But not soon enough, because Wicked takes her Firebird in hand and begins to turn the controls in a way I’ve never seen before. I know it, though, even before I recognize a little twist of the thumb I recall from Romola Harrington’s trick in the Romeverse.
Wicked’s setting up a collapse. She’s going to destroy my universe.
No. It’s impossible. We can protect ourselves. Can’t we? We’ve done this for so many other worlds—
“You didn’t—save yourselves—first. Stupid.” She laughs once, a bitter sound I can hardly recognize as coming from my own throat. “Always—look out—for number one.”
But you’ll die too! If your world and ours both vanish, you’ll kill yourself along with the rest of us.
“Fine. So long as I get the rest of you. You talked them into this. You dished it out. So take it.”
“Marguerite?” my mother says through tears. “What are you—”
Theo catches on and snarls, “Oh, hell no. Not now!”
The ground trembles. Not that much, nothing out of the ordinary here on the edge of the San Andreas fault. My parents and Josie hardly even react. But I know the truth. It’s the beginning of the end.
I want to call Wicked more names. I want to tell her she has the worst life of any Marguerite in the entire multiverse, not because her dimension sucks but because she’s chosen to lead the angriest, meanest, most vindictive existence possible. I want to taunt her with the horror of what awaits her, an eternity of parasitic possession where she will never, ever be able to call anything or anyone her own.
But my fate is even worse. I will never have been born. My last moments will be spent knowing that everyone I have ever loved is about to be erased along with me. Wicked has doomed us all.
The earth trembles again, stronger this time. Her hands tighten over the Firebird, and with a rush she’s gone.
I stagger backward as Theo grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Get out of her. Get out of her!”
“She’s gone! It’s me!” I cry. “It’s collapsing. The universe is collapsing. Wicked used my Firebird and destroyed us—”
“What?” Theo looks like he might faint. Understanding dawns on my parents’ faces, followed by horror.
“Wicked jumped back inside me. She started the chain reaction. I couldn’t stop her.” A sob rises in my throat. My family, my friends, and my world are all about to die at my hand.
“Damn!” Dad runs for the pile of equipment at the far end of the great room, Mom and Theo just behind him. “We can do this. How long do we have?”
A couple of hours, I want to say. It took that long for the Romeverse to fall. But maybe our world is more fragile, because already the earthquake has returned, this time strong enough to rattle the dishes in the cupboard. The few remaining books on the shelves fall to the floor.
Mom answers my father’s question. “Not long enough.”
But they all throw themselves at it, grabbing material, trying to get the stabilizer device put together in no time. Josie, blank-eyed, starts taking more things off shelves, putting them on the floor so they won’t tumble down and get broken—sensible in an earthquake, irrational here. Not that I can blame her for being terrified to the point of shock. My entire body feels numb.
Then I hear footsteps in the hallway behind me. Who else could be in our house?
Only one person.
I whirl around to see—“Paul!”
Oh, God, he’s alive. He made it out after all—
—only to come here and be killed along with the rest of us.
I try to run for him, but the shaking earth nearly topples me. Only slumping against the wall keeps me from pitching onto the floor. Paul catches himself, bracing both hands against the sides of the hallway. As soon as it’s steady enough to move, he rushes forward. “What’s going on?”
“The universe is collapsing,” Theo says. “Bad Marguerite possessed Good Marguerite just long enough to make it happen.”
Paul turns to me just as I reach him. His arm is still bandaged along the scar she slashed in his skin. I fling myself into his embrace, as if his strength alone could hold me up while the rest of the world falls. The scent of his skin, the feel of his hands on my back, even the catch in his breath as he pulls me nearer—everything about him is more precious to me than ever before. It is the most beautiful and terrible moment of my life.
Terrible, because I know Paul has been given back to me just in time for us to die together.
Though pent-up sobs threaten to steal my voice, I manage to say, “Where were you? I thought you were gone.”
“There was no time to figure out a new destination. I had to jump backward to the Moscowverse. Then I had to recharge the Firebird and—damn.” Paul swears again in Russian at the bleak irony of getting home just in time to die.
Although I know the answer, I have to ask, “We can’t escape, can we?”
He kisses my cheek, my forehead, and clutches me even tighter. “No way out. Not one we would ever take.”
And he’s right. Whatever existence we would have after this would be stolen from other selves, other worlds. Would I rob Valentina of her real parents forever? Or force my Warverse self to give up her life so I could lead it instead? Do we decide whether to take one alternate self for good, or to steal weeks or months from others? Escaping this dimension without any hope of going home would turn us into parasites.
I don’t want to die. But I refuse to live if the cost is betraying what I believe, and who I love.
At least I got to see Paul one more time before the end.
He turns to look at the frantic activity on the rainbow table. He makes no move to join them. That’s when I know. “Paul, can they build a stabilizer in time?”
“No.”
The real quake hits then. We all shriek or yell, and every one of us falls to the floor except Josie, who was already there. Shouts from outside make me wonder what’s happening to the sky, or whether the ground has split apart to reveal another moment of pure hell.
Paul crawls closer, reaching out for me. This is it. We’re going to kiss each other goodbye and die in each other’s arms.
Instead, he grabs my Firebird, and I remember our one chance.
“Linking the Firebirds!” I shout over the din of falling plates and blaring car alarms outside. Back in the Moscowverse, he said this might work in an emergency. There’s never been a bigger emergency than this. “That’s going to save us, isn’t it?”