by Claudia Gray
The bedroom isn’t that big; the bed itself fills most of the space. There’s nowhere else for Theo to sleep but the floor, and nowhere else for him to sit, either. I tell myself I’m being stupid to think this is awkward—to imagine that he’s concentrating on anything other than the insane situation we’re in, that the flicker of attraction between us could even matter in the middle of all this.
Then our eyes meet, and I know—it’s not just me.
“Okay,” I say, gesturing toward the en suite. “I’m going to, uh, freshen up.”
Theo nods as he walks toward the window. “Sure. Go ahead and take your shower.”
I’d only been thinking about brushing my teeth, but a shower sounds nice. My hair and clothes smell like cigarette smoke and stale champagne—like the other Marguerite’s life. Right now I need to be myself again.
I step into the white-tiled bathroom and close the door behind me. The leather peels away grudgingly; my skin stings as I tug the dress off. It occurs to me that this is a designer dress worth thousands of pounds; Romola probably meant for me to give this back. Well, I’ll mail it to her tomorrow. Right now I let it crumple onto the floor like a skin I’ve shed. My fist closes over the Firebird, and I lift the locket from around my neck.
Only when I’m standing in the shower, letting the hot water course over me, do I become aware—vividly aware—that I’m stark naked while Theo is only steps away. I tell myself there’s no reason for it to be weird; Theo’s practically been living in my home for the past few years, after all. I’ve bathed and slept and cut my toenails with Theo a room away.
But it feels different now.
Steam wreathes around me as I duck under the showerhead, feel hot water sinking into my curls and trailing down my face. I try to think only about scrubbing away the smell of cigarettes. Instead, my thoughts keep turning to the way Theo took me in his arms at the club, or how, when I leaned against him in the elevator, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
There’s always been . . . something between Theo and me. Not because he flirted with me—he flirts with every woman he meets, and even a few guys. He even flirted with Romola, pulling her aside for a moment at the club before he shepherded me out of there. Flirting is just a thing Theo does automatically, without thinking, the way the rest of us breathe. If anything, I knew Theo’s feelings toward me were changing because he began flirting with me less. When he did, the words had taken on weight; the attention he paid me wasn’t meaningless any longer, and we both knew it.
I always told myself nothing was ever going to happen. Theo’s older than me. He’s snarky and he’s selfish and his arrogance would be completely repellent if he didn’t have the brilliance to back it up. At times, when he’s been awake for two days straight, and he’s pacing around our house talking more in math than in English, there’s a recklessness to him, like he’s determined to push his limits to the brink of self-destruction, and maybe past it. So I told myself I loved Theo as a friend. Okay, a friend who’s sort of wickedly hot—yet, still, only a friend.
But the past two days I’ve seen a whole new side to Theo. Maybe I’ve finally seen the real Theo. Why did I ever doubt him? Probably the same reason I used to trust Paul. Apparently I don’t understand people at all.
Paul is out there. Right now the only thing I can do to get ready to face him is to sleep this off. Theo’s with me, and that’s enough.
I shut off the water, dry myself, brush my teeth a second time. The Firebird goes back around my neck even before I’ve toweled my hair. There’s a long T-shirt hanging from one of the hooks on the door, so I slide into it. The pale pink color is slightly translucent, and I didn’t think to bring in any fresh underwear. But it’s darker in the bedroom; it won’t matter.
When I step out of the bathroom, Theo’s standing at the window, arms braced against the sill. Moonlight has painted his black hair, making it gleam. It takes him a moment to turn and face me; when he does, the same electricity crackles between us, and I feel as though the T-shirt is see-through. But I don’t move. I just stand there, facing him.
Theo breaks the silence first. “For what it’s worth, I don’t see anyone down on the street who seems to be checking this building out. Nobody was following us home from the club, either—at least, as far as I could see.”
“Oh, right. Good.” Why didn’t I think of that? It’s at that moment I realize that I’ve still got way more alcohol in my system than I should. I sink down onto the bed, woozy and whirling. “Do you think Paul knows we’re here?”
“If he’s thought to check.”
Of course he’s checking to see if anybody’s after him, I want to retort, but then I stop myself. A smile spreads across my face. “Paul doesn’t know about the other Firebirds,” I say. “You kept it a secret from everyone. Even him.”
“Sometimes it pays to be a secretive bastard.” Theo grins back. However, I can tell he’s not totally confident. “Still, we can’t assume Paul doesn’t have any more tricks up his sleeve. We underestimated him once. Let’s not do it again.”
“You’re right.” My rage at Paul threatens to break through once more, but I force myself to put it aside. My whole body hurts, and my mind is fuzzy and confused and not my own. I need to sleep.
Theo’s voice gentles. “Hey. Toss me a pillow, all right? Gonna make myself a dog bed here on the floor.”
I throw him one of the pillows; he pulls a spare blanket from the foot of the bed. We’re so quiet that I can hear the rustle of fabric on fabric. When I tuck my feet under the bedspread, he flicks off the light so that we’re once again in the dark.
Slowly I lie down, but I’m so aware of him. My breaths quicken; my heart feels like it might hammer its way out of my chest.
It’s stupid to be nervous. I trust Theo. There’s no reason for me to worry about him doing something.
Then I realize—Theo’s not the person I’m unsure of. What I don’t know is what I might do.
It would be so easy, so good, to forget everything farther away than this bed and my own skin.
And it’s Theo. The one person in this world I can rely on, the one I want to keep closer than any other—
My whisper is the only sound in the room. “You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”
For a moment, the only reply is silence. Then Theo rises from his place at the foot of my bed. His body is silhouetted by the moonlight, and I realize that he’s taken off his shirt to sleep.
Without a word he walks around to my side of the bed, then sits down, his hip against my leg. The mattress sinks in beneath him, rolling me slightly closer. Theo braces one hand near my pillow. With the other, he brushes my damp curls away from my face. I want to say something to him, but I can’t think of what. All I can do is lie there, breaths coming fast and shallow, staring up at him, both wanting him to touch me again and terrified that he will.
Slowly Theo leans down over me. My T-shirt is slightly off one shoulder, and his lips brush me there—along the line of my collarbone. The kiss lasts only a moment. It crashes through me like lightning.
He whispers, “Ask me again sometime, when we’re both ourselves.” Then he lifts his head, and his smile is soft. “Next time I won’t stop with your shoulder.”
With that he rises from the bed and goes back to his own place. Already I know he won’t say another word until morning.
Should I feel humiliated or flattered? But my heartbeat is steadying; I feel safe with Theo, safer than I’ve felt since the moment we heard about Dad. That makes it easy to close my eyes, relax, and surrender to sleep.
I awaken to the sound of laughter.
For one split second, I think I’m back at home. So many days, I’ve awoken to the sound of my parents and sister laughing in the kitchen, and maybe their research assistants, too, voices floating to me along with the scent of blueberry waffles. But no. I’m still in another Marguerite’s bedroom, her body, her world.
No way am I wearing this pink T-shirt in br
oad daylight, so I fish around in the nightstand, hoping for something to put on. Then my fingers make contact with silk, and I lift a butter-yellow kimono-style dressing gown, elaborately embroidered. It shocks me, weirdly, because this looks more like something I would own. The Marguerite from this dimension saw this silk robe and responded to it like I would . . . because we are the same person, on some level I’m still learning to understand.
I wrap the silk gown around me and hurry to the kitchen. The illusion of my old life must be incredibly strong, because I could still swear I smell blueberry waffles—
“You’re a naughty one, you are,” Aunt Susannah coos, and she’s still chuckling at her own joke when I walk in to see her sitting at the kitchen island while Theo busies himself at the stove. He’s wearing his undershirt and boxers, a serious case of stubble, and a grin.
“We just met, and already you’ve got my number,” Theo says as he pours batter into a frying pan. As he finishes, he looks up and sees me. “Morning, Meg!”
“Uh, hi,” I say faintly. “You’re . . . making breakfast?”
“Blueberry pancakes. I learned the recipe from the master.” By this Theo means my dad. “They were going to be waffles, but Susannah here is shockingly deficient in waffle irons.”
“Guilty as charged.” Aunt Susannah’s hands are folded under her chin in a gesture that would look childish on someone my age, much less hers. I remember from my old London trips that she does this to hide the wrinkles on her neck.
Oh, my God, she’s flirting with him. I might feel jealous if it weren’t so ludicrous.
Theo is of course flirting back. “Girl, someone needs to take you shopping.”
“Don’t think I haven’t looked for a sugar daddy,” she says. “Of course, we’re set up all right. Maybe I should try being a sugar momma for a change.”
“Intriguing notion.” He cocks one of those arched eyebrows of his, then flips the pancake over.
There’s only so much of this I can watch. “I’m getting dressed,” I announce, and hurry back to my room.
My closet at home is filled with dresses, flowing skirts, floral patterns and vivid color, crochet and lace. This closet looks more like a magazine layout designed to show off the world’s most expensive and impractical designer brands. But I find a simple black T and gray slacks that will work, and one pair of shoes that looks like it won’t kill my feet.
When I emerge, I cross paths with Aunt Susannah, who’s wandering back to her own room with a plate in one hand and a fork in the other; one last wedge of pancake sits on her plate. She beams at me and says, in a stage whisper, “I like that one. He’s cleverer than your usual sort.”
Who else has the other Marguerite brought home after clubbing? I don’t want to think about it.
A plate of pancakes waits for me on the kitchen island, and my stomach grumbles in eager gratitude. Theo is standing by the sink, his hands braced against the counter; he doesn’t look up when I walk in.
“Thanks,” I say as I sit down to breakfast. “It’s good that we’re starting early. But you could’ve woken me.”
“Yeah. I guess.” He seems distracted—more tired than he was before. Probably he didn’t rest well, sleeping on the floor.
“Is pancake batter the same as waffle batter?” When I take a bite, it tastes about right. “Did you eat already?”
“What?”
I look up from my plate to see Theo staring at me. He looks confused—even unnerved—
That’s when it hits me. The Firebird isn’t hanging around Theo’s neck. He must have taken it off last night to sleep, but now his memory has started to fail. Sometime in the past few minutes, my Theo began to lose his hold on this body, this consciousness.
Mom wasn’t totally wrong about our consciousness slipping in alternate dimensions after all.
“You need a reminder.” I drop my fork, go to him, and grab his hand. Enough of my Theo remains that he doesn’t fight me or ask questions as I tow him back toward my bedroom.
I give him a gentle push that makes him sit heavily on the bed. For a moment he looks like himself again, and he smiles. “Didn’t we go over this last night?”
“Oh, my God, stop flirting for once in your life.” I fish through his clothes on the floor and find his Firebird locket. Quickly I loop it around his neck. “Just wear that, okay?”
“Wear what?”
He’s forgotten about it already. He doesn’t seem to notice the matching Firebird hanging around my neck, either. Mom explained once that, since the Firebirds belonged to our dimension, they would be very difficult to detect by a native to another dimension. At the moment I call attention to the locket, in theory, Theo could see it—but otherwise it hovers beneath his level of awareness.
It’s a good thing that actually works. Otherwise, people would instantly freak out about the Firebirds appearing around their necks and remove them, destabilizing the would-be interdimensional travelers who had just leaped there. As it is, people might wear them for months without noticing. Physics is weird.
“Hang on,” I tell him as I take his Firebird in hand and find the sequence that sets a reminder, dropping it in the instant before blue-white light flickers around it.
They told me a reminder would hurt. They didn’t tell me how much. Theo bucks against it, almost convulsing, before swearing under his breath as he slumps forward, and for a moment I think he’s going to pass out.
(“A shock?” I asked my mother when she told me about this. “A reminder is only an electric shock?”
She beamed, like we were talking about butterflies and rainbows. “Not at all. A reminder is a fairly sophisticated resonance shift. It simply feels like an electric shock.”)
“Theo?” I lean forward and take his shoulders in my hands. “Are you okay again?”
“Yeah. I am.” He looks up at me, panting and wide-eyed, then repeats, “I am,” as if I’d contradicted him.
“That was close.” I put my hand on my chest to remind myself that the Firebird is still there. The curve of hard metal against my palm reassures me, and makes me think. Will I need a reminder too, eventually?
Theo’s face is pale, and he’s braced himself against the bed like he’s expecting an earthquake. At my questioning glance, he says, “I need a few minutes. All right?”
“Sure.” That had to have been as terrifying as it was painful. So I gently rumple his already disheveled hair and go back out to the kitchen, where I finish my pancakes while I strategize.
If Paul’s not already on his way to us, we’ll be on our way to him within the hour. There have to be monorails that would get us to Cambridge quickly, right? Or even a regular train. We find him before he finds us. And then—
—we kill him.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that the Paul I need to destroy is currently a passenger in the body of another Paul Markov entirely. Although right now it seems to me that anybody as evil as Paul would be evil in every single dimension, I don’t know that for sure. So it’s not as simple as finding him and, I don’t know, shooting him or something.
But there are things you can do with the Firebird that are dangerous to the traveler inside. Theo told me that much.
In fact, I decide, we should go over that before we do anything else, even before we leave the house.
Determined, I put my plate in the sink and return to my bedroom to talk this through with Theo. When I walk inside, though, he’s not in the bedroom. His clothes remain on the floor, apart from his thin black jacket, which I don’t see.
“Theo?” I walk into the bathroom, and I’m two steps in before it occurs to me how rude it was to do that without knocking first.
At that moment I see him, and I know he wanted to be alone. I also know why.
Because Theo, my guide, is sprawled on the tile floor, shooting up.
6
“THEO?” I TAKE A STEP FORWARD, THEN STOP. FOR SOME stupid reason I feel ashamed to see him like this.
Right after the
shame comes anger. Why should I be embarrassed? I’m not the one getting high in the middle of something so dangerous, so important—
Then Theo groans as he slumps sideways onto the bathroom floor. He’s completely, totally out of it.
“Oh, shit.” I drop to my knees and roll him onto his back. Theo doesn’t even seem to know I’m there. “What are you doing?”
Theo focuses his eyes on me for only a moment and chokes out one word. “Sorry.”
“Sorry? You’re sorry?”
“Yeah,” he says. My anger is very far away from him right now; I can tell. The whole world is far away from Theo at the moment.
I grab the small bottle I see on the bathroom floor; it’s still about half full of some liquid that’s a brilliant emerald green. What drug looks like that? It must be something from this dimension, because I’ve never seen anything like it.
I try to adjust him on the bathroom floor so that he’s not all crumpled against the vanity; he responds by rolling halfway over to rest his head in my lap. With a sigh, I settle in on the cold bathroom tile, back against the wall, and untie the rubber tube that he’d knotted around his forearm. It can’t be good to leave that on for long.
I can feel his breathing, deep and regular, as his chest swells against my thighs.
Leaning my head against the vanity, I try to steady myself. But it’s hard. Theo . . . isn’t stable. I knew this. We had all begun to realize that about him. His courage and loyalty don’t change this one critical fact.
The person I’ve been relying on to get me through this is someone I can’t be sure of relying on at all.
Although I hate to admit it, Paul was the first one who warned me about Theo—the first one who realized how bad he was getting, who tried to say something. And he must have suspected for a while, but kept it to himself. Only the Accident made him speak up.
The Accident was two months ago, and it’s the only time I ever saw my parents angry with Theo. They patched it up, and nothing actually happened, but still, it stood out.