Even more earnestly, Conley says, “And at the home office, I’ll also give you the coordinates for the final splinter of Paul’s soul—for the universe where you can put him together again. No errands to run there; that dimension isn’t one of my problems. You can just go get Paul and bring him home. Sound good?”
I imagine reawakening Paul, holding him in my arms, and telling him I’ll never let him go. I need that even more than Conley will guess—more than I can ever let him know. “It sounds . . . necessary.”
There’s that smirk again. “Is that a yes?”
Someday, I’m going to make Wyatt Conley sorry he ever screwed around with us. For now I have to play along. “Yes. Now give me what I need to get the job done.”
He holds out his hands to gesture at the stone walls and flaming torches. “I’ll give you the data, but I need a little more sophisticated setup than this. Shall we return to your home turf? I can transmit the first coordinates from there.”
My dimension, he means. I’m relieved to hear him suggest it. Mom and Dad deserve to know what’s going on. By now they must be frantic. “Okay.”
Conley takes his own Firebird from the collar of his robe. With its intricate design and dull bronze color, his Firebird looks . . . mysterious. More antique than cutting edge. It seems to belong to this dimension more than our own. “Shall we?”
“I want to say goodbye to Paul. This Paul.”
“You get so sentimental about the duplicates,” Conley says, shaking his head. “But I won’t tease you about it. My other self is just as bad.”
That’s definitely not the vibe I’ve gotten from our world’s Conley, but whatever. “Besides, you need to give that order protecting my parents. From the ‘witchcraft’ mobs. Right?”
“Oh, right! You got it.” He thumps the side of his head, like Duh. “I’ll talk to Her Holiness right away. Pope Martha the Third. Rumor has it she puts our Borgias to shame.” As he begins to walk away, Conley adds, “Listen, someday, when you’re on board with this and we’ve been working together for a while, you and I will look back on this and laugh.”
I don’t dignify that with an answer. Instead, I wait for him to leave, and then search for Father Paul.
As I guessed, he’s been waiting. Paul kneels in a small room off to the side that turns out to be a private chapel. A mural of Jesus raising Lazarus covers one wall, perspective wonky and faces stylized—the art, too, looks older than the Renaissance. They haven’t rediscovered the techniques of the ancient world yet; this civilization is still crawling away from the Dark Ages. Light flickers from a handful of tallow candles in iron stands. Paul—Father Paul—is praying, but when I walk in he quickly murmurs something in Latin, crosses himself, and turns his face to me. “Is everything well? The cardinal will take care of your family?”
“I hope so.” This chapel has no pews, only kneelers. So I go to my knees beside him; it’s the only way to be close enough.
Paul glances at the doorway, no doubt worried we’ll be seen. “You could claim sanctuary here. The sisters would keep you safe until your parents fall under the cardinal’s protection.”
Nuns? I’ll be spending the night in a convent? This world’s Marguerite doesn’t get to have nearly enough fun.
She’ll be near her Paul, though. That’s enough. All I want now is to be back with mine.
I bring my hand to Paul’s face and brush my fingers along his cheek. He draws in a sharp breath. Have they even kissed? Paul tentatively covers my hand with his, so that I’m cradling the side of his face. If I were to kiss him right now, he wouldn’t resist. He’d kiss me back so passionately that—well, this chapel might be deconsecrated.But I stole the Grand Duchess Marguerite’s first and only night with Lieutenant Markov. I won’t steal any more firsts with Paul. Each me should get to experience that moment.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” I say, to myself as much as to him. “You and I—we’ll figure it out.”
“Ours is not an easy path.”
Paul’s old-fashioned, elegant phrasing reminds me of Lieutenant Markov, which reminds me of falling in love with Paul in the first place, and now I can’t take it anymore. I have to go home; the journey to save my Paul has to begin.
“The path isn’t easy,” I tell him. “But we’re walking it together.”
It’s true in every world, everywhere. I have to believe that.
I take hold of my Firebird and Paul’s—the two of them around my neck, one of them carrying a splinter of Paul’s soul—and leap back home.
I fully expected my parents to freak out about what Wyatt Conley had done and the bargain we’d struck. What I didn’t expect is that they would flat-out refuse to let me go.
“Dad—” I pull my hair back with both hands, trying to calm myself. “You know we don’t have any other choice.”
“We don’t know that,” Dad insists. “We have to at least try to get Paul out of this ourselves. We tracked him to the—Medievalverse, didn’t we? So we could figure out a way to trace the other splinters. We don’t need Conley’s bloody coordinates.”
“We already have the coordinates.” Theo sits on the sofa in a plaid shirt and jeans, a pale shadow of his usual self. His plastic hospital bracelet still hangs around one wrist. “Why wouldn’t we use them?”
The data packet arrived from Triad Corporation a couple of hours ago, just after I returned. While we can already see the first coordinates, the ones that will lead us to the second two dimensions have to be “unlocked”—by storing data that proves I’ve done Conley’s dirty work. Each betrayal wins me one more dimension, one more piece of Paul’s soul.
My parents don’t even want to download the information into the Firebirds. Dad insists, “We can manage on our own.”
Theo groans. “Come on, Henry. We didn’t even know splintering was possible until a couple of days ago. Tracing those splinters in alternate dimensions? We could be months away from cracking that.”
“Or days,” Mom says. “The only reason we haven’t solved the puzzle is because we haven’t yet tried. Obviously our counterparts in another universe managed to master this; if they hadn’t, Conley wouldn’t have the technology to splinter Paul in the first place. What they did, we can do. We only need to begin.”
Dad nods, becoming encouraged. “And if Triad could think of a treatment for Theo’s condition, well, then, so can we.”
“We’re not physicians, Henry.” My mother glanced at the bottle of Nightthief on the shelves, the one they’d hardly begun to study. “Still, we must make an attempt. Obeying Conley has to be our last resort.”
“This is the last resort!” I don’t argue with my parents that much anymore, but right now I feel like I could scream. “Don’t you get it? Paul has been torn apart. If I don’t do this, we might never get him back. If even one of Paul’s other selves dies, then—then we’ve lost him forever.”
Mom’s expression is more sympathetic, but she still shakes her head. “That is a risk, yes. But a fairly remote one given his age and health.”