CABLES SNAKE DOWN THROUGH THE DARKNESS TO DANGLE all around us. Triad’s guards begin sliding toward the ground, flashlight beams streaming from their headsets, their weapons shadowed against the night—black on black.
“Run!” Theo shouts, and the rest of the resistance scatters. Although some of them are armed, more of them were caught by surprise. None of them were ready for this fight.
Because you set them up, I tell myself savagely as I dash for one of the nearby buildings.
The nearest building stretches up so high overhead that I can’t imagine where it ends. Its lower stories, however, must have been abandoned for a decade or more. The windows are shattered, or simply blank holes covered by ragged cloths. One of them is open to the air, and I vault through it as fast as I can. My leap is more acrobatic than my landing, which sends me sprawling onto the floor of a room empty except for a few broken-up crates.
Mere seconds later, Paul slides through the window after me, though it’s harder for him to get his large frame through. The only illumination comes from the brightening spotlights outside. I duck behind one of the larger, more intact crates, and motion for Paul to join me.
As he kneels by my side, he studies the odd, box-like gun he has in this dimension. “The firing mechanism seems obvious,” he mutters. “I’m not as sure about targeting.”
“You’re not shooting anyone! We didn’t come here for that—”
“We didn’t come here to get captured, either.” Paul takes a deep breath. I see him struggling. This is the splintering at work once more, threatening to shred his self-control at the moment he can least afford to snap. But he’s not angry with me, and I realize now that I wasn’t really the person he was angry with even before the guards. It’s just the unending tension of this chase, and the fear that we’re fighting a war we can never win.
“You should go back to the Moscowverse or move on,” I whisper as shouting begins outside. “This world’s Paul knows how to handle the gun, and he knows where to hide. He’d help me.”
Paul looks at me in total incomprehension. “I can’t leave you like this.”
“You can and you should.”
But it’s too late. A door I hadn’t seen before swings open, and a Triad guard runs in. His weapon is in his hands, and he’s aiming it straight at me.
Paul moves so fast he’s a blur, launching himself at my attacker. They go down together, but Paul winds up on top. The lights attached to the guard’s uniform shine in bright rays straight up toward the ceiling, as though the two of them were fighting in a cage of light. Paul doesn’t even bother trying to shoot the guard. Instead he uses his weapon as a bludgeon, smashing the guard’s face with it.
“No,” I whisper as droplets of blood spatter through the thin beams of light. Paul looks like he’s going beat this guy to a pulp—or to death. “Paul, no.”
But Paul doesn’t hear me. Instead he lifts the gun up, preparing for a more savage or even fatal blow. He’s lost to the fever pitch of violence. Truly lost.
Or so I think, until Paul freezes, hand with his bloody gun still over his head.
I watch, wide-eyed, as Paul stares down at his defeated opponent. He’s breathing hard, trembling from the sheer rush of adrenaline, but in the faint light I can see his face shifting from a grimace of rage back into the Paul I know. After a long moment, he lowers his hand, then tosses the gun aside.
He did it. Paul took control again. He did it! This isn’t like last time, where he spared Romola mostly because he thought she could still fire. He beat the splintering, and he knows he beat it. Despite everything going to hell all around us, I start to smile. Maybe now he can begin to hope again, and that hope can save us both.
Movement flickers at the corner of my eye. My mind supplies only one word: gun.
The next guard is firing even as he runs into the room. Paul looks up in the split second before he’s hit. His body jerks backward, blood spraying from his chest in a halo of red, and he falls.
My screams seem to belong to someone else. This horrible, agonized sound can’t be coming out of my throat; it has to be the whole world shrieking at once. No no no not Paul that’s going to kill them both, this world’s Paul and mine unless he can get to the Firebird, or I can—
I lunge forward, but the guard marching toward Paul shoves me back so hard that I tumble to the ground. Looking over my shoulder through the blur of tears, I see Paul lying on his back, one leg bent under him at an unnatural angle. His hand gropes blindly at his chest—for the Firebird? For the wound? I can’t tell. But then the guard fires again, and Paul’s body jumps once more before lying still.
He’s dead. Paul is dead.
My first thought is to rush the guard again, to make him kill me, too. I want to be dead, to be with Paul, not to feel my heart ripping into a thousand pieces.
Memory takes me back to Russia, to a battlefield of snow and blood, to the side of a cot where Lieutenant Markov lay dying. I imagine his face as he whispered his final words: Every Marguerite.
Every Paul, I think as I get my hands under me and prepare to hurl myself at the guard. Every world gives us a chance. I wish I hadn’t blown ours. I wish we’d been able to create a world.
Then the wall caves in.
As the guard skitters backward from the tumbling plaster, I see the flying car that just smashed through the bricks. It’s dented and scratched, one window busted out, but it’s still operational—and behind the wheel is Theo. He shouts, “Get in!”
I hesitate for only one instant before the memory of my mission wins over my grief. Once I dash for the car, Theo swings open the door—and no sooner has my butt hit the seat than he guns it in reverse. Only grabbing the seat belt keeps me from tumbling out the still-open door to the ground that’s now rapidly getting much farther away.
“What happened to Paul?” Theo revs the motor as I tug the door shut, then banks hard, sending us zooming upward through a canyon of high-rise buildings.
I choke back a sob. “He’s dead.”
Theo swears under his breath. “Yours or mine?”
“Both, I think.” As badly as I want to think my Paul was able to use his Firebird and get away, I don’t see how he could’ve had the chance. Roughly I wipe at my cheeks, forcing away the tears. I don’t deserve the release. “I never should’ve come here.”
His voice shakes even as he tries to talk tough. “Triad was after us long before you showed up. We knew how it could go.” That’s as close to absolution as Theo can give me.
The resistance members weren’t the only ones I endangered. “Wait. Where’s Romola?”
“The Romola you showed up with?” Theo executes a hairpin turn that sends us careening through a narrow, crooked alleyway. “She went back to her home universe, which is exactly what she should’ve done. This world’s Romola? She’s back with the guards, probably bitching about how I stole her car. Let’s dent this sucker up, huh? Pay her back for what happened to Paul.”
The next five minutes are more like being trapped in some kind of video game than anything resembling real life. It would terrify me if I weren’t crushed by grief. Theo zigzags through the densely packed city as if it were a maze he’d run a thousand times before. Once he even steers the car almost completely vertical, vaulting into the air like a rocket blasting into orbit. But he can’t shake the guards pursuing us.
They’re going to catch us, and if they were willing to kill Paul, they’ll kill Theo, too. My hands can’t bear any more blood.
“I can’t let this happen.” I try to catch Theo’s eyes. “I can’t let you pay the price for this.”
Theo simply accelerates. “C’mon. You ought to know by now that I can handle a car in any dimension.”
I remember the wreckage after the fatal crash in Quito, the way it felt to shut Theo’s eyes for him. “That doesn’t mean you always make it out alive.”
He doesn’t reply, but he does slow down. Slightly. “I’ve got this, okay? Just hang on.”
We soar out into a broader traffic way. Now that it’s dawn, more people are out and about, which means other flying cars swoop and swerve around us. Theo swiftly steers us out of the main drag, just over a long building that’s several dozen stories shorter than average. How far are we above it? Not even ten feet. Probably that’s Theo’s idea of “lying low.”
I see it as an opportunity.
“Good luck, Theo,” I say, and I grab the door handle.
“Marguerite—no—”
His voice falls away as I leap from the car. For one split second, there’s nothing but rushing air, but I remember to tuck and roll. That doesn’t keep it from hurting like hell when I land on the roof, but as I tumble over and over, I remain conscious. Skin is scraped from my arms, and pain tells me where the bruises will be, but my bones don’t crack.
But I lie there, motionless, even as the guards’ vehicles hover around me to take me into custody. I’m too devastated even to cry. Instead I wonder why I’m not dead. Why our hearts don’t stop beating the moment they’re broken. It feels like my soul has already left me, and my body is just this weight I’ll have to carry forever.
Maybe he got away, I try to tell myself as I walk numbly through the corridors of Triad, my wrists held together with binders, a guard at either shoulder. Paul did reach for his Firebird. He could’ve jumped out. Maybe.
But I can’t make myself believe it.
I’m led into an area of Triad headquarters I haven’t seen before—their labs, I’m guessing. The narrow black-panel computer terminals I’ve glimpsed elsewhere are now enormous panels that nearly cover the walls; their calculations show in faint display of color that shine briefly, then fade, as they continue the long work of determining which dimensions have to die. This complex exceeds our power and sophistication by so great a degree that I can’t believe we ever thought we stood a chance. They haven’t even bothered taking away my Firebird. That’s how little a threat I’ve ever been to them.
Wyatt Conley isn’t anywhere around, which is a small mercy. But my parents wait here, standing near a long, glass-walled chamber in the very center of the lab, as if it were the altar in this cathedral of death. Their expressions remain sorrowful but fond—as if they were about to ground me.
“Sweetheart,” my mother says. “I’m sorry this has been so difficult.”
They still refuse to acknowledge the truth of what they’re doing. “You killed other versions of me. You killed an entire universe. That goes slightly beyond ‘difficult.’”
Dad shrugs. “Who said it would be easy to raise someone from the dead?”
“What makes you think you can?” Before they start in with their explanations, I gesture as best I can at my Firebird. “You tore my Paul into four pieces. You splintered his soul. And after that he had to fight as hard as he could to stay in control, maybe even just to stay sane.”
Paul won that fight. At least he had that moment of triumph just before the end.
I continue, “What do you think Josie’s going to become after you put the thousand pieces of her back together again? If you think she’ll be your daughter again, the same girl you lost, you’re wrong. She’ll be haunted by lives she never lived. Controlled by desires she never felt. Unable to love the people she loved before or to promise that she can keep from hurting anyone who crosses her path. Your version of me called Paul ‘Frankenstein’s monster,’ but really it was Josie she was describing. Josie is the one you’re turning into a monster.”
Finally, my parents are speechless. It takes Dad a long time to muster the ability to say, “We’re close, so close—”
“You’re willing to condemn Josie to a living hell just so you don’t have to grieve anymore. Oh, wait! You are going to keep grieving. Just like I had to mourn my dad months after I knew he hadn’t really drowned. Remember how you made me think he’d drowned?” Tears well in my eyes again. “No wonder you don’t care if Josie turns into a monster. You’re all monsters already.”
The silence that follows seems to last for years. I wonder dully whether they’ll try again to make me work for them. What else can they do to me? Destroy my dimension, probably. That would be the only way to eliminate me as a risk forever.
For a moment I imagine our home in the Berkeley Hills, with its cozy great room, the potted plants and the rainbow table, the chalkboard wall of equations, and the constant chatter of scientific theories, geeky jokes, and boundless affection. It seems like the house stands for our entire world, the one that’s about to be lost.
“Look,” Mom finally says, gesturing to the glass chamber. “Marguerite, please, just look.”
Look at what? The chamber is empty—or is it?
My jaw drops as I realize that there’s a translucent shape at the heart of the chamber, the color of fog, almost invisible. After a few moments, I finally recognize what I’m seeing: Josie. She lies there, hands over her heart, the posture she must have been in when she activated her Firebird for that last fatal jump. The universe or universes Triad have already destroyed sent their splinters back, which is just enough to recreate this much of her—a suggestion, a shade, only a hint of the body they’re trying to reanimate.
When they look at old paintings under infrared light, sometimes they see the shadows of figures the artist painted over, or outlines of people they meant to draw but finally chose to leave out. That’s what Josie is now, just a blurry shadow that doesn’t belong anymore.
“Oh,” I say. “Not a monster yet. Only a ghost.”
“Marguerite, stop it,” Dad snaps. “We can’t quit. Not this close to success. Not even if—if—”
Not even if we know it’s the right thing to do. That’s what he’s not saying. Mom and Dad can’t lie to themselves any longer, but they also can’t turn back. Their maniacal commitment won’t let them—and they can’t let Josie go, not while they can actually see her lying here, so close to resurrection.
I have to set them free. I have to set Josie free. I have one last chance to stop this, if I act right now.
While my parents stare, transfixed, at my dead sister’s face, I bring my bound hands to my chest; I have just enough freedom to wrap my fingers around the Firebird. Leaping away would change nothing, and it would save me only for a few hours or days.
But there’s incredible power stored inside this locket—and in Moscow, Paul showed us all how to set it to overload.
I close my eyes. I envision his hands, mimic his movements. Did I get it right? A faint vibration between my fingers tells me that I did.
“Josie would never have wanted this,” I say. “Not your version, not mine, not any Josie ever. She said so.”
My parents look at each other, more surprised and dismayed than I’d thought they would be. “It doesn’t matter how long we have to work with her,” Mom finally says. “Or how difficult it is. We will put Josie back together again.”
The faintest warmth emanates from the Firebird in my hands, as though I had just ended a journey. In some ways, I guess I have. “That’s not what I mean. Josie won’t be able to go on, knowing how many people died so she could live. She’ll hate herself for every breath. And she’ll never feel the same about you, or the other me, or Conley. So you’re robbing her of everyone she’s ever loved. Some resurrection. You’re not bringing her back from heaven. You’re making sure Josie’s life will be a living hell.”
But I can save my sister. I can save my whole world. Everyone but Paul.
The metal against my palms warms even more—becomes hot—
“What’s that sound?” Dad, who’s been trying to ignore me, jerks around and looks at me. His eyes widen. “Dear God.”
As fast as I can, I lift the Firebird over my head and hurl it at the glass. One pane shatters, sending shards flying in every direction. The Firebird itself lands in the middle of Josie’s shadowy half-form—the body that is only just becoming observable again—and for a moment it glows red where her heart ought to have been. My mother screams, and I wonder just how big the boom is going to be.
When it blows, the explosion seems to roar through all the dimensions at once.
When I come to, only a few minutes must have passed. Broken bits of glass and metal pepper the floor, and most of the nearby computer panels have gone dully dark, their world-ending calculations concluded for now. I lie on one of the tables, and my hands are no longer bound.
The absence of my Firebird feels so strange. I’ve become so used to the sensation of that weight on my chest, the metal against my skin. By destroying my Firebird, I stranded myself in this dimension forever—or until they decide to exile me to some other dimension so they can bring Wicked back home. She could return to this body at any time, but I’ll own her consciousness as long as I remain. Will they put me back in my own universe to die along with it? Or will they cast me into some random, unfamiliar place to blunder through my last hours alone?
My head doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel dizzy or nauseated. My blackout doesn’t appear to have sprung from a concussion. Maybe a human consciousness tethered to a Firebird reacts this way when the Firebird suddenly ceases to exist.
I hear my parents’ voices before I see them. Specifically, I hear my mother as she says, “Delete all data related to Project Eurydice. Permanent deletion; hard destruction of former data storage to follow immediately. Authorization Kovalenka One.” I turn my head in time to see a green beam sweep past her eye, checking her retina, before the word comes up on the computer monitor in glowing font: CONFIRMED.
Dad hesitates, then sighs. “Secondary Authorization Caine One.” Again the word CONFIRMED comes up.
My mother reaches toward the screen before she catches sight of me. To my astonishment, she smiles. It’s the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “You’re all right, then.”
“Um, yeah.” I try sitting up. I feel okay, and nobody stops me. Not a single security guard is in the room. “What happened?”
“What happened is you destroyed Josie’s chance for resurrection.” Dad closes his eyes for a moment, but his tone remains gentle. “Not for revenge—we do understand that. We do.” He says it like he has had to work to convince himself. “You felt you were saving the other worlds, and her too. Didn’t you?”
I nod. The Firebird’s explosion would affect even the “non-observable” body in this dimension—if it didn’t have that power, it couldn’t bring us back to our bodies to begin with. When I destroyed that chamber, I destroyed Josie’s body forever. They have no reason to collapse any more universes, because the slivers of her soul have no place to return to. Josie can finally rest in peace.
I know I did the right thing. What I can’t believe is that my parents seem to understand that too. “And you’re not angry I did that?”
“We’re angry,” Mom says sharply. “Losing Josie will never be anything less than the greatest nightmare we’ve ever known. But what you said—about how she would feel—”
“We thought about ourselves,” Dad adds. “Not her.”
My mother continues, “We’re angrier with ourselves for starting down this road in the first place. For bringing Josie and then our Marguerite into this. We’ve been trying to cheat a fate we richly deserve. Did you really do anything we didn’t push you to do? Are we suffering any loss we didn’t earn?”
“We would never have stopped on our own,” Dad admits. “But we understand why you had to stop us.”
They can’t have given up that easily. They can’t. Could they have really heard what I was trying to tell them, before? They love Josie so much . . .
. . . but they love me, too. Maybe, despite the terrible loss they’ve suffered and the renewal of their grief, they can let Josie go if they still get to keep the daughter they have.
Those mutilated portraits in the Josieverse haunt me still. If the Home Office versions of my parents can give up their quest, I can try to reconcile them to their surviving daughter, even if it means giving Wicked a happy ending she doesn’t deserve.
I remind myself not to use the name Wicked here. “Your Marguerite is willing to do anything to get you guys to notice her. To love her best. But you were telling her all these other people were replaceable, that anybody and everybody in the entire multiverse could go straight to hell as long as you got Josie back again. Of course she thinks she’s replaceable too. That she doesn’t matter. And she hates herself for not being enough. So she killed all these other Marguerites because it felt like committing suicide, over and over.”
“No,” my mother insists. “She wanted Josie back too, as badly as we did. You don’t know her like we do.”
“I don’t have to know her. I am her. Because each version of us is a unique individual who deserves to be recognized for themselves—but something deep down inside is always the same. That’s why I can see inside her when you can’t. That’s how I know this has been destroying her.” I struggle for the words. “When she comes home, you have a lot of work to do.”
Slowly, Dad nods. “We’ll get her back. One way or another.”
As long as I never have to deal with her again, great.
My mother finally turns back to the computer console. “Activate final deletion of all Project Eurydice files on my mark.”
They’re really doing it. They’re really going to end their quest for Josie. It’s over.
But why did Paul have to die for this? The unfairness and loss claw at me, tightening my throat again. His death saved so many other lives, I tell myself, but I don’t even care. Not now, not yet. At this moment I know why my parents thought destroying universes was a small price to pay for bringing Josie back. I feel like I could do terrible things, tear the whole horrible world apart, if only it meant I could see my Paul again.
I wouldn’t. Not ever. But now I know just how bad you have to hurt to feel that way.
With the Firebird, I could always find him, or at least a version of him, I tell myself. It doesn’t help. Another version won’t do. I want the one who gave up everything to save me, the one I held close in Moscow, my Paul. And he’s gone.
Mom hits the console. The computer voice intones, “Initiating Project Eurydice shutdown.”
Relief washes over me in a dizzying wave. It’s over. It’s really over.
The lights in the room go out. After a split second of darkness, one of the screens comes on. Projected in front of us, ten times larger than life, is the face of Wyatt Conley.
“Henry, Sophia, if you’re watching this, it’s because you tried to end Project Eurydice.” Conley seems even sadder than they do. “When I swore to get Josie back, no matter what, I had to consider every potential weakness in our plan. One of those weaknesses was the possibility that you would lose your will to continue. So I put measures in place to make sure even you could never stop me.”
This can’t be happening. But in the projected glow of Conley’s image, I can see how pale and drawn my parents have become.
“I’m not angry,” Conley says. “I forgive you. Sometimes hope is even harder to bear than grief. For Josie’s sake, one of us had to be strong enough to bear it. Looks like it’s me.”
My mother ducks down to look at the computer terminal, where data is now flashing past at dizzying speed. She whispers, “Dear God.”
Conley brings his hands together in front of his face like a man praying and briefly touches his fingers to his lips before he continues. “I took the precaution of locating some of the single most important source vectors in the multiverse. That information is already programmed into the Firebird, ready for Marguerite to act on at any time.”
He means Wicked, not me. Her Firebird has been programmed for destruction from the beginning.
“That signal has already gone out to her, and she’ll be taking action immediately. Of course, this increases the damage we’ve had to do, but I know you’ll forgive me when we have our Josie back again.” Conley smiles. “Until then.”
The screen goes black, leaving us in darkness again, except for the flickering light from the scrolling data on my mom’s terminal.
“Bloody hell.” Dad actually sounds like himself. “We ought to have anticipated this. He certainly did.”
“But he can’t get Josie back!” I protest. “It’s impossible with her body gone.”
“Wyatt didn’t know that when he set up this failsafe,” my mother explains. “He must have done this months ago. Maybe even years.”
Dad and Mom both just sit there, slumped, as if in defeat. They still don’t care about the other dimensions, not compared to their grief. Although they are no longer actively trying to destroy those worlds, they won’t fight to save them either.
But I’m not going to stop fighting. Not now, not ever.
“We have to save them.” When my parents stare at me, I continue, “Do you have another Firebird? If you tell me what dimensions to go to, what to do, I can still protect them. Still tell them about the stabilizers, all of that. Just tell me you’ve got a Firebird!”
Mom seems to awaken from her stupor. She walks to a nearby console and pushes a couple of switches. A console door slides open, revealing a Firebird.
Wait a second. As realization dawns, I whisper, “This is mine. The one Romola stole from me in the Romeverse.”
“The least we can do is give it back,” Dad says with a sad, broken smile.
I nod as I try to snap back into action mode. No time to cry for Paul. I can’t even let myself think about him, because I won’t be able to bear it. I must hold together long enough to complete the mission he died for.
Then I can finally fall apart.
“Okay, I’m ready.” I put the Firebird back on. That heavy chain around my neck has rarely felt so good. “Where should I go first? You can give me the data, can’t you?”
My dad shakes his head. “It’s not that simple, Marguerite.”
Mom gestures at the terminal in front of her. “Conley has plots within plots, plans within plans. The multiverse is infinite, and he has exploited its vulnerability to the fullest. Had I any idea he distrusted us so completely—but that’s irrelevant now. Suffice it to say that as long as Conley wants to pursue this path, and our daughter is willing to help him, we can’t stop him. Blocking an infinite number of pathways is, by definition, impossible.”
“That’s it? He wins?” I sit down heavily. It sounds like the only way out would be to convince Conley to change his mind, but I don’t think I could do that. I doubt anyone could. At this point it’s not only about love for his lost Josie; it’s about making sure that nobody ever stops him from doing what he planned. Pride can be as strong as love, and a hell of a lot crueler.
“No, that’s not it.” My mother straightens. “There’s another step we can take. Drastic, even radical. But once it’s done, Conley can never threaten another dimension again.”
My first reaction is anger. “So why didn’t you do that in the first place, instead of doing the shutdown thing that tipped Conley off?”
“Because the solution involves sealing this dimension off from all the others, permanently.” Dad puts his hand over Mom’s, an unexpectedly tender gesture. “We could turn this into a sort of pocket universe, its own tiny bubble.”
“So . . . you wouldn’t ever be able to travel out of this universe again. Your Firebirds wouldn’t work.” I can see why they’d be reluctant to do that. However, the stark misery on my parents’ faces tells me this scenario has the potential to become far darker.
“That’s the best-case scenario,” my mother says. “In the worst-case scenario, the bubble pops. This dimension collapses.”
“No.” That’s a fate I couldn’t even wish on the Home Office. “That’s too much. All the billions of people who live here—”
“Would be lost.” My father gazes into an unseen distance, maybe imagining the death of this world. “But that’s still fewer lives than we have already taken. And if Conley continues this, a mere fraction of the total death toll.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice yourselves.” For Conley, even for my parents, that would be fair. For all the countless other people who live and have lived in this dimension throughout history, it’s unspeakably cruel. Maybe you can say that it’s worth sacrificing one life to save a hundred, something like that—but once you’re talking about entire dimensions, the scale becomes too enormous for that kind of calculus. Billions of lives can’t be squeezed down into the X in the equation. “Are you really going to do this?”
And Mom and Dad wouldn’t just die. They’d be obliterated, unmade until the end of time. . . .
“Wait,” I say. “If your universe dies, doesn’t mine go with it? You’ve influenced us, changed us.”
“But we didn’t create you. So no, your dimension won’t collapse.” My father looks thoughtful. “However, it will warp. Your actions back to the beginning of our intrusion into your universe will be erased, as will all our influence. Your reality will be reshaped.”
“Don’t worry about confusion,” Mom adds. “You won’t remember a thing.”
“And Paul—he died here—but he’d be alive again, wouldn’t he?” Something like hope stirs inside me.
“If he hadn’t died in this universe, I’d say yes, certainly.” My father says this like any other theoretical. For him this is only a puzzle piece, not a human life hanging in the balance. “As it is, the question becomes far more complex.”
“You don’t even know?” That brief hope shatters like porcelain. Maybe Paul will return to life—or maybe we’ll be thrown back to where we started, with no idea that we ever knew a Paul Markov, or at least no idea what happened to him. He won’t only be dead—he won’t even be remembered.
All I have left of Paul are memories. I can’t let them go.
And if the Home Office’s influence on us is erased, so is our influence on other dimensions. If we didn’t go to the Russiaverse, the grand duchess would never have had her baby, even though Lieutenant Markov would probably have died in battle no matter what. She would be trapped in that life she hated and forced to marry a stranger, with no child from her great love.
Mafiaverse Theo wouldn’t be shot, and Londonverse would still be alive. But my mother in the Josieverse would still be lost to near-suicidal depression, and the Warverse wouldn’t have leaped forward to the technology it needs to defeat its enemy. The cracks in the multiverse would spread wider and wider, beyond any possible judgment of what is better or worse. No one person could ever understand the full ramifications of this act.
In the end, I find myself thinking of the grand duchess, remembering the way her hand stole across her belly. When I stole her night with Lieutenant Markov, I took something precious away from her. I won’t take her baby, too.
Paul would say the exact same thing if he were here, even knowing the cost would be his own life.
My actions have consequences. Everyone else has had to live with the repercussions of the choices I made—now it’s my turn.
“Don’t do it,” I say. “We have to figure something else out. You can start by getting your daughter under control.”
“No other way offers a guarantee of success.” My mother shrugs. “And there is at least a forty percent probability we will survive.”
Forty percent doesn’t sound like such great odds to me. “Please, you can’t do this. If you won’t think about your own world, think about mine! You’d be rewriting history. It’s like—like destroying yet another dimension, in a way.”
“But it will be over.” My father’s blue eyes, usually so warm, have become remote, and as pale as a pond icing over. “Finally, truly over.”
That’s when I realize Mom and Dad aren’t valiantly sacrificing themselves for the rest of us. They don’t care whether they live or die. Josie’s gone. They’ve lost their purpose. Back when they thought they could do some good by stopping Conley, that sustained them. Now they’d rather die than keep on enduring their grief.
My parents only want to be with Josie again.
Dad quietly says, “You should go home immediately. And—that communication you’ve set up between the dimensions—very clever, by the by, we only picked up on that yesterday, congratulate the other us for us—”
“Henry.” Mom pats his shoulder, her usual hint that he is beginning to run on. Even at this moment of mortal despair, they remain connected.
Dad sighs. “If you could use that system to get a message to our daughter, please, tell her to come home.”
“What happens to her if she’s not here when this universe gets sealed off? Does she die?” I look from Mom to Dad and back again. “Would she be, like, pulled back automatically?”
“She would become . . .” Mom thinks this over. “A spirit without a body. Possibly she would be free to travel from dimension to dimension, but only within other Marguerites. She could never return here. I suspect that would be the same fate she’d face if our universe collapses, though she might prefer being a ghost to simply perishing with the rest of us.”
“But ask her. Please. If you can.” Dad’s voice cracks. “And tell Josie we love her. Right away. Before you don’t remember us any longer.”
Only a few minutes ago, I thought I could finally see my parents in these people. Now they terrify me more than they ever have before.
I think of all the others out there who deserve to be protected. The grand duchess and her baby. Vladimir, the tsarevich of all the Russias. Josie talking to me in the middle of her Scottish rafting holiday, alive with enthusiasm. Valentina with her little stubborn chin. New York’s version of Romola, with her boundless loyalty. Theo in the Warverse, who has already spent so much of his life fighting to stay alive, and who is so helplessly, completely in love.
My father as tutor to the Russian royal family, hiding the secret that one of the children is his. My mother in a world where she’s already lost my father and sister, and where the mere sight of a Firebird gave her the hope to go on.
And Paul. The one who learned sign language as a boy so he could talk to the girl he liked. The one who had been rejected, then betrayed, but who still dashed into a collapsing universe to save me. Lieutenant Markov—who is dead, lost forever, but still remembered in a world where his child will someday be born. My Paul, who may be only a memory but who thought and felt and loved, who deserves to have been.
All our fates hang in the balance. All our histories. And there is nothing I can do but run.