Ten Thousand Skies Above You (25 page)

“Do your worst.”

As I rise to my feet, he takes my hand. For one moment, I remember everything he told me last night, and how much we are to each other in so many worlds I don't yet know.
“Do you really think this Theo might find this Marguerite again?”

“Maybe.”

I find myself hoping he will.

Within half an hour, I'm in the car with Vladimir, leaning my head against his shoulder as we head to the train station. I need to go—I'm ready to go—but it's hard leaving my brother for good.

“Do you blame me?” I murmur. “For loving Lieutenant Markov?”

“Sometimes our hearts are wilder than we know.”

“But you fell in love with the ideal girl. A Polish princess, no less.”

Vladimir's grin can be nearly as rakish as Theo's, sometimes. “I'd love Natalia if she were a chambermaid. When you meet her, you'll see.”

“Can't wait. Thanks, by the way. For everything.”

“That's what family is for.”

Goodbye, Vladimir,
I think. In my mind I imagine them all: Peter, Katya, this world's version of my father. And the baby, too, whose face I'll never see.
Goodbye.

Time to stop looking back. Time to leap forward. Time to rescue Paul.

MY HAND CLOSES AROUND THE FIREBIRD, PRESET TO THE
coordinates Wyatt Conley gave us for the home office, and—

—I slam into myself, rocking backward into a broad, thinly padded chair. After the initial dizzy rush of traveling through dimensions, I immediately realize three things. One, the way I'm sitting in this chair, arms and legs braced.

My other self was prepared for this. Waiting.

Two, Theo is nowhere to be seen.

Three, I'm in some kind of office or lobby in what must be the top floors of the tallest skyscraper in the world. No, taller than anything in my world—or the Triadverse.

I thought Conley was bringing us back to the home office. Instead, he's thrown us into a dimension I've never seen before.

Where the hell am I?

The room I sit in could be found in any corporate
headquarters, if that corporation wanted to come across as chilly and forbidding. Brushed metal tiles shine dully on the walls; the large black chair I'm in, like the rest of the furniture around me, forms sharp dark angles and sits a bit too close to the floor.

But the city stretching out before me looks nothing like any city I've ever seen. Nothing like any city in the world I know. This has to be the hundredth story of this building, at least—but outside are dozens of buildings nearly as tall. When I went to the Londonverse, I saw strange, futuristic skyscrapers with spires and angles in every direction. At the time I found it intimidating. Now I look out at structures that all form the same darkly mirrored rectangles across the sky, the small windows giving off only the tiniest pinpricks of light. The buildings are so tall, so tightly pressed together, that I can't see the ground at all. Brilliantly colored company logos stretch down most of the buildings in letters that must be fifteen stories tall, and yet the black hulks of the high-rises themselves dominate the view. The sliver of sky above it all glows a pale, febrile red—cinnabar, I think, or rose madder. That must be dawn.

My body is once again its usual bony self, my belly no longer curved. The watery sensation in my abdomen I'd begun to recognize as pregnancy has vanished. It's not like I didn't expect it to happen, but for a moment I can only feel that sudden absence.

“I see our visitor has arrived,” says a cool female voice. As soon as I register the English accent, I recognize who it is.

“Romola.” I turn to see her standing near my chair, wearing clothes that look subtly, imperceptibly off—the long-sleeved shirt and pants are made of a fabric that seems stiff, even though the cut is formfitting, and everything from her collar to her shoes is the exact same shade of midnight blue. Belatedly I realize I'm wearing something very similar, but all in black.

“You recognize me?” She smiles with what appears to be real pleasure. “I'm not placed well in most of the important dimensions. I so rarely get the chance to travel.”

“Where am I?”

“Precisely where you ought to be. Do you need some coffee? Our Marguerite didn't sleep a wink.”

I do feel tired, actually. But I don't want anything she's offering me, coffee or food or anything else. It feels like a fairy tale, one of the old scary ones: If you drink or eat in the mysterious realm, you never get to go home. “I don't understand. Conley promised me that if I did what he wanted, he'd show me to the final dimension where Paul is hidden.”

Or—is this the place? Instinct tells me it isn't.

“Naturally Mr. Conley intends to fulfill his bargain. After your meeting, of course.”

“The meeting was supposed to be in the home office.”

Romola laughs. “Where do you think you are?”

At that moment, I see the faint green glow reflecting on the skyscraper nearest us, and I recognize it as Triad's trademark emerald.

I thought the Conley I'd been dealing with—the Theo
that screwed us all over so badly—I thought their universe, the Triadverse, was the home office. But the core of the evil, the plot to dominate the multiverse: It all began
here.

Then I realize how stupid we've been not to guess that another dimension was in on it, running the whole thing. We should have known that from the beginning. Because Triad means
three.

Romola turns brisk. “We should get started. Sure you won't take a coffee? No? Then I'll take you to the conference room now.”

“Wait. Where's Theo?” Did Conley even give us the same coordinates? Maybe Theo's already rescuing Paul. Or maybe Conley sent him off in another direction entirely, or into oblivion.

She reacts to Theo's name in a way I wouldn't have expected. Her lips press together in disapproval. “You needn't trouble yourself on Theo Beck's account.”

“I'll make that decision on my own, thanks. Where is he? Did Conley kidnap him?” Dread swirls inside me. Does Conley intend to give me back Paul only after he's abducted and splintered Theo in turn? Will I spend the rest of my life working for Triad to protect the people I love?

But Romola shakes her head. “Mr. Beck is entirely beyond our control.”

I'm not sure what that means, but I like the sound of it. I imagine him down in the stark metal city, looking up at this green-tinted building and flipping it off.

As for me, I appeared within a Marguerite who seemed
to be prepared. She was waiting—willing—to let me enter her body and take her over, right here in the heart of Triad headquarters. Slowly, I say, “In this dimension, I know about all this, don't I? About Triad's plans.”

Romola smiles at me, fond and yet condescending, like someone talking to a very small child. “You've worked here for a while now.”

Somehow, Conley is able to force me to do his bidding in this world, too.

I've spent all this time wondering whether the constants in the multiverse are destinies, or souls, or love. Now I realize the one constant in my infinite lives might be Conley's inescapable control.

Paul and I talked about this once—the constants in the universe. The things that change, and the things that don't.

Back in early February, we drove to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. The drive to Muir Woods always terrifies me; the only way up there is a narrow, winding road that seems to be barely hanging on to the hillside. Paul kept both hands on the wheel of my parents' new car, eyes locked on the road while I gripped the sides of the seat like that would help. At one point I laughed shakily. “This probably isn't as scary for you. I mean, you go rock climbing. You're used to heights.”

“Yes, but when I'm climbing, I'm in considerably closer contact with the terrain and can judge my safety accordingly. Here, we have to trust a car with which I'm relatively unfamiliar.” His eyes narrowed as we neared another curve.
“Our levels of fear are probably identical.”

“You really didn't have to tell me that.”

He was silent, trying once again to figure out the rules of human conversation. “I meant—we'll be okay.”

I nodded, and tried to believe him.

Of course, we
were
okay. We got to the top in time for lunch, ate cold sesame noodles we'd brought along, and then went wandering through the forest hand in hand. (The way his large hand almost covered mine—it made me feel safer than anything else I could imagine. More than that—
treasured
. Like Paul held on because he never wanted me to drift away.)

Standing among the redwoods does strange and beautiful things to your brain. You're reminded of your own insignificance in the vast universe by these mammoth trees towering overhead, their leaves so far up that they seem to form a second sky. These trees live hundreds upon hundreds of years; some of the ones growing in Muir Woods today sprouted back in the Middle Ages. They'll still be there long after the entire civilization I know has changed into something I wouldn't recognize. Yet you don't feel meaningless. Instead, you remember that you're part of these trees' history—part of the whole story of this world—connected in ways you can't even guess.

“Is that what you see?” Paul said to me after I explained this. We walked up to one of the tallest trees; I let go of his hand to press my palms against the reddish bark. “The trees as a . . . bridge to infinity?”

“Yeah.” I ducked my head. “Maybe it's the artist in me.”

“You see more than I do. It's your gift.”

I smiled at him as I kept walking around the enormous circumference of the tree. “What about you? When you look at the redwoods, what do they make you think about?”

“The fundamental symmetry and asymmetry of the universe.”

When I hear something like this, from Paul or my parents or anyone else, I know not to ask any more questions unless I'm absolutely positive I want to hear the crazy-complicated answer. With Paul, I usually do. “What do you mean?”

He lifted his hand, two fingers mirroring the lines of two redwoods in the near distance. “Every one of these trees has a unique genetic code. They differ from each other in countless ways—the number of branches, the pattern in the bark, their root systems, so on. Yet they mirror each other. Parallel each other. The commonality overcomes the differences.”

“And that's how the universe works?” I thought of all the different selves I've met, all the different paths that have led me to Paul. “We mirror each other over and over again?”

He nodded. “Down to the subatomic level. Quarks come in pairs—always—and if you try to destroy one, another will instantly appear to take its place and maintain balance.”

Quarks are smaller than atoms. Smaller than electrons. I swear, that is all you ever have to know about quarks. But when Paul said it like that, the subject caught my interest. “Like, the universe
knows
the mirrored pairs have to exist?”

“Yes, exactly.”

One thing I've learned from my parents is that the physical universe seems to understand a lot, in ways you'd think would require consciousness. Information between particles appears to travel faster than light. I knew better than to ask Paul about it, though, because that's a mystery not even he can solve. I like that it's a mystery—that the universe always knows something we won't.

“So symmetry is one of the fundamental forces of the universe.” I kept pacing around the tree. Paul, standing in place, vanished behind the trunk as I wound my way to the other side. “Unbreakable.”

“No. Not unbreakable.”

“But you just said—”

“Physics sometimes violates its own rules.” From the pitch of Paul's voice, I could tell he was looking upward at the branches swaying in the wind. “Luckily for us. Or else the world wouldn't be here.”

“Okay, you have to explain that one.”

“One of the symmetries in the universe should be between matter and antimatter,” he says. “But you know what happens when they meet.”

This much I understand. “They annihilate each other.”

“So if the universe contained exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, it would self-destruct. Actually, it would have self-destructed almost immediately after forming. At some point at the very beginning of creation, the symmetry broke. Nobody knows how or why. That break allowed our universe to come into being.”

I came around the curve of the tree and peeked over to see Paul. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his waterproof jacket; his thrift-store jeans showed wear that had nothing to do with being “distressed.” The vivid dark greens of the forest outlined his strong profile, and his gray eyes remained focused—not on the leaves, I realized, but the one patch of blue he could see through them.

I don't know why that moment was so special, but it was. That image is one of the first I remember every time I think of how I feel about him. It was like I loved him
so much
in that instant, like he was part of my blood and my bones.

“So that's why the whole world is here. Asymmetry saved us,” I said as I walked back toward him. “But symmetry keeps the universe moving forward.”

“More or less.” Paul turned toward me and smiled, holding out one hand.

Instead of taking it, I pulled his arm around me so I could snuggle against his side. “So it's symmetry that keeps bringing the same people together in world after world? That makes sure you and I always find each other?

“Maybe,” he said. His expression clouded over. At the time I thought he was lost in thought about subatomic particles or the seconds following the Big Bang. Now I wonder whether he was thinking about the fact that the universe always seems to make sure we run into Conley, too.

Romola and I ride downward in an oddly cube-shaped elevator. Long narrow screens halve each wall, and each one
flashes the exact same Triad Corporation motto I know from two other worlds:
Everyplace. Everytime. Everyone.

At home, the motto is in an attractive serif font that's supposed to look quirky and creative. Here, it's in block letters you'd see on signs in a prison. In this dimension—the Home Office—nobody's even pretending this is about reaching out and providing fun new products for people to love. The motto's real meaning shows through. It's about control.

“Why isn't Conley's office on the top floor?” Most CEOs get the prime real estate for themselves—at least, in my extensive experience of watching TV shows where corporate titans always seem to have a spectacular view.

Romola gives me a look. “Not very secure, is it? The principals of Triad Corporation work from the very center of the building, of course.”

“What do you mean, secure?”

“Market-share rivals could launch an assault at any time. Of course we
use
the upper rooms—the better to keep an eye on the competition—but that's no place for vital officers of the company.”

Other companies might
attack
? “If—if some other company tried that—I mean, they'd go to jail, right?”