“So who’s leading the country?”
“His wife, the queen regent. She’s Juliana’s stepmother, the king’s second wife. Not a lot of love lost between Juliana and the queen. You’ll have to watch out for her; she and Juliana have never gotten along, even before everything happened with the king, and she can be spiteful.”
I closed my eyes as the enormity of my task threatened to overwhelm me. “I don’t see how you and the General expect me to do this. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Thomas pressed his lips together. “You won’t be doing it alone. I’m going to help you.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m not just a transporter,” Thomas said. It was incredible how steady he could keep his voice, how calm he was in this very strange situation. I resented his perfect composure. It made me feel wild and untethered, entirely at the mercy of something besides my own rational mind, which wasn’t like me at all. It was also not the way to be if I wanted to go home again. I had to be just like Thomas. I had to push my feelings way, way down so that they couldn’t rise up and defeat me. I wouldn’t let him be stronger than me.
“Then what are you?”
“I’m Juliana’s lead bodyguard,” Thomas said. “I know her pretty well. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and I can coach you through the next six days, if you’ll let me.”
“And if I won’t?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you’ll do just fine.”
He nodded to me as if to say goodbye and stepped back from the window, making his way toward the door. When he reached the middle of the room, he stopped and turned; I swiveled my head and our eyes locked. The room was dark, but I could still see his face, illuminated by the aurora and the moon that shone through the window like a spotlight.
“Of course,” he said with a casual lift of his eyebrows, “it’s not going to be easy, considering you’ve never met her.”
I stared at him. “Where are your parents?”
The question surprised him. I felt a thrill at having caught him off guard. “My parents?”
“Yeah. If you’re Grant’s analog, then you’re probably the same age,” I said. “Right?” He nodded. “Which means you’re, what, eighteen? Most of the guys I know are picking out colleges, not serving as bodyguards to a princess or running covert operations in parallel universes and kidnapping girls. Your parents just let you do this?”
“My parents are dead,” he told me coldly. “I’m pretty sure they’re beyond caring what I do.”
“Oh.” For a moment I felt bad, but my parents were dead, too, and I led a normal life. Well, I had up until recently, anyway. “I’m sorry. What … happened?”
“What always happens here,” Thomas told me. “War with Farnham. My parents were both in the military, and we were stationed on a base near St. Louis, right along the border between Farnham and the Commonwealth. It’s a heavily disputed territory, even now. They’d called a ceasefire, so things were supposed to be relatively safe, but Farnham launched a sneak attack and bombed the hell out of the base one morning. The death count was … substantial. Both of my parents died instantly.” He closed his eyes for a second, as if experiencing a wave of intense emotion, which of course made sense, and came as a welcome relief to me. He could feel things. Some things, anyway.
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
We both fell silent. Finally, Thomas spoke. “I didn’t tell you that story to make you feel sorry for me. You can still hate me all you want, I don’t care. But I hope it gives you a sense of how important this treaty with Farnham —and Juliana’s marriage to the prince—is to this world. We wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of bringing you here if we didn’t have a very good reason.” He shook his head, a bit sadly, I thought. “I don’t know about you, but preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on both sides is a damn good reason to me. I’m not going to insult you with apologies, because I’m not sorry I did what I did. Sorry it had to come to this, maybe, but that’s it.”
I didn’t know what to do with his speech. He sounded so self-assured, and yet so conflicted. Thomas confused me. One moment he was cold and unfeeling, the next he was passionate and insistent. Much as I hated to admit it, I found him interesting. I didn’t trust or like him, but I felt for him. I knew what it was like to lose your parents. I knew it was something you never got over, even though your life carried on without them. I’d been lucky; I had Granddad, who’d taken me in when I was alone, who’d made me feel loved and safe. I couldn’t know for sure, but I suspected that Thomas had not been so fortunate.
“What happened to you?” We needed a different topic, and I’d noticed he was holding his hand strangely, as if it hurt. The moonlight filtering in through the window was strong and bright, and I could see that purplish bruises had started to form at the base of his thumb.
“Oh.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “Well, you fell on me.”
“What?”
“When we entered Aurora,” he explained. “Passing through the tandem always causes a disruption—” I scrunched up my face in confusion. “It’s like a ripple effect, a by-product of the energy it takes to move between universes. When we landed in Aurora, there was a small tremor, and I lost my grip on you. We fell, and … you landed funny. On my hand.”
Part of me wished I’d broken it. “Well, sorry.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t do myself any favors by punching out those Libertas guys.” He shrugged. “One of the perks of being KES. It’d take me a week to list all the injuries I’ve sustained doing this job, so I’m used to it. It’ll heal up quick.”
“How many times have you gone through the tandem?”
“A dozen or so,” Thomas told me. “Not a lot, but more than most people. Nobody knows about the tandem except a handful of KES, and the scientists who work on developing many-worlds technology, like that anchor you’re wearing. It’s a highly classified project. In the scheme of things, you’re actually pretty special. There are probably only twenty or so people who’ve even passed through the tandem, and you’re one of them.”
“Where do I send the gift basket?” Like getting kidnapped was some kind of honor! Still, I did want to know more about how moving between universes worked.
It turned out there was a limit to what he could tell me. “I’m not so good with the physics of it,” he admitted. “I know what I need to know—what happens when you pass through, and, of course, how to use the anchor.”
“And how does the anchor work?”
He gave me a rueful smile. “Nice try.”
“Okay, then tell me about the disruptions,” I pressed. “Do they happen every time?”
He nodded. “As far as I can tell, they’re proportional to how much mass you’re bringing into the universe, or removing from it. The more massive the object, the more energy it takes to bring it through, the greater the disruption. When it’s just you and me, the mass is tiny, especially by the universe’s standards. So all you get is a little quake, something you’d barely notice if you weren’t standing right at the epicenter.”
“What if you wanted to bring through something bigger?”
He ran his fingers through his hair, rumpling it. He seemed tired, and all of a sudden he looked young to me, with his hair sticking up in the back and the moonlight picking up the wrinkles in his suit. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. A skyscraper.”
“Not sure why you’d want to do that.”
“It’s hypothetical,” I said.
“I’m not even certain that you
I shrugged. “No reason. I was just curious.” I’d never been good enough at science to consider making a career out of it, even though, as Thomas had pointed out on the beach, it was the family business. But I knew enough to be interested, and it delayed the start of my performance as Juliana.
It was just two weeks ago that I’d last dreamt about her. I’d woken up full of apprehension. She’d been experiencing something difficult and painful, but I didn’t understand what, or why, until now—she’d been busy
