NO TIME WHIRLED AROUND FAR, MIXING with the scent of scalded tea. His crew was talking, but he couldn’t pick their words apart from the roar in his brain. All of his senses were on overload, blasted into static. He barely felt the blanket’s wool fringe scratching his throat. He didn’t see the washroom door open. Priya’s scream—that made it through, if only because the sound was so out of place.
“FAR! LOOK OUT!”
His daze twisted into tight focus. Eliot was emerging from the washroom—pink-faced, blaster in hand. Far had seen more than a few gun barrels in his day, but this one was unique: shaped like an X instead of an O, ready to punch a cross through his chest. There was no flourishing pause, no dramatic monologue, no time for Far’s Recorder reflexes to throw him out of the weapon’s range. Eliot pulled the trigger and he was a dead man.
Or would’ve been, if not for Saffron. The red panda launched from the pipes with a step on me and I’ll fall on you vengeance—landing on Eliot’s head, every claw flailing. She yelped. The blaster swung, its laser reducing the cushion by Far’s shoulder to a blackened smolder. Gram launched himself over the second couch, wresting the weapon from Eliot and tossing it back to Far, who caught the blaster midair—Way to finally make an appearance, Academy training!
When he turned the weapon’s sights back at its owner, Eliot froze. The whole hashing room did. Gram had managed to secure the girl’s arms behind her back. Priya paused by the charred couch and Imogen was brandishing the chai pot, though Far doubted she’d use it. There wasn’t a violent bone in his cousin’s body. There weren’t many in his, either, but almost getting blasted through the heart was enough to whip up aggression in anyone.
“You can’t shoot her, Far.” Priya was the first to move, bringing the moment back into itself with a touch on his arm. “She’s family.”
“Not on this crew, she’s not.”
“It’s not a metaphor,” Priya insisted. “The Ancestral Archives results came through. Eliot shares half of your mother’s DNA, which means she’s either your sister or your aunt.”
“What?” The worst day of Far’s life was also now jockeying for the weirdest. “No. No! I don’t have a sister. And Uncle Bert is Mom’s only sibling. There must be a mistake. We were both eating blood orange gelato when you gathered the sample; you must’ve snatched my spoon instead.”
That was it. The only thing that made sense…
“The DNA is Eliot’s,” Priya pressed. “It has all of her markers. Female. Alopecia universalis. She’s a McCarthy.”
Far stared down the blaster sights. Eliot stared back, no more smirks left to give. Those eyes did look an awful lot like his: same color, same stark stubbornness. “Is this true?”
“In a sense.” Hers was one of the most earnest sighs ever exhaled. “My name is Eliot Gaia McCarthy. I’m not your sister, or your aunt. I’m the daughter of Empra McCarthy, born on April 18, 2354 AD, in a parallel universe.”
Parallel universe.
As in…
Another world.
Weirdest worst day ever. “So you’re my doppelgänger?”
“Doppelgängers look the same,” Gram corrected him. “What Eliot posits, what the evidence substantiates, is that there’s a different universe in which Empra McCarthy had a daughter instead of a son. That would mean Eliot is an alternate version of you.”
“Far’s the alternate version,” Eliot muttered.
“I think we all know who’s the original here,” Far shot back, blaster steady.
“Really?” Imogen lowered the chai pot. “We just found out there are whole other worlds and you’re arguing for an ego boost?”
Fair. Far looked back at the Engineer. “Is this even possible? Parallel worlds and shazm?”
“Hypothetically? Yes.” Gram’s eyes brightened: Geek-out mode greenlit. “String theory has maintained the existence of a multiverse for centuries, but we haven’t figured out how to communicate with these theoretical universes, much less attempt interdimensional travel.”
“A lot of the universes haven’t,” Eliot said. “Mine only joined the fun about twenty-seven years ago.”
“That’s remarkable!” Gram glanced down at her. “How’d your scientists manage it?”
Far broke in before things spiraled into quarky atomic talk. “If you’ve been able to jump worlds for so long, how come we haven’t heard of this multiverse before?”
“For the same reason your world’s history hasn’t caught on to the fact that the future walks among them. Much like the past, the multiverse is delicate. The Multiverse Bureau doesn’t like disturbing worlds that haven’t discovered parallel universes. It’s their policy to remain observers in such spheres.”
“You call trying to shoot someone observing?” Tiny tongues of smoke licked off ruined satin, dispersing when Far waved toward them. “I, for one, am very disturbed. If not for the deus ex machina à la bear-cat, that would’ve been my chest! Why would you want to kill yourself? I mean, your alternate self. Crux, we need a term for this.”
“I don’t want to kill you.” There was a crack in Eliot’s voice, threatening to spill out all sorts of emotion. “I have to.”
Far wasn’t sure he wanted her to go on.
“Why?” Priya asked for him.
“You just saw why.” Eliot’s eyes slid toward the hatch, meaning clear.
The door was the same as it’d always been, yet the crew’s hearts quickened when they stared at its metal and bolts. As if the why—the Fade—remained on the other side, apocalyptic storm front rolling, ever rolling, toward them, edges heavy with a skeleton army. Far could almost hear the clip-clop of ghost hooves, galloping in infinite silence….
“You mean that fady cloud-thing?” Imogen murmured. “What’s that got to do with Farway?”
“Everything,” Eliot said. “It’s—well, it’s hard to explain. It’d be easier to show you. There’s a memory chip of datastreams inside my pocket universe.”
“Your bag o’ secrets is a pocket universe?” Far snorted. “No way am I going to let you rummage through that. You probably have another weapon tucked away in there somewhere.”
Eliot looked to Priya. “The pocket universe is on my left wrist. It’s easier to open if you stretch it horizontal.”
So the bag o’ secrets was a pocket universe was a… bracelet? The chain was, for the most part, invisible. All the naked eye could see was a distortion—a ripple of wrong air strung between Priya’s hands, paper-cut thin. She stretched it out, eyes widening as they registered what she held: porthole to a different world. Slender fingertips vanished, first knuckle, second, third, wrist, as she reached into a space the rest of them couldn’t see. For a terrible moment, Far feared the disappearing would swallow her, too.
But her hand resurfaced, clutching the edge of a daffodil dress. Lace frothed out of thin air, until an entire gown stretched before them. The whole thing looked as magical as ever. Whoa was a common theme the room over, except for Imogen, who was making grabby hands for the dress itself.
“If you set the pocket universe on the floor, it’s easier to see what you’re grabbing,” Eliot offered. “You can stretch it wider, too. Just take care that you don’t fall in.”
Priya did as instructed. The dimension’s edge was malleable, warping to her touch until Far could see where space itself had split open, allowing for a cavity that was both there and not. One of the Invictus’s floor panels now went a level deeper than ship schematics dictated.
“What I wouldn’t give for a purse like this.” Priya pulled out another gown. “It’s… well, I mean, it’s phenomenal.”
Gram craned his neck for a better view. “This tech’s from your world?”
“Standard issue from the Multiverse Bureau.” Eliot nodded. “Light packing makes interdimensional travel worlds easier.”
“Ha!” Imogen grinned as she hung the dress in the wardrobe. “Punny!”
“What’s the Multiverse Bureau?” the Engineer asked. “How do you travel between worlds? Is there an interdimensional equivalent to a TM?”
“Like I stated, it’s easier to show you,” Eliot said. “The answers are inside the chip, which is in a blue velvet box.”
Annoyance worked Far’s jaw back and forth. Had everyone already forgotten Eliot’s transgression, still sizzling a hole in the couch? Perhaps forgiven was the better word, because the Fade sure as Hades hadn’t snatched that moment yet: Eliot nearly knocking him out of this life, not even lifting a scribbly eyebrow about it.
“Blue box, blue box…”
Priya’s hand kept dipping through the floor, producing a new item each time. There were powdered wigs, fishnet stockings, muddy trousers—more clothes than the wardrobe above them. A case stamped with a blue serpent twining around an orange cross contained curiously labeled silver packets. Medicine, Priya declared, though she looked uncertain when she read the names. There were gadgets, too—near as silver, just as strange.
“Careful,” Eliot warned when a metallic cylinder was drawn out. “That’s—”
A scarlet bright light leaped from the instrument, stopping short of Priya’s jaw. The burning smell of the room went threefold; a generous swoop of raven hair fell to the floor.
“A laser knife.”
The beam retracted when Priya let go of the hilt. Hair that had flowed past her shoulders was chopped in a ruthless line far too close to her neck. She brushed the loss with fluttering fingers, unable to reconcile where hair ended and air began. “Well. Guess there’s no need to worry about split ends for a while.”
Imogen was considerably more distraught. She tugged her own locks back, making a noise that could only be attributed to a robot-roadrunner: “Meeeeeeep.”
“Any more lethal surprises hidden in there?” Far remembered he was holding a gun, remembered it was aimed in Eliot’s general direction. He nudged it at her. “Speak now.”
“No. Just the laser knife.” Light bounced off Eliot’s head as she shook it. The welts from Saffron’s claws were a bloody tiara, finely scrawled. “Trust me. I don’t want to hurt any of you.”
“This from the mouth of the girl who claims she has to kill me.” His hand ached against the blaster. Did he even know how to shoot this alternate-universe tech, if it came down to it? “I’m sure you understand why I’m not terribly trusting at the moment.”
“Aha!” Priya had recovered the box. It was blue—the shade’s truest version, found on primary color wheels—and small enough to fit in her palm. The chip inside was translucent, with the dimensions of a pinkie nail. When held up to the light, it resembled a snowflake on the verge of melting, patterned with a delicate labyrinth of circuits. Dropped, it would take hours to find, minutes to step on.
Gram squinted from across the room. “Is it compatible with our tech?”
“Not without modifications,” Eliot told him. “There’s a shortcut hologram function that responds to voice command, though.”
“This is a hologram platform?” Priya asked. “But—it’s so tiny.”
“They get smaller every year. If you put it on the table, we can get started.”
The box was set down first, the chip placed back inside, where it was least likely to vanish into the common area’s knickknack landscape. One word from Eliot lit the air above it; files appeared in the form of several more boxes, each a different color, most bearing a Roman numeral. 0 through VII. White through black.
“Zero.” The lid to the white box opened at Eliot’s command. “Start at the beginning.”
A scene unfurled from the container, blooming before the group. It looked as solid as the Sims, but everything had a miniature quality—doll-sized people sat at aluminum tables the length of Far’s arm. Some held forks. Others chopsticks. Both utensils looked elementary in the hands of the fresh cadets, who’d grown up on meal blocks. Far did a double take at the uniforms. These kids were being groomed for the Corps. They were eating lunch inside the Academy.
The mess hall looked the same as the one from Far’s schooling, but also different. Its checkered floor was a red-white pattern instead of navy-gray. The security camera this footage had been lifted from was in the wrong bird’s-eye corner—facing the grub line instead of the stage where Instructor Marin rattled off his list of don’ts at the beginning of every term. Some of the people were the same. Mrs. Benucci was running the kitchen— harried curls sticking out of her hairnet, dishing out the pasta she claimed was an ancient family recipe. Ekstone Elba sat where he always did, picking tomatoes out of his sauce. Instructor Lee—who taught the wildly popular Pop Culture Through the Centuries class—sported his acerbic lime hair.
Far’s eyes skipped to his usual seat: second table, far end. Logic told him what—who—he should expect there, but the sight jarred him anyway. Eliot didn’t look like Eliot. Cap off, hair gone, she sat in a ring of friends, laughing so much she couldn’t get a bite in edgewise. Her smile was… real.
Everything was familiar. All of it strange.
could’ve been could’ve been could’ve been
This was his life.
This was another’s.
An announcement poked through the mess hall speakers: “Cadet McCarthy, please report to Headmaster Marin’s office.”
“Marin’s headmaster in this universe?” Far spluttered. “What is this? The darkest timeline?”
“It gets darker. Marin’s the least of our worries from here on out.” Eliot’s hologram grin quivered; by the time she replaced her cap and stood, it had vanished. Something about the way now-Eliot regarded the scene made Far doubt the expression would return anytime soon. “You guys might want to get comfortable. Grab a seat, make a snack. This will take a while.”