Wicked was gone.
“Paul, are you okay?” I reached toward his arm, and Paul jerked back from my touch. For a moment we could only stare at each other. Then I realized I was still holding the blade, now stained with his blood.
Paul had reacted instinctively. Intelligently, given that I was still holding the weapon that had injured him. But seeing him pull away from me sent a chill through my veins.
Already he’d been questioning himself, refusing to believe in our love.
Now he couldn’t believe in me, either.
4
“IF ONLY GETTING RID OF THE . . . IMPOSTORS SOLVED OUR problems,” Mom said a few minutes later. I was kneeling in front of Paul, who sat on the sofa as I bandaged the gash on his forearm. Dad, meanwhile, was trying to get Theo to drink a cup of tea. (My father is English, so he thinks tea solves everything.) “But based on what you’re telling us—the other two dimensions of Triad are now switching to a new strategy, one far more dangerous than before.”
“They’re willing to destroy entire dimensions, every one that contains a sliver of Josie’s soul,” I said. “Even this one. All to get Josie back. I still can’t believe you guys would ever do that.”
“I can,” my father said quietly. Mom gave him a look, but she folded her arms across her chest, the way she did when she got defensive, as Dad continued. “That bout of meningitis you had when you were two, Marguerite . . . the disease works fast. You were in a pediatric ICU, and the doctors told us we could lose you. The state of mind I was in then . . .” He trailed off, and when he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I would’ve made a deal with the devil. Any deal, any devil.”
I remembered my mother’s rage at Paul in a universe where he had only injured me. That alone had been enough to turn all her love for him into hate. My parents pride themselves on being rational, logical people, like the scientists they are, but maybe that’s made them more vulnerable to strong emotion. The same grief that wounds the rest of us deeply is something they can’t even begin to bear. No wonder Josie’s death had driven them mad.
“We have to act immediately.” Paul hadn’t looked me in the eyes since I’d become myself again. His head remained slightly bowed, as though he were too ashamed to lift it. “To do something to protect the dimensions in danger of being destroyed. Triad needs a perfect traveler’s cooperation to accomplish their plan quickly—but even without Marguerite, they have the Triadverse version of Wyatt Conley.”
“It didn’t sound to me like Conley was going to do any of this personally,” I said. Being a perfect traveler could be dangerous, as I’d learned. Conley talked a big game, but he preferred to protect himself and risk others. “And what does ‘slamming doors’ mean? Conley mentioned it, and so did she, but I don’t get what they’re referring to.”
My dad sighed. “Unfortunately, neither do we.”
“Wait a second.” Theo frowned as he stared down at the rainbow table. He lifted his cup of tea from the papers laid across its multicolored surface. “We have some very, very interesting equations here.”
Mom walked to his side. “What do you mean?”
“Not exactly a road map—but maybe a hint to the kinds of places they’re trying to go. The universes they’ll try to kill first.” Theo grabbed the pencil his doppelganger had left and picked up the work mid-equation.
“We know what they’ll all have in common—they’ll be the dimensions that version of Josie had visited before,” I said. “Those are the ones where the splinters of her soul are . . . buried, I guess.”
The splinters were too small to be collected with a Firebird, they’d told me. Nothing of Josie’s consciousness remained intact. She was dead, truly dead, and yet the Home Office had traced a bloody path to resurrection. By destroying the worlds in which Josie’s soul had existed, they hoped the splinters would slingshot back to their own universe—until finally enough splinters would come together to restore Josie body and soul.
Though if Paul was still so damaged from being splintered into four parts, what would Josie be after shattering into a thousand pieces?
“I’ve been thinking about the theoretical implications.” Paul sounded grateful to be dealing with math again rather than messy human emotions. “Triad will want to destroy source vectors as well—to take out multiple dimensions at once.”
All these years surrounded by scientists, you’d think I would’ve already learned every bit of technojargon I would ever need. Apparently not. I said, “What are source vectors?”
“Universes that generated many other universes valid for Triad’s purposes,” Mom said. No doubt my expression gave away my confusion, because she stopped and backed up. “For instance—in our world, and the Triadverse, and several others we’ve seen, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. If you could find the one core universe where that event originated, and destroy that universe, you would in effect destroy all universes in which that event took place. That core universe would be a source vector. Do you see?”
“And you must understand, the timing of the significant event is completely irrelevant,” Dad cut in. “Dimensions wouldn’t just collapse. They would be . . . unmade. Even if the event took place centuries or millennia ago, destroy that source vector here and now, and it would unravel all the way back to the beginning of time.”
“Shortly after the Big Bang,” Mom interjected. We were literally talking about the apocalypse, but she still needed to be precise about when time began.
Every choice, however trivial, made a new quantum reality—another dimension unique in the multiverse. Each of the many worlds I’d visited so far, every other Marguerite I’d been: All of them would be demolished in an instant if someone found the choice back in time that led to my being born. Without that choice, that universe, none of the other Marguerites would exist. They would be unmade along with their dimensions, completely.
“Yes,” I said. “I get it. So the Home Office wants to destroy all the worlds Josie got lost in and some, uh, source vector worlds. How do we stop them? Wait. Hang on. How do they even do that? How do you destroy an entire dimension?”
The four scientists in the room exchanged glances. Their expressions looked almost . . . guilty.