A Thousand Pieces of You

by Claudia Gray

  The moment we’re alone, Paul turns to me, furious. “I told you to go home.”

  “You don’t get to give me orders! You think you’re in charge just because, what, you’re a genius and I’m not?”

  “I should be in charge because I’m older than you and I understand what’s going on, while you don’t,” he retorts.

  “The only reason I don’t understand is because you won’t explain.”

  “Look, Conley is dangerous. You need to go home,” he repeats, and there’s something about the way he says it that makes me realize what he actually means. Paul’s not telling me to get out of his way. He actually means there’s some reason I need to be back at home, a reason my presence there is important.

  Not that this gets him off the hook. Not by a long shot. But it calms me enough to focus on the most critical problem we have. I palm the little silken purse and show Paul the fragments of the Firebird locket. “I’m not getting home with this.”

  Most guys would swear. Paul just presses his lips together into a pale line. “This is bad.”

  “Understatement of the year.”

  Paul takes the purse from me and begins examining the pieces one by one. I resist the urge to keep arguing with him. If he’s fixing the Firebird—i.e., my only shot at not living in this dimension forever—I’m going to let him concentrate.

  Finally he says, “It can be repaired.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Almost sure,” Paul answers, like that’s just as good when it so is not. He must catch the look on my face, because he adds, “The Firebirds are made to be easily reassembled. We wanted them to snap apart into their components for repair, adjustments, that kind of thing. It looks like that’s what happened here.”

  “So you can pop it back together?” Relief rushes into me, makes me giddy. Talk about dodging a bullet.

  “I need better light, and I’ll want to double-check it against my own Firebird.” Paul hands the silk purse to me and pulls at the chain around his neck; the locket gleams dully against the scarlet of his uniform coat. “Come on. Let’s get this done and send you home.”

  I jerk back. “I’m not going home until you tell me why you’re here!”

  Paul’s not one of those people who gets louder when he gets angry. He gets quieter. Goes still. “This isn’t the dimension I was looking for. That much is already obvious. I need to keep moving, but I can’t leave here until you—”

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  We both straighten, startled to see another Russian officer walking toward us. He has gray hair, a beard to rival the tsar’s, and a monocle. Paul stands at attention, or at least what looks like attention to me; I don’t guess either of us has any idea what proper Russian military protocol would be.

  The officer says, “Markov, I’m surprised at you. Pestering Her Imperial Highness like this instead of doing your duty.”

  Oh, that’s me. I’m the Imperial Highness. I have to stifle a laugh. “I, uh, I asked him to look at something I broke.” I hold out the Firebird locket pieces to show him.

  The officer’s puffed-out chest falls a little; he seems smaller, robbed of his indignation. But his eyes light up as he finds something else to say. “And what is this? Out of uniform while on duty?”

  And he grabs the Firebird from around Paul’s neck.

  I gasp. Paul’s eyes widen. We’re both too startled to think, much less move.

  “Now that you’re finally in appropriate uniform, Lieutenant Markov, you may carry on,” the officer says, tucking Paul’s Firebird into his pocket as he continues down the long hallway.

  We watch him go in mutual horror. I’m the one who finds words first: “Oh, crap.”

  “We have to get the Firebird back.” Paul takes a deep breath. “I have to go after him.”

  “Surely he’s going to give it back to you. Eventually. Right?”

  “How would I know? Besides, we don’t have much time. My memory—it’s already getting cloudy. The Paul Markov from this dimension is going to take over again, any minute.”

  The rest of it hits me: If Paul can’t remember who he really is, he can’t fix my Firebird. Meaning unless and until Theo finds us—if Theo even exists in this dimension—we’ll be trapped in this dimension. Potentially forever.

  “Okay, you’ll go after him and—” I put my hands to my head, trying to think, and only when my fingers touch the tiara do I remember who I am here, what I can do. “Wait! No, I go after him, and I order him to give back the locket. He has to do it. I’m a princess! Or a grand duchess, whatever they call them in Russia—”

  “Yes! Good. Right. Go.” Paul nods his head, almost comically fast.

  I take off down the hallway toward the stairs, running down them as fast as I can—which isn’t that fast, because I’m wearing a long dress cut narrow through the skirt, plus high heels that don’t even have a strap across the foot to hold them on. My jewelry jangles around my neck; my tiara slides to one side, and I lift one hand to hold it to my head. “Sir!” I shout, wishing I’d thought to ask the guy’s name. A name would work better. Could I just yell, I command you to stop?

  But as I reach the bottom and turn the corner, I see an enormous gathering of people all walking through a broad hallway. This isn’t the party itself, but the entrance for most of the guests. Dozens of women in a rainbow of gowns and jewels nearly as fine as mine, from girls my age with feathery fascinators in their hair to elderly dowagers seemingly bent low by the weight of their diamonds—young men in elegant evening suits, brilliant scarves knotted at their throats—

  —and military officers. At least fifty of them, all wearing uniforms that look identical to the one on the man who took Paul’s Firebird. I strain to catch a glimpse of his face—he had a monocle, they can’t all wear those, can they?—but it’s impossible to pick him from the crowd. He might already have gone into the ball.

  Should I run in there, create a scene? I have a feeling that wouldn’t get me very far.

  As quickly as I can, I rush back upstairs. Paul is leaning against the wall, as though he were exhausted. “I lost him!” I call out. “He’s in the party, but you could recognize him, couldn’t you? Help me find him?”

  “I—I think so.” He winces and puts his fingers to his temple, like he has a headache. His confusion reminds me of Theo, back in London, in the last moments before he would have forgotten himself completely.

  “Paul, don’t! You have to stay with me.” I take his shoulders in my hands and get in his face. “Look at me. Look at me.”

  “You have to get the Firebird,” he says, slow and careful with each word, as if he doesn’t trust himself to force them out. “You have to use it to bring me back.”

  “How do I find that guy again?” How do I do anything in this dimension? My hands are shaking, and the diamond choker around my neck feels like a noose. “Oh God, oh God, he had that big beard, and a monocle—”

  “Colonel Azarenko,” Paul says absently.

  I stare at him. “What?”

  He looks at me as though he hadn’t seen me before. Then he straightens, pulling out of my hands. “Your Imperial Highness.”

  This is not my Paul any longer. This is Lieutenant Markov.

  He continues, “Forgive me, Your Imperial Highness. I can’t think why—I don’t remember how I came to be here. Was I taken ill?”

  “You . . . became lightheaded.” I cover as best I can. “I wasn’t feeling well either. So you were to take me to my room, so I could rest.”

  “Very well, my lady.” He bows his head and begins walking briskly through the corridor, his shining boots dark against the red velvet carpet. In something of a daze, I trail along behind.

  At least one of us knows where my room is.

  Paul and I are trapped here. With no idea how to contact Theo, if I even can. All I have to go on is the name “Colonel Azarenko.”

  Tomorrow, I tell myself. I’ll be able to ask about him tomorrow, have him brought to m
e, and get Paul’s Firebird back.

  If I can’t—

  —but no. I can’t think about that right now. Instead I straighten the tiara on my head and pretend I know what the hell I’m doing.

  11

  LATER THAT EVENING, AFTER MY MAIDS (I HAVE THREE) have dressed me in a loose nightgown and settled me into my bed, I lay the pieces of my Firebird on my embroidered coverlet. This enormous bed of carved wood is high above the floor, every blanket and sheet pristinely white, so it feels a bit as though I’m considering my options while resting on a cloud.

  With a sigh, I flop onto the soft pillows piled at the head of my bed. The room surrounding me isn’t that large, nor is the decor gaudy, and yet there’s no mistaking the wealth and elegance that created it. The walls and high ceiling are painted the cool, soft green of aged copper. A writing desk in the corner is scrolled with vines of inlaid wood, as if it were being reclaimed by the forest leaf by leaf. Across from my bed, a broad fireplace set with enameled tiles glows with the fire that warms my room.

  My jewels are back in their velvet boxes, along with all the others.

  At least this version of me has books, several of which are strewn around me right now. Many of them are in Russian . . . but I can read that here, and speak it too. Apparently that kind of memory is hardwired into the mind differently than emotions and experiences.

  From what I can tell from the books I’ve scanned, just as technology had developed slightly faster in the London dimension, here it has developed far more slowly. My surroundings seem to belong in the year 1900 more than in the twenty-first century. Although some elements of this world are more or less advanced than my dimension was at this point, the overall feel is like stepping back a century in time. In this world, the twenty-first century simply looks very different. People travel by railroad or steamship, or even sometimes on horseback or in sleighs. Telephones exist but are so new we only have a few in the palace, and they’re only for official use; nobody has even thought of telephoning a friend merely to chat. The internet hasn’t even been dreamed of. Instead, people write letters. I can see a stack of creamy stationery waiting on my desk.

  The United States of America exists but is thought of as remote and provincial. (I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but everyone here in St. Petersburg would agree.) Royalty still reigns throughout Europe, including of course the House of Romanov. The man everyone thinks is my father is Tsar Alexander V, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias. So far as I can tell, this dimension doesn’t yet contain the equivalent of a Lenin or a Trotsky. This is good, as I have zero interest in pulling an Anastasia—getting shot to death in a basement and then having every crazy woman in Europe pretending to be me for the next fifty years.

  A set of leatherbound encyclopedias on a lower shelf has an entry about the House of Romanov. There, in plain text stark on the page, I learn that Tsar Alexander married a young noblewoman named Sophia Kovalenka. With her he had four children: the Tsarevich Vladimir, Grand Duchess Margarita (i.e., yours truly), Grand Duchess Yekaterina (a very fancy name for the brat who stuck her tongue out at me), and finally Grand Duke Piotr.

  My mother died giving birth to her fourth child.

  Mom and Dad always said pregnancy was “difficult” for her; I never realized that meant “dangerous.” They stopped after me and Josie, for the sake of her health. Here, I realize, the Tsar never stopped demanding more children, pressuring her into pregnancy after pregnancy until, finally, she died while in labor with her younger son.

  They cut him out of her after she died. I wish I hadn’t read that.

  My mother is a scientist. She’s a genius. She’s strong and she’s fierce and, okay, she can be a little obtuse about ordinary life, plus she doesn’t understand art at all, but still, she’s Mom. She has more to give the world than almost anyone else I can imagine.

  Tsar Alexander thought all she had to offer were heirs to the throne, so he . . . bred her to death.

  I pick up a silver photo frame from my bedside table. The oval portrait there, in slightly fuzzy black and white, shows my mother with younger versions of me, Vladimir, and Katya; she’s dressed in an elaborate long-sleeved gown, but the way her arms are curved protectively around me and Vladimir, the way she smiles down at the toddler Katya in her lap—something in her, too, remained the same in this universe.

  But not enough. Here, my mother never had the chance to study science. What interested her here? How did she occupy her brilliant, restless mind? Did she ever look at Tsar Alexander with anything like the love and trust she always had with my dad?

  And here, Josie was never even born. Dad must have been a fleeting presence in her life, which is almost impossible for me to imagine.

  With a shaky hand I put the photograph back where it belongs; even the thought of what happened to my mother is too much to bear right now. I slump back on the piled feather pillows and take slow, deep breaths.

  My eyes go to the sliver of light visible beneath my bedroom door. Until a few minutes ago, that light was broken by two dark lines—the shadows of Paul’s feet as he stood guard outside. But apparently even the personal guard of one of the grand duchesses is allowed to sleep. The encyclopedia informed me that I live in St. Petersburg, currently in the Winter Palace.

  What about Theo? If he exists in this dimension, he probably would be in the United States, or maybe in the Netherlands, where his grandparents were from. My heart sinks as I realize that, in a world where the swiftest travel possible is by train, there’s no way Theo could reach me today, or tomorrow, or even within a few weeks. Given the famous savagery of the Russian winters, it’s entirely possible he couldn’t get here before spring. Even if he did manage to travel to St. Petersburg, how would he ever win an audience with one of the grand duchesses?

  It’s all right, I tell myself. You’ll find Colonel Azarenko tomorrow. Anyway, Paul’s here. You don’t need anyone else.

  My mind fills with thoughts of Paul. How could I have completely failed to understand him?

  “In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.”

  The scene is as vivid for me now as it was on that day: Theo in a faux-weathered RC Cola T-shirt. Paul in one of the heather-gray Ts that I knew he only wore because he had no idea how much they showed off his muscles. Me tucking my hair behind my ears, trying to look and feel as grown up as they were. All of us together in the great room, surrounded by Mom’s houseplants and the summer warmth from the open doors to our deck.

  I was joking when I spoke about fate, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”

  Although I knew Theo thought the idea was silly, it intrigued me. Anytime the physics discussions around me shifted from complicated equations to concepts I could connect with, I seized on it. So I sat beside Paul at the rainbow table and said, “How does this work, then? Fate.”

  He ducked his head, shy with me even after spending more than a year practically living in my house. But like any scientist, he was so fascinated by ideas that he couldn’t stay quiet about them for long. He steepled his large hands together, fingertip to fingertip, holding them in front of me, as our illustration of a mirror image. “Patterns reoccur, in dimension after dimension. Those patterns reflect certain resonances—”

  “And people each have their own resonance, right?” I thought I’d picked up on that much.

  He smiled, encouraged. Paul’s smiles were rare—almost out of place on someone so large and brutish and serious. “That’s right. So it looks as though the same groups of people find each other, over and over. Not invariably, but far more than mere chance would suggest.”

  Theo, who was across the room settling back into his own math, made a face. “Listen, little brother, if you write your theory up like that, and you stick the numbers, you’re golden. It’s when you get into this souls-and-destiny crap that you sink your thesis. Seriously, you’re going to get up before the committee and
defend that?”

  “Stop knocking him,” I told Theo. At the time I’d been too enchanted by Paul’s idea to listen to even good objections. “Everybody gets to have wild theories here. Mom’s rule.”

  Theo shrugged, already too absorbed in his work to protest further. Yet Paul looked over at me as though he were grateful for the defense. I realized how close we were sitting—closer than we usually did, so near that my arm nearly brushed against his—but I didn’t move away.

  Instead I said, “So does destiny create the math, or does math create our destiny?”

  “Insufficient data,” Paul said, but I could tell, in that moment, how much he wanted to believe in destiny. It was the first time I thought of him as someone who, all appearances to the contrary, might have some poetry in his soul.

  Maybe it was the only time I ever understood him at all.

  The next day, I discover what it’s like to have people get you ready in the morning.

  I mean, totally. My maids appear around my bedside as I wake, serving me tea on a silver tray, running me a warm bath in an enormous tub carved of marble, even soaping my back.

  (Yes, it’s completely embarrassing bathing in front of an audience, but it seems this Marguerite does it every day, so I have to roll with it. I guess they already know what I look like naked, which . . . doesn’t help that much.)

  These women even put the toothpaste on my toothbrush.

  They select a dress for me: a soft yellow the color of candlelight, floor length, so formal for everyday that I can hardly keep myself from laughing at it. They braid my hair back and fasten it with pins set with small white enameled roses. I stare at the mirror in disbelief as my uncontrollable, lunatic curls are tamed and settled into a style as complicated as it is beautiful.

  I could almost believe that I’m beautiful, though really this is a testament to what personal stylists (or their nineteenth-century equivalents) can accomplish.

  No makeup is to be seen anywhere, but they rub sweet-smelling creams into the skin of my face and throat, then dust me with lilac-scented powder. By the time they’re finished clipping on my pearl earrings, I actually feel like a grand duchess.