He means Wicked, not me. Her Firebird has been programmed for destruction from the beginning.
“That signal has already gone out to her, and she’ll be taking action immediately. Of course, this increases the damage we’ve had to do, but I know you’ll forgive me when we have our Josie back again.” Conley smiles. “Until then.”
The screen goes black, leaving us in darkness again, except for the flickering light from the scrolling data on my mom’s terminal.
“Bloody hell.” Dad actually sounds like himself. “We ought to have anticipated this. He certainly did.”
“But he can’t get Josie back!” I protest. “It’s impossible with her body gone.”
“Wyatt didn’t know that when he set up this failsafe,” my mother explains. “He must have done this months ago. Maybe even years.”
Dad and Mom both just sit there, slumped, as if in defeat. They still don’t care about the other dimensions, not compared to their grief. Although they are no longer actively trying to destroy those worlds, they won’t fight to save them either.
But I’m not going to stop fighting. Not now, not ever.
“We have to save them.” When my parents stare at me, I continue, “Do you have another Firebird? If you tell me what dimensions to go to, what to do, I can still protect them. Still tell them about the stabilizers, all of that. Just tell me you’ve got a Firebird!”
Mom seems to awaken from her stupor. She walks to a nearby console and pushes a couple of switches. A console door slides open, revealing a Firebird.
Wait a second. As realization dawns, I whisper, “This is mine. The one Romola stole from me in the Romeverse.”
“The least we can do is give it back,” Dad says with a sad, broken smile.
I nod as I try to snap back into action mode. No time to cry for Paul. I can’t even let myself think about him, because I won’t be able to bear it. I must hold together long enough to complete the mission he died for.
Then I can finally fall apart.
“Okay, I’m ready.” I put the Firebird back on. That heavy chain around my neck has rarely felt so good. “Where should I go first? You can give me the data, can’t you?”
My dad shakes his head. “It’s not that simple, Marguerite.”
Mom gestures at the terminal in front of her. “Conley has plots within plots, plans within plans. The multiverse is infinite, and he has exploited its vulnerability to the fullest. Had I any idea he distrusted us so completely—but that’s irrelevant now. Suffice it to say that as long as Conley wants to pursue this path, and our daughter is willing to help him, we can’t stop him. Blocking an infinite number of pathways is, by definition, impossible.”
“That’s it? He wins?” I sit down heavily. It sounds like the only way out would be to convince Conley to change his mind, but I don’t think I could do that. I doubt anyone could. At this point it’s not only about love for his lost Josie; it’s about making sure that nobody ever stops him from doing what he planned. Pride can be as strong as love, and a hell of a lot crueler.
“No, that’s not it.” My mother straightens. “There’s another step we can take. Drastic, even radical. But once it’s done, Conley can never threaten another dimension again.”
My first reaction is anger. “So why didn’t you do that in the first place, instead of doing the shutdown thing that tipped Conley off?”
“Because the solution involves sealing this dimension off from all the others, permanently.” Dad puts his hand over Mom’s, an unexpectedly tender gesture. “We could turn this into a sort of pocket universe, its own tiny bubble.”
“So . . . you wouldn’t ever be able to travel out of this universe again. Your Firebirds wouldn’t work.” I can see why they’d be reluctant to do that. However, the stark misery on my parents’ faces tells me this scenario has the potential to become far darker.
“That’s the best-case scenario,” my mother says. “In the worst-case scenario, the bubble pops. This dimension collapses.”
“No.” That’s a fate I couldn’t even wish on the Home Office. “That’s too much. All the billions of people who live here—”
“Would be lost.” My father gazes into an unseen distance, maybe imagining the death of this world. “But that’s still fewer lives than we have already taken. And if Conley continues this, a mere fraction of the total death toll.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice yourselves.” For Conley, even for my parents, that would be fair. For all the countless other people who live and have lived in this dimension throughout history, it’s unspeakably cruel. Maybe you can say that it’s worth sacrificing one life to save a hundred, something like that—but once you’re talking about entire dimensions, the scale becomes too enormous for that kind of calculus. Billions of lives can’t be squeezed down into the X in the equation. “Are you really going to do this?”
And Mom and Dad wouldn’t just die. They’d be obliterated, unmade until the end of time. . . .
“Wait,” I say. “If your universe dies, doesn’t mine go with it? You’ve influenced us, changed us.”
“But we didn’t create you. So no, your dimension won’t collapse.” My father looks thoughtful. “However, it will warp. Your actions back to the beginning of our intrusion into your universe will be erased, as will all our influence. Your reality will be reshaped.”
“Don’t worry about confusion,” Mom adds. “You won’t remember a thing.”
“And Paul—he died here—but he’d be alive again, wouldn’t he?” Something like hope stirs inside me.
“If he hadn’t died in this universe, I’d say yes, certainly.” My father says this like any other theoretical. For him this is only a puzzle piece, not a human life hanging in the balance. “As it is, the question becomes far more complex.”
“You don’t even know?” That brief hope shatters like porcelain. Maybe Paul will return to life—or maybe we’ll be thrown back to where we started, with no idea that we ever knew a Paul Markov, or at least no idea what happened to him. He won’t only be dead—he won’t even be remembered.