I wanted a guard at my door, not a battery of medical tests. Still, I can’t help smiling weakly at Mom. It feels good to know she’d go to bat for me, even when I’m behaving weirdly, even when the doctors are telling her to let it go. Not all parents support you that much; Paul’s never have, never would. I got lucky with Henry Caine and Sophia Kovalenka.
Dr. Singh capitulates with a small smile. “I suppose it can’t do any harm, and I don’t have any physicals to run until tomorrow. Lie down, Marguerite. This won’t take a second.”
Obediently I take my place on the medical table. Instead of the paper covering I’m used to, here the table is sleeved in clear plastic, which must be sterilized after each use. What kind of tests are they about to run? I’ve never been a baby about shots or blood draws, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy getting poked with needles. Or maybe they’ll do something more dramatic. Would a space station have an MRI machine?
But Dr. Singh simply takes out what looks like a metal headband, thick and elaborate, and slides it over my head so that the two points press in on my temples. The band itself doesn’t quite touch my skin. I feel a warm, electric sort of prickle—not pleasant, but not painful either—and readouts begin to stream along nearby screens. Dr. Singh watches them, nodding and at ease, until she gasps.
“What do you see?” Dad says sharply. “Dear God. When Sophie talked about a tumor, I thought—”
“It’s not that.” Dr. Singh steps closer to the screen, looks back at me, then stares at the screen again. “There’s no tumor. Body chemistry is largely within normal parameters. But Marguerite’s brain activity, particularly in the precuneus—that’s a section of the parietal cortex, the core seat of our consciousness—well, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Mom rises to stand by Dr. Singh as my father’s hand closes reassuringly over mine. My mother says, “Can you draw any conclusions? Even speculate?”
Dr. Singh shakes her head, not in negation but in wonder. “The levels of activity in the precuneus are higher than I’ve ever seen. Higher than should even be possible.”
“Is that good or bad?” Dad squeezes my hand tighter.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Singh says. “It looks like—almost like—no. That can’t be.”
“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” Mom’s tone goes firm. “Say the first thing on your mind, doctor. The first conclusion you came to.”
After a moment, Dr. Singh sighs. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was more than one mind at work inside Marguerite’s brain.”
Holy crap. They found me.
9
FOR A SPLIT SECOND I CONSIDER TELLING THEM THE TRUTH. Hi. I’m a visitor from a parallel dimension, an alternate version of your daughter hitching a ride in her body for a while. I’m here to protect you from yet another version of your daughter, who just tried to kill her. See? It’s a very simple explanation, really.
Yeah, no. For now, I’m playing it safe.
“What could that mean?” I ask Dr. Singh, trying to sound natural.
She gapes at the readouts. “I have no idea. This is completely unlike any results I’ve ever seen. Nobody’s even theorized something like this before.”
“Is it dangerous?” Dad has wrapped both of his hands around one of mine, probably meaning to comfort me, but I think he’s the one who needs reassurance.
“If you’d shown me these readings on their own, I might have said yes.” Dr. Singh looks back at me and shrugs. “But Marguerite is awake, alert, apparently healthy, and displaying no stranger symptoms than some short-term memory loss. So while this clearly has some deleterious effects, and we need to keep an eye on her . . . her mental function is more or less intact.”
“I take it monitoring is the next step.” My mother is trying very hard to act impartial about this, but her hand trembles slightly as she tucks a loose curl behind one of her ears. “We wait to see whether this activity—spikes, or diminishes, and so forth.”
“Exactly,” the doctor says. “We keep her under observation, twenty-four/seven.” Then she frowns. “I keep using that phrase even though it doesn’t apply up here. . . .”
That makes Dad chuckle, and even Mom smiles a little. Good—I don’t want them to be too frightened. The weird activity in their daughter’s brain will resolve itself as soon as I take off with the Firebird. If Wicked ever returns for a second murder attempt, they’ll cue into her weird behavior right away.
Mission accomplished.
Except—how do I get back down to Earth?
The answer is obvious, in one sense. I return to the sweet, sweet ground I will never take for granted again the next time I use the Firebird. Chances are that whatever dimension lies ahead, I’ll find myself back on terra firma. But I’m trapped here until I get a moment to myself to try to leap away.
Part of me wants to obsess about what Wicked might be doing in the next world over. She nearly launched me into the absolute zero of space this time, so how could I even guess what might be waiting ahead? But I’m too freaked out by memories of the world I left behind.
Theo killed me.
He strangled me with my own scarf, his body on top of mine, so he had to have felt every convulsion, heard every choking sound, and eventually felt the other Marguerite go limp beneath him as she finally died. As awful as I feel about what happened to my Londonverse counterpart, the death my other self faced in the Egyptverse was even more terrible. Every time I let my mind wander for even an instant, memory jerks me back to that moment, to the visceral sensation of Theo’s fingers tightening around my throat. It’s like an adrenaline shot to the heart or an electric shock, every single time.
Sometimes the memory of horror is worse than the horror itself. You only live through the trauma once, but a memory can last forever. Memory never has to let you go.
I think this one’s going to keep its hold on me for a very long time.
How am I supposed to beat Wicked? I can never catch up to her. Do I have to just chase her endlessly, fixing the disasters she created?
Yes. I do. Until we have another plan, the best I can do is help to save these other Marguerites. I couldn’t rescue Londonverse or Egyptverse . . . but Spaceverse is fine.