“Yeah, well, you have to stick around in this cave for a while, so get used to it.” Theo kicked back in one of the chairs, resting his Chucks on the edge of the table. “What’s the game plan?”
“We pretend to belong here.” The Wicked Marguerite looked down at the bracelet on my wrist with distaste, then slid it off. “You’re good at that, I know. We don’t sabotage them right away—we wait, let them think the crisis is over, catch them off guard. But there’s one problem we have to take care of right away, and that’s Paul Markov.”
My terror deepened. Paul knew about most of this; I’d been able to tell him the most important parts back in the Cambridgeverse. But that knowledge had put his life in danger.
My parents had never imagined any of this when they invented the Firebird—a device that allows consciousness to travel through quantum realities, which are what non-science-geniuses call “parallel dimensions.” They only wanted to study the countless ways history could unfold. Because everything that can happen does happen. Each time we make a choice, or luck comes into play, reality splits in two. This has been going on for infinity and always will.
My mother, Dr. Sophia Kovalenka, became fascinated with the multiverse at the beginning of her career in physics. She didn’t only want to prove the existence of alternate realities; she wanted to see them for herself. Since traveling to parallel dimensions had previously been less scientific endeavor, more Star Trek episode, she very nearly got laughed out of her academic career. But a few people believed in her, including the English researcher Dr. Henry Caine, who became her collaborator in every way possible. (In other words, he’s my dad.) They’ve worked with other scientists and many grad students as well, including their two current doctoral candidates, Paul Markov and Theodore Beck, and after years of painstaking effort, finally created the device. The Firebirds may look like crazy-complicated steampunk lockets, but they’re the most powerful and miraculous scientific creations since the atomic bomb.
Unfortunately, like the bomb, the Firebirds turn out to have significant downsides.
As I said, you can only travel to worlds in which you exist. If there’s a world where you died as a child or your parents never met? You’ll never see it. Whatever situation your other self is in, you’re stuck with it. And you’re lucky the Firebird can remind you of your true identity, because otherwise you’ll sink into the corners of your host’s mind as that person takes over their body and life again.
Unless you’re a “perfect traveler”—someone with the ability to maintain memory and control no matter what universe you’re in. You can make only one in a dimension. Wyatt Conley made sure this dimension’s traveler would be me.
“Let me take the lead, Theo,” the Wicked Marguerite said as she checked herself out in a mirror, scowling at my messy hair. “You’ve been detected before, so they’ll suspect you first. But me? Nobody would imagine a ‘perfect traveler’ could be conquered so easily. Shows how much they know.”
“Feel free to take charge. But I should warn you . . .” Theo paused. “It’s harder than you think. Separating them from your own versions. Emotions get, uh, confused.”
“Maybe yours do. That’s not one of my problems.” Wicked began braiding back my hair. She pulled tighter than I would, enough that my scalp hurt. But the hairstyle wasn’t so dramatically different that it would tip anyone off. “I admit, I wasn’t sure about the Nightthief. Whether it would work this well. Nobody’s tried to leap into a perfect traveler before.”
“You’ll probably need a hell of a lot more than I do.” Theo sounded maddeningly calm about the damage they were doing to Theo’s body and mine. “Keep it close by. Use it the instant you feel the first flicker of—you know.”Wicked wasn’t her dimension’s perfect traveler. That had been my older sister, Josie. In my visit to the Home Office, I’d seen how much Josie adored journeying between alternate universes; the work was an ideal fit for my sister, who was both a science geek and an adrenaline junkie.
But visiting parallel dimensions is dangerous even for a perfect traveler. The rest of us had all been at serious risk during our trips, and Josie had died.
Not only died. Splintered.
Splintering is what happens when a traveler’s consciousness rips into two or four or a thousand pieces. Fortunately it’s very, very difficult to do accidentally. But in the past few days I had learned two ways a person’s soul could be torn into fragments. One was what had happened to Josie: her host had been seriously injured, and she’d tried to leap out in the last seconds before death—because if your host dies while you’re inside them, you die too. The Home Office’s Josie had nearly made it, but not quite. Instead, as she leaped, she splintered into countless parts, through dozens of dimensions, each so tiny and ephemeral that there was no putting her back together again.
This drove the Home Office versions of my parents to madness. And God only knows what it did to Wicked, because she’d been twisted into something I could never imagine being.
Yet this evil, too, had to be an essential part of me . . .
“You know where you need to go after we settle the situation here, right?” Theo said as I helplessly watched Wicked finish with my hair. “You’ve got the calculations?”
She rolled my eyes. “I don’t need calculations if they’re in my Firebird, and they are.”
“I want to double-check,” Theo insisted. The Triadverse version of him had learned to be more cautious. As he began taking notes, working through whatever unfathomable physics governed this, he said, “If you want to talk to Conley, seize the moment, before Sophia and Henry get back. Nothing will tip them off faster than evidence you’ve spoken with him.”
Wicked frowned. “Which Conley?”
“This world’s. But he’s on board with everything.”
Wyatt Conley: tech genius, business mogul, and America’s most powerful geek. I’ve seen him on newsfeeds wearing jeans and a blazer over an Iron Man T-shirt, his rumpled, boyish look as manufactured as his tPhones that took over the cellular market a few years back. Not yet thirty, people say, and he’s accomplished so much. If they knew what Conley’s really done, they wouldn’t smile when they said it.