by Claudia Gray
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Claudia Gray
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
I CAN’T BREATHE. I CAN’T THINK. ALL I CAN DO IS HANG ON to this cable and stare down at the river at least four hundred feet below me. Nothing stands between me and death but a few nylon ropes, clutched in hands that are already slick with sweat.
Traveling to other dimensions can be scary—but I’ve never been thrown into anything as terrifying as this.
Panic clouds my thoughts and turns everything surreal. My brain refuses to accept that this is actually happening—even as the truth stretches my arms and pulls my muscles. Every pound of my body weight cramps my fingers and tells me how immediate my situation is. The city lights from the ground below seem so distant they might as well be stars. But still my mind cries, This is just a nightmare. You’re seeing things. This can’t be real—
But the Firebird locket hanging around my neck still radiates heat from my journey into another world. What I’m seeing—the mortal danger I’m in—is definitely real.
Then I realize that I’m dangling from a hovership, one projecting holographic advertisements upward into the dusky sky. My eyes finally focus on one detail from the metropolis beneath me long enough to recognize St. Paul’s Cathedral—and, beyond it, a futuristic skyscraper that has never existed in my version of London.
The Londonverse. I’m back in the Londonverse, the first alternate dimension I ever traveled to.
Apparently it’s also going to be the dimension I die in.
“Marguerite!” I turn my head to see my Aunt Susannah, who’s hanging out of one of the hovership’s passenger windows. Her dyed-blond hair whips around her face, blown by the same strong gusts that tear at my gray dress, exposing me to the world below. Not that I care who sees my butt while I’m on the verge of death. Aunt Susannah’s eyes are wide, and dark lines of mascara streak down her cheeks with tears. Other passengers crowd around her, pressing their faces to the hovership windows, eyes wide as they stare at the girl who’s about to die.
Okay, I think, trying to slow my breaths. All I have to do is climb back in. It’s not that far. Up four feet, over twenty?
But it’s not that easy. I don’t have the upper body strength to climb the rope on its own, and the nearest metal strut is out of reach. How did I even get here? This universe’s Marguerite must have tumbled from one of the hovership windows and grabbed a rope to save herself, which is why I’m now dangling hundreds of feet above the city of London. . . .
Panic seizes me again. Every inch between me and the river seems to elongate. Dizziness courses through me. My muscles go weak. And my grip on the ropes trembles, bringing me closer to death.
Oh, God, no no no. I have to pull this together. If I don’t save her, we’re both doomed.
Because if you’re in another dimension when your host dies, then, at the exact same instant, you die.
I could just get the hell out of this universe. My parents’ invention, the Firebird, gives me the ability to travel to a new dimension at any moment. Now seems like a really good time to check out some other reality—any other reality. But to use the Firebird, I’d have to hit the controls and leap out. Both of my hands are currently busy gripping this rope to keep me from plunging to my death. Kind of a catch-22 here. The hovership flies so far up that by the time I fell all the way down, my body would be traveling at a velocity that would make hitting the water as instantly fatal as smashing onto concrete.
“Marguerite!” another voice calls out. In astonishment I look over and see Paul.
What is he doing on this hovership? We didn’t even know each other in this universe!
I don’t care why he’s here. I only care that he is. My love for Paul Markov is one of the few constants in the multiverse. He would do anything, even risk his own life, if it meant he could keep me safe. If anyone can get me out of this, he can.
Normally I get myself out of my own perilous situations, but this, today? This is bad.
“Paul!” I shout back. “Please, help me!”
“They’re landing as fast as they can,” he calls to me. The wind ruffles his dark hair, and he edges out onto the metal frames for the hovership’s projectors with total assurance; he must go rock-climbing in this universe too, because the height doesn’t faze him. “Just hang on.”
Sure enough, I can hear the changing key of the engines. The propellers send new winds to buffet me. London below comes slightly closer, though it’s still mostly a blur of lights and murky twilight colors—dark blues and grays and blacks. My adrenaline-flooded brain refuses to make sense of the shapes below me any longer; I might as well be staring down at artwork by Jackson Pollock with its squiggles and blots and spills.
I imagine a Pollock painting with a huge red splotch in the center. Blood red. Nothing else will remain of me if I let go of this cable.
My fingers hurt so much. My shoulders. My back. No matter how badly I want to hold on, I won’t be able to manage much longer. Within minutes, I will fall to my death.
Sweat beads along my face despite the chilly winds blowing around me. I can taste the salt as it trickles into my open, panting mouth. As I try to readjust my grip, people on the hovership scream. One of my black shoes slips from my foot and tumbles out of sight.
“Marguerite, no!” Aunt Susannah sounds like she’s been screaming. “You don’t have to do this, sweetheart. Don’t let go! We’ll make it right, whatever’s bothering you, I swear it. Just hold on!”
I want to shriek back, Does it look like I need any more encouragement to hold on? But then I realize what my aunt just said. You don’t have to do this.
She thinks I’m attempting suicide. And since I can’t figure out any other way this world’s Marguerite could’ve wound up in this situation, I think—I think Aunt Susannah is right.
But it wasn’t this world’s Marguerite who tried to kill herself. It was the other one. The wicked version of me who’s working on behalf of Triad, even now. She attacked me at home and escaped into this dimension, but only in this instant—as I gulp in desperate breaths and hang on with the last of my strength—do I realize what her plan really is.
She’s trying to kill me.
She’s trying to kill every me, in every world, everywhere.
2
I LEARNED OF MY DARKER SELF A FEW DAYS AGO, WHEN I first visited her dimension. But I only realized how dangerous she was when I tried to go home earlier today—only hours before I wound up dangling above London—and she followed me there.
By follow, I mean possess.
I had just leaped back into my own body after a mad chase to save Paul Markov, who is—
—what can I call him? Throughout the multiverse, our fates are entwined in ways both beautiful and tragic. We have seen worlds where we rejected each other, hurt each other, hated each other�
��and the knowledge of how terrible our romance could turn devastated us both.
But I’ve got bigger problems than my love life.
The moment I returned to my own dimension, I opened my eyes to see Theo standing above me. He looked haggard and pale—proof of the terrible damage done to him by the drug Nightthief, the one that made it possible for another dimension’s Theo to possess him and spy on us for months. Paul had endangered himself to find a cure and save our friend’s life. “About time you got here,” Theo said with a wry smile.
“Good, you made it. How do you feel?”
“I’ve been better.” His faux-vintage Beatles T-shirt hung on his too-skinny frame. Dark circles shadowed his eyes. So his first question seemed natural. “But, hey, you got the juice, right? The data for the juice, I mean.” He meant the treatment for exposure to Nightthief.
“Right. You’ll be feeling better in no time.” I looked around for my parents, who needed to hear about Triad’s plans ASAP. We had believed only one other dimension was spying on us, trying to manipulate events, but I’d found out that the real threat was a third dimension, the powerful Home Office, which had plans so much darker than mere spying. “Where are Mom and Dad?”
“They were out when I got here. Probably at the university labs, trying to figure some other way out of this, or building another Firebird.”
I nodded absently. No point in calling them—my mom and dad, the illustrious scientists who created the most miraculous device in existence, rarely remembered to turn their cell phones on because that’s too much technology. But they weren’t the only ones I worried about. “Have you checked to see if Paul has come back yet?”
“You found him, huh?”
As I sat up, dizziness overtook me—nausea and vertigo both.
That was the sign. The warning. The moment I should’ve protected myself.
Instead, I only thought I’d moved too quickly. “Whoa. What was that?”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Theo said. In the moment I didn’t recognize the gleam of triumph in his eyes. “No wonder you’re tired.”
Still I felt strange. Uneasy. But I didn’t suspect what was coming.
“So, Paul was going to come back at the exact same time as you?” Theo asked.
“That’s what he said. Where did I leave my phone? I want to call him.”
“Don’t worry,” Theo began going through the constant mess of papers on the rainbow table; I thought he was looking for my tPhone. “Take it easy. You’ll find him, Meg.”
Meg.
Only one person ever called me that. Theo—but not my Theo.
Only the spy from the Triadverse.
I turned to him in horror, realizing he would attack, but it was already too late. Theo and I scrabbled and fought until he pinned me on the wooden floor and injected me with a syringe filled with emerald-green liquid—Nightthief.
At first I thought he was a fool. Nightthief helps interdimensional travelers take over their hosts and retain full consciousness and control. But I was home in my own body. Was he trying to poison me? Nightthief took months to kill—
—I shuddered, and then I couldn’t move. Not my head, not my hand. Yet my lungs breathed without me, and my voice spoke someone else’s words: “About time.”
Theo smiled as he rose to let me up. “Always a pleasure to meet anyone from the Home Office.”
I would’ve screamed if I could. The three dimensions in which Triad existed were my own; the Triadverse, a world very close to my own but only a few years ahead in technology; and the Home Office, a futuristic hellscape where ruthlessness ruled and profit was God.
During my adventures in different dimensions, I’ve lived within many of my other selves and learned who I would be if history had unfolded just a bit differently. I could dwell in a Russian palace or under the sea. Sometimes other versions of me made choices I didn’t understand; sometimes they dealt with depression and solitude. But none of them had horrified me more than my Home Office version.
She did Triad’s bidding. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill. She loved to cause pain, which she called her art.
And she had hijacked my body, leaving me powerless.
She seemed to be in charge, too, because Theo asked her, “So, what’s our first assignment?”
“Figure out what they’re up to.” She smiled. Feeling her smile, knowing that she enjoyed turning my body into a prison of flesh and bone—it revolted me more than anything else ever had. “My parents aren’t the kind of people to surrender even if it’s the smart thing to do, in any universe. But once the versions here have been outsmarted a few times, sabotaged a few times more . . . well, we might be able to bring them in line yet.”
Theo nodded and helped her to her feet. “And if we don’t get them to work for our cause?”
She laughed. “Then it’s time for this dimension to die.”
The Firebird only allows you to visit universes in which you exist, because your consciousness can only leap into another version of yourself. I prided myself on taking good care of the other Marguerites, on getting them out of any danger I got them into. But then I caused some problems I couldn’t solve. One version of Theo may never walk again because of me. Another Marguerite has been caught up in a multidimensional conspiracy she should never have had to be part of.
And a second me—one I inhabited for nearly a month, one in which I realized I was in love with Paul Markov and went to bed with him—is now expecting the baby I conceived for her.
So I’d come back to my own dimension humbled. Ashamed. Determined. There had to be more ethical ways of traveling through the worlds, ways that wouldn’t endanger or violate our other selves.
But I had no idea how profound the violation was until another Marguerite leaped into me.
“Look at this mess,” sneered the other Marguerite in my body, the one I’d already begun to think of as the Wicked Marguerite. She shoved a stack of papers covered with scribbled formulae, and they fluttered to the Turkish rug on the floor. As she glanced around the room through my eyes, at the books and the potted plants, the blackboard-paint wall with its chalk equations, and the rainbow table Josie and I hand-painted as children, she didn’t see home. Instead, my lips curled in contempt. “Primitive. Disorganized. They might as well live in a cave.”
“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.