My body is once again its usual bony self, my belly no longer curved. The watery sensation in my abdomen I’d begun to recognize as pregnancy has vanished. It’s not like I didn’t expect it to happen, but for a moment I can only feel that sudden absence.
“I see our visitor has arrived,” says a cool female voice. As soon as I register the English accent, I recognize who it is.
“Romola.” I turn to see her standing near my chair, wearing clothes that look subtly, imperceptibly off—the long-sleeved shirt and pants are made of a fabric that seems stiff, even though the cut is formfitting, and everything from her collar to her shoes is the exact same shade of midnight blue. Belatedly I realize I’m wearing something very similar, but all in black.
“You recognize me?” She smiles with what appears to be real pleasure. “I’m not placed well in most of the important dimensions. I so rarely get the chance to travel.”
“Where am I?”
“Precisely where you ought to be. Do you need some coffee? Our Marguerite didn’t sleep a wink.”
I do feel tired, actually. But I don’t want anything she’s offering me, coffee or food or anything else. It feels like a fairy tale, one of the old scary ones: If you drink or eat in the mysterious realm, you never get to go home. “I don’t understand. Conley promised me that if I did what he wanted, he’d show me to the final dimension where Paul is hidden.”
Or—is this the place? Instinct tells me it isn’t.
“Naturally Mr. Conley intends to fulfill his bargain. After your meeting, of course.”
“The meeting was supposed to be in the home office.”
Romola laughs. “Where do you think you are?”
At that moment, I see the faint green glow reflecting on the skyscraper nearest us, and I recognize it as Triad’s trademark emerald.
I thought the Conley I’d been dealing with—the Theo that screwed us all over so badly—I thought their universe, the Triadverse, was the home office. But the core of the evil, the plot to dominate the multiverse: It all began here.
Then I realize how stupid we’ve been not to guess that another dimension was in on it, running the whole thing. We should have known that from the beginning. Because Triad means three.
Romola turns brisk. “We should get started. Sure you won’t take a coffee? No? Then I’ll take you to the conference room now.”
“Wait. Where’s Theo?” Did Conley even give us the same coordinates? Maybe Theo’s already rescuing Paul. Or maybe Conley sent him off in another direction entirely, or into oblivion.
She reacts to Theo’s name in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Her lips press together in disapproval. “You needn’t trouble yourself on Theo Beck’s account.”
“I’ll make that decision on my own, thanks. Where is he? Did Conley kidnap him?” Dread swirls inside me. Does Conley intend to give me back Paul only after he’s abducted and splintered Theo in turn? Will I spend the rest of my life working for Triad to protect the people I love?
But Romola shakes her head. “Mr. Beck is entirely beyond our control.”I’m not sure what that means, but I like the sound of it. I imagine him down in the stark metal city, looking up at this green-tinted building and flipping it off.
As for me, I appeared within a Marguerite who seemed to be prepared. She was waiting—willing—to let me enter her body and take her over, right here in the heart of Triad headquarters. Slowly, I say, “In this dimension, I know about all this, don’t I? About Triad’s plans.”
Romola smiles at me, fond and yet condescending, like someone talking to a very small child. “You’ve worked here for a while now.”
Somehow, Conley is able to force me to do his bidding in this world, too.
I’ve spent all this time wondering whether the constants in the multiverse are destinies, or souls, or love. Now I realize the one constant in my infinite lives might be Conley’s inescapable control.
Paul and I talked about this once—the constants in the universe. The things that change, and the things that don’t.
Back in early February, we drove to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. The drive to Muir Woods always terrifies me; the only way up there is a narrow, winding road that seems to be barely hanging on to the hillside. Paul kept both hands on the wheel of my parents’ new car, eyes locked on the road while I gripped the sides of the seat like that would help. At one point I laughed shakily. “This probably isn’t as scary for you. I mean, you go rock climbing. You’re used to heights.”
“Yes, but when I’m climbing, I’m in considerably closer contact with the terrain and can judge my safety accordingly. Here, we have to trust a car with which I’m relatively unfamiliar.” His eyes narrowed as we neared another curve. “Our levels of fear are probably identical.”
“You really didn’t have to tell me that.”
He was silent, trying once again to figure out the rules of human conversation. “I meant—we’ll be okay.”
I nodded, and tried to believe him.
Of course, we were okay. We got to the top in time for lunch, ate cold sesame noodles we’d brought along, and then went wandering through the forest hand in hand. (The way his large hand almost covered mine—it made me feel safer than anything else I could imagine. More than that—treasured. Like Paul held on because he never wanted me to drift away.)
Standing among the redwoods does strange and beautiful things to your brain. You’re reminded of your own insignificance in the vast universe by these mammoth trees towering overhead, their leaves so far up that they seem to form a second sky. These trees live hundreds upon hundreds of years; some of the ones growing in Muir Woods today sprouted back in the Middle Ages. They’ll still be there long after the entire civilization I know has changed into something I wouldn’t recognize. Yet you don’t feel meaningless. Instead, you remember that you’re part of these trees’ history—part of the whole story of this world—connected in ways you can’t even guess.
“Is that what you see?” Paul said to me after I explained this. We walked up to one of the tallest trees; I let go of his hand to press my palms against the reddish bark. “The trees as a . . . bridge to infinity?”
“Yeah.” I ducked my head. “Maybe it’s the artist in me.”
“You see more than I do. It’s your gift.”
I smiled at him as I kept walking around the enormous circumference of the tree. “What about you? When you look at the redwoods, what do they make you think about?”
“The fundamental symmetry and asymmetry of the universe.”
When I hear something like this, from Paul or my parents or anyone else, I know not to ask any more questions unless I’m absolutely positive I want to hear the crazy-complicated answer. With Paul, I usually do. “What do you mean?”
He lifted his hand, two fingers mirroring the lines of two redwoods in the near distance. “Every one of these trees has a unique genetic code. They differ from each other in countless ways—the number of branches, the pattern in the bark, their root systems, so on. Yet they mirror each other. Parallel each other. The commonality overcomes the differences.”