Nobody told Romola that, though. She lunges at me with enough force to send me sprawling onto my back. “What are you doing?” she yells. “Have you gone completely mad?”
“Tell me—where—my parents are!” I grab at her arms, trying to get her off me—which is when I see that she, too, is wearing a Firebird.
Wait.
She raises an eyebrow. “Catching on at last, are you? Thank goodness. Where are you from?”
“The Berkeleyverse. Where are you from?”
“The Mafiaverse, which by the way is an atrocious name.” Romola lets go of me, flops onto her butt, and sighs. “Good lord. Do you think next time you could wait to hit someone until you’ve checked to find out whether that person is on your side?”
“Probably not, actually. No time to waste.” I can’t quite wrap my head around this. Romola’s on my side this time? My brain rejects the idea, replaying memory after memory of Romola doing me wrong. Getting me wasted so I wouldn’t look for Paul on my own, freeing Wicked to continue her mission of destruction, or setting me up to destroy the Romeverse.
But none of those were this Romola. This is the one who met me at the movies in Times Square, watched a goofy comedy, and showed me the glory of mixed M&M’s and popcorn. This Romola is my friend, and she traveled through the dimensions to help.
I’ve been so shaken by finding my one worst self that I never considered how much it might change our fates by finding someone else’s best self. Travel through enough dimensions and maybe you’d find the hero and the villain in everyone.
I ask, “How did you even know to come to the Home Office in the first place?”
“We all agreed we needed a pair of eyes ‘on the inside,’ as it were. I seemed to be the best candidate—the one the Home Office wouldn’t suspect.” Romola shrugs. “When security signaled about capturing an alternate Marguerite, I knew it could only be you.”
“How long have you been here?” I ask as we start to get to our feet.
“Not quite twenty-four hours, I think?” Romola smiles unevenly and reaches out to snap the cuff binders off my wrist for good. “Turns out Triad has employee barracks in this universe. Optional, but rather well-populated. I’ve found it easier to simply remain in my office.”
Do I want to know what employee barracks look like? No, I don’t. “I came here to sabotage Triad any way I could, but I don’t know what to do—or what to do it to. Any insight?”
“Not in particular. You were looking for your parents?”
I shake my head no. “Not really. They’ll realize I’m an imposter. But if I’d had to call on them to get out of a level-one interrogation—”
“Got it.” Romola nods once. “I’ve been trying to study their core computer functions, to look for vulnerabilities, but Triad is so vast in this universe, it’s like trying to find the center of the internet.”
“The resistance will know what we can do. I managed to find Paul and Theo last time, and maybe I can again.” I take a deep breath. “Any idea how I can reach public transit?”
Romola clucks her tongue. “Oh, I can do better than that! I’ve got access to a company car. That was an unexpected benefit. Triad haven’t safeguarded anything against me.”
“Because they never saw you coming.” Finally it hits me that we’ve managed to turn one of the Home Office’s trickiest weapons to our advantage. I begin to smile. “Thank you for doing this.”
“Oh, it was nothing.” Romola gives me a PR agent smile, then pauses as it fades. “Actually, given that you’re trying to keep my universe from potentially being demolished, it really is the least I can do.”
She punches the elevator panel, canceling her last floor request and redirecting us toward the garage. We’re this close to escaping into the wider world of the Home Office, finding the resistance, and shutting this down once and for all.
Just one problem.
“What do you mean, it flies?” Romola stands outside her silvery car, which bobs a few inches off its platform on some kind of magnetic field. Dozens more hover all around us, shimmering in the garage bay like Christmas ornaments hung from spindly branches. “It’s a flying car?”
“Did you not see them outside the windows?”
“Of course I did! But I never thought those were the only kind of automobiles this dimension had.”
“Well, they are. The city’s been built up so high that almost nobody goes down to ground level anymore.” I bite my lower lip, wishing for some way out of this, but there isn’t one. “You’ll just have to try it.”
“Me?” Romola’s eyes grow wider. “Why me?”
“I don’t even have a driver’s license for a regular car yet. Just a permit.”
This argument isn’t as convincing as I expected. Romola says, “I haven’t one either.”
“What? You’re, like, four or five years older than me.”
“I grew up in London and never left until I moved to lower Manhattan! When would I ever have had occasion to drive a bloody car?”
Dad, you really should have let me borrow the car more often. I take a deep breath. “Okay, let’s try this thing.”
If you think driving in two dimensions can be tricky, you have no idea how terrible it is in three. Disengaging from the magnetic “parking spot” is easy, but everything after that is an exercise in horror.
“Oh, my God.” Romola clutches at her seat belt as though it could hold her up on its own as the hovercar wobbles out of the garage, and we see just how many hundreds of feet we are from the ground. “We’re going to die.”
“Way to think positive, Romola.” But when I try to turn, and the car bobs even more precariously, I add, “Keep one hand on your Firebird.”
Come on, come on, you can do this, I tell myself. You haven’t come this far just to get taken out by a stupid flying car!
If only the ground weren’t so far beneath us . . .
I take the controls and nudge the car downward. The slope makes me shift forward until my safety belt is all that’s holding me in my seat, and Romola whimpers. But I take it slow, edging us down a bit at a time. When I stop thinking of it as a car in flight, and instead remember it as the submarine from the Oceanverse, steering in three dimensions gets a little easier.