to come down. But he doesn’t want me to evacuate. I can tell he just wants me to get my brush back.
Usually I try to piece together the most important clues about a universe on my own, but this time, I’m going to need some help. So I say to the man below, “What’s going on?”
But I don’t say it with my voice.
Instead, automatically and unconsciously drawing on the language information rooted deeply in this Marguerite’s brain, I respond in sign language.
Oh. I’m deaf.