A Million Worlds with You
Page 38

“We’re in the Warverse,” I say. “Where Theo and I came a couple of weeks ago.”
“You remember me.” Paul can’t meet my eyes any longer. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It hasn’t even been a month. . . .” My voice trails off. He didn’t literally believe I would have forgotten him so soon. He just thought I wouldn’t care enough to think back on him often, if at all.
When Wyatt Conley splintered Paul’s soul, sending each part to another dimension as blackmail for me to do his dirty work, he sent one sliver here. While the Warverse possesses technology as advanced as our own, all that tech has been turned to military use. This nation—whichever it is, because I never learned the name—it’s embroiled in a desperate global war and has been for decades. The overall impression I got of the Warverse was that it felt like World War II would have, if it had lasted for fifty years.
Conley sent me here to sabotage this universe’s Firebird project, which was on the verge of success. In this world my parents are top military scientists, Paul is one of the researchers working with them, Josie has become a bad-ass fighter pilot . . . and Theo is the guy Warverse me apparently fell in love with. But Warverse Paul cares for me, and I realized I might be able to use that to my advantage. Believing I had no other choice, I let Paul take me out for a romantic night on the town, flirted and talked with him, and even wound up kissing him passionately on the streets of San Francisco.
Our kiss lasted until the moment Paul recognized my Firebird, and I was busted.
In the end, I negotiated a truce: We manufactured fake evidence of sabotage while actually giving the Warverse the data they needed, and in return I got my Firebird back. But Paul was angry and bitter about my deception to the very end. I thought he hated me and would forever.
Instead he just risked his life to save mine.
“Thank you,” I say very quietly. “What you just did— what that meant—”
“This isn’t only about you.” Paul averts his gaze from my face. “It’s about Triad, too. Come on.”
I start toward the door. “Where are we going?”
“A Firebird project staff meeting.” Paul steps aside from the doorway as I walk through it, making sure our bodies don’t brush against each other. “Time to come clean.”
From the way Paul says that, I expect my parents to feel as betrayed as he does. When he shows me into a small conference room down the hall, however, my parents in their stiff military uniforms look up from their work spread on the table and smile.
“You’re the other one?” Dad says, in the same tone of voice I would expect him to use if he someday recognized Paul McCartney on the street. “The Marguerite who visited our world recently?”
“I—uh—yeah.” This is not a situation I prepared for.
My mother shakes her head, smiling in her you-silly-thing way. “Why didn’t you just tell us who you really were? We’d have been so delighted to speak with you!”
“I thought I had to sabotage you,” I admit. “It didn’t seem like the beginning of a great relationship.”
“Fair enough.” My dad drums his fingers on the edge of the table. “But you and Lieutenant Markov here found a way around that, didn’t you? Now we’ve got our own Firebird technology and have been able to put it to good use.”
“But I was here only a week or two ago!” Honestly, I’ve lost track of the days, especially while I was in outer space, but I’m positive it hasn’t been that long in “real time” since I left the Warverse. “How do you have Firebirds already?”
“Two reasons,” Paul says. Although I’ve gratefully sunk into a chair at the conference table, he remains standing at the door, more as if he’s guarding this meeting than taking part in it. “One, we were almost there to start with. We had the materials on hand. We had most of the know-how. All we needed was a boost, which the information from your Theo Beck provided.”
If they hadn’t been close to success, Conley wouldn’t have wanted to sabotage them in the first place. “Okay,” I say, “but what’s the second reason?”
My parents give each other a conspiratorial smile as Mom says, “Well, for the past few days, we’ve been having some very interesting conversations with others who have built Firebirds of their own.”
“Others?” What, are there tons of people in the Warverse on the verge of dimensional travel? That sounds completely unbelievable. “How many scientists are working on this here?”
“No, no, sweetheart, not here.” Dad sighs. “We’ve been speaking to our own other selves from various universes, including yours.”
Conversations between dimensions? Of course—the Cambridgeverse! They were working toward this ability, and the very last thing I did before leaving that world was internally ask my other self to please, please try to reach out to the other parallel dimensions.
She actually listened. They did it. And now . . . “We’re joining forces.” I feel a smile dawn on my face. “We’re all going to work together against Conley and Triad.”
“Exactly.” Mom leans across the table, so pleased with herself I’d call her “smug,” if it weren’t for the fact she has every reason to be this proud. “The counter-conspiracy to defy Triad has already been born.”
If someone set off all the fireworks from the Fourth of July right now, the spectacle still wouldn’t be fabulous enough to express how completely freakin’ ecstatic this makes me. We’ve done it! We’re finally, finally ahead of Triad, ahead of Wyatt Conley. We can stop reacting and start acting.
And as one of the very few perfect travelers in the multiverse, I just went from being a pawn to being a weapon.
Being a weapon is going to be lots better.
“We can defend the universes now,” my mother says. “Experiments conducted by the Berkeleyverse Paul—”
I hold my hands up in the time-out signal. “Wait. Berkeleyverse?”
“Well, the different universes have to have different names.” My dad says this so smoothly you’d think he was the one who’d been traveling between worlds for months instead of me. “It helps keep things straight, especially since we’re mostly communicating with other versions of ourselves. Can’t really address a message to ‘Henry’ when I am one of the Henrys, can I?”