THE SUDDEN PRESSURE OF THE CHAIR BENEATH ME FEELS like an impact, though of course Wicked’s body has been sitting here all along. More startling is the silence—real silence—broken by the subtle whirr of the ventilation system and the newly strange sound of my own breath. I grip the armrests and open my eyes to look out on the darkly garish megalopolis stretching out from below Triad headquarters. Small airborne craft dart around the gigantic skyscrapers like fireflies in the night, and in the distance, one of the high-speed monorails shimmers with electricity, a scar of light on a gloomy horizon.
The Home Office. I’m back to the beginning of the conspiracy at last.
I feel subtly different—as if I’d just gone swimming or done yoga, my body pleasantly energized instead of exhausted. Then I realize it’s because I’m alone in here. Wicked is off tormenting some other Marguerite somewhere, so I have this body all to myself. The last time I was here, her sorrow and anger weighed me down like an anchor. Now I’m free.
What time is it? To judge by the darkness and the relative stillness of the megalopolis outside, it’s the time of night when “very late” turns into “very early.” Perfect. The fewer people around to observe me, the better.
I get to my feet and start searching for this universe’s version of a computer terminal—a slim black panel that can be found on a table, or a wall, or even on the arm of a chair. If Wicked is Triad’s most trusted operative here in the Home Office, then her clearance should allow me to access any information I need. Do I look for a main computer core? For Firebird storage? Any damage I can do to their data would help, but I need to figure out how to maximize my impact—and, preferably, take the Home Office out of the universe-destruction business completely.
My parents would’ve had a better idea exactly what to target; so would Paul. Biting my lower lip, I wonder whether I should’ve told them about my plans after all.
The resistance! Memories flash through my mind as bright as victory banners: This world’s Paul and Theo, former employees of Triad, living as a band of outlaws on the murky, underpopulated surface of this world. The weapons they held. The mission they all agreed upon—the downfall of Triad.
If I can find them again, they can tell me what to target—and then Wicked’s body will become our ultimate weapon.
“Miss Caine?”
I turn to see two men standing in the doorway, both tall and blank-faced as mannequins. Although their monochromatic gray outfits differ only slightly from mine, instinctively I understand these guys are Triad security. Are they here to guard me or to guard against me?
“You sent no advance word of your return to this universe,” says the same guy who spoke before—that, or they both have the same dull, monotonous voice. “This activates primary security protocols. What was the color of the Beatles’ submarine?”
Not purple. My world is the only one where it’s purple. What did Wyatt Conley say about this? In some universes, the Beatles sang about a “Big Green Submarine,” but mostly the submarine is yellow. Shouldn’t I go with the most common one?
And yet I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of a yellow submarine. So I roll the dice. “Green. The Beatles’ submarine was green.”
The guard lifts his arm and begins speaking into what must be a communicator bracelet: “All security to level forty-seven. Extra-dimensional intruder detected. Imposter Marguerite Caine reveals knowledge of entity called ‘the Beatles.’”
Trick question. Damn! I look around wildly for somewhere to run. A door farther down the hallway opens, and I brace myself for a phalanx of guards rushing in to arrest me—
—and instead I see Romola Harrington, again, wearing an outfit all in rich royal blue. One lock of her blond hair has escaped from its braid, marring her usual smug, placid expression. As she hurries toward us, she wrings her hands together and says, “You’re not supposed to be back yet.”
“Intruder,” the security guard says. “We’re taking her into custody now.”
“Indeed not.” Romola acts as though the butler asked her whether she wouldn’t rather eat her roast pheasant off a paper plate. “The other Marguerite requires level-one interrogation. Leave that to me.”
The security guard pauses. “Level one . . .”
Romola draws herself even more rigidly upright. I imagine her spine straightening until it snaps, but no such luck. “You don’t have the clearance. I do. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen?”
The other guard, the silent one, hands over what must be a pair of handcuffs—though they’re made of plastic. Romola clicks them around my wrists as if she’s done this a thousand times before.
But she hasn’t, because one of the binders doesn’t fully close. It’s not locked, which means I can still get out. Despite the surge of triumph I feel, I bow my head as if in defeat and bide my time.
“You’ll receive the appropriate credit and commendations,” Romola says smoothly to the guards as she guides me toward the nearest elevator, her hand firm around my upper arm. “Please remain here to await further instructions.”
The guards nod as we walk into the elevator. I wait until the doors slide shut. As the floor shudders with the tiny jerk-and-give of motion, Romola says, “My goodness, I never thought—”
I don’t know what she never thought, and I don’t plan to find out, because that’s when I punch her in the face.
I’ve gotten better at hitting people since I started traveling with the Firebird, but it still hurts like hell. The heel of my hand jars against Romola’s jaw, sending her staggering backward. She grabs at my sleeve, though, and takes me down with her.
When we hit the floor of the elevator, I grab a fistful of her hair. “Where are my parents?”
“I don’t know!”
Romola sounds panicked—but in the very next moment, she clamps both her hands around my free wrist and twists hard enough to make me cry out and let her go. She tries to pin me, but I get one of my knees between us and use it to throw her off.
The security guards can’t reach us in here. Nobody’s coming to help her. Romola’s stronger than she looks, but she won’t want to hurt me badly, because this is Wicked’s body she’d be breaking. But I’m willing to mess both of them up, which means I’m going to win.
Nobody told Romola that, though. She lunges at me with enough force to send me sprawling onto my back. “What are you doing?” she yells. “Have you gone completely mad?”
“Tell me—where—my parents are!” I grab at her arms, trying to get her off me—which is when I see that she, too, is wearing a Firebird.
Wait.
She raises an eyebrow. “Catching on at last, are you? Thank goodness. Where are you from?”
“The Berkeleyverse. Where are you from?”
“The Mafiaverse, which by the way is an atrocious name.” Romola lets go of me, flops onto her butt, and sighs. “Good lord. Do you think next time you could wait to hit someone until you’ve checked to find out whether that person is on your side?”
“Probably not, actually. No time to waste.” I can’t quite wrap my head around this. Romola’s on my side this time? My brain rejects the idea, replaying memory after memory of Romola doing me wrong. Getting me wasted so I wouldn’t look for Paul on my own, freeing Wicked to continue her mission of destruction, or setting me up to destroy the Romeverse.
But none of those were this Romola. This is the one who met me at the movies in Times Square, watched a goofy comedy, and showed me the glory of mixed M&M’s and popcorn. This Romola is my friend, and she traveled through the dimensions to help.
I’ve been so shaken by finding my one worst self that I never considered how much it might change our fates by finding someone else’s best self. Travel through enough dimensions and maybe you’d find the hero and the villain in everyone.
I ask, “How did you even know to come to the Home Office in the first place?”
“We all agreed we needed a pair of eyes ‘on the inside,’ as it were. I seemed to be the best candidate—the one the Home Office wouldn’t suspect.” Romola shrugs. “When security signaled about capturing an alternate Marguerite, I knew it could only be you.”
“How long have you been here?” I ask as we start to get to our feet.
“Not quite twenty-four hours, I think?” Romola smiles unevenly and reaches out to snap the cuff binders off my wrist for good. “Turns out Triad has employee barracks in this universe. Optional, but rather well-populated. I’ve found it easier to simply remain in my office.”
Do I want to know what employee barracks look like? No, I don’t. “I came here to sabotage Triad any way I could, but I don’t know what to do—or what to do it to. Any insight?”
“Not in particular. You were looking for your parents?”
I shake my head no. “Not really. They’ll realize I’m an imposter. But if I’d had to call on them to get out of a level-one interrogation—”
“Got it.” Romola nods once. “I’ve been trying to study their core computer functions, to look for vulnerabilities, but Triad is so vast in this universe, it’s like trying to find the center of the internet.”
“The resistance will know what we can do. I managed to find Paul and Theo last time, and maybe I can again.” I take a deep breath. “Any idea how I can reach public transit?”
Romola clucks her tongue. “Oh, I can do better than that! I’ve got access to a company car. That was an unexpected benefit. Triad haven’t safeguarded anything against me.”
“Because they never saw you coming.” Finally it hits me that we’ve managed to turn one of the Home Office’s trickiest weapons to our advantage. I begin to smile. “Thank you for doing this.”
“Oh, it was nothing.” Romola gives me a PR agent smile, then pauses as it fades. “Actually, given that you’re trying to keep my universe from potentially being demolished, it really is the least I can do.”
She punches the elevator panel, canceling her last floor request and redirecting us toward the garage. We’re this close to escaping into the wider world of the Home Office, finding the resistance, and shutting this down once and for all.
Just one problem.
“What do you mean, it flies?” Romola stands outside her silvery car, which bobs a few inches off its platform on some kind of magnetic field. Dozens more hover all around us, shimmering in the garage bay like Christmas ornaments hung from spindly branches. “It’s a flying car?”
“Did you not see them outside the windows?”
“Of course I did! But I never thought those were the only kind of automobiles this dimension had.”
“Well, they are. The city’s been built up so high that almost nobody goes down to ground level anymore.” I bite my lower lip, wishing for some way out of this, but there isn’t one. “You’ll just have to try it.”
“Me?” Romola’s eyes grow wider. “Why me?”
“I don’t even have a driver’s license for a regular car yet. Just a permit.”
This argument isn’t as convincing as I expected. Romola says, “I haven’t one either.”
“What? You’re, like, four or five years older than me.”
“I grew up in London and never left until I moved to lower Manhattan! When would I ever have had occasion to drive a bloody car?”
Dad, you really should have let me borrow the car more often. I take a deep breath. “Okay, let’s try this thing.”
If you think driving in two dimensions can be tricky, you have no idea how terrible it is in three. Disengaging from the magnetic “parking spot” is easy, but everything after that is an exercise in horror.
“Oh, my God.” Romola clutches at her seat belt as though it could hold her up on its own as the hovercar wobbles out of the garage, and we see just how many hundreds of feet we are from the ground. “We’re going to die.”
“Way to think positive, Romola.” But when I try to turn, and the car bobs even more precariously, I add, “Keep one hand on your Firebird.”
Come on, come on, you can do this, I tell myself. You haven’t come this far just to get taken out by a stupid flying car!
If only the ground weren’t so far beneath us . . .
I take the controls and nudge the car downward. The slope makes me shift forward until my safety belt is all that’s holding me in my seat, and Romola whimpers. But I take it slow, edging us down a bit at a time. When I stop thinking of it as a car in flight, and instead remember it as the submarine from the Oceanverse, steering in three dimensions gets a little easier.
“Heavens, it’s dark.” Romola peers through the front windows with both trepidation and curiosity. The metal and concrete buildings on either side of us loom overhead like cliffs, and our pathway is a valley. “Are you sure you’ll know when we’re reaching the ground?”
“The altitude sensor will show us.” I point to the gauge that I really, really hope is the altitude sensor.
By the time we reach the ground, the gloom is nearly complete. The only illumination besides our headlights comes from a few squats where the poorest of people live, where we see the glow of lanterns and the flicker of candles. We’re probably waking up everyone, which can’t be the greatest way to keep the resistance’s location secret. But without the headlights, I’ll crash this thing for sure.
As we move slowly along, about ten feet above the ground, Romola gapes at the makeshift shanties, the rubble that used to be sidewalks or soil, and the ramshackle gangways and rope bridges that connect the dwellings down here. “It looks like a refugee camp,” she whispers. “I suppose it is. Except people haven’t run away—they’ve run downward.”
“I guess.” By now the car is scanning for the location we input—my parents’ home address, from the Triad database—because as late as a couple of weeks ago, the resistance was headquartered not that far away (horizontally speaking, at least). No need for me to navigate: All I have to do is keep nudging the car forward and make sure I don’t hit any of the gangways. “So, tell me, what exactly is your deal?”
“I beg your pardon?” Romola’s tone turns frosty, and she raises an eyebrow. “My ‘deal’?”
“Why are you usually so loyal to Conley? Even when he’s normally a gigantic psychopath? I mean, I watched another version of you set up a dimension to be destroyed. You wouldn’t have done it on your own, but you did that for him.”
“I can’t answer for a Romola I haven’t met.” After a pause she adds, “However, were I to speculate, I’m always a very loyal person to anyone I care about. In my world, Wyatt Conley happens to be an extraordinarily inspiring employer and mentor. In a dimension like this—where money is all that matters, and where people think of their corporations as if they were churches—he must seem like a prophet.”
Although I’d like to scoff at that image, I can’t. In a world so coldly ambitious that it could turn my parents into killers, Conley would be the ultimate leader.
That doesn’t excuse what the other Romola has done. But it makes me capable of seeing this Romola as herself.
I steer over a drooping rope bridge. Its shadow slices through the beams from the car’s headlights, making the ragged, broken-down landscape around us look as if it has been torn in half. Romola frowns at one of the screens on the dash. “That shows our location, doesn’t it?”
One of her long fingernails taps against the blinking green beacon that says our mark is just ahead.
Parking the car turns out to be the easiest part: Hit the right button and it settles itself onto the ground with barely a thump. Romola reaches for her door handle until I lean across to stop her. “Don’t. If the resistance is here, they will have heard us coming. Make sure your Firebird is visible, okay?” I tug mine out over my collar so it will show front and center. “Wait until they come to investigate, then we come out with our hands up.”
“Oh! We came here to surrender, then. Jolly good.” She does what I told her to do with the Firebird, though.
Sure enough, they appear from the shadows one by one. Their figures are faceless in the darkness, but I can very clearly make out the silhouettes of their weapons. I hold up my hands, nudge for Romola to do the same, and then, after a long few seconds that gives them plenty of time to see, I get out of the car.
Even as I put my hands up again, one of them steps closer. Theo’s sneer is exactly as obnoxious as I remember from my last time in the Home Office. He wears the same monochromatic outfit in burnt orange, and his black hair radiates out in spikes that are a cross between the style of Ludwig von Beethoven and an anime character. And his strangely boxy weapon is once again pointed at my heart. “You want us to think you’re not from this dimension,” he says with a scowl. “So prove it.”
“How am I supposed to prove a negative?”
“I don’t know, but you’d better figure it out.”
“The last time I was here, you were acting like a total ass,” I retort.
Theo doesn’t flinch. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“The car!” Romola says. When both of us turn to look at her, she points at the car. “You must’ve seen what a terrible driver this Marguerite is. Yours would know how to handle a flying car, wouldn’t she?”
After a moment, Theo says, “Could’ve faked it—but you didn’t.” He lowers the weapon, and I feel like I can breathe again as he adds, “Our Marguerite likes to show off too much. She wouldn’t let herself be caught dead doing anything that badly.”
“Where’s Paul?” I look past Theo into the silhouetted band of fighters that came out here with him. Although I could recognize Paul from his profile, maybe even from the way he stood, I can’t spot him. “Is he back in your headquarters? We need to talk.”
“I’m here.”
I wheel around to look behind me. Paul stands there, silhouetted from behind by lantern-light, almost ghostlike in his pale gray clothes. As he steps closer, I can make out the scar on his jawline, and once again I wonder what happened to Paul in this dimension. Who did that to him?
“What were you thinking, coming here?” His eyes burn with anger so fierce I can see it despite the darkness. “It’s dangerous, Marguerite.”
I could laugh. “Universes are collapsing all around us. There’s no safe place left.”
“You were safe in Moscow! If you had told us what you were planning—”
“Wait? Paul?” It’s my Paul. Despite my warning, he followed me here. “What are you doing here?”
He lifts his stubborn chin. “Protecting you.”
“You were supposed to be protecting the Moscowverse—”
“Sophia and Henry can handle it.”
“And what about Valentina?”
“She has her real parents back.”
Our argument is interrupted by Theo, who steps between us. “Wait. Little brother—that’s not you?”
“It is, Theo. Just a different me.” Paul gives Theo a flinty smile, one without any pretense of happiness. But it’s honest, and hard, and so obviously, completely my own Paul that I take comfort in it despite his simmering anger.
Theo scowls and leans against the flying car. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Ah, just to be clear—” Romola raises her hand. “This is the Berkeleyverse Paul with us now, yes?”
I nod. “Even though the Home Office Paul could probably help us more at the moment.” As much as I love Paul, his protectiveness couldn’t have kicked into overdrive at a worse time. “Will you please just let me do this?”
Paul folds his arms in front of his chest. “Not without me.”
“We’re not alone,” Theo announces.
Romola sighs. “How true. We all have other selves, so even in our own individual person, we can no longer be said to be solitary—”
“No, I mean we’re not alone right now.” Theo points upward at flickering lights in motion overhead. More flying cars, which doesn’t seem like a big deal, until the pink-and-red lights begin to flash and a siren’s wail begins to echo in this urban canyon.
My gut drops as if I were on a roller coaster. “The police?”
“Triad security,” Theo says, as if it’s the same thing. His grin is more vicious than his scowl ever was. “Thanks for dropping by. Looks like you led them straight to us.”
Paul and I exchange a stricken look. “And now?” he says.
“We fight for our lives. Or we die. Maybe both.” Theo checks his gun’s charge and points it upward. “Probably both.”