Tandem: The Many-Worlds Trilogy

by Anna Jarzab

  A wave of panic swept through me and I began to cry. I tried to staunch the tears with the backs of my hands, but I couldn’t. I wanted my mother so badly. The first time I had a reaction, she took me home from the doctor’s and put me to bed, then crawled in with me and curled her body around mine, holding me through the night. I missed her so much it was like a black hole had opened up inside of me, consuming everything in its path. I want to go home, I thought desperately, and the tears came faster, spilling down my cheeks. Thomas gazed at me with eyes full of concern, and I almost lost it. The only thing that stopped me was the stark reality of my circumstances and fear of the General’s wrath.

  The door to the reception room slid open and a man walked in. I turned to look at him. He was short and grizzled, with a shock of thinning silver hair and a thick white mustache that curled over his lip like a fat caterpillar. He held a black doctor’s bag in his hand and wore a pair of thick gold-rimmed spectacles that made his eyes seem overlarge and surprised.

  “Who are you?” the queen demanded. “Where’s Dr. Rowland?”

  “Dr. Rowland is off duty tonight,” the General said, before the man could speak. “Dr. Moss is one of our KES physicians.”

  “Your Majesty.” Dr. Moss bowed low before the queen, then turned his attention to me. “Your Highness, I’m sorry to see you in this distressing state. Would you mind if I gave you a cursory examination?”

  I looked at Thomas, who nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “Wonderful. Excuse me, Agent, would you mind moving aside?” Thomas did as he was asked, disappearing from my field of vision.

  Dr. Moss looked me over for a few minutes, then asked, “Besides the hives, do you have any other symptoms, Your Highness?”

  My fingers fluttered near my temples. “A headache. And … it’s hard … to breathe.”

  “A simple allergic reaction, then. What did you eat tonight?” I told him, and he nodded. “When did you first start experiencing these symptoms?”

  “A couple of minutes … after … dessert,” I said, pausing a few times to catch my breath.

  “I see. Well, I’m sorry to say this, Your Highness, but it seems as though it was the chocolate that did it.”

  “That’s absurd!” the queen cried. “Juliana isn’t allergic to chocolate.”

  “Food allergies are mysterious creatures, Your Majesty,” Dr. Moss explained. “They come and go as we age, and they can manifest quite unexpectedly.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to do something about the wedding cake,” the queen muttered.

  “Don’t bother,” I told her. “I just won’t eat any.”

  “Luckily for Your Highness, I can administer an antihistamine that should fix you up quite quickly. Have you any objection to needles?”

  I shook my head. Under the circumstances, I could hardly protest. I squeezed my eyes shut while he gave me a shot in the crook of my elbow. “What now?” I asked when it was over.

  “Now,” he said. “We wait.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. Within moments I was feeling much better; the headache had started to recede, the hives were clearing up faster than they had appeared, and in the space of fifteen minutes, I could breathe normally again. I sat up as soon as I had the strength and thanked Dr. Moss.

  “Happy to be of service, Your Highness. If there’s nothing else … ?” He looked at the General, who shook his head.

  “That will be all,” the General said. “You’re excused.”

  Dr. Moss nodded. As he stood, he made eye contact with me, and deliberately held my gaze. A smile quirked the ends of his mouth. He knows, I thought. Was Dr. Moss the same scientist friend Thomas had mentioned before, the one with all the theories about analogs?

  When he was satisfied that I understood, the doctor turned and left. I wanted to call him back and pepper him with questions—Thomas had told me a lot about the tandem, but there was still so much I wanted to know, especially about the strange visions I’d been having of Juliana. Maybe Dr. Moss could explain things better.

  Thomas slid his arm around my back and helped me stand. “I’ll see you to your room,” he offered. I shook him off, remembering another offer he’d made once, to walk me home. I didn’t want him to touch me, or help me, or do anything for me. I just wanted to be alone.

  Perhaps deciding it wasn’t worth fighting in front of the others, he let go of me, but I hadn’t gotten more than a few steps on my own before I had to stop, because the room was spinning. I reached out instinctively and he caught me around the waist.

  “Are you sure you don’t need any help?” he asked. I gave in, seeing as I obviously wasn’t going to be able to get back to Juliana’s bedroom without assistance. As we left the room, Whitehall gave me a kind smile.

  “Be well, Juli,” he said with affection. I nodded, wanting to appear grateful, but all I could do was wonder if I would ever truly be well again.

  THOMAS IN THE TOWER / 2

  “Sir, I think we have a mole,” Thomas said. It was early in the morning, and sun was just beginning to rise over Columbia City, chasing away the aurora. He was seated across from his father in the General’s office, squeezing in this audience while the General signed off on some long-neglected paperwork. His interactions with the General had more or less always been this way, with the General only half listening as he attended to some more important matter of Citadel business. Thomas was used to it, but this morning he found it frustrating, and was doing a poor job of hiding it. The General despised signs of physical restlessness, so Thomas often had to resist pacing, drumming his fingers, tapping his feet—all those natural impulses that struck when he was agitated—but today he couldn’t.

  “That’s ridiculous,” the General said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Thomas insisted. Most of the time, arguing with the General was a fool’s errand, but Thomas wasn’t going to back down about this. If someone inside the Citadel was feeding Libertas information, Sasha was in greater danger than they had foreseen. “They took Juliana out of here right under our noses, leaving behind no trace of entry or exit. How could they have done it without the help of someone with intimate knowledge of the Castle? And Grant Davis—it’s not a coincidence that they had a patrol on the South End at the same time he came through the tandem. Someone told them to go there. They were waiting for him.”

  “And you think it’s someone in the KES?” The General’s tone implied that he thought Thomas was being insubordinate. He would have to tread very carefully around this issue—except that he had no interest in doing so.

  “The KES isn’t impervious!” Thomas gripped the wooden arms of his chair. The thought of one of his KES brothers betraying the agency and putting Operation Starling in jeopardy made him sick to his stomach, but he wasn’t going to turn a blind eye and keep walking into Libertas traps. Libertas had no idea who Sasha really was—that was a secret known by so few people that unless the mole was himself, the General, Gloria, or Dr. Moss, they couldn’t have any inkling as to her otherworldly origins—but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find out, if the General ignored the fact that someone was funneling KES secrets their way.

  “I know it isn’t,” the General told him sternly. “I’ve been part of the KES for thirty years, and I’ve seen many trusted agents exposed for the traitors they were. Do not presume to believe you know everything, Thomas; arrogance will betray you every time.”

  Thomas sighed. “I’m sorry, sir.” His father was right; one of Thomas’s weaknesses was his propensity to mistake passion for understanding. He was devoted to the KES and its mission, but he had only been part of it for two years. There was still so much about the agency that he didn’t know.

  “If you think there’s a mole, then find him,” the General said. “And find him fast. Because the world is about to change, and when it does, we must be at our strongest.”

  “I will, sir,” Thomas said, energized by the General’s faith in him, grudging though it was.

  “Good,” the
General said, turning back to his paperwork. “Now go eat something. They can hear your stomach growling all the way up at the Academy.”

  Thomas rode the elevator from the General’s office suite, which took up the entire 114th floor of the Tower, down to the 62nd floor, which contained the KES mess hall. The King’s Elite Service was a network that spread all over the country and the Tower was its nerve center. More than just a headquarters, the Tower was the workplace and residence of over twenty-five thousand agents and support staffers; they worked on the lower and upper floors of the building, but the middle floors were reserved for residential and other living spaces. Not all agents opted to take the General’s blanket offer of free housing, but Thomas hadn’t had a choice; when he received his assignment after he matriculated from the KES Academy, he’d been given his room number and that had been that. Housing quality was determined by years served, not by rank, so he had one of the smallest, least desirable rooms; it had a bathroom but no kitchen, so he was forced to take all his meals in the mess.

  Not that he minded. The mess was one of his favorite places in the Tower, because it was where agents and staff came to socialize. He liked its noise and chaos; it reminded him of his time at the Academy. He’d only been there for a little less than six months, but they had been some of happiest months of his life.

  It was a little too early for the breakfast rush when Thomas arrived at the mess, so there were only a few people scattered across the enormous dining hall, spooning oatmeal or scrambled eggs into their mouths while going over files or reading copies of the Royal Eagle, Columbia City’s largest daily newspaper. Thomas got his food and made his way to his usual table. He was looking forward to finally being alone, because it would give him some space to think about his rapidly growing pile of problems.

  First, there was Sasha. Just about everything to do with her was a problem. He hadn’t realized just how much he would like her, but he had, from the moment they’d met. At the time, he’d put this down to her resemblance to Juliana, but it hadn’t taken long for him to see how different Sasha was from her analog. If people were houses, Juliana was like the Citadel she’d grown up in—beautiful and well-appointed, but guarded and set apart—while Sasha was her grandfather’s Hyde Park Victorian—cheerful and bright, with the windows and doors flung wide open. Sasha was curious and interested in people besides herself; she liked to laugh and didn’t take herself too seriously, while Juliana, accustomed to being used and befriended for her position, kept everyone at arm’s length. Spending time with Sasha on Earth had been easy and fun, and he’d meant what he said to her on the beach: it had been the best night of his life. Despite the fact that he’d been on a mission, Thomas had never felt freer than when he was on Earth; it had been such a relief to live a normal life for once, even if it wasn’t—and could never be—his forever.

  It was the run-in with Libertas in the Tattered City that showed him how much he’d grown to care for Sasha. He’d been so angry with her for running off, and worried for her, too, but when he saw her in that alley with that stringy haired Libertine’s arm around her neck, his blood had run cold, as if a splinter of ice had become lodged in his heart. Fear was an unusual emotion for Thomas—he’d been trained so well over his years of military education to control it, to process it into swift, precise action. He’d learned long ago how not to let it paralyze him, and it’d been years since he’d properly felt it, like a drizzle of freezing rain down his spine. But he felt it then, and he knew—she wasn’t just an assignment anymore, a counterfeit Juliana. She was Sasha, and he was in big trouble.

  So, then, what to do about it? There could never be anything between them besides a brief, loose friendship; the tandem was too high a hurdle, and he got the sense—silly as it would have sounded if he’d said it out loud—that the universes would disapprove. Besides, her opinion of him seemed … variable. She’d despised him at first, after finding out how he’d tricked her, which was understandable. He was sure he’d be able to coax her out of it eventually, and convince her to trust him at least so far as to take the help that he offered her. He’d thought it was working, but last night she was angry again, and nothing he said or did seemed to please her. In the end, he’d just stopped trying to talk to her, dropped her off at Juliana’s room, briefed the night agent stationed outside, and returned to the Tower for some rest. He needed to figure out what was bothering her, and fast; if he didn’t, it could compromise the entire mission.

  But Sasha was only one of many things that troubled him. The Grant Davis situation enraged him, even more now that he suspected someone in the agency of funneling intelligence to Libertas, and of course there was Juliana, who he tried not to think too hard about. He wouldn’t put it past Libertas to kill her if the General didn’t give them what they wanted, which he never would. The only comfort Thomas had was the knowledge that Juliana would be doing her best to give them hell, because that was her way. She wasn’t good at taking orders, the natural consequence of a life of privilege.

  And then there was the mole. Thomas’s involvement with Operation Starling didn’t leave him with a lot of time to run his own covert internal investigation, and he had no idea where to start looking for the leak. The KES was a huge organization, a complicated hierarchy with a seemingly infinite set of moving parts. All missions, even Operation Starling to an extent, required the diligent work of hundreds of agents in a wide variety of fields to successfully pull off. Any one of them could be the chink in the KES armor, but ferreting him or her out would require an exhaustive search on a scale outside what Thomas could do on his own. He couldn’t let that stop him, though. He’d just have to figure out a way.

  Lost in his thoughts, Thomas didn’t notice his brother until he took a seat across the table from him and gave him a hearty, “Hey T.”

  “Lucas,” Thomas said. “What are you doing here?”

  Lucas was KES, too, but he was a mid-level support agent with no field duties or on-call minimums who’d chosen not to live in the Tower. Thomas knew it bothered Lucas that his younger brother was a senior level active agent at the age of eighteen, while he’d been denied admission to the KES Academy three times. The Academy was the one place the General’s favoritism didn’t go very far. Potential recruits had to score above a certain level on a number of mental and physical examinations to even qualify, and despite all efforts Lucas couldn’t make the grade. Thomas was sorry for that, because he knew how badly Lucas wanted to be active, and how much he hated having to settle for some mind-numbing desk job, but rules were rules, and Thomas was pretty sure the world was better off not having Lucas Mayhew on active KES duty.

  “Just because I don’t live here doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to free breakfast,” Lucas said, lunging across the table to liberate a piece of bacon from Thomas’s plate.

  “Actually,” Thomas said, swiping at his brother with his fork. “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Too bad.” Lucas set to work devouring Thomas’s scrambled eggs. “What’s on today’s schedule, princess? Manicures and dress fittings?”

  “No, the fitting was yesterday,” Thomas said in bemusement. Lucas rolled his eyes.

  “I used to be so jealous of you,” Lucas said, downing half of Thomas’s orange juice in one gulp. Thomas stared forlornly at his breakfast tray, the contents of which were swiftly disappearing. Lucas’s very presence was growing more and more annoying. Thomas hoped he’d get to the point soon. “But if being an active agent means tea parties and fashion shows all day, forget it. I wouldn’t trade jobs with you if you paid me.”

  Oh, yes you would, Thomas thought. He wasn’t fooled by Lucas. He knew his brother would kill to be doing what he was doing, and he didn’t even know about Operation Starling, or the true nature of Thomas’s most recent work. The thought of how envious Lucas would be if he did know warmed Thomas’s heart a little. “What do you need from me, Luke? Money?”

  Lucas grimaced. “When have I ever asked you for money?” Thom
as opened his mouth, prepared to launch into a long list of examples, but Lucas cut him off with a raised hand. “No, this isn’t about money. It’s about Mom.”

  Thomas sighed. “I thought so.”

  “She’s fine, by the way. But she misses you. I know you don’t believe it, but she does, and she wanted me to ask you to come out and see her. Again.”

  “I will,” Thomas said, concentrating on the remnants of his breakfast in an effort to avoid Lucas’s gaze. It seemed like every time he saw Lucas these days, all he wanted to talk about was what a terrible son Thomas was being, and how it broke Alice’s heart that the youngest Mayhew never made it out to Montauk to visit. But it was more complicated than that, as Lucas knew full well. Alice didn’t care if he came or not; she may have told herself she did, but that was only because not caring made her feel guilty.

  “When? I just went out there this weekend. Would’ve been nice of you to come with me.” Lucas eyed him carefully, and Thomas wondered if his brother knew he’d been away. By virtue of their different roles in the KES, weeks could go by without the Mayhew boys getting even so much as a glimpse of each other. But Lucas was acting shiftier than usual, and Thomas had a feeling that for all his scolding, Lucas wanted Thomas and their mother to remain estranged. It guaranteed that at least one of their parents preferred him over Thomas.”

  “I’m sort of busy at the moment,” Thomas said.

  “What, carrying Juliana’s train?” Lucas scoffed. “Yeah, real important work you’re doing in the Castle there, toy soldier.”

  “Hey!” Thomas snapped. “Don’t call me that.” It wasn’t easy to ruffle his feathers, but that nickname got under his skin. “Toy soldier” was what they called recruits at the KES Academy, not active duty agents, and it wasn’t a term Lucas was entitled to throw around in either case.

  Lucas put his palms up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry. You need to lighten up.”