A Million Worlds With You

by Claudia Gray

  “Nobody deserves a broken heart. Everybody deserves to be loved.”

  His smile falters, but only for a moment. “I am loved. Just not the way I was hoping for. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll go do my postdoc work somewhere else, at a university far away from California, far away from all of you. You and me and Paul, we’ll still Skype and text, just a little less often than we used to. I’ll spend some time feeling sorry for myself and listening to emo music, then I’ll spend some time partying too hard and probably sleeping with a few of the wrong people, and finally someday I’m gonna meet a woman who actually makes me glad I didn’t get you. Because she’ll be to me what Paul is to you, right? She’ll be the one.”

  “Yeah. She will.” My words come out hoarse, strangled by the lump in my throat.

  Theo continues, “Someday you’ll come to my wedding, and I’ll come to yours and Paul’s—where I expect to be best man, remember—and eventually we’ll argue about whose babies are cutest. Mine, probably, because look at this face.” He points at his own widening smile. “And we’ll drift further apart, but you and me and Paul—we will never, ever let go.”

  “Because we’re friends, always.” I sniffle as I try to smile back. “How can you be so . . . okay with this?”

  “Because I want you to be happy. With or without me, whatever it takes.” Theo sighs. “That’s the difference between wanting someone and loving them.”

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  “You’re most sincerely welcome. Now—one final request—all these other versions of me get to kiss you. I’d like to kiss you just once, as myself.” He hesitates, the mask of cocky self-confidence slipping for a moment. “Only if you’re okay with it. I’m going for poignant, not pathetic.”

  “Poignant works,” I say, and he takes my face in his hands.

  When Theo kisses me, it’s gentle, even tender—demanding nothing. We embrace in this one still moment stolen from time, surrounded by the currents and choices that could have swept me away from Paul and onto Theo’s shore. In infinite worlds, we are together, our other versions loving each other with their own sense of a perfect, unshakable destiny.

  We don’t live in any of those worlds. We live in one where Paul is my only love. But Theo has accepted that. He is content to be here with me, to hold me close just this one time.

  At last our lips part. We smile at each other. “Paul’s going to get this right,” Theo murmurs as his thumb brushes along my cheekbone. “He’s going to come back to you.”

  “I hope so.”

  Our wistful mood is instantly shattered as we walk through the door to hear Wicked’s voice. “They won’t pay you anything. We can pay you everything.”

  “Money is merely a necessary artifact of late-stage capitalism.” Mom perks up as she sees us. “Oh, good. You’re back. There have been some bribery attempts since you left.”

  “You don’t know Mom and Dad at all,” I say to Wicked. “I would’ve thought that by now you’d seen enough alternate versions to know how little they usually care about being rich.”

  “Believe me,” Wicked shoots back, “I know how little they care.”

  I pause. I want to use this knowledge against her—but is it possible I might get through to her?

  So I pull out a chair to sit opposite from Wicked. “You think Mom and Dad don’t love you, because they’ve been so upset about losing Josie. I know that’s not true.”

  Wicked laughs. “You have the luxury of being sentimental. Me? I see the world the way it really is.”

  “Every Marguerite you’ve killed—we usually have a pretty good life, you know?” Could anything still touch this person? Or is her soul completely dead? “It can be like that for you, if Triad would just stand down. There are ways to go on, even after the worst has happened.” Mom proved that to me back in the Josieverse. Dad endured the loss of my mother in the Russiaverse. And if I hadn’t kept going after I thought my father was dead, we really might have lost him forever. “They have to let Josie go.”

  “Precious Josie is the only thing that matters,” Wicked retorts. “Even here! She’s the daughter Mom had for real. Apparently the rest of us were farmed out to surrogates. We’re just spares. Don’t you see?”

  Mom, unmoved by any of this, folds her arms. “I could hardly be expected to carry octuplets. That wouldn’t have been healthy for me or for any of you. The surrogates were all enthusiastic volunteers for the experiment.”

  I try to hush Mom. “That’s not what’s bothering her. Listen to me, okay, Wick—I mean, um, Marguerite? You can’t undo any of the things you’ve done, but you can stop here. You can show my—your parents that you have the power.”

  Wicked looks at me in confusion. Some of the hostility has left her, though, and that gives me hope.

  “See, if you stop now, if you refuse to do anything else for Triad, you’ll force them to deal with you and your feelings.” In a lot of ways, I don’t believe Wicked deserves a happy ending. But if getting one means other dimensions get to live—then that’s the price we have to pay. “You could go home. Today, even! Just return home and tell them what’s really going on with you. They’ll listen.”

  “But—” Wicked blinks. “But—I don’t understand—”

  “What?” My heart is in my throat.

  She looks down at herself and says, “Why am I tied to this chair?”

  No wonder the hostility is gone. This is no longer Wicked but Victoire.

  “Without her Firebird, she didn’t get a reminder.” Theo has caught on too and explains to my mother. “Wicked’s been, uh, submerged inside your daughter’s consciousness. She’s not coming out until the Firebird reminds her again.”

  I sigh and lean back in my chair. I nearly got through to her . . . or did I?

  “Um, seriously,” Victoire says, eyes wide. “What is up with the chair?”

  The front door opens, and I hear half a dozen voices talking at once about Rey and Finn and Poe Dameron—and every single one of those voices is mine.

  Dad steps into the dining room first, wearing a white linen shirt and khaki shorts that emphasize his scrawny chicken legs. He never wears shorts at home, but here I guess the heat won out. “Hello, what’s this?”

  And then there are my other selves—six more of me—all of them in outfits I could easily choose, all of them with their wildly curly hair tucked into styles I’ve worn a hundred times. It feels like staring into a funhouse mirror, except that all the reflections are exactly right.

  My mother gets up. “Marguerite, Theo, you know Henry, and these are Elodie, Colette, Oceane, Giselle, Estee, and Amelie.”

  Dad folds his arms. “Why are you introducing me to one of our own children, and why is another of them tied to a chair?”

  “I’d like to know that too,” Victoire interjects.

  “This is going to be one hell of a long explanation,” Theo says.

  “So get started.” The sharpness in my voice surprises me, but now that I see all my other selves in one place, I know what has to be done. “They need to understand completely, because I have to ask their permission for something important. Something they have to fully comprehend before they say yes.”

  Theo gives me a look. Mom says, “Marguerite, what do you mean?”

  “It’s time we had a meeting.” I take a deep breath. “All the Marguerites. Every one of us. We’re going to come together at last.”

  21

  THREE HOURS LATER, I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF THINK OVER the sound of my own voices.

  All six of them.

  “Do you realize that Theo lost his left leg below the knee?” Mafiaverse is so angry she’s near tears, her fists balled up in the lap of her green skirt. We’re all seated at the table, being watched by my gaping parents and Theo as we have this extraordinary meeting—a gathering of all the people I could potentially be. “He’s going to need a prosthetic, and now I’m getting all these cree
py emails from some guy in the Russian mob—”

  “Paul and I are flying back from Ecuador tomorrow.” Triadverse sits near me in an orange sundress, calmer than any of the others. “So far as we can tell, nobody else at Triad had any idea about the cross-dimensional stuff—”

  “I have an evil phantom inside of me,” says Victoire, who’s still stuck with Wicked. “Get it out.”

  “Don’t get me wrong.” Cambridgeverse wears a cornflower blue T-shirt and a lot of dangly chain necklaces, and she rubs her left arm as she speaks in her crisp English accent. “Mom and Dad are super psyched about communicating between universes, but did you really have to go snuggle up to the guy who maimed me for life?”

  Warverse is wearing a straw fedora, a pink dress, and a scowl. “Markov? Seriously? How am I ever supposed to explain all this to Theo? I mean, my Theo.” Her eyes glance back at the Theo in this room, who winks at the version who chose him. She beams back.

  Angriest of all is Oceanverse in black, who yells, “You wrecked a submarine!”

  Then another voice cuts through the din, hushing us at once. “Everyone, be silent.”

  We all close our mouths and look toward the person sitting at the head of the table—the Grand Duchess.

  She wears a crimson camisole and her curls tumble free down her back, yet she looks more regal now than I ever did in her jewels and furs. The grand duchess’s perfect posture turns the ordinary dining room chair into a throne, and the command in her voice is undeniable. From this moment on, there’s no question about who’s in charge.

  “You must all listen to this Marguerite from the shadow world known as the Berkeleyverse, as she is the only one possessed of all the knowledge that can help us,” the grand duchess commands, gesturing at me lightly with one hand. “The question of her actions while in our own worlds—that will be dealt with later.”

  Oh, God. Dread weighs me down. How am I going to look the grand duchess in the face as I apologize for getting her pregnant?

  “You will proceed,” the grand duchess finishes, with a nod in my direction.

  “Okay. Well. First of all, thanks for coming—”

  “I was kidnapped!” Oceanverse cuts in, though she immediately looks abashed when the grand duchess fixes her in an imperious stare.

  “Sweetheart, we’re merely borrowing you for a time.” Dad smiles at Oceanverse encouragingly; he was the one who made the trip to her dimension. Between him, Mom, and Theo, at least one of us was near the Marguerite in each world—even the Russiaverse, where the Parisian chemist Theodore Beck was already visiting his friend in her new Danish home. We only had the two Firebirds to work with at first, which meant we could only undertake one trip at a time. Since then, though, both the Triadverse and the Cambridgeverse have contributed one each. They’ve needed reminders, but we can pass one Firebird around for that.

  I continue. “However you got here, I’m glad you came. Because if we’re going to stop the Home Office—the dimension that’s trying to destroy so many of the others—we all have to work together. I realize some of you were already making a head start on that,” I interject, nodding toward the three for whom this is true: Triadverse, Cambridgeverse, and Warverse. “But we need to be united, completely.”

  Mafiaverse folds her arms across her chest. “You mean, we should just forgive you.”

  I feel sick. “You don’t have to forgive me. Ever. Just understand that right now, this moment, I’m doing my absolute best to keep every one of us safe.”

  “It’s not so bad, what you did,” Cambridgeverse says, surprising me. When she takes in my expression, she shrugs. “I mean, I wish you hadn’t gone over to Paul’s place, but he wasn’t exactly your Paul, and I remember how we used to be—you know, it’s awkward, but I get it.”

  “Not so bad? Tell that to Theo,” Mafiaverse retorts.

  “I’m right here,” Theo says, “and even though I’m not the one who has to live with the consequences, I am the one who took the bullets. So believe me when I say what happened to, well, to us that night wasn’t Marguerite’s fault. At the beginning she had no idea the Russian mob could be involved. She couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen. Me, I’m the one who knew she’d been kidnapped and walked right into a bad situation anyway. If what happened to your Theo is anyone’s fault besides the guy who fired the gun? It’s mine.”

  Oceanverse still looks livid. “So who wrecked the submarine?”

  “That would actually be yet another version of me, who’s now dead,” Theo says. “So if you were hoping to file a lawsuit, you’re out of luck.”

  Triadverse leans backward, putting her hands to her temples. “My head hurts.”

  This would be a prime moment for the grand duchess to bring up what I did to her, but she doesn’t. Maybe it’s beneath royal dignity to speak of such things in public. She looks at me and says only, “If the interruptions have finally ceased, please continue.”

  “Right. So, first of all, we have to make sure we strengthen all of your universes so that they can’t be destroyed, ever. That process requires one Firebird”—I hold up my locket, even though the others are all familiar with the device by now—“and one stabilizer, which isn’t hard to build in a technologically advanced dimension. Those of you who are already in communication with other universes have started working on that. Mafiaverse, you guys have the know-how. You just have to execute the plan. For the rest of you with different technologies, we have to figure out alternative solutions.”

  “Where are we even supposed to start with that?” Oceanverse says. “I don’t have that kind of knowledge, and in my universe, my parents don’t either.”

  “But my parents do.” I think fast. “One of them needs to go to your universe. Preferably Dad—my version of Dad, I mean—he stayed there for a month after he was kidnapped, and he still remembers some of it. That would give him a head start with the technology.”

  “I can head back and tell him.” Theo shakes his head with a wry smile. “High time Henry did some dimensional traveling of his own, don’t you think?”

  “Definitely.” Mom and Dad have left the journeying to us—to me, mostly, because of the talent Wyatt Conley gave me. But they ought to experience some of this, both the chaos of it and the wonder.

  “And my own world?” At the sound of the grand duchess’s voice, everyone focuses on her again. She sits with her hands in her lap, and somehow she looks both older and more beautiful than the rest of us. People always say, oh, beauty comes from within, and I always thought they were being glib. But now I see that energy radiating from the grand duchess, intangible but undeniable, as she continues. “It appears our mechanical advancement is significantly behind yours.”

  Theo shrugs, like, no big deal. “All we need are the right metals and the knowledge, Your, uh, Highness? Was that it?”

  “Your Imperial Highness,” I whisper.

  “Right, that’s it. Yes. Your Imperial Highness. Since it turns out you and I are friends there, and I’m in your neighborhood anyway, we can work together on it. You commandeer the materials, and I’ll get the job done.” Theo sort of salutes her, then pulls his hand back, obviously feeling ridiculous. Warverse giggles.

  Oceanverse raises her hand, reminding me she’s one of the only Marguerites who attended something resembling a real school. “So, some other version of Dad is going to just take over my dad without any warning?”

  “Ask his permission,” I say. “Tell your dad everything. If he doesn’t want my dad to stay, then he won’t. I promise. It’s your dimension, so it’s your choice.”

  “Okay.” Then she adds sheepishly, “I guess since the alternative is getting our dimension blown up, Dad’s probably going to say yes.”

  “Probably,” I agree. Though I predict that later on my father will bitch at length about the inhuman suffering of being forced to return to a dimension without the Beatles.

  “What about here?” Victoire says. “Will your Theo stay, or will another versi
on of Mom come to our universe, or what? And who’s going to get the evil phantom out of me?”

  Theo and I glance at each other. How exactly do we deal with Wicked? If we just left her in Victoire forever, would Wicked remain trapped as she is now? Or might she grow stronger over time, work her way out? Even if she didn’t, it’s hard to imagine a soul that damaged, that poisonous not corroding the person who contained it.

  And if my parents in the Home Office are willing to destroy entire dimensions to get one of their daughters back, is there anything they wouldn’t do to rescue the only child they have left?

  The front door opens, startling us all. Cambridgeverse whispers, “Wait, there’s another one?”

  But the footsteps are too heavy to be mine. The familiar sound brings a smile to my face even before Paul walks in.

  His hair is slightly longer here, and at the moment it’s mussed—air-dried and textured with salt water. A faint stripe of sunburn covers his nose, and over his shoulder is a backpack no doubt full of equipment. He’s still wearing a long-sleeved black swim shirt and matching trunks.

  But it’s not the differences that strike me the most. It’s the Firebird hanging around his neck.

  It’s my Paul, finally with me again.

  The reaction ripples around the table, each one of us wearing a different expression, from loving to terrified and everything in between.

  But it’s the grand duchess I can’t bear to witness. She grips the arms of her chair, and her lips are parted in awe. Her love for Lieutenant Markov defined and changed her life, and then she lost him forever.

  Or she had until this moment, when—for her—Paul has returned from the dead.

  Paul, meanwhile, must have gotten texts from Theo and my parents telling him to get here as quickly as he could, and Theo sent a couple of messages explaining the clone thing. But knowing the facts doesn’t appear to have prepared Paul for the reality. He stops in the doorway, staring at each of us in turn, his jaw slowly dropping open.

  “I know, little brother,” Theo says with a wry grin, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “I had this dream too.”