“Have you ever eaten Pringles?”
It was such a non sequitur that at first I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Pringles? Like the potato chips?”
“Yes,” he said earnestly. “They’re very good.”
“I know. I’ve had Pringles. I mean, obviously. But this is the first time anyone’s ever used them as part of a cosmological theory.”
Paul hugged me more tightly. “They all have to be shaped the same to fit into the can. If they were too irregular, they couldn’t be packed together.”
“You mean—dimensions are like potato chips in a can.” It began to make sense to me, which was either a breakthrough or possibly proof I’d been hanging around physicists way too long. “They have to be shaped the same, at least a little, or they couldn’t co-exist.”
“Exactly. See, we might make a scientist of you yet.”
“You wish.”
“No, I don’t. I would never want you to be anyone but yourself.” Paul kissed the back of my neck again, slowly this time, so that I felt the warmth of his breath on my skin. I took his hand and slid it up my body, inviting him to explore. It seemed like we had become our own tiny universe of heat and light and love, needing nothing else. . . .
And now Paul and I stand here, terrible bleak tension between us because he no longer has faith that our fate brings us together.
But if he can no longer believe in us, I want him to at least believe in himself.
I step to his side and keep my voice low. “You stepped away from Romola, okay? You thought of me first. The splintering didn’t get you.”
“I only stopped because Romola threatened you.” Paul stares at an empty corner, again avoiding my gaze. “I nearly committed murder.”
“Nearly doesn’t count! You hung on and controlled yourself. You can win this fight.”
“But it will always be a fight. Always.” He shakes his head as though he were about to pronounce a death sentence.
“And you can always win.” I put one hand on his arm.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He steps away from me. Maybe the breakthrough is just too new, or maybe his despair runs even deeper than I thought.
As badly as I want to make things right with Paul, we have a multiverse to save.
“You’ve input the coordinates for this important dimension?” I take my Firebird back, determined to carry on. “I’m cleared to go?”
“I’ll follow as soon as I can. If I can,” Paul promises. Still he doesn’t meet my eyes.
The Grand Duchess Margarita of all the Russias watches us in dismay. Although I see her eagerness to speak, she has far too proper manners to ever intrude. How angry she must feel, seeing me blow my chance to be with my Paul after she tragically lost hers.
But now I’m thinking about Lieutenant Markov, whose memory always makes me cry, and I can’t afford to break down. So I just look around the room at my other selves, whether visitors from other dimensions or this world’s clones. “These might not be the best circumstances, but I’m glad I met all of you. Seeing all these lives we could lead, and all the different ways things turn out—”
“It proves anything is possible,” says the grand duchess.
I nod at her, then look again at Paul, who finally returns my gaze in the instant before I hit my controls and—
—I wobble, because I’ve slammed into a world where I’m currently on top of a very tall ladder. I manage to recover my balance in time, saving me from tumbling to the tiled floor below. But I’m even more afraid. Because the one thing I know about this dimension is that somewhere, very close, a bomb just went off.
The only other time I’ve been near a massive explosion was during an air raid in the Warverse. One of the fighter planes dropped a bomb nearly on top of our shelter, and for a couple of minutes after that, the only thing I could hear was a dull roar, almost exactly like the one ringing in my ears now.
Did Wicked get here before me after all? Did she set off an explosive device, trying to frame me as a terrorist? But she hasn’t had time for anything that elaborate, and besides—I don’t smell smoke. I don’t see any damage. A few people walk along on the tiled floor beneath my ladder, all of them headed in one direction but in no particular hurry. Their clothes look roughly modern, if kind of drab. A drop cloth is spattered with red, but the drops look more like paint than blood.
How can nobody care about the bomb? I look to my other side and see Paul’s face, larger than life on the wall by my shoulder, the paint still wet. Clipped to the ladder is a box of paints, and I realize I’m wearing a smock.
From the corner of my eye I catch some movement and look down again to see a middle-aged man holding up a paintbrush. He looks irritated, and he has a blue-gray stripe across one cheek. I must have dropped my paintbrush on him. And he’s way more interested in that than the freakin’ bomb.
The man waves at me again, signaling for me to come down. But he doesn’t want me to evacuate. I can tell he just wants me to get my brush back.
Usually I try to piece together the most important clues about a universe on my own, but this time, I’m going to need some help. So I say to the man below, “What’s going on?”
But I don’t say it with my voice.
Instead, automatically and unconsciously drawing on the language information rooted deeply in this Marguerite’s brain, I respond in sign language.
Oh. I’m deaf.
23
I THOUGHT BEING DEAF WOULD BE . . . QUIETER.
The man beneath the ladder signs back, but badly. “Brush. You. Get.”
Shaking off my bewilderment and the dull roar in my ears, I head back down the ladder. My shoes are kind of clunky—lace-up boots—but not so much that I have to worry about falling. When I get to the bottom, this man hands me the brush. But then he smiles and shrugs, like you do when you realize you’re in a bad mood for no reason.
“Work stop. Night. Goodbye.” After this primitive farewell, he begins packing up brushes and such, even heading up the ladder to collect the paints, which must belong to him. I back away from the dropcloth, looking up at the mural above us. Yes, that’s Paul’s face, but I’m painting him as one of a group of hardy peasants, marching through a field of wheat, being led by Vladimir Lenin to a glorious tomorrow.