Tandem

“The Last Common Event,” Thomas said. “The moment where the timelines on Earth and Aurora fully separated.”

“What was that?” Granddad would’ve been fascinated by all this information; so would my parents. They had spent their entire careers searching for proof of alternate universes—they would’ve been amazed to find out just how right their theories were.

“George Washington was killed during the Revolutionary War,” Thomas said. “Or, as we call it, the First Revolution. There was a Second Revolution in 1789, this time led by a British nobleman named John Rowan who used his power as the governor of the New York Colony to raise an army against the Crown. After he succeeded in overthrowing British rule, he crowned himself king and renamed the country the United Commonwealth of Columbia, after Christopher Columbus. He established his capital in New York and renamed it Columbia City.” Thomas smiled. “Aurora 101.”

“So what you’re saying is, even though Juliana and I look the same, we don’t have the same parents, or backgrounds, or anything?”

“Juliana’s a different person,” he said with a helpless shrug. “Wholly and completely. I’m not a physicist; I can’t explain it more than that.”

“But my parents do have analogs in Aurora, don’t they? Even if they’re not Juliana’s parents, they still exist?” Thomas drew in a deep breath. “You know who they are, don’t you?”

“Your mother’s analog is a schoolteacher in Virginia Dominion,” Thomas told me. “She’s got three kids, two boys and a girl.” I blinked. Three kids? I would’ve given anything for just one sibling—sister, brother, I couldn’t have cared less, as long as I had someone who understood, who knew what it meant to have had my parents and then lost them.

“And my dad?” I asked, trying to keep all emotion out of my voice but hearing a tremor in it nonetheless.

Thomas sat up straight and rubbed the back of his neck. “Your father doesn’t have an analog in Aurora. Sometimes that happens. Nobody knows why, but it’s more common than you might think. We don’t all have analogs in every universe.”

“Can I see her?” I asked. Please, please, please just let me see her, I thought desperately. Even though I knew my mother’s analog wouldn’t actually be my mother, I needed to know what she would’ve looked like now, if she had lived.

He shook his head. “Virginia’s too far. There’s not time.”

I nodded. I should’ve known better than to believe something good might come from this experience. Aurora seemed to delight in crushing every faint flutter of hope I dared to have.

“All right, that’s enough,” Gloria interjected. I started at the sound of her voice; I’d forgotten she was even there.

“It’s—” Gloria consulted her tablet. “Four-thirty-seven a.m., so we don’t have much time. Juliana rises precisely at seven thirty every morning when she’s at the Castle, unless she has an early engagement; I come in at eight o’clock on the nose to go over her schedule for the day and she eats breakfast while she’s being prepped.”

“Prepped?” I repeated, my voice hollow. “Prepped how?”

“Clothes, hair, makeup,” Gloria said, as if this was all self-explanatory. It made sense; clearly, as a public figure, Juliana had to look her best every day. But the thought of being primped like some kind of life-size Barbie made me slightly ill. I already felt like an object in this world, a curiosity rather than a person in my own right. To them, Juliana was the real one; I was just a stopgap illusion they had no choice but to tolerate. “Juliana often changes several times a day, and her stylists are on call around the clock to make sure the princess is always perfectly presentable. I manage Juliana’s staff and master calendar, and act as a sort of … turnstile in the princess’s life. I control access to Her Highness; nobody outside the royal family gets to her without first going through me.

“Of course, that still leaves the matter of the queen and her children,” Gloria continued. “As Thomas may have told you, Juliana and her stepmother don’t play well together. They never have, not even when Juliana was a child, and things have only gotten worse since the regency.”

“Why?” I vaguely remembered what a regent was from my sophomore year European history class; they took over the throne of a country when the real monarch was for whatever reason incapable of ruling on their own.

“When the king was shot, it became clear very quickly that he was never going to recover his mental faculties,” Gloria said, her shoulders tensing when she said the word shot. “A regent had to be found to replace him.” Gloria went on to tell me that, under normal circumstances, the heir apparent would automatically become regent, but at sixteen Juliana wasn’t of age. She had to be seventeen to take the crown. So Congress had convened out of session to choose a regent. On paper, the queen had been the natural choice, but Juliana ran a very aggressive campaign against her, backing the president of the Congress—Nathaniel Whitehall— for the spot, and she almost succeeded. The faction that supported the queen won by a very narrow margin. “The queen has always felt threatened by Juliana, and that only made it worse. They’re civil to each other in public, but in private … well, I suppose you’ll see for yourself very soon.”

“Comforting,” I muttered under my breath. The last thing I needed was a woman who had known Juliana for years watching my every move with a distrustful eye. I looked over at the window and once again caught my reflection in it. “I just don’t think I can do this. I can’t pretend to be somebody I’m not. They’ll know.”

Thomas shook his head vehemently. “They won’t. You look exactly like her, right down to the freckle on your left earlobe.” I touched my ear, wondering how in the world Thomas had managed to notice that. “Sasha, I watched you for a week before I—before we first talked, back on Earth. I did my research. You can do this. People want to think you’re her. What’s the alternative? That you’re a double from an alternate universe? I don’t think we could convince anyone of that if we tried.”

“Libertas has the real Juliana,” I reminded him. “They’ll know I’m not her. What if they go public with that information? Everything will be ruined. What’ll the General do to me then?”

“They won’t,” Thomas assured me. “Libertas is just as in the dark as everyone else about the multiverse. If anything, they’ll think we found a look-alike, someone who just happens to resemble Juliana. But who’s going to believe that, when Juliana is standing on the Grand Balcony, waving to thousands of people? No one.”

“You really think people are that stupid?”

“Not stupid,” he said. “Ignorant. And yeah, I do.” 

THIRTEEN

“Oh my God,” I said as I stepped inside Juliana’s bedroom four hours later.

“Royalty does have its perks,” Thomas said, with a trace of irritation in his voice. He was trying to teach me how to use the security device on the door. All the doors in the Citadel—including the Tower, where we’d just been, and the Castle, where we were now—were controlled by panels with biometric scanners similar to the one I’d seen him use on the car door back in Chicago; they required a handprint and a six-number code to gain access if they were locked. Juliana and I didn’t have the same handprint; Thomas had replaced mine with Juliana’s in the security database. But ever since the door slid open to reveal the room beyond, I was having a hard time focusing on what he was saying.

It wasn’t because the room was opulent to near-Versailles proportions, although it was. In fact, Juliana’s bedroom was the most beautiful, luxurious, impeccably decorated room I’d ever stood in. An enormous four-poster canopy bed with a blue satin goose down comforter and mounds of pillows took up a portion of the right wall. All the furniture was made of beautifully carved mahogany wood. There was a sitting area with a sofa and two armchairs upholstered in bright, cheerful cornflower blue brocade and embroidered with tiny, perfect pink rose petals. The adjoining bathroom was done all in silver and marble, and the cavernous walk-in closet was filled with every item of clothing and accessory that a girl could possibly want. Floor-to-ceiling French doors opened on to a huge stone terrace that looked out onto the gorgeous landscaped garden over which the sun was rising, bathing