A Million Worlds With You

by Claudia Gray

  Please don’t let Paul have to see that, I think. Please.

  “If Marguerite doesn’t feel the need to rest, then I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t get something done today,” my mother says. “We need the work crews for excavation, but not for her sketching. In fact, she really should have more time down in the tombs when she can draw uninterrupted.”

  “And the sooner you get down there, the better.” Dad lifts his coffee to me, as if in a toast. “We don’t want last night’s little incident to spook you.”

  I raise my mug to him and take a drink—and then stifle the shudder that passes through me. Oh, my God, that coffee is strong. Crazy strong. Like, if I drink this whole mug, I might be able to see through time. Apparently, if you wanted to drink coffee before the invention of the filter, you had to mean it.

  “She shouldn’t go into the tombs alone again,” Paul suggests. “I’m happy to go with her.”

  Theo’s face falls as he sees the opportunity one second too late. Maybe I ought to feel sorry for this world’s Theo, but I figure he can take care of himself. “I’d like that,” I say, and Paul smiles. It feels good to see him smile again.

  Twenty minutes later, he leads me into another tomb—down another ladder, this time into a far larger passageway, one where it’s easy to stand up and walk. The lantern in Paul’s hand illuminates a long corridor that seems to stretch into infinity. As he holds it up, its light reveals the hieroglyphics and paintings on the wall. The entire Egyptian pantheon stands before me painted in ochre, cobalt, and gold: Horus with his curved beak, Isis with her arms outstretched like wings, Anubis with his dark jackal head waiting to take the dead to the underworld.

  “This is amazing,” I whisper. My fingers reach toward the symbols, but I know better than to touch them.

  “Almost intact.” Paul sounds proud. “With the help of your sketches, we’ll be able to translate them. People who died three thousand years ago will speak again.”

  I flip open my sketchbook, which I hadn’t yet taken the time to look through. Here, I draw as much as I paint, if not more—sometimes with colored pencils, sometimes with plain—and my work reveals much more meticulous detail than I’ve ever used in my artwork back home.

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t studied Egyptology,” Paul adds. “Not formally, at least. But you’re the one who might make the greatest discoveries of all.”

  That’s when it hits me: My dad wasn’t joking about me being in the “family trade.” Here, I’m an Egyptologist too. This time, I’m not just along for the ride. I work alongside Mom and Dad. I’m part of the team. That’s never happened before.

  Wait, no. It’s true for Wicked—she’s as much a part of the Home Office’s plans as anyone. But she shouldn’t get to be the only one, because this feels incredible.

  See, my parents have never made me feel bad for not inheriting their science-genius genes the way Josie did. They’ve always encouraged my artwork and never even suggested that my kind of creativity was less important than theirs. Still, they’re the ones who have redefined the laws of physics. I’m the one who has had exactly one gallery show in my life. It’s hard not to feel insignificant when your parents are basically Marie and Pierre Curie. What would I have to create to match the Firebird? The Sistine Chapel, maybe.

  But here, my parents need my artwork. I’m part of their discoveries and their triumphs. The knowledge fills a hole in my heart I hadn’t even known was there until this second.

  Maybe you’d think being a perfect traveler, a journeyer through the dimensions, would have been as fulfilling. The difference is, that’s something that was done to me. As great a gift as it is, the burden of it is real. And the danger. And the wrong I’ve done. This, though—these sketches of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—this is pure. Totally my own, born out of the art I love.

  Compared to the terrible stuff that’s happening throughout the multiverse right now, this consolation isn’t much. But maybe I need it more. I’m grateful for even this brief wonder, this moment that could almost be called happiness.

  I hug my sketchbook to my chest, and Paul laughs softly. “You seem . . . excited to get to work.”

  “I am.” For as long as I’m stuck in this universe, I intend to do my best.

  Paul hesitates before saying, in his thick Russian accent, “I always wished I could draw and paint as you do.”

  “Really?”

  He nods, his eyes not quite meeting mine. Sometimes it’s adorable how such a large, strong man can be so shy. “We find so many artifacts of a lost civilization. A broken statue. A buried jar. We see shards and scraps. Mere pieces of what was a glorious whole. When I think about this, I wish I could put it back together again. Not as it was before—that is of course impossible. But enough to see it, truly see it, as it once was. The art you create—that’s as close as we ever come.”

  Not as it was before. I remember racing through the dimensions, trying desperately to put the pieces of Paul’s soul back together again. Can he ever be the same? Or will I only see him the way this Paul sees Ancient Egypt—in paintings, in memories, and in dreams?

  I refuse to believe that my Paul’s soul is lost. He’s not broken. Not one of the ruins that surrounds us. He can make it.

  Then Paul’s eyes widen, and he steps back, grimacing as if in pain. He slumps heavily against the wall as if the paintings weren’t even there.

  “Paul!” I go to him, alarmed. “Are you—”

  My hand touches his chest, and beneath his shirt I feel the unmistakable outline of his Firebird. It’s my Paul, here at last.

  I want to hug him, but he holds out his hands as though for balance. He’s still disoriented. “Where are we?”

  “Egypt. This is an ancient tomb, and we’re all exploring it together. As dimensions go, this one is pretty freakin’ awesome, right?” I’m trying to make him smile, because if I can, that means he didn’t have to see the dead body of Londonverse’s Marguerite. But Paul’s face is pale, and his gray eyes tormented, and I know the last thing he saw in that world. “I’m sorry.”

  “You could’ve died.” Then his body tenses. His eyes widen. His voice drops to a growl as he says, “Maybe you did.”

  “Paul?”

  He doesn’t answer—instead he pushes me back so roughly that I nearly hit the opposite wall. Something in his gaze reminds me of the cold-blooded Mafiaverse Paul, who unloaded bullets into Theo without even flinching. “Prove who you are.”

  “What?”

  “You could be her,” Paul says. His hands grip my shoulders so tightly that I could never wrench myself free. “You could have killed her, and waited here to kill me too. So prove it. Prove that you’re my Marguerite or I promise you—”

  Paul doesn’t finish that sentence. He doesn’t have to. He just saw one Marguerite lying dead in front of him. Now he’s willing to kill another with his bare hands.

  My Paul would never do that—ever—or he wouldn’t have.

  But the splintering has damaged him, left rough edges and paranoia where love used to be. To my horror I realize that I may not even know Paul anymore.

  And if he doesn’t know me . . . would he hurt me?

  Oh, God. He would.

  7

  “PAUL—” I CAN’T TALK. FOR A MOMENT I CAN HARDLY breathe. His gaze burns into me with the cold blaze of ice, and he steps closer, as if preparing to do his worst.

  I remember Lieutenant Markov shooting the traitorous guard who would’ve murdered the grand duchess, and, from another world, the Russian mafia lord’s son who blew away Theo’s knees in cold blood. The potential for violence, whether for good or for evil, lies within every Paul—including the one I love.

  My own Paul had overcome that, long before his splintering. Before I even met him. He’d struggled through the darkness in his past to become a good person, and a strong man. But the cracks in his soul remain, and at any moment the good man I love could fall apart. Become someone else, someone dangerous.r />
  So I’d better defend myself.

  “Okay,” I begin shakily. “I just got hijacked for the first time in my own body, because Wicked—”

  “Wicked?” Paul squints, as if assessing a suspicious stranger.

  “Oh, right! That’s what I’m calling her, the one from the Home Office, because—well, it’s easier, for one, and I don’t even think she deserves to be called Marguerite. But she knows about Nightthief, doesn’t she? Then—then I bet she doesn’t know about that terrible spring break you and Theo had in Vegas—”

  “Stop.” Paul takes a deep breath, and then he looks like himself again. My nauseating dread fades. Of course I didn’t have to be afraid of Paul. Splintered or not, he’s still himself. He has to be. “I knew it was you as soon as you told me you nicknamed the other one Wicked.”

  I don’t want to ask this next, but I have to. “What happened in the Londonverse?”

  “What do you think happened? Do you need me to say it out loud?”

  I nod like the hypocrite I am, demanding that Paul speak when I lack the courage to even ask the question.

  “She’s dead,” Paul says heavily. “I watched her die.”

  The knowledge crashes into me, nearly as hard and cold as the water of the Thames must have been for her. I would give so much to have stayed in one second longer, to have spared her the awareness of her fall until the very last instant, when she might not even have had time to understand what was happening.

  You can’t cut it that close, I remind myself. It wouldn’t save her, and it would only endanger you. True. Doesn’t make me feel any better.

  Paul and I remain silent for a few moments. The ancient gods surrounding us stare with their identical, arched eyes, and now this passageway feels like the tomb it used to be. Did you think death was a game you could cheat? The painted figures seem to say. The people buried here thought that too. Now you’re digging up their bones.

  “I waited for them to find the body.” Paul stares at the wall behind me, looking past my face as if I were just another hieroglyph—no. That’s not it. He sees the dead Marguerite in his memory more clearly than he can focus on the real me, here and now. “I realized seeing her wouldn’t tell me anything—even if it had been you, and the Firebird had been around your neck when you hit the water, surely the impact would’ve broken it. Or the current could’ve snatched it away. But I still thought I needed to see her for myself.” He closes his eyes. “I wish I hadn’t.”

  They say that hitting water from that high up is just like hitting concrete. My Londonverse self might have been in pieces. Nausea ripples through me, and I have to swallow hard. “Did—did Aunt Susannah have to—”

  “I identified the body for her.”

  “Thank you.” Aunt Susannah wouldn’t have been able to bear that, I don’t think. Then I realize the full meaning of what Paul has just told me. “Wait. Aunt Susannah knew you? Well enough for you to—well, to do that?”

  Paul nods. “After you left the Londonverse the first time, your other self remembered who you were. Everything she’d done. So apparently she looked for Paul Markov at Cambridge, hoping he had some explanation. Then they began . . . spending time together.”

  It breaks my heart all over again. Another world where Paul and I might have been together, maybe forever—and Londonverse Marguerite finally had some kind of shot at happiness—ended in one fatal plunge.

  “Aunt Susannah explained some of it to me, while we were waiting for—while we were waiting,” Paul continues. “The rest I put together for myself.”

  “See? We really do have a destiny. Because if there was any world where you’d think we didn’t have a chance, that had to be the one.” I feel shallow, talking about my love life at a time like this. But I’m not doing it for me—I’m doing this for Paul. He needs something to hold on to. Otherwise, the grief and guilt he feels from all these universes will continue to drag him down. The cracks left within him from when his soul was splintered could deepen and weaken until he truly falls apart.

  My distraction works, at least a little. Paul takes another deep breath and straightens. “Did you say Egypt?”

  I hold out my hands to gesture at the hieroglyphics. “No, actually, this is Wisconsin.”

  He almost smiles. “Egypt. My accent is stronger here—”

  “You’re the tsar’s own Egyptologist, working with Mom and Dad on the expedition. We have these huge tents, and this crazy strong coffee, and real live camels. Mom’s even wearing a turban.”

  Paul’s dismay brings me closer to laughing than I’ve been in a long time. “Do we have to ride the camels?”

  “I don’t know. Hasn’t come up yet.”

  “I hope not.” Just when I feel like we might be getting past the worst of it, he tenses again. “Wait. The other one—Wicked—she came here to kill you? Just like the last Marguerite?”

  “She’s slamming doors—shutting me out of more and more universes.” The twisted plan has become clearer to me after a night to mull things over. “Triad is trying to make sure that I can’t save the universes in question. I can’t save a universe I can’t reach. I can’t reach a universe where I’m already dead. So they’re going to kill all these Marguerites—one after another—unless I follow Wicked and put things right. I have to keep after her, Paul. I have to save the other Marguerites. Not only because it lets me reach those dimensions and protect them, but because . . . I can’t just let the other versions of me be slaughtered. Not if I have the power to stop it.”

  Paul wants to object, I can tell. No doubt he thinks my plan for rescuing the other Marguerites is too dangerous. Honestly, I agree. It is too dangerous. But that’s what I have to do. Maybe he senses my determination, because instead of arguing, he simply asks, “What happened in this dimension? How did she attempt to murder you?”

  “She tried to bury me in a cave-in. One of the passageways wasn’t as stable. I got through it fine, except for the part where an actual ancient mummy fell on me. Way less fun than it looks in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

  Paul frowns. “That sounds survivable. Obviously. But—”

  Quickly I explain why Wicked’s methods are going to be less immediately dangerous in the future, and at first Paul nods, agreeing with me. But his gaze slowly becomes more distant, even confused. Then he strokes his short beard—a gesture that seems familiar, even studied—and says, his consonants thick and blurred with his Russian accent, “Wait. Remind me, I know this. Who is Wicked, Miss Caine?”

  Crap. This world’s Paul is bleeding through again. I step closer, which ignites hope in his eyes until the moment I reach into his shirt, take hold of his Firebird and set a reminder.

  Paul staggers back, swearing under his breath in Russian—even though he’s my Paul again. “Let me reset this for more frequent reminders.”

  “You could make some Nightthief.” No sooner have I spoken the words than I realize how unlikely that is. “We probably don’t have the supplies out here in the desert.”

  “Probably not. I’ll look later. Right now I want to set the reminders just in case.”

  He starts manipulating the controls, his large hands surprisingly deft with the tiny mechanics. Instead of stepping back, I remain close in an attempt to preserve the fragile bond restored between us.

  So of course that’s when I hear Theo shout, “Hello in there!”

  “Hey, Theo,” I call back. Paul steps back and drops his Firebird back within his shirt just in time for Theo to appear.

  Somehow Theo’s grin looks even more devilish when set off with that mustache. He could pass for a lothario from some old silent movie. “How goes the sketching, Marguerite?”

  “Oh, it’s—” Great, I want to say, but the sketchpad is closed and Theo isn’t a fool. “Still getting started. I’m a little nervous in these passageways after what happened last night.”

  “Who could blame you?” Theo steps closer and puts one hand on my shoulder, an unmistakably flirtatious touch. “Next ti
me we’re in Cairo, I’m making it my sworn duty to distract you from your troubles. What about a trip to the moving pictures?”

  Oh, my God, even movies are new here. This would be amusing if it weren’t for Paul’s gaze on us, heavy and disapproving. I step out of Theo’s reach, clutching my sketchpad to my chest. “Drawing is the only distraction I usually need. Which is why I should get started.”

  The rebuff doesn’t affect Theo much. He simply shrugs. “Let me know what you think, next time we’re in Cairo.”

  “Sure. Definitely.” I mean it as a brush-off, but Theo grins again.

  As soon as he’s gone, Paul says, “You’re with him, here.”

  “No, I’m not!” I would have picked up on some sign of that last night or this morning. “He’s only flirting, or maybe just being Theo.”

  “Maybe you have a destiny after all.” Paul turns away to follow Theo out. “It’s just not with me.”

  “Why are you acting like this?” I could shake him. “Why are you being so—so jealous, so angry—when you know that I—”

  Paul whirls around. The anger is back, but subsumed in grief that’s even more terrifying to see. “I’m not angry. I’m not jealous. I’m relieved. You shouldn’t be tied to me anymore, Marguerite. Theo would be better for you.”

  “Excuse me, but who I love isn’t something you get to prescribe for me, like a doctor with some pills.”

  “Don’t you understand?” His voice rises nearly to a shout, echoing from the stone walls. “I see Theo near you and I remember shooting him. I see you near him and I want to shake you until you fall. This brutal . . . thing my father tried to turn me into—I thought I’d buried it. Maybe I had. But the splintering set it free. I’m no good for you any longer, Marguerite. I never will be again.”

  “It’s only been a few days. How can you know?” I’m sympathetic to what Paul’s going through, but this defeatist attitude has to stop. “Paul, you didn’t hurt me. You would never hurt me.”

  “You don’t know that. And neither do I.” When I start to protest, Paul holds up one hand. The wind blows at the collar of his white linen shirt, ruffles his reddish hair. “You don’t know what it feels like, being splintered. You don’t know how it is to know that . . . that you’ve been stolen from yourself.”