A Million Worlds with You (Firebird #3)

“Every Marguerite you’ve killed—we usually have a pretty good life, you know?” Could anything still touch this person? Or is her soul completely dead? “It can be like that for you, if Triad would just stand down. There are ways to go on, even after the worst has happened.” Mom proved that to me back in the Josieverse. Dad endured the loss of my mother in the Russiaverse. And if I hadn’t kept going after I thought my father was dead, we really might have lost him forever. “They have to let Josie go.”

“Precious Josie is the only thing that matters,” Wicked retorts. “Even here! She’s the daughter Mom had for real. Apparently the rest of us were farmed out to surrogates. We’re just spares. Don’t you see?”

Mom, unmoved by any of this, folds her arms. “I could hardly be expected to carry octuplets. That wouldn’t have been healthy for me or for any of you. The surrogates were all enthusiastic volunteers for the experiment.”

I try to hush Mom. “That’s not what’s bothering her. Listen to me, okay, Wick—I mean, um, Marguerite? You can’t undo any of the things you’ve done, but you can stop here. You can show my—your parents that you have the power.”

Wicked looks at me in confusion. Some of the hostility has left her, though, and that gives me hope.

“See, if you stop now, if you refuse to do anything else for Triad, you’ll force them to deal with you and your feelings.” In a lot of ways, I don’t believe Wicked deserves a happy ending. But if getting one means other dimensions get to live—then that’s the price we have to pay. “You could go home. Today, even! Just return home and tell them what’s really going on with you. They’ll listen.”

“But—” Wicked blinks. “But—I don’t understand—”

“What?” My heart is in my throat.

She looks down at herself and says, “Why am I tied to this chair?”

No wonder the hostility is gone. This is no longer Wicked but Victoire.

“Without her Firebird, she didn’t get a reminder.” Theo has caught on too and explains to my mother. “Wicked’s been, uh, submerged inside your daughter’s consciousness. She’s not coming out until the Firebird reminds her again.”

I sigh and lean back in my chair. I nearly got through to her . . . or did I?

“Um, seriously,” Victoire says, eyes wide. “What is up with the chair?”

The front door opens, and I hear half a dozen voices talking at once about Rey and Finn and Poe Dameron—and every single one of those voices is mine.

Dad steps into the dining room first, wearing a white linen shirt and khaki shorts that emphasize his scrawny chicken legs. He never wears shorts at home, but here I guess the heat won out. “Hello, what’s this?”

And then there are my other selves—six more of me—all of them in outfits I could easily choose, all of them with their wildly curly hair tucked into styles I’ve worn a hundred times. It feels like staring into a funhouse mirror, except that all the reflections are exactly right.

My mother gets up. “Marguerite, Theo, you know Henry, and these are Elodie, Colette, Oceane, Giselle, Estee, and Amelie.”

Dad folds his arms. “Why are you introducing me to one of our own children, and why is another of them tied to a chair?”

“I’d like to know that too,” Victoire interjects.

“This is going to be one hell of a long explanation,” Theo says.

“So get started.” The sharpness in my voice surprises me, but now that I see all my other selves in one place, I know what has to be done. “They need to understand completely, because I have to ask their permission for something important. Something they have to fully comprehend before they say yes.”

Theo gives me a look. Mom says, “Marguerite, what do you mean?”

“It’s time we had a meeting.” I take a deep breath. “All the Marguerites. Every one of us. We’re going to come together at last.”

21

THREE HOURS LATER, I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF THINK OVER the sound of my own voices.

All six of them.

“Do you realize that Theo lost his left leg below the knee?” Mafiaverse is so angry she’s near tears, her fists balled up in the lap of her green skirt. We’re all seated at the table, being watched by my gaping parents and Theo as we have this extraordinary meeting—a gathering of all the people I could potentially be. “He’s going to need a prosthetic, and now I’m getting all these creepy emails from some guy in the Russian mob—”

“Paul and I are flying back from Ecuador tomorrow.” Triadverse sits near me in an orange sundress, calmer than any of the others. “So far as we can tell, nobody else at Triad had any idea about the cross-dimensional stuff—”

“I have an evil phantom inside of me,” says Victoire, who’s still stuck with Wicked. “Get it out.”

“Don’t get me wrong.” Cambridgeverse wears a cornflower blue T-shirt and a lot of dangly chain necklaces, and she rubs her left arm as she speaks in her crisp English accent. “Mom and Dad are super psyched about communicating between universes, but did you really have to go snuggle up to the guy who maimed me for life?”

Warverse is wearing a straw fedora, a pink dress, and a scowl. “Markov? Seriously? How am I ever supposed to explain all this to Theo? I mean, my Theo.” Her eyes glance back at the Theo in this room, who winks at the version who chose him. She beams back.

Angriest of all is Oceanverse in black, who yells, “You wrecked a submarine!”

Then another voice cuts through the din, hushing us at once. “Everyone, be silent.”

We all close our mouths and look toward the person sitting at the head of the table—the Grand Duchess.

She wears a crimson camisole and her curls tumble free down her back, yet she looks more regal now than I ever did in her jewels and furs. The grand duchess’s perfect posture turns the ordinary dining room chair into a throne, and the command in her voice is undeniable. From this moment on, there’s no question about who’s in charge.

“You must all listen to this Marguerite from the shadow world known as the Berkeleyverse, as she is the only one possessed of all the knowledge that can help us,” the grand duchess commands, gesturing at me lightly with one hand. “The question of her actions while in our own worlds—that will be dealt with later.”