THE MOMENT I APPEAR IN MY OWN DIMENSION, I KNOW IT’S already gone wrong.
Normally returning to your own body is smooth and soft, like easing into a warm bath. This feels like doing a belly flop into icewater. Pain echoes through my body, every nerve crackles, and at first neither my thoughts nor my eyes will focus.
When I can see again, my hand is clutching a piece of paper that reads: YOU SNEAKED INTO MY HOUSE, SO I SNEAKED INTO YOURS.
My hand drops the paper without my volition, and I know then that I really am back home—but Wicked got here before me.
Nightthief. She’s already dosed my body with Nightthief. I’m trapped.
As if she can hear my thoughts, Wicked looks up—into the mirror over my bedroom dresser—and smiles in triumph.
“Let me out of here!” Josie screams from the hall closet. She’s beating on the door so hard that it sounds like she’s trying to punch her way through. “Give me back my sister!”
Fresh scratches and bruises ache along my arms and torso. Josie would’ve fought hard, and she’s stronger than I am; Wicked only won because of the element of surprise. But the closet door is thick. For now, Josie’s stuck.
Wicked walks from the bedroom into the great room, hardly even glancing at the door where Josie’s hammering so desperately. The cozy atmosphere has vanished—no, been destroyed. Houseplants have been knocked over, their roots crinkling feebly around the cylindrical mounds of soil on the floor. Books lie scattered around, and the equations have been erased from the chalkboard wall, replaced by obscene drawings and rude commentary on the relative size of Paul’s and Theo’s . . . of Paul and Theo.
Far more troubling is the sight of Theo, arms belted behind him, bleeding from the corner of his mouth.
“That Nightthief isn’t going to last forever,” he shouts, and from the hoarse timbre of his voice, I can tell he’s been yelling for a while. “You’ve used it up, and soon it’s going to wear off, and then you’re screwed!”
“I don’t need forever. I’m done here.” Wicked lifts her Firebird, leaving mine hanging around my neck. She turns to the same mirror where she braided my hair, triumph gleaming in her eyes. “Next time you take over my body in my dimension when I’m not around? Someone you love dies.”
A jolt—and then I slump against the nearest wall. The aching in my beat-up body sharpens, but I don’t care. I’m alone in my own head again.
“Theo? It’s me now.” I hurry over to the chair and loosen the belt that binds his hands behind his back and to the leg. “Oh, God, what did she do?”
“Thrashed me, basically. For the record, she wouldn’t have been able to do that if I weren’t still recovering.” Theo flexes his shoulders, rubs at the reddish dents the leather carved into his skin as he gets to his feet. “Or if Josie had been here at the time. If Wicked hadn’t gotten the jump on her, Josie could’ve taken her out.”
I hug Theo quickly. “Is there any way to save the Home Office?”
He gives me a double-take. “Whoa. Why are we trying to save the Home Office? And what from?”
“They’re trying to seal themselves off so Wicked can never get out again, but there’s a chance that whole dimension will collapse, and if it does our history gets rewritten, completely. That can’t happen. Besides—if we can save a dimension, we should. Even if it’s the Home Office.” My parents and Wyatt Conley are only three people among billions. That world’s Theo deserves to survive, him and all the other countless people in that world. “I think they’ve already started the process. Can we stop it?”
Theo takes that in for a second, then shakes his head. “If I had a month to work on this, maybe I could figure out exactly how they’re doing that and how to prevent a collapse. But not even I’m genius enough to do it in a few minutes.”
What’s about to happen to all of us? Is the reality I know about to be erased? There’s no way for me to know, no way for me to control anything. “So we’re just . . . stuck here? Waiting to find out if our memories are about to be rewritten?”
Theo groans. “Looks like it.”
“Marguerite, is that you?” Josie calls from the closet, then pounds on the door. “Let me out!” I hurry to free her, which right now feels like the only useful thing I can do.
“What’s that?” My dad pokes his head out of my parents’ bedroom. I realize they’ve just jumped back too.
I open the closet door to see Josie tucked between our winter coats. She has the beginnings of a black eye and a fist cocked just in case I’ve been lying about being the real me. But she relaxes when I let her walk past me into the hallway, where Mom, Dad, and Theo have all gathered.
As I explain the plans to seal off the Home Office in its own bubble and its potential collapse, the physicists in the room become agitated in the way they do when thoughts are flying fast. They know our history could be erased without my having to explain it. Impossible as it is, they’re still trying to figure out how to preserve the Home Office in time. Theo even grabs a piece of chalk to jot down some rough equations, though he pauses a moment to grimace at what Wicked wrote on the wall. “Really?” he mutters as he erases the words with his bare forearm. “C’mon. Give a guy some credit.”
As the math starts to fly, Mom says, “Where’s Paul? He left the Moscowverse to follow you to the Home Office. Did you find each other there?”
Words desert me. How can I bear to tell the others that Paul is dead? I have to—I know this—but it seems as if speaking the words will make them true. As if my silence makes it possible that he might return home to us, safe and sound, like this is all one bad dream.
“Good news,” Theo announces, saving me from having to answer.
Josie pauses from repotting the poor houseplants. “What?”
“If we’re using the tracking technology from the Warverse correctly, and I think we are, Wicked went right back home, as in the Home Office itself. So that mean’s she’s done, right? They’re going to seal off that world—or destroy it—but either way, she’s not coming back. Yes?”
“Yes.” Her parents don’t need me to deliver the message anymore. The Home Office is about to be sealed off forever. No more dimensions are in danger. It’s really all about to be over. My throat tightens with unshed tears, both of relief and the sorrow I can hold back no longer.
“Sweetheart?” Dad steps closer to me, the concern in his blue eyes changing to fear. “Did you say whether you found Paul? Did you see him?”
Theo gets this seasick look on his face. He’s seen the truth in my face. “No,” he whispers. “No, it can’t be—”
Nausea sweeps through me, followed by a rush of dizziness. My shoulder slumps against the wall. My hands brace me to keep me from falling. My mother cries out, thinking that I’m collapsing from grief, and by now the others have realized why I’m grieving—why I can’t say what happened to Paul.
But another horror overtakes me, seizing my muscles, my voice, and my will. Once again I am imprisoned in my own body. And two Firebirds hang around my neck.
Wicked’s back.
“Did you—did you think . . .” She’s having trouble talking. The Nightthief is wearing off. She won’t control me much longer. “That I—would let them—kill me?”
She found out about the bubble. She found out about the chance of destruction. And she escaped here.
“Marguerite?” Josie says. She’s the only one not freaking out about Paul, at least not so much that she can’t tell I’m acting weird. Wicked turns away and covers my face with my hands.
You might live! There’s a chance! But the words won’t come out of my mouth.
Yet it doesn’t matter, because Wicked hears me and answers in a raspy whisper. “I don’t—like—the odds.”
In this strange twilight of the drug, my consciousness can communicate with hers. Surely I’ll get control back any second.
But not soon enough, because Wicked takes her Firebird in hand and begins to turn the controls in a way I’ve never seen before. I know it, though, even before I recognize a little twist of the thumb I recall from Romola Harrington’s trick in the Romeverse.
Wicked’s setting up a collapse. She’s going to destroy my universe.
No. It’s impossible. We can protect ourselves. Can’t we? We’ve done this for so many other worlds—
“You didn’t—save yourselves—first. Stupid.” She laughs once, a bitter sound I can hardly recognize as coming from my own throat. “Always—look out—for number one.”
But you’ll die too! If your world and ours both vanish, you’ll kill yourself along with the rest of us.
“Fine. So long as I get the rest of you. You talked them into this. You dished it out. So take it.”
“Marguerite?” my mother says through tears. “What are you—”
Theo catches on and snarls, “Oh, hell no. Not now!”
The ground trembles. Not that much, nothing out of the ordinary here on the edge of the San Andreas fault. My parents and Josie hardly even react. But I know the truth. It’s the beginning of the end.
I want to call Wicked more names. I want to tell her she has the worst life of any Marguerite in the entire multiverse, not because her dimension sucks but because she’s chosen to lead the angriest, meanest, most vindictive existence possible. I want to taunt her with the horror of what awaits her, an eternity of parasitic possession where she will never, ever be able to call anything or anyone her own.
But my fate is even worse. I will never have been born. My last moments will be spent knowing that everyone I have ever loved is about to be erased along with me. Wicked has doomed us all.
The earth trembles again, stronger this time. Her hands tighten over the Firebird, and with a rush she’s gone.
I stagger backward as Theo grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Get out of her. Get out of her!”
“She’s gone! It’s me!” I cry. “It’s collapsing. The universe is collapsing. Wicked used my Firebird and destroyed us—”
“What?” Theo looks like he might faint. Understanding dawns on my parents’ faces, followed by horror.
“Wicked jumped back inside me. She started the chain reaction. I couldn’t stop her.” A sob rises in my throat. My family, my friends, and my world are all about to die at my hand.
“Damn!” Dad runs for the pile of equipment at the far end of the great room, Mom and Theo just behind him. “We can do this. How long do we have?”
A couple of hours, I want to say. It took that long for the Romeverse to fall. But maybe our world is more fragile, because already the earthquake has returned, this time strong enough to rattle the dishes in the cupboard. The few remaining books on the shelves fall to the floor.
Mom answers my father’s question. “Not long enough.”
But they all throw themselves at it, grabbing material, trying to get the stabilizer device put together in no time. Josie, blank-eyed, starts taking more things off shelves, putting them on the floor so they won’t tumble down and get broken—sensible in an earthquake, irrational here. Not that I can blame her for being terrified to the point of shock. My entire body feels numb.
Then I hear footsteps in the hallway behind me. Who else could be in our house?
Only one person.
I whirl around to see—“Paul!”
Oh, God, he’s alive. He made it out after all—
—only to come here and be killed along with the rest of us.
I try to run for him, but the shaking earth nearly topples me. Only slumping against the wall keeps me from pitching onto the floor. Paul catches himself, bracing both hands against the sides of the hallway. As soon as it’s steady enough to move, he rushes forward. “What’s going on?”
“The universe is collapsing,” Theo says. “Bad Marguerite possessed Good Marguerite just long enough to make it happen.”
Paul turns to me just as I reach him. His arm is still bandaged along the scar she slashed in his skin. I fling myself into his embrace, as if his strength alone could hold me up while the rest of the world falls. The scent of his skin, the feel of his hands on my back, even the catch in his breath as he pulls me nearer—everything about him is more precious to me than ever before. It is the most beautiful and terrible moment of my life.
Terrible, because I know Paul has been given back to me just in time for us to die together.
Though pent-up sobs threaten to steal my voice, I manage to say, “Where were you? I thought you were gone.”
“There was no time to figure out a new destination. I had to jump backward to the Moscowverse. Then I had to recharge the Firebird and—damn.” Paul swears again in Russian at the bleak irony of getting home just in time to die.
Although I know the answer, I have to ask, “We can’t escape, can we?”
He kisses my cheek, my forehead, and clutches me even tighter. “No way out. Not one we would ever take.”
And he’s right. Whatever existence we would have after this would be stolen from other selves, other worlds. Would I rob Valentina of her real parents forever? Or force my Warverse self to give up her life so I could lead it instead? Do we decide whether to take one alternate self for good, or to steal weeks or months from others? Escaping this dimension without any hope of going home would turn us into parasites.
I don’t want to die. But I refuse to live if the cost is betraying what I believe, and who I love.
At least I got to see Paul one more time before the end.
He turns to look at the frantic activity on the rainbow table. He makes no move to join them. That’s when I know. “Paul, can they build a stabilizer in time?”
“No.”
The real quake hits then. We all shriek or yell, and every one of us falls to the floor except Josie, who was already there. Shouts from outside make me wonder what’s happening to the sky, or whether the ground has split apart to reveal another moment of pure hell.
Paul crawls closer, reaching out for me. This is it. We’re going to kiss each other goodbye and die in each other’s arms.
Instead, he grabs my Firebird, and I remember our one chance.
“Linking the Firebirds!” I shout over the din of falling plates and blaring car alarms outside. Back in the Moscowverse, he said this might work in an emergency. There’s never been a bigger emergency than this. “That’s going to save us, isn’t it?”
“It might,” Paul says as he starts fitting them together.
“Might?”
“I give it a thirty-four percent chance of success.”
Oh, God. “Do it.”
“It’s going to hurt.” Paul doesn’t say this to give me a chance to back out. Already he’s readjusting my Firebird and his, working fast because we both know there’s no other choice.
Our ceiling morphs and shimmers, then seems to melt, revealing a storm-cloud sky overhead. Josie begins to scream. And Paul brings our Firebirds together.
It’s like a lightning strike. Pure pain boils through me, so anguishing I can’t even breathe. I’ve never felt pain like this—a reminder comes close, but a reminder’s over in a second and this goes on and on.
Paul shudders in the same agony. But he pulls me into his arms, hanging on as if I could save him. Tears blur my vision. The whole house is falling apart, or maybe the dimension, and surely this is the end.
“I love you.” I hold him even closer, grateful for the chance to say this just one more time.
“I love you, too.” He folds me against his heart.
If this is how we end, then let it come.
At that moment, light surrounds us, blazing bright as a sun, and a tremendous shudder of energy passes through my body. It’s like the eye of a cyclone at the heart of me, winding tight and pulling me inward. The whirl of it hurts more than all the rest. I cling to Paul even more desperately, willing myself to stay in one piece. To stay with him. To stay alive.
Then everything . . . stops.
The pain vanishes. The shaking subsides. The ceiling’s just a ceiling again. For a few long seconds we all lie there, not trusting our own senses.
Hope and despair and confusion collide, blurring my thoughts as I hang on to Paul. He looks as astonished as I do. But the silence endures, and the stillness, until I begin to think they might last forever.
“We made it,” I whisper. “. . . Didn’t we?”
Theo’s expression slowly shifts from bewilderment to a smile. “Either that or the afterlife is way more mundane than advertised.”
Paul breathes out in relief. “We made it.”
Josie and Dad both start to laugh with joy—they have the same crazy cackle. I should be laughing too, or cheering, or jumping up and down in crazed glee. But I’m still too stunned to feel anything but astonishment.
Theo slides over to us, a grin on his face. “Little brother, what did you just do? Show me this mad sexy science.”
Paul sits up, towing me with him. Now I can see that Mom has already pulled herself back to her feet and is busily working with her own Firebird. I try to sit up on my own, but I’m clumsy and slow; the Nightthief lingers in my system, and my muscles twitch in the aftermath of extreme pain. “Mom? What is it?”
“The Home Office. We have to be sure they won’t try again.” Mom squints at the readouts.
They wouldn’t. Wicked might. “They weren’t destroyed, were they? Because our history is the same.”
“Exactly,” Dad says. “I think they’ve sealed themselves off. And it looks like your counterpart is sealed in there with them.”
She went back. She heard what I said and went back, even knowing she might die. Wicked gets another chance she doesn’t deserve. But her ultimate fate is in her own hands. If her life is any good from now on, that’s because they found a way to get through to her. If her life’s a hell, it’s because she’s still venomous, bitter, and small. I’ll never know which, and honestly, I don’t much care. For me, it’s enough to know we’ll never see her again.
Dad’s laptop lies open on the floor, dirt from a capsized fern scattered across its keyboard, but it still works, signaling us that someone is calling via Skype. Paul gets that icy look in his eyes as he staggers to his feet. “There’s only one person it could be.”
My father grabs the laptop, brushes it off, and sets it on the rainbow table as we gather around. Still trembling, I brace myself against a chair. When he clicks Answer, Wyatt Conley’s face appears on the screen. His smug satisfaction has been wiped away, replaced by fear. “Listen—I know we’re not on the best terms, but if I’m interpreting these readings correctly, we just—”
“—took care of it.” Mom folds her arms. “Our world is safe. Triad as you knew it is over. One of your counterparts is dead, and the other is trapped permanently in a sealed universe.”
Dad cuts in. “As of now, Wyatt, you’re alone. You’re also outnumbered—because we now have several other worlds working with us, every one of which has been warned about you. So I suggest you drop the idea of meddling with interdimensional travel ever again.”
Josie leans between our parents’ shoulders to show her face to the screen. “And also, just for the record? We are never going out.”
It’s like Conley can’t take it in. Has he ever been defeated before, even once in his life? He’s succeeded over and over again, raking in the money and praise of the entire world, but now all he can do is stare. At last he says, “What happens now?”
I step forward to speak to the screen. Hopefully this is the last time I ever have to look Wyatt Conley in the face. “I suggest you go back to cell phones. That’s what you’re good at.”
With that, I hang up. The screen goes blank.
Theo shakes his head. “If we could put that bastard in jail—expose him, make the world see what’s he’s done—”
“We can’t.” Dad’s expression is rueful as he flops down on the sofa. “They haven’t any laws against this sort of thing yet, have they? We stopped him, Theo. Let that be enough.”
“Besides, think of all the research awaiting us.” Even amid the wreckage of our house, a brush with death not even ten minutes in our past, Mom’s eyes are already starry with the thought of discoveries to come. “The links between the universes, the unlimited potential of the data we can share . . .”
“Mad sexy science.” Theo manages to smile.
Josie resumes rescuing the poor plants, putting them back in their pots, and Mom tries to sort the scattered piles of paper back in the order they were in to begin with. Dad and Theo head to the front door. This is supposedly to check on how bad the damage is outside in our neighborhood, but probably Theo also wants to be sure his car made it through okay.
“Marguerite?” Paul’s voice is gentle.
I look up at him, struck anew with the wonder of his survival. What’s even more beautiful is that he’s smiling back at me with just as much joy. Just as much hope.
He takes my hand and says, “Let’s make a world.”