THEO EMERGES FROM MY ROOM SCRUBBED CLEAN. HE’S put on a fresh T-shirt from his backpack, a gray one with a picture of some rock band I don’t know, from the sixties maybe, The Gears. He’s freshly shaved and smells of soap; his damp hair is combed back into something that, on another guy, would look almost respectable. When his eyes meet mine, I expect to see lingering embarrassment—but instead Theo seems determined. Focused. Good. I need that more than his regret.
At first, neither of us knows what to say, and he can’t hold my gaze very long. I look at his T-shirt because it’s less awkward than looking at his face—and then I realize I know a couple of the members of The Gears. “Wait. That’s Paul McCartney and George Harrison, but—who are the other guys?”
“No freaking clue.” Theo holds his shirt out as he glances down. “Apparently they never met John Lennon, or even Ringo Starr, so the Beatles never quite happened. These guys seem to have been pretty famous on their own, though.”
No Beatles in this universe. It makes me sad, the nonexistence of a band that broke up decades before I was born. I know all their songs word for word, thanks to my father. Dad was the biggest Beatles fan ever. His favorite song was “In My Life,” and he’d hum the verses while he washed up after dinner.
The memory stings—and I hate that, I hate how all the good memories have turned into things that hurt—but I need the pain.
Aunt Susannah’s blow-drying her hair, so we’re able to escape from the apartment without any more vomit-worthy flirtation between her and Theo. As the elevator takes us back to ground level, I try to get our plans together. “All right. First we have to figure out whether or not Paul’s left Cambridge—”
“Forget it.” Theo slips on his jacket. “If he’s still in Cambridge, he’s not the Paul Markov we’re looking for. If Paul leaped into this dimension, if he’s in this version of Paul, then he’s on the move. Promise.”
That seems like a big assumption to make. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I know Paul had been acting borderline paranoid about Triad Corporation the last couple of months,” Theo replies. “Like the guys who were funding us would’ve sabotaged the research they paid for. Makes no sense, right? But I guess now we know Paul wasn’t . . . thinking clearly. Let’s put it that way.”
Maybe that’s the secret: Paul spent the past few months slowly going crazy. We thought he was acting normally, but he was always so quiet, so introverted, that there was no telling what might be going on inside. “That makes sense. But how does it help us?”
“Triad Corporation may be one of the world’s biggest tech companies, but everybody knows it all boils down to one guy—Wyatt Conley.” Triumphant, Theo holds up his wrist and projects a holographic image of a news story in front of us. The newness of the technology fades as I read the headline: CONLEY TO SPEAK AT TECH CONFERENCE IN LONDON.
“He’s here,” I say as I read the date. “Wyatt Conley is in London today.”
“Which means we don’t have to find Paul. We find Conley—because if our Paul is here, he’s going after Conley first.”
Stands to reason Conley would be a tech genius here, too. He’s only thirty, but he’s considered one of the giants—mostly because he developed the core elements of the smartphone when he was only sixteen. Triad is probably the most prestigious corporation in the world, has a glitzy, ultramodern office under construction not far from my home in the Berkeley Hills, and makes the kind of gadgets and gear people stand in line for for two or three days before they’re released. Personally I think it’s kind of stupid to get that worked up over a phone that’s, like, two millimeters thinner than the last one, but I don’t knock it, because Triad’s R&D money made Mom’s work possible.
I guess Paul turned against everyone who ever helped him, all at once.
The elevator doors slide open, and we walk out through the chic mirrored lobby. I smile at the doorman as we go out, cool December air ruffling my hair and Theo’s jacket. The doorman seems surprised; I don’t think this Marguerite spends a lot of time being nice to people. Once we’re alone again, I ask, “How do you know Paul’s not coming after us first?”
Theo shrugs. “I don’t. But either way, we don’t have to waste time looking for him. The fight’s coming to us.”
The tech conference is being held at a super posh hotel in the center of the city. Theo and I head in on one of the shimmering monorails that slithers over the crowds below.
“How do we get in?” I ask as we sit on the plastic seats. Above our heads, holographic ads glitter and dangle like hallucinogenic Christmas ornaments. “Tech conferences like this don’t sell tickets at the door, do they?”
“Hell, no. If Wyatt Conley’s the keynote speaker, this thing probably costs a thousand bucks a head.”
My eyes widen. I have more money in this dimension, but that’s a lot—and anything that expensive probably sells tickets in advance, not in person. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to sneak in.” He gives me a sidelong look, and he smiles. “Since I’m the one with the criminal instincts on this team, leave that part to me, all right? Once we get past the main entry area, nobody’s going to look twice at either of us as long as we play it cool.”
The people at this conference are going to be corporate tycoons, millionaires, and so on, but Theo’s wearing beat-up jeans, a parka, and a T-shirt. “What about your clothes?”
“You’re the one who’s dressed wrong for a tech conference—not that you don’t look as sensational as ever.” He’s as cocky as he ever was, like I didn’t see him stoned and helpless on the bathroom floor an hour ago. Is that infuriating or a relief? Theo gestures to his beat-up jeans. “I’m probably slightly overdressed as it is, but I can get away with it. Just stick close to me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Nervous energy is building inside me as we come closer to confronting Paul. Or not—we might have got it wrong. This isn’t necessarily our dimension’s Paul Markov at all. What if he’s fled somewhere else entirely?
Then we’d have to jump into a whole new dimension, with a new set of rules, and maybe an even greater distance to cross to reach each other. The thought of it makes my head hurt.
And yet, a new dimension might be one where I’d be with my parents. Both of them. By now Mom feels almost as lost to me as Dad.
What is Mom doing right now, back home? Theo and I left a message explaining what we were doing; she would have lost it when she read that, but without a Firebird of her own, she can’t follow us. It’s awful to think of her being scared about me and Theo when she’s still so raw from losing Dad, but when we decided to go, I didn’t stop to think about how long we’d be missing in our own dimensions. We’ve been gone for a day and a half so far.
I wonder if they’ve had Dad’s memorial service—they couldn’t even have a real funeral, couldn’t even give him a true resting place—
No. I can’t let this get the better of me now. This close to our goal, I have to stay strong.
“Show me how to use the Firebird,” I say, pulling mine up from within my shirt.
“You’ve got the basics, right?”
“I don’t mean the basics.” This is difficult even to say. “I mean, show me how to use it to kill Paul. Our Paul.”
“You want to keep it down?” Theo glances around us; we’re surrounded by commuters. But they’re too absorbed in their own holoscreens and headphones to have heard a word I’ve said.
I insist. “Show me.”
“Listen. For your safety and my peace of mind, let’s leave that part to me, okay?”
“My safety isn’t one of our priorities here.”
“Speak for yourself,” he says, so intense that once again I find myself both thrilled and afraid of what it might mean.
My voice softens, but my resolve doesn’t. “You need to show me how to do it, just in case.” In my heart I know it’s my job to kill Paul—my duty, my right—but I also know that’s not an argument Theo wants to hear. If he’s worried about safety, fine, we’ll talk about safety. “If something happens to you, I have to be able to defend myself.”
Theo still looks wary. “You understand that this isn’t easy, right? Paul either has to be down for the count before you do this, or you have to have grabbed the Firebird from around his neck—assuming he’s got it on him. Which he might not.”
Paul might have his locked in a safe somewhere. But I’d bet anything he hasn’t. Theo and I are still wearing ours, because this thing is too precious, too valuable, to keep anywhere else but right next to the heart.
“I understand,” I say. “Show me.”
So Theo leans close and shows me a fairly elaborate set of twists and turns of the Firebird’s many layers and gears—by pantomime, of course. There are so many steps to the process that I can hardly even begin to memorize them all. “Why does this take so long? How is anybody supposed to do this in a crisis?”
“Nobody’s supposed to do it, period,” he answers. His head is so near mine that one of my curls is brushing his cheek, and he doesn’t push it away. “We were building ways to travel through dimensions, not killing machines. What I’m showing you is technically a reset—something you should only do in your home dimension, to allow the Firebird to . . . connect to a different person, a different dimensional resonance, you see what I’m saying?”
“Kind of.” I’m letting my frustration get the better of me. “I wish it were easier, that’s all.”
“It has to be difficult, because it’s fatal to anyone not in their home dimension. We didn’t want anybody doing this accidentally while they were traveling.”
As I watch Theo’s hands go through the sequence, over and over, I think of it again—the reality that I’m going to kill someone. An actual person, even if he’s not in his own body at the time.
He’s in someone else’s, I remind myself. You’ll be setting this world’s Paul free. But I can’t work up much righteous indignation while I’m shanghaiing someone else’s body myself.
And it’s not some anonymous stranger. It’s Paul. The one who looked like he’d never received a nicer birthday gift than the lopsided cake Mom baked for him. The one I once teased for buying all his clothes at thrift stores—and then felt so bad when I saw that he was embarrassed, because he didn’t shop there to be a hipster, he did it because he was poor. Paul, with his gray eyes and soft laugh and lost look, the one who held me against his chest when I was afraid . . .
Paul was able to look at all the good in my father, all the love Dad had given him, and go on to murder him without blinking an eye. Why can’t I do the same? Why can’t I be as hard as he is? I’m the one who has a reason, the one with a right to kill. I shouldn’t be the one who feels guilty and horrible and sick.
For Dad, I tell myself, but for the first time it rings hollow.
My stomach churns, and the monorail car feels too warm. I suck in a deep breath, attempting to steady myself, and Theo glances over. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say shortly. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Be careful when you go through the process,” he says, clicking my Firebird back into its proper configuration, all the thin metal layers folding in on one another like an insect’s wings. “We built this thing to be easy to repair and customize, so when you have it all spread out like that, it can pop apart. Simple enough to fix if you know how—but that’s something I can’t teach you in an hour. Or a month.”
“Right. It’s complicated. You don’t have to keep reminding me.”
Theo’s brown eyes meet mine, warm and knowing. “Somebody’s in a mood.”
“We’re going to kill a man. Should I be perky?”
He holds his hands up, like, I surrender. “I know this is hard, all right? It’s not easy for me either.”
Little brother. Theo used to take Paul out for what he called “Remedial Adolescence”—trying to introduce him to music and clubs and even girls, all the stuff he missed out on when he started doing higher physics at age thirteen. Of course, Theo did that partly to soak up the hero worship, because Paul thought Theo was about eighty times cooler than anyone else on earth.
Or we believed he did, anyway. In the end, Theo was as deeply deceived by Paul as the rest of us. As bitterly betrayed.
“I’m sorry.” I lean my head back against the plastic seat and stare upward at the shiny holographic ads squiggling above us, begging me to buy products I’ve never heard of. “I know I’m acting like a bitch. I’m tired is all.”
“It’s not easy,” he agrees. “We can save ‘nice’ for later. After.”
“Right.”
The monorail comes to our stop. Theo and I step out of the car side by side, without saying another word to each other. Maybe he’s still thinking that nice comes later. Maybe that’s what I should be thinking too. Instead my mind is clouded with uncertainty about what we’ll find when we see Paul, whether we’ll see him at all, and, worse, with doubts about my resolve.
I can’t even look at Theo, lest he see how worked up I am. So I glance around at the crowds rushing by us in this station of metal grids and holographic signs, hoping for a moment’s distraction from the dark work ahead.
One figure halts in his tracks. A large man in a long black coat, stopping midstep to check a holographic map of the area floating overhead. As the motion flickers in the corner of my eye, I turn toward it and my first thought is, He’s having a heart attack.
Then I see who it is.
I’ve chased Paul Markov across dimensions. Now he’s only twenty feet away.