PAUL SMILES AT ME, AS SHY AS HE HAS EVER BEEN IN ANY world, even holding the baby. With one hand he clumsily signs, “Look, Mama’s home.”
This must be Valentina—my daughter with Paul.
I sink down heavily onto one of the chairs by the dining table, and Paul frowns in concern. He puts Valentina down on the floor. She’s big enough to crawl and happy to do so while he comes to my side. “Are you all right? You look pale.”
“I feel faint. Josie walked me home.” And now I’m going to pass out from shock. The fate of the Grand Duchess Margarita flashes through my mind. First I find out I’m pregnant, then two weeks later, I have a kid.
Obviously I understand these are different universes, different Marguerites, different babies. But on every emotional level it feels as if I went from conception to delivery in two weeks.
Paul slips off his own gloves and holds one hand to my head before pulling it back to sign, “Do you think you have a fever? It’s not the flu, is it?”
“Honestly, I think all I need is sleep.” Plus some time to get used to this.
“No wonder. She’s been doing so much better, but last night was just like she was six weeks old again, wasn’t it? Up every hour.” He sighs, and I realize he’s tired too. But Paul lays his own weariness aside. “We’ve got some of the soup left over. I could heat that up, plus the bread and cheese. Does that sound good?”
He wants to make dinner for us, so I can rest. Our daughter is playing on the floor, and this cozy little apartment is ours. At least in one world, it got to be just this simple, this sweet. We fell in love. People marry young here, so we did too. And now we have a family. We share a life.
“Are you crying?” Paul touches my hands before kneeling in front of me.
I shake my head no, even though tears are in my eyes. “I’m fine. Everything is so much better than fine.”
He gives me a look, obviously wondering where that came from, but after only a moment he kisses my forehead and goes into the kitchen to get dinner started.
The next couple of hours pass in a blur, a mixture of the mundane and the sublime. For a while, as Paul cooks, I play with Valentina on the floor. In one moment, it feels like babysitting a stranger’s child. In the next, it hits me all over again. This is our daughter. Paul’s and mine, together.
Will the grand duchess’s child look like this? Valentina has big gray eyes like her daddy, but the few wispy curls atop her head tell me she’s inherited the lunatic Kovalenka hair. She’s beautiful, in the way most babies are beautiful, but the longer I look at her, the more individual she seems. I see a glimmer of my father’s smile, then Paul’s stubborn chin. In her I recognize parts of most of the people I’ve loved most in my life.
My parents would call it genetics. To me it seems like alchemy—the luminous space between science and magic.
Even diaper duty isn’t enough to make me feel less awed by this. When I scoop Valentina back into my arms afterward and smell her head, a warm little shiver passes through me, and I feel like I could hold her forever.
Once we’ve eaten, Paul insists on looking after Valentina himself. He settles in with her for yet more block-stacking action as I lie on the couch, when suddenly another small blinking light goes off. Paul winces. “I forgot Mom and Dad were coming by.”
“That’s okay.” I sit up and smile. “I want to see them.” What mad scientists will come through the door this time?
But when Paul lets our visitors in, I don’t see my parents. I see Leonid Markov and the woman who must be Paul’s mother, Olga.
The last time I laid eyes on Leonid Markov, he killed a man in cold blood not three feet from my face. He debated the pros and cons of keeping me alive. And I saw the cruelty and control he used to batter his son into leading a life that would slowly poison Paul’s soul. Olga was unknown to me until this moment. All I knew was that she supported her husband’s criminal enterprises, and she ostracized Paul for refusing to join the “family business.”
Tonight, however, Leonid wears a plain brown overcoat and suit. Olga’s hair is piled atop her head in an old-fashioned way, and her dress is a ghastly plaid. But they look, well, normal. They’re happy to be here. Most astonishingly, Paul smiles as he lets them in.
“Hello,” Olga signs. “Good to see you.” Her technique is clumsy, but I can still tell what she means. Obviously she doesn’t know much more sign than that, because she then starts speaking to Paul.
He seems used to serving as translator. “Babushka says Valentina grows prettier every day,” then signs as he replies to her, so I’ll understand too. “Beautiful, but the little tyrant was up all night. Marguerite is exhausted. Tonight isn’t good for a long visit.”
Leonid nods, smiling. As he talks to his son, Paul signs for me. “The party meeting was tonight, and my parents are tired too. Can they take the baby for a while this weekend instead? It would give you a chance to rest.” With a significant look, Paul adds something only for me: “Imagine having hours to ourselves.”
I remember the bedroom we share. Oh, I can imagine lots of things. “If it’s okay with you,” I reply. Paul’s smile widens, and he nods as he tells his parents of course, Valentina always loves spending time with her grandparents.
Slowly I begin to put it together. In this world, Leonid isn’t a mobster. Instead, he’s a loyal member of the Communist Party. Maybe that’s what he draws his sense of power from—that gives him the sense of authority he so craves. The USSR prized its top science students and gave them the best of everything, which meant that in the Moscowverse, Leonid supported Paul’s ambitions. He’s proud to have a scientist son.
I feel sure there’s a darker side to this. Leonid Markov is the last person who should ever have authority in a police state, and Paul is intelligent enough to have seen that for himself. But that doesn’t change the core fact that in this world, Paul grew up valued, supported, and cared for.
He has no reason to believe he will never be loved, and so, when we met, nothing held him back.
Olga and Leonid coo over Valentina a while longer as Paul serves them a quick cup of tea, but it’s not half an hour before they leave and our tiny family is alone again. Valentina fusses a little, and Paul bends down to kiss her head. “She’s tired too.” He smiles up at me. “No wonder. I’ll give her a bath, get her in bed.”
“I can help—”
“No, no. Rest.” Paul looks skyward. “And hope tonight she decides to sleep.”
Although I sneak a peek of him sitting beside the bathtub with her, laughing as she splashes, mostly I explore the front room even more avidly than before. I find a photo album, the kind I remember from my grandparents’ house with sticky adhesive pages and old, slightly discolored photographs. Here, though, most of the snapshots are in black and white. This album must have been put together by Olga, then given to us as a wedding gift, because the initial pages show Paul as a little boy—smiling more eagerly than he probably ever did in my own universe. After a few scholastic honors (scarlet ribbons emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, or portraits of Lenin again), the first photo of me shows up. Despite the dowdy school uniform I’m wearing, I grin unabashedly at the camera, both my arms around Paul’s waist. It looks like we hooked up here when we were maybe thirteen and fourteen? Maybe even a year younger than that.
A couple of pages later comes the wedding photo. Without a huge commercialized bridal industry to egg them on, brides and grooms keep things simpler here: Paul is wearing a regular suit, and I’ve got on a knee-length dress with only a couple of flowers in my hair. But there’s no mistaking the joy shining from our faces.
I look up from the photo album when Paul walks in carrying Valentina, who is now wrapped in a soft yellow blanket. She yawns, which is insanely cute—her tiny mouth opened wide, her teeny fists. When Paul sees what I’m looking at, he raises his eyebrows—the question he can’t ask while his hands are busy holding our daughter. Why have you pulled that out?
“I’m feeling sentimental,” I tell him.
He sits down in the big chair, cradling Valentina against his chest. At first I think he’s talking to her, but as I walk across the room to place the photo album back on the bookshelf, I realize that he’s singing.
To my surprise, I haven’t actually missed being able to hear since those first few seconds of confusion. Right now, though, I wish I could listen to Paul’s lullaby. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s enough to watch the expression on his face, the complete tenderness, as he sings our daughter to sleep. No song could be sweeter than that.
Then he jumps slightly, enough to startle Valentina for a moment before she yawns again. Paul’s eyes widen, and so do mine, when I see the Firebird around his neck. My Paul has caught up with me at last.
He looks at the baby, then up to me, then at the baby again. I pick up a pen and notebook on the table and write one word in huge letters before holding the page up for him to read: Surprise.
My world’s Paul Markov knows only a handful of signs. The Moscowverse’s Paul, despite his fluency, must have learned later in life, because his knowledge isn’t ingrained deeply enough for my Paul to access it. I can speak—my voice wasn’t affected by the meningitis, and although it’s weird to have to deliberately think about how to shape my mouth for each sound and syllable, I can do it. But he can reply only in writing, and the back and forth between his notes and my unheard speech makes the conversation awkward, so it’s not long before I stop trying to talk at all. We wind up communicating via a sheet of paper.
Paul writes, Do you have any idea what your parents do for a living here? What kind of science they specialize in?
We’re sitting on the kitchen floor while Paul sifts through the various cleaning products and medicines, trying to assemble the ingredients for Nightthief. Although being a perfect traveler has involved a lot of danger and drama, I admit I’m not sorry I don’t have to inject into my veins any substance more commonly used for unclogging drains. I jot down, I haven’t checked, but if you go through the books on the wall, you’ll probably be able to put it together. I pause before writing the next. We met when we were lots younger here, so you must have studied with Mom and Dad from an early age.
Paul stops his chemistry experiment for his next lines. Do you know where they live?
Josie and I didn’t go to their place, I reply. You and I have an address book, though, so we can find them in the morning. Once we explain what’s going on, they can help us get started. He nods without ever looking me in the eye. I quickly add, Why don’t you just use the reminders?
I nearly ran out of charge in the Egyptverse, he replies. If he had, he would’ve wound up marooned there, unable to awaken or escape. Not worth the risk. Will we have to call in sick to work, wherever it is we have jobs? Or is tomorrow Saturday? By this point, my concept of time has been thrown completely out of whack. Probably not a big deal, but even the little complications can sometimes trip things up.
When Paul pours another couple of fluids together, the mixture finally turns the telltale emerald green of Nightthief. Sometimes the hardest part is finding a needle, he writes. It’s the first thing he’s said that is more than strictly necessary. The Triadverse and Home Office actually build small injectors inside their Firebirds. We should do the same.
Don’t you feel weird using Nightthief, given how bad it is for people? I write back.
No, Paul writes. This is a lot like arsenic. People can take small doses without it being toxic. But if you keep exposing the body to arsenic over and over again, eventually it builds up and it becomes deadly. Two or three doses of Nightthief won’t have any effects worse than maybe some temporary short-term memory loss because of the inability to dream while on the drug. And those doses are more than enough for what we have to do.
Two or three doses. Triadverse Theo stayed in our Theo for months. But he gave his life to atone for those sins, so somehow I have to learn to let them go.
Paul puts the bottle of green stuff on the counter as he gets up and heads back to the bathroom, hoping no doubt to search the medicine cabinet. Maybe he says something to me as he walks out, forgetting I can’t hear, but the feeling of being left behind is too clear. He even had me put Valentina to bed by myself, although I managed it pretty easily, since she’d already been sung half to sleep.
Enough, I decide. I’m not going on like this anymore. I can’t make Paul believe—but I can make him listen, even without my voice.
Paul returns with an actual syringe. I walk out of the kitchen as he prepares to inject the stuff, and I take my seat on the sofa with a couple of fresh pieces of paper. Only the slightest tension in his shoulders betrays the moment the needle enters his skin, and he’s done with the shot in an instant. Almost as soon as he puts the syringe down, though, he starts to shiver.
I pull him onto the sofa, fearing another full-fledged overdose like Theo had in the Londonverse. But it doesn’t get to Paul that badly. He only trembles for a few moments, his pupils dilated, as he attempts to shake it off. I rub his shoulders, stroke his hair.
When the reaction passes, Paul tries to stand up again—but I grip his shoulders and force him back onto the couch beside me. He gives me a look, then writes, I’m all right now.
I write back, I know. But we have to talk. You keep avoiding me, but now you’re in a world where we share a home and a bed, so it’s time.
There’s nothing else to say. We don’t share a destiny. By now we’ve proved that. One world like this, where we’re . . . Paul’s hand stills, and I see him glance back toward Valentina’s room. Then he starts over again. One world is only one outcome. It doesn’t mean we’re fated to be together.
It doesn’t mean we’re not. I take his hand as I search for the right words, so he can’t move away.
But he takes the pen back first. You know what the splintering has done to me. Do you think I could go on with you, realizing I’ll never be the same?
Yes! I answer. So you got hurt. So you’ve been changed. If you were a danger to me—then yes, I would let you go. Both because I would always protect myself and because I know you’d rather be alone than ever cause me harm. But you aren’t a danger to me. You were able to control yourself with Romola, weren’t you? You aren’t broken. You only have new scars, and I would always love you despite any scars. Wouldn’t you love me if I were scarred, or sad, or hurting?
Paul hesitates. Am I getting through to him? He writes, Of course I would, but this is different. You won’t see that, because you still believe in some mystical fate—
I snatch the pen from his hands to stop him right there, and so I can say the most important part. Paul, fate doesn’t guarantee us a happy ending. We’re not promised to be together no matter what. But in dimension after dimension, world after world, fate gives us a chance. Our destiny isn’t some kind of mystical prophecy. Our destiny is what we do with that chance.
I don’t dare look up. I don’t dare stop writing. It’s pouring out of me now, the one thing I feel I’ve learned for sure.
You said it yourself. Each new quantum reality splits off when someone makes a decision. Every single world we’ve visited isn’t just random—it’s the result of countless choices, all of them combining to create a new reality. You and I have been given an infinity of chances, and that’s so much more than most people will ever get—but in the end we get to live in only one world, and that’s the world we make. I want us to create that world together.
My eyes feel hot. My throat tightens up. When I look over at Paul, I see that he’s even closer to the verge than I am. I’m forcing us both to confront the fact that one of our most beautiful dreams was a lie.
We both believed in destiny as a kind of guarantee—a promise from the cosmos that we would have our time together in virtually every world we shared. But now I see that believing only in destiny means giving up responsibility. We fooled ourselves into thinking happiness was a gift we would be given time and time again. It’s so much scarier to admit that our lives are in our own flawed, fallible hands. Our futures are not kept safe for us in the cradle of fate. We have to hack them out of stone, dig them out of mud, and build them one messy, imperfect day at a time.
By now my hand is shaking so much that my letters are a mess, but hopefully Paul can still read what I have to say. You grew up believing nobody could ever love you unconditionally. That you didn’t even deserve to be loved. But everyone deserves to be loved, and there’s so much waiting for you. You don’t need fate to give you a friend like Theo, or mentors like my parents. They chose you. The more they knew you, the more they understood who you really are, the more they loved you. And it took me so long to see you because you hide yourself so well, but I see you now, Paul. I see you and I love you so m—
The pen falls from my fingers, my words trailing into a scrawl, as Paul pulls me fiercely to him. I slide my arms around his neck and hug him back, willing him not only to understand what I’ve been saying, but to believe it, too. He kisses my forehead, my cheek, and finally my lips, both of us slowly opening our mouths as we drink each other in.
I swore that I would never make another mistake like I did in the Russiaverse, never again assume what kind of choices one of my other selves might make with her body. But we are within a Paul and Marguerite who share a bed, a life, and a child. What we feel is not so different from what they feel.
We’re in our home. We, and this world, are safe. We have the entire night.
I’m the one who gets off the couch, takes Paul’s hand, and starts leading him to the bedroom. He’s the one who picks me up in his arms to carry me the rest of the way, lays me down on the bed again, and covers my body with his own.
But we each help the other struggle out of our clothes. We each call on our memories of that one night in the dacha. We each reveal ourselves completely, bodies and souls, as we never have before. Paul and I are united in shadow and silence. What we create, we create together.