by Claudia Gray
Fate and mathematics don’t only bring you back to the people you love. They can also bring you to the people you hate.
In this world, they brought me back to Wyatt Conley.
2
WHO IS WYATT CONLEY, AND WHY IS HE SUCH A SON OF A bitch?
My parents explained the situation pretty well the day after I brought my father back home from our first adventure through the dimensions. That night we’d all been crying and happy and too freaked out to even think; then, once we woke up, we couldn’t stop talking about our adventures—everything we’d seen and done. Everyone we’d been.
That morning, it turned out, the physics faculty was holding a departmental meeting. Mom said that was as good a place to begin explaining as any, so my parents, Paul, Theo, and I headed to the university. As usual, I felt out of place as we walked through the hallways of the physics building. It’s like you can almost smell the math.
All of us went in together, interrupting the meeting in progress. All the science professors seated around the long oval table sat upright and stared.
“Forgive our lateness,” my mother said. Even in her faded cardigan and mom jeans, she was immediately the person in charge. Mom has this effect on people. “I need to raise an urgent issue not on the agenda, namely Triad Corporation’s role in funding research into the Firebird device.”
“As in, they shouldn’t have one anymore,” Theo chimed in. “We need to be independent from them, now.”
Dad stepped forward. “Triad has brought agents from another dimension into our own. These agents have been spying on us and attempting to direct and control our progress with the Firebirds. Their CEO, Wyatt Conley himself, is deeply involved in this—orchestrating it, even—in both worlds. To this end, he altered my daughter Marguerite’s dimensional resonance so that she can travel more effectively than anyone else in this world.”
Mom’s eyes flashed with anger as she cut in. “The procedure only works once in a dimension. By choosing our daughter, putting her in this dangerous position, Conley thought he could control us.”
“Conley also hoped to blackmail Marguerite into working for him, operating as his spy in countless dimensions. That’s why I was kidnapped into an alternate universe in the first place,” Dad said.
A silence followed. Everyone in the room just kept staring at us, this sea of huge eyes behind thick glasses. I wondered, Do they think my parents have finally lost their minds? The events Mom and Dad had just talked about sounded pretty fantastical, but every physicist in this department (and probably the world) knew that my parents were on the verge of a breakthrough—that dimensional travel was going to become a reality.
Then Theo held up his hands in the time-out signal. “Uh, we probably ought to back this up. Turns out the Firebirds work! Dimensional travel is possible! I guess technically Dr. Caine went first, then Paul, and then Marguerite—but the point is, we’ve tested the devices. The Firebird is a success. Yeah, we should’ve led with that.”
“Not that,” Paul said, expression grim.
I realized what he was getting at, and my eyes went wide. Uh-oh.
Paul stepped forward and said, as formally as if he were defending his dissertation, “We should have first informed you that Dr. Caine is alive.”
“Oh!” Dad said, as Mom put her hand to her mouth. “Right! Thought that was sort of obvious—but ought to have gone over it anyway. I’m not dead! Body not lost at sea or in the river, wherever it was supposed to be. I’d been kidnapped into another dimension instead. Left out that important detail, didn’t we?”
“Also, most of you will have heard that I killed Dr. Caine, when in fact I was framed for the crime. I am not guilty,” Paul continued. Then, with a glance at my dad, he finished, “Obviously.”
“Because I’m alive.” Dad clapped his hands together, amused and embarrassed at the same time. “Of course. No wonder you’re all startled, since to you it’s like I just rose from the grave! Can’t say I blame you. We ought to have phoned a few people when I got back last night, but we got a bit carried away there, with the reunion and all. But no, I’m not dead. I’m absolutely fine. Never better.” The professors in front of us remained still, and I realized several of them were pale with shock. My father broke the awkward silence. “So, how are all of you? Ah, Terry! Changed your hair, I see. Looking good.”
That was when someone fainted.
Believe it or not, that has to count as a positive reaction. For years, the scientific community wrote off my parents as lunatics; a lot of people would like to do that again. Their colleagues finally accepted that cross-dimensional travel might be possible—but spies from other worlds? Wyatt Conley, inventor and entrepreneur, the mastermind behind a mysterious plot? Triad makes the most advanced personal electronics in the world, and sells them in stores you can find in any shopping center. Their cheery ads and emerald-green signs don’t seem like they’d belong to the front company for a James Bond–esque supervillain. And what was Conley supposed to have done to me? “Changed” me? “Blackmailed” me? Why would a powerful billionaire ever need to blackmail an average eighteen-year-old girl?
Or so the thinking goes.
After the paramedics revived Professor Xavier, my parents, Theo, and Paul had to answer questions from the physics faculty for almost three hours. The president of the university has pleaded with Mom and Dad not to issue any public statements about the Firebird project for the time being. So far they’ve agreed, even though reporters have kept calling, and their questions have become more pointed, suggesting the public mood has shifted from breathless anticipation to doubt. Wyatt Conley hasn’t made any public statements either. As far as anyone in the general public knows, he’s still going about his usual routine, a thirty-year-old CEO who wears jeans instead of stuffy suits. His boyish face grins from beneath his curly auburn hair on the covers of business magazines. He even agreed to continue providing funding for my parents’ research going forward—or so he told the dean, who passed this info along to us probably hoping we’d decide we were just being paranoid jerks about the guy.
The other side of Conley lies just beneath that glossy surface.
Not long after that meeting with the physics department, we got our first visit from the general counsel of Triad Corporation.
Her name was Sumiko Takahara. If Wyatt Conley ran a global business while wearing blue jeans, it was because he had people like this behind him—armored with business suits and legalese. Ms. Takahara stood in our house as if she couldn’t believe she’d been sent on an errand this pedestrian; no doubt she spent more time suing megacorporations than talking to academics seated around a table that had been painted in rainbow swirls by me and Josie when we were little kids. Despite this, her professional demeanor never faltered.
“The folders before you represent Mr. Conley’s best offer,” she said. Her gray business suit had a slight glimmer to it, like the skin of a shark. “You’ll find paperwork regarding several Swiss bank accounts, one for each of you. The amounts of money within—”
“Would stun a maharaja,” Theo finished for her, then whistled, like, wow. Paul shot him a look, and Theo shrugged. “It’s true.”
Ms. Takahara seemed encouraged. “If Miss Caine will accept Triad’s offer of employment, I’m instructed to turn these accounts over to you, effective immediately.”
My mother handed her folder back unopened. “In other words, this is the price Wyatt Conley has set on our daughter,” she said. “His offer is declined.”
The chill in Mom’s voice would’ve cooled Siberia in winter. To Ms. Takahara’s credit, she wasn’t fazed. Instead, she looked at me. “The offer is Miss Caine’s to accept or refuse.”
I slid my folder across the table, back to the lawyer. “Then tell Mr. Conley that Miss Caine refuses.”
Finally Ms. Takahara hesitated. She couldn’t have seen many people turn down that kind of money. “Is that all you have to say in reply?”
I thought it over. “You can
also tell Conley to bite me.”
So that’s how that conference ended.
Ms. Takahara brought the next offer directly to my parents at the university, supposedly for them to pass along to me. But Conley was trying to bribe them with something they’d value far more than money—this time, he promised information.
“All the research from the Triadverse’s Firebird project,” my mother said that night as we stood in line for pizza at the Cheese Board Collective. “He promised he would share everything they’d learned so far. Experimental data, theoretical work, every bit of it.”
That research had won the Triadverse version of my mother a Nobel Prize. “What did you guys say?
“Honestly, the nerve of the man. The Triadverse is only a few years ahead of us. We’ll catch up.” In her calm, precise voice, my mother added, “Therefore we told Conley to stuff it.”
I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t help thinking that Conley had baited his hook more intelligently this time. For my parents, new knowledge would be the greatest temptation of all. “Are you sure? You guys would learn a lot.”
“Marguerite, we never considered it for an instant.” Mom pulled my arms around her so that I was hugging her from behind. Her hands squeezed mine. “It wouldn’t matter if Wyatt Conley offered us the theory of everything, with cold fusion as the cherry on top. Nothing matters more than you girls. And there’s not one piece of information more important than our love for you.”
I embraced her more tightly, and didn’t worry about Conley any more that evening.
Conley, however, was not done worrying about us. Nearly six weeks ago, he sent Ms. Takahara back to us. This time, she didn’t bother smiling.
“Mr. Conley has improved his offer,” she began.
“You said his last offer was his ‘best offer,’” Paul pointed out.
“He has reconsidered, and encourages you to do the same. I’ve been instructed not to accept any final answer from you today.” Ms. Takahara didn’t make eye contact with anyone at the rainbow table; if she had, she’d have seen her “final answer” written all over our faces. Instead, she continued, “Take your time. Look this over, and discuss it among yourselves. For the time being, Mr. Conley intends to allow you to conduct your research in peace. He asks that you show him the same courtesy. To clarify, he requests that you refrain from traveling to the dimension corresponding to the coordinates in the document before you, henceforth referred to as the Triadverse. Not only would this violate his request, but he warns that the consequences could also be dangerous.”
“Dangerous in scientific terms?” Paul asked. “Or is Conley merely threatening us?”
“I don’t pass along threats,” Ms. Takahara huffed. Probably she thought she was telling the truth. Conley might have told her about dimensional travel, but there was no way he’d explained the full story. “Instead I have shared an extraordinarily generous offer from Triad Corporation. Consider it at your leisure. When Mr. Conley is ready to hear your answer, I’ll be back in touch.”
After she left, Mom, Dad, Paul, and Theo got into a long, intense discussion about what Conley might do after he finally realized I’d never agree to work for him.
“After the carrot comes the stick,” Dad said. They got to work then on superior tracking technology for the Firebirds, so that if Conley tried kidnapping any of us into another dimension again, we could find that person easily, tracing their jumps through the universes no matter how long or complicated the trail might become. Paul and Theo’s pet project was working up a way of monitoring Conley’s cross-dimensional activity; the day might come, Paul said, when we’d need to report Conley to the authorities.
“What authorities?” I asked. Pretty sure the local cops don’t have the power to arrest people in other dimensions. “The FBI? Interpol?”
“Jurisdiction is unclear,” Paul admitted. His hand closed over mine, warm and reassuring. “But if he threatens you, we’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
I hugged him then, though at that point I felt safe enough. And Conley’s “terms” were easy enough. It’s not as though I was in some huge hurry to go back to the Triadverse, to revisit the Theo who deceived us all.
(Or the Londonverse, where my other self drank too much, partly to kill the memory of Mom, Dad, and Josie dying in a horrible accident. Or the Oceanverse, which was actually a pretty cool place, but where I am probably criminally liable for wrecking a submarine. The Russiaverse—where I was the Grand Duchess Margarita, and Lieutenant Paul Markov was my personal guard and secret love—that world, I would return to. I haven’t, though. Going there again would mean revisiting that Paul’s death.)
But Conley knew something we didn’t. He knew we’d be compelled to return to the Triadverse soon, that we’d break the truce no matter what.
He knew what was about to happen to Theo.
3
“YOU TRICKED US,” I SAY TO CONLEY AS THE THREE OF US stand together in this stone room, in an Italian castle a world away. Paul looks from Wyatt Conley to me in confusion. “Saying you’d let us ‘think it over’—”
“I did, didn’t I? You had weeks.” Conley straightens the red robes he wears as if he’s proud of them. “Then Paul Markov came to my dimension, even though you were warned it would be dangerous. He’s paying the price. It’s as simple as that.”
My dimension, he said. That means this is the Triadverse Conley I’m dealing with. Not that it makes much difference; the two Conleys work together, forming a conspiracy of one.
“Cardinal Conley—I don’t understand.” This world’s Paul looks hopelessly bewildered, and no wonder. “What law have I broken?”
Conley smiles, all grace and benevolence. “This is between me and your lady fair, Father Paul. You can speak with her later. At the moment, she and I need to have a private conversation.”
Paul steps between us. It’s more obvious than ever how much taller he is than Conley, how much stronger. “You can’t blame her for my weakness. I alone am responsible.”
Is he amazing in every universe? I place one hand on Paul’s back, a small touch meant to say thank you.
However, Conley remains in faux-kindly mode. “She won’t be punished. More than that, I hear her parents have been condemned for their studies by some of the local priests. Tonight I shall tell Her Holiness to officially declare them under her protection. You see? All will be well. Now go.”
When Paul hesitates anyway, I murmur, “It’s all right. I’ll talk to you soon. Con . . . the cardinal and I don’t have much to say to each other.”
At last Paul turns to go, with one last look at me filled with such longing that my heart turns over. No sooner has he walked out, however, than Conley starts to laugh. “Oh, Marguerite. You and I have so much to say.”
“What did you do to him?” I demand. “I tracked Paul here from your universe. I gave him a reminder, and the Firebird seems like it worked—”
“Inconvenient, isn’t it? The way most people forget themselves between dimensions. You don’t appreciate your gift.”
That’s how it is for virtually everyone who travels through the multiverse. Without constant reminders, they quickly become silent, passive witnesses as those dimensions’ selves take over again. For Mom and Dad’s purposes, this doesn’t matter; the travelers remember everything they experienced through their “other selves” in each world. As long as you have your Firebird to remind you, you can still get back home and analyze what you learned.
But as I discovered on my first voyage, there are serious flaws in this procedure. For instance, you can lose a Firebird. It can be broken or stolen. And if you haven’t got your Firebird to remind you of yourself, then you’ll remain in that alternate dimension, within that other self—unconscious, paralyzed, and trapped—forever.
That’s why it would help to have a “perfect traveler,” someone who always remembered who she was, who remained in control no matter what.
So Triad turned me into one.
I still don’t exactly understand what it was that was done to me. The device Triad loaned us seemed like any other piece of scientific equipment, and all I felt when the conversion happened was a moment of dizziness. Paul and my parents have explained it to me a dozen times, but it’s the kind of explanation you need a graduate degree in physics to fully understand.
All I know is that I can go to any dimension and remain in total control. Where to go, who to see, what to do: It’s entirely up to me. I also know that you can create only one traveler like me in any given universe. (Apparently, creating more than one exception to the laws of physics can seriously destabilize reality.)
But I still don’t understand why Wyatt Conley makes such a big deal out of it. “Other people can travel through dimensions! Okay, so, it’s more of a hassle. It doesn’t matter. You’ll use Nightthief on anyone—you proved that much. And you can travel as well as I can, so you can run your own creepy errands! So why do you keep after me?”
“Important work is coming.” Conley’s smile fades. “Tricky work, some of it in universes I can’t reach. Triad needs you on our side, and soon. Be fair—I tried gentler persuasion, didn’t I? If you work with me, you’ll be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. But it looks as though more extreme measures are necessary to get you on board.”
“Like kidnapping Paul into this dimension, just like you did my dad?”
To my surprise, Conley shakes his head. The flickering orange light of the torches casts eerie shadows on his face. “Not exactly. This time, I’ve given you a challenge.”
“You mean, because the reminder didn’t work.” How was Conley able to prevent my Paul from waking up? The Firebird seems to be functioning normally, except for this strange, unique reading I don’t understand.
Conley walks to the arched window and looks out, though in a world without electricity the view isn’t much to speak of. Moonlight paints the city dimly, a sprawl of buildings beneath the high hill of the castle. He says, “I told you already, but I suspect you were too upset to listen.”