A Thousand Pieces of You

“Is pancake batter the same as waffle batter?” When I take a bite, it tastes about right. “Did you eat already?”

“What?”

I look up from my plate to see Theo staring at me. He looks confused—even unnerved—

That’s when it hits me. The Firebird isn’t hanging around Theo’s neck. He must have taken it off last night to sleep, but now his memory has started to fail. Sometime in the past few minutes, my Theo began to lose his hold on this body, this consciousness.

Mom wasn’t totally wrong about our consciousness slipping in alternate dimensions after all.

“You need a reminder.” I drop my fork, go to him, and grab his hand. Enough of my Theo remains that he doesn’t fight me or ask questions as I tow him back toward my bedroom.

I give him a gentle push that makes him sit heavily on the bed. For a moment he looks like himself again, and he smiles. “Didn’t we go over this last night?”

“Oh, my God, stop flirting for once in your life.” I fish through his clothes on the floor and find his Firebird locket. Quickly I loop it around his neck. “Just wear that, okay?”

“Wear what?”

He’s forgotten about it already. He doesn’t seem to notice the matching Firebird hanging around my neck, either. Mom explained once that, since the Firebirds belonged to our dimension, they would be very difficult to detect by a native to another dimension. At the moment I call attention to the locket, in theory, Theo could see it—but otherwise it hovers beneath his level of awareness.

It’s a good thing that actually works. Otherwise, people would instantly freak out about the Firebirds appearing around their necks and remove them, destabilizing the would-be interdimensional travelers who had just leaped there. As it is, people might wear them for months without noticing. Physics is weird.

“Hang on,” I tell him as I take his Firebird in hand and find the sequence that sets a reminder, dropping it in the instant before blue-white light flickers around it.

They told me a reminder would hurt. They didn’t tell me how much. Theo bucks against it, almost convulsing, before swearing under his breath as he slumps forward, and for a moment I think he’s going to pass out.

(“A shock?” I asked my mother when she told me about this. “A reminder is only an electric shock?”

She beamed, like we were talking about butterflies and rainbows. “Not at all. A reminder is a fairly sophisticated resonance shift. It simply feels like an electric shock.”)

“Theo?” I lean forward and take his shoulders in my hands. “Are you okay again?”

“Yeah. I am.” He looks up at me, panting and wide-eyed, then repeats, “I am,” as if I’d contradicted him.

“That was close.” I put my hand on my chest to remind myself that the Firebird is still there. The curve of hard metal against my palm reassures me, and makes me think. Will I need a reminder too, eventually?

Theo’s face is pale, and he’s braced himself against the bed like he’s expecting an earthquake. At my questioning glance, he says, “I need a few minutes. All right?”

“Sure.” That had to have been as terrifying as it was painful. So I gently rumple his already disheveled hair and go back out to the kitchen, where I finish my pancakes while I strategize.

If Paul’s not already on his way to us, we’ll be on our way to him within the hour. There have to be monorails that would get us to Cambridge quickly, right? Or even a regular train. We find him before he finds us. And then—

—we kill him.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that the Paul I need to destroy is currently a passenger in the body of another Paul Markov entirely. Although right now it seems to me that anybody as evil as Paul would be evil in every single dimension, I don’t know that for sure. So it’s not as simple as finding him and, I don’t know, shooting him or something.

But there are things you can do with the Firebird that are dangerous to the traveler inside. Theo told me that much.

In fact, I decide, we should go over that before we do anything else, even before we leave the house.

Determined, I put my plate in the sink and return to my bedroom to talk this through with Theo. When I walk inside, though, he’s not in the bedroom. His clothes remain on the floor, apart from his thin black jacket, which I don’t see.

“Theo?” I walk into the bathroom, and I’m two steps in before it occurs to me how rude it was to do that without knocking first.

At that moment I see him, and I know he wanted to be alone. I also know why.

Because Theo, my guide, is sprawled on the tile floor, shooting up.

6

“THEO?” I TAKE A STEP FORWARD, THEN STOP. FOR SOME stupid reason I feel ashamed to see him like this.

Right after the shame comes anger. Why should I be embarrassed? I’m not the one getting high in the middle of something so dangerous, so important—

Then Theo groans as he slumps sideways onto the bathroom floor. He’s completely, totally out of it.

“Oh, shit.” I drop to my knees and roll him onto his back. Theo doesn’t even seem to know I’m there. “What are you doing?”

Theo focuses his eyes on me for only a moment and chokes out one word. “Sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re sorry?”

“Yeah,” he says. My anger is very far away from him right now; I can tell. The whole world is far away from Theo at the moment.

I grab the small bottle I see on the bathroom floor; it’s still about half full of some liquid that’s a brilliant emerald green. What drug looks like that? It must be something from this dimension, because I’ve never seen anything like it.