Tandem: The Many-Worlds Trilogy

by Anna Jarzab

  I knew one thing for sure—I couldn’t keep leading Callum on. It wasn’t that I didn’t have tender feelings for him, because I did, especially after what we’d just gone through—what he had put himself through partly on my behalf. But there was still Thomas, taking up so much space in my heart, and though in the end I couldn’t be with either of them I couldn’t allow Callum to continue to fall in love with the Juliana I was pretending to be.

  But that conversation was for later. At the moment, everything was far too uncertain. I had yet to meet the queen of Farnham, and I was worried. Juliana’s stepmother sounded easy compared to Queen Marian, and I needed to hold my own against her.

  The limo pulled over and the door opened. A man who could’ve been a KES agent if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t in the Commonwealth anymore opened it for us and we climbed out.

  I didn’t even get a chance to see the outside of Adastra Palace. The windows of the limo had been tinted so darkly that they only gave a vague idea of what the city looked like, although from what I’d seen I could tell that it was less grand than Columbia City.

  The security detail that had met us at the car led us silently through the underground garage. “Her Majesty commands that we take you straight to the throne room, Your Highness,” the guard told Callum. “She wants to see you immediately.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Callum muttered, so low that only I could hear.

  “Cal!” A boy of about twelve came barreling around a corner and slammed into Callum. Callum wrapped his arms around the boy and gave him a fierce bear hug.

  “Mother said you weren’t coming back,” the boy said. “She said you’d gone to live with the enemy forever.”

  “They’re not the enemy, Sonny,” Callum said. “Well, not all of them. This is Juliana.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Your Highness,” Sonny said, bowing his head a little and reaching out to take my hand. When I gave it to him, he kissed it. “Welcome to Farnham.”

  Callum gave me a sideways glance, struggling to keep a straight face. “We’re well trained here.”

  “I can see that.” I smiled at Callum’s little brother, impressed by his gallantry. “Hello. It’s lovely to meet you, Your Highness. Can I call you Sonny?”

  He shrugged, blushing, both elated and embarrassed by the attention. “She’s nicer than I thought she’d be,” he said to Callum.

  “Then you don’t know her yet,” Callum teased. I made a face at him, and he returned it. God, I was glad he was alive.

  “Let’s go see Mother,” Callum said to Sonny. Now it was Sonny’s turn to make a face.

  “Rather not, thanks,” he said, ducking out of Callum’s embrace. “It was nice to meet you, Your Highness.”

  “You can call me Juli,” I told him.

  “Nice to meet you, Juli!” he called back as he disappeared around the corner from whence he came.

  “He gets to call you Juli after meeting you for two seconds?” Callum said in mock-exasperation. “Unbelievable.”

  “What can I say? I like him better,” I said. Callum tugged on a strand of my hair and smiled. Then he sighed.

  “Come on, Mother awaits.”

  He led me into a cavernous room that was empty but for a throne at the far end. A woman was sitting in it, tapping her heel against the marble in agitation. She was surrounded by a half-dozen bodyguards, all of whom were stiff as rods. It didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

  Queen Marian stood as we entered and watched as we crossed the vast distance between the door and the throne. Callum fell to one knee at the queen’s feet.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said. “May I present—”

  “Yes, yes, I know who she is,” the queen said. “Stand up, Callum.” She leaned forward as if to examine him, taking his chin in her hand and tilting it this way and that like she was mapping it. “I see there’s been no lasting damage from your exploits.”

  “It would appear that way,” Callum said. There was a slight wobble in his voice.

  “No thanks to you,” Queen Marian said. She was talking to me. She turned to her bodyguards and summoned them forward with a wave of her hand. “Take her to the Hole.”

  “What?” Callum jerked up in alarm. “No, you can’t do that. She’s here with me! She’s my fiancée!”

  “Not anymore,” Queen Marian said. “I’ve had quite enough of this whole royal wedding business. It’s very clear that the General never intended for the two of you to marry, or for the peace treaty to be signed. I know how to proceed.”

  The bodyguards seized me, one at each arm. “Wait!” I cried. “You can’t do this!”

  “She helped me escape, Mother,” Callum protested.

  “No, dear, my agents helped you escape,” Queen Marian said. “Take her to the Hole and throw her in a cell with that other piece of UCC filth. I’ll decide what to do with them later.”

  The bodyguards dragged me away. I struggled against them, doing all I could to resist, but it was futile. They were far stronger than me. Blood rushed to my face; I could barely hear Callum over the thump of my heart in my ears. He was screaming for his mother to reconsider, but Queen Marian was unmoved.

  After pulling a sack over my head, the bodyguards took me down a seemingly endless flight of stairs. After a while I stopped fighting them. We reached the bottom of the stairs and proceeded down a long hallway before we finally stopped. I heard a metal key turn in a metal lock and a set of metal bars creak open. Then I was on the ground, the heels of my hand scraping against the rough cement floor. One of the men whipped the sack off my head, and I found myself in a large cell, harshly lit by fluorescent lighting in the ceiling. I turned sharply and watched them slam the bars shut. I reached up and grabbed them, hauling myself to my feet and banging my palms against them.

  “Let me out of here!” I shouted. “I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “It’s useless,” a voice said. “They won’t listen.”

  I turned slowly, not quite believing my ears. Against all odds, Thomas was sitting on the lower level of a metal bunk bed, his head hanging in defeat.

  “Oh my God,” I cried, rushing to him. I knelt before him, my hands on his knees, but he pushed me away.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded angrily. Then he recognized me. “Hey, I know you. You’re … you go to my school.”

  “Grant,” I breathed. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Yeah, well, neither can I,” he said, lying down on the bed. After a few seconds, he popped back up. “Wait, what are you doing here?”

  That other piece of UCC filth, Queen Marian had said. I remembered something Thomas had told me about Grant. They suspected that he’d been taken into Farnham by Libertas and traded for something, that Queen Marian thought he was Thomas. I didn’t know how he’d gotten into Farnham, but at the very least it seemed as though the last part was true.

  “It’s a long story,” I grumbled, falling into a cross-legged position on the floor.

  “I’ve got time,” Grant said.

  So I told him everything, from the tandem to the analogs to the peace treaty between Farnham and the UCC to Libertas to the arranged marriage between Callum and Juliana. He was silent for a while after I finished. I was afraid I’d scrambled his brain.

  “So you’re saying that we’re in a parallel universe? Where there are people who look exactly like us but are not us?” He shook his head. “That’s crazy, Sasha, you know that, right?”

  “I’m not crazy,” I told him. “Hello! Look where you are. This is not normal.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Grant said. “And you’re saying I ended up here because my … what’d you call them?”

  “Analogs.”

  “Right. I touched my analog and that’s why I ended up here?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t explain why a bunch of armed thugs grabbed me off the street and brought me here,” Grant said.

  “Libertas,
” I said. “They thought you were Thomas. Your analog. They traded you for something. Do you know what?”

  He shrugged. “Not a clue. I was knocked out for most of it. I woke up in here and I haven’t been able to get a single answer out of anybody.”

  “That’s not a shock.” Now that all the adrenaline had drained from my body, I was overcome with fatigue. My stomach growled. “Do they feed you in this place?”

  “Sometimes,” Grant said. “I’ve been hoping this was all just a very vivid nightmare. Now it’s looking like not so much.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Believe me, I wish it was.”

  “So now what?” Grant asked.

  “I honestly have no idea.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Days passed. I kept hoping Callum would find a way to get me out of the Hole, but he never came. I found it hard to keep track of time. Our cell had no windows, and we could only make rudimentary guesses about time of day based on when our bodies told us to sleep and wake up. We’d been fed five times since Queen Marian had her guards throw me into the cell with Grant, but none of them would speak to us, let alone tell us anything useful.

  “I can’t believe this!” I cried, slamming my hand against the bars as yet another guard walked away after delivering our meals.

  “You’d better eat,” Grant advised. “That soup is barely lukewarm, and it’s no good cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “If you don’t want it, can I have it?” Dinner consisted of one small bowl of soup and a hard roll that Grant was trying to soften by soaking it in the broth. It was definitely not enough for a guy like him to subsist on; I was so full of rage I couldn’t bring myself to eat.

  “Go ahead,” I said. I sank down against the bars and tucked my knees under my chin. “I just can’t believe I went from one prison to another. This is the biggest load of crap. I’m sick of this place. I want to go home.” I looked up at the ceiling, which was covered in mold. “Do you hear me? I want to go home!”

  Grant sighed. “Sasha, stop it. I did exactly what you’re doing for like three weeks. Nobody’s listening.”

  “I’m not giving up,” I told him. “I’ve gotten out of worse jams than this before. I’ll get us out of here, too.” The truth was, I’d gotten out of those jams with help from other people, mostly Thomas. But I couldn’t just shut down under the weight of hopelessness the way that Grant had. The only time he ever became animated was when we were fed; otherwise he was as motionless as a stone, sleeping or pretending to sleep as I lay awake thinking up harebrained schemes to get us out. There had to be a way. There just had to be. That was what I kept telling myself, anyway, but the longer Grant and I remained locked in the Hole, the more I accepted that Callum wasn’t coming. I couldn’t even allow myself to hope that Thomas would. Still, every once in a while I let myself believe. This was one of those moments.

  “Hey, you come up with a plan, I’ll help you,” Grant said, his mouth full of my bread. “I’m just saying. It doesn’t look great.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I know.”

  On the third night—or maybe it was the fourth—of my incarceration, I awoke to the now-familiar sound of the cell doors sliding open. I sat up, wondering what fresh hell awaited me, but it was too dark to see anything until the motion sensors on the fluorescent lights caught whoever had entered the cell and flickered on.

  “Sasha?” Grant whispered.

  “Grant?” I inched over to the edge of the bed to peek out at the intruder.

  “No,” the voice said, sounding a little bewildered. “It’s me.”

  Thomas.

  I leapt off the top bunk and threw myself at him. He caught me and held me tight. “You’re here,” I said happily, for the moment forgetting everything else. I buried my face in his shoulder, squeezing my eyes shut to keep from crying, but a few tears slipped out anyway. “I thought I would never see you again.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, smiling against my cheek. “It took me a while to figure out where you were—Farnham’s a big place, but some of my connections in Adastra told me you might be down here. No wonder they call it the Hole. It’s awful.”

  “Sasha, who is it?” Grant rolled out of bed and stood up, squinting into the lights. It took a few seconds for him to register exactly who he was looking at, but once he did his face contorted into an expression of blind fury. “You.”

  “Grant, wait!” But he didn’t listen. He might not even have heard. Without pausing to think, Grant lunged for Thomas, and in the split second when his fist connected with Thomas’s jaw, Grant vanished into thin air.

  “Grant!” I cried. Thomas fell from the force of Grant’s impact, clutching his face, and the ground rumbled beneath us, throwing me to the floor as well. We watched in horrified shock as the door to the cell slammed shut, locking us in.

  “What the—” I couldn’t even get the entire sentence out.

  “The disruption event,” Thomas said gravely. “You remember what I told you?”

  It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. The disruption event. The physical event caused by the ripple created when mass traveled between universes. It had knocked the door loose and caused it to close. We were trapped.

  “And here I thought I was coming to the rescue,” Thomas said, prodding his jaw tenderly. “I should’ve known he would do that. It’s not the first time.”

  “I did tell him about the analog problem,” I said. “Maybe he did it on purpose.”

  “I brought this for him,” Thomas said, drawing something out of his pocket. “I was going to send you both back. The ungrateful bastard.”

  “The anchors!” I cried triumphantly. “Thomas, we can get out of here. You put on the anchor and we’ll go back to Earth.”

  “Bad idea,” Thomas said.

  “Why?” My face fell. I was desperate to get out of Farnham, he had a solution in hand, and he was telling me we couldn’t use it?

  “I didn’t expect us to stay here,” Thomas explained. “I didn’t map this place. I have no idea what it corresponds to on the other side. We could end up anywhere.”

  “But anywhere is better than this,” I protested. Wasn’t it? And if not, then what had happened to Grant? Worry dropped into the pit of my stomach like a stone.

  “Oh really? How would you like to land in the foundation of a house? Or maybe you’d prefer to end up under the wheels of a moving moto?”

  “Okay, you made your point,” I grumbled. I propped myself up against the wall, too tired to stand.

  “Sasha, what happened back there?” Thomas asked. “Why did you run?”

  “The General tried to force me to poison Callum,” I told Thomas. “He said he was going to keep me in Aurora forever—in a place just like this, I assume—unless I did what he said. He said he’d send me home if I did it, but I couldn’t. I told Callum and he arranged for an extraction. Apparently he had undercover agents in Columbia City the whole time.”

  “That was smart of him.” Thomas hung his head. “I’m sorry, Sasha. I didn’t know.”

  I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “No, it isn’t. This is all my fault. I never should’ve brought you here.” He kneaded his brow with his fingertips.

  “Stop it, Thomas. Let’s just forget about that, all right?” I leaned my head back against the wall and sighed. “How did you get here?”

  “Just because the General cut me off doesn’t mean I don’t still have my own ways of getting things done,” Thomas said. “Dr. Moss was able to get his hands on the remote that controls your anchor, plus an extra, and smuggled me out of the Citadel, then I used my connections to get here. Took me longer than I would like, but I did it.”

  “I guess that means you’re officially fired, huh?” I noticed he was no longer wearing his KES ring.

  “Yeah, I guess it does.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” I told him. I lay my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. He took my hand and
squeezed. I shivered; the cell was always cold. Thomas took off his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I put it on and snuggled up against him. All the talk of analogs and anchors reminded me of something—I’d never had a chance to tell Thomas about my father and his connection to Aurora.

  “I found out something else,” I said. “Back at the Citadel. About the tether.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Dr. Moss came to see me at the gala. He said he consulted with Dr. March and they think—”

  “Hold up. Dr. March?”

  “Yeah.” I searched his face. “What? What’s wrong with Dr. March?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Thomas said offhandedly. “Except I’m pretty sure he doesn’t exist.”

  “What?”

  “Mossie is a genius, but he’s also a little, you know.” Thomas whistled and whirled his finger in a circular motion around his temple. “He talks about Dr. March all the time, but I’ve never met the man, and never met anybody else who has. I hate to use the word ‘delusion,’ but …”

  That was disturbing, but it didn’t change the fact that Dr. Moss had a genuinely possible hypothesis about why I could see Juliana through the tether. “Dr. March or no Dr. March, he had a breakthrough. He says that I can see through the tandem because I have a connection to Aurora.”

  “What kind of connection?”

  “My father was born here.”

  Thomas’s eyes widened in surprise. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “He showed me the file. Apparently my father was one of the research fellows in Dr. Moss’s lab at the Citadel a long time ago, before he was drafted into the KES for an assignment. On Earth.”