Tandem: The Many-Worlds Trilogy Page 4

  “Granddad,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “Be cool.” According to Granddad, that was something my mom used to say to him as a teenager when she thought he was being too strict. He’d told me this once in rare fit of nostalgia, something I’m sure he regretted later, because it worked every time.

  “All right,” he relented. “One a.m., then. But no later.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Grant said. “We won’t be late.” Granddad nodded, trying not to appear pleased at Grant’s politeness, but I couldn’t disguise my own happiness. Granddad was the world’s hardest person to impress, and if Grant was managing to charm him, it meant I had nothing to worry about.

  In a gesture of uncharacteristic sentimentality, Granddad placed his hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the forehead. “Have a good time, dear. And be safe.”

  “Thanks, Granddad. I will.”

  Gina hooked her elbow with mine. “Come on, Lawson. Let’s get out of here.”

  FOUR

  Grant was a terrible dancer. When we first arrived at the hotel—where prom was already in full swing—he was shy about it, demurring every time I tried to drag him onto the dance floor. Finally, I took his hand in mine; I’d had two glasses of punch, which had most certainly been fortified by something out of a flask while the chaperones’ backs were turned, and was overcome by a sudden boldness.

  “Okay, Grant, what’s up?” I whispered into his ear. “You asked me to prom and you won’t even dance with me?”

  “I don’t know how,” he said, confessing this secret in a voice so low I almost didn’t hear it over the pounding music.

  I laughed, thinking he was joking, and he looked away in embarrassment. “I’m serious,” he said, his expression dark and distant.

  I squeezed his hand, trying to make up for laughing and to reassure him without implying that he needed any reassurance. I felt light and fearless, due to a combination of spiked punch and the realization that Grant wasn’t perfect, that he had his own anxieties and faults just like the rest of humanity. It was a relief. Much as I liked Grant, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to tolerate someone who seemed so flawless.

  “You don’t have to know how,” I told him. “Just listen to the music and move the way you want.”

  He shook his head vehemently. “I don’t want to. I’ll look stupid.”

  “Not possible,” I said in earnest. I led him into the crowd of shifting bodies until we were right in the center of the ballroom. He stood apart from me, glancing around as if anticipating some sort of ambush. I reached up and put my arms around his neck. His reticence had burned mine completely away, and I didn’t care what anyone else was thinking or doing, so long as Grant and I were having a good time.

  “Put your hands on my waist,” I commanded. He did as he was told. His fingers were like feathers on my hips, but his chest was solid, so close and so warm, which I didn’t mind despite the heat of the ballroom. I swayed along with the beat. “Come on,” I coaxed. “Just do what I do.”

  He did his best to mimic my movements. We started slow, ignoring the high-spirited flailing of our classmates, and after a few minutes I felt him begin to relax in my arms. Before I knew it, half a dozen songs had played, and Grant’s nerves seemed to have entirely evaporated. Soon enough, he was jumping and spinning and pumping his fist along with the music just like everybody else.

  “I love this song!” he shouted. I laughed. Though we were surrounded on all sides, it was as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.

  Four hours later, I collapsed into a chair, panting. My hair was a disaster, I was covered in a thin layer of sweat, and my dress had a stain down the front where Gina had accidentally spilled some punch earlier in the evening. I was having the time of my life. Even Jeff was cracking the occasional smile, a pretty much unprecedented occurrence in my experience.

  “Come on,” Grant said, hoisting me out of my chair. The lights were coming up in the hotel ballroom; prom was over. Gina and Jeff were making out two tables away. The staff was going to have to forcibly eject them.

  Grant put his arms around my waist and held me close. At some point in the evening he’d undone his bow tie; it was hanging loose around his neck and I batted at it playfully like a kitten. He grinned. “Let’s go somewhere. We’ve still got an hour before your curfew.”

  “Where?” I fanned myself with my fingers. “It’s so hot in here.”

  “To the beach,” he suggested.

  “Which one? Fifty-Seventh Street?” That was undoubtedly where everybody else was headed, there or Promontory Point, both of which were in our neighborhood. One of the best things about Hyde Park was its proximity to the water.

  “No, no,” Grant said. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing; if we went to a Hyde Park beach, there was no way we’d get a chance to be alone. “There’s one a few blocks from here. Oak Street Beach. It’s not far.”

  I was a little worried about making it home on time, but the beach was close and we didn’t have to stay long. Besides, what was Granddad going to do if I was fifteen minutes late? I doubted he would even be up when I got home, since his usual bedtime was ten p.m.—one of the benefits of having a septuagenarian as my legal guardian. I said goodbye to Gina and Jeff, but all I got in return were a couple of barely audible grunts. That suited me just fine—I wanted to be alone with Grant so badly, my knees shook just thinking about it. I gathered my things, including the pashmina Gina had lent me, and hobbled out of the ballroom into the hotel lobby, my feet aching from the three-inch heels I wasn’t used to wearing.

  I was grateful when we reached the beach and I could take the shoes off. I plunged my toes deep into the cool sand and sought out my date in the darkness. Grant looked perfectly handsome and disheveled in the moonlight. He was standing with his back to me, hands in his pockets, staring out at Lake Michigan. Behind us, the high rises and skyscrapers that made up the Chicago skyline rose up into the night, mountains of light and glass. I rested my chin on his shoulder and slipped my arm through his.

  “Looking for something?” He turned at the sound of my voice and his lips brushed my forehead, right along my hairline. I shivered as he put his arms around me, pulling me in and holding me tight.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “No.” I laid my head upon his chest.

  “It’s big, isn’t it? Sometimes I forget how big everything is.” His voice was soft and far away, as if his mind was somewhere else. A charcoal cloud sailed through the sky, blotting out the moon.

  “I know what you mean.” I looked up at him. He was back to gazing over the water, as if he was searching for something out there in the dense black night. I admired the line of his jaw, the slight upturn of his ski-slope nose. The moon emerged again, blanching our skin and giving Grant the stately appearance of a Renaissance statue. “Granddad always likes to tell me that the Earth in relation to the galaxy is like a single pin lost somewhere in the United States. That’s how small we are.”

  “Not us,” Grant said. His hand migrated up my arm and stroked the fine hair at the nape of my neck. I shivered again. “The planet.”

  “Right,” I said. “ ‘A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’ ”

  Grant glanced at me. “What?”

  “It’s a quote. By Carl Sagan. He was my father’s favorite writer—he was a physicist, too, my dad. And my mom.”

  “The family business,” Grant said, pressing his cheek against the top of my head.

  I smiled into his shoulder. My parents would’ve loved Grant, I was sure of it. They wouldn’t have had a choice. There was no way they could’ve disliked anyone who made me this happy. “Something like that, yeah.”

  Grant looked directly at me for the first time since we’d stepped foot on the beach, and a sudden bolt of sadness flickered across his face, so quickly that I thought I might’ve imagined it.

  “Sasha,” he said, with an intensity that nearly swept me off my feet. I loved the way he said my name, like an incantation, l
ike a magic word. I’m falling for him, I thought, in the space between heartbeats. I was surprised by how easy that was to admit. For a long time, I’d thought the deaths of my parents might have inured me to love—fear of losing something beloved was the reason I’d never wanted a pet—but it hadn’t. In fact, it had only made me want it more, something I hadn’t realized until this moment.

  “Whatever happens,” Grant continued, “this has been the best night of my entire life.”

  I laughed. “What could happen?”

  “Anything,” he said. My heart pounded away in my chest like a bass drum, and my hands were shaking. I clenched them into fists to keep Grant from noticing.

  He took a deep breath. The air changed, as if there had been a shift in the Earth’s rotation. “I have a gift for you.” He dug around in the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a flat black box the size of his palm. “Open it.”

  Inside the box was a thin silver bracelet on a bed of black velvet. It was the simplest thing I’d ever seen, and because of that, one of the most lovely. Not a single engraving or gem or artistic flourish, just a plain, elegant silver band. I picked it up and tried to slide it over my hand, but it wouldn’t fit. It was too small. A flush crawled up my neck and into my face. My hand was too fat for Grant’s gift.

  “No, not like that.” He reached over to take the bracelet; I didn’t quite see how he did it, but he managed to open an imperceptible hinge. He placed the bracelet around my left wrist before closing it with a firm snap. It was snug, but not tight, as if it had been sized just for me.

  The sleeve of Grant’s jacket rode up and I caught another glint of silver. I grabbed his arm.

  “You have one just like it?” It was a question, but not. He was wearing a bracelet identical to the one he’d just given me on his own wrist. My brain struggled to process this information, to make some sense out of it. Grant really wasn’t the type to wear jewelry. At least I didn’t think he was, but it wasn’t like I knew all there was to know about him. Still, it struck me as odd.

  Grant didn’t explain. Instead, he cupped my face in one hand and adjusted the scarf around my neck, pulling me in by my waist and holding me close. I shut my eyes and let myself drift in his arms, forgetting about the bracelets. He leaned in, his lips brushing my ear. I thought I heard him whisper I’m sorry, but the words were washed away by the hush of the waves on the sand, if he even said them at all.

  THOMAS IN THE TATTERED CITY

  Thomas watched the rise and fall of Sasha’s chest as she slept. High above, the aurora performed its nightly dance across the indigo sky, casting a soft green glow upon her skin. After everything he’d seen, he still couldn’t believe how much she looked like Juliana. The resemblance was breathtaking in its perfection, and unsettling, too; he would have called it impossible if he didn’t know the truth. Thomas slid his KES ring back on; it was a relief to wear it again after two weeks of having to carry it around in his pocket. His hand throbbed with pain, and a strange sort of restlessness stirred within him; it was the same way he’d felt on the night he came face to face with Grant Davis. The universes didn’t like to be messed with, and try as he might, he couldn’t shake off the sense that he had made a catastrophic error in bringing her here.

  But it was already done.

  The waters of Lake Michigan—his Lake Michigan—gently lapped the shore ten yards away, and the towering skyscrapers of the Chicago skyline rose behind him, nearly invisible in the dark. They called it the Tattered City; Libertas had stripped it to its bones, and the buildings were largely derelict now, places where squatters played house. Electrical power was erratic in the Tattered City these days, and the city officials had started enforcing a mandatory blackout after midnight in an effort to conserve energy. He couldn’t have planned their arrival in Aurora any better; the streets would be dark and empty, and he would slip through them easily with his otherworldly cargo. Operation Starling was proceeding exactly as planned.

  Something beeped in his pocket; his mobie had caught a signal. He pulled it out to send a message to Agent Fillmore, who was waiting in the wings for his summons. The mobie was about the size and shape of a playing card; this one was government-issue, made of a near-indestructible titanium alloy and only an inch or so thick, not counting the retractable cover. He pressed a button and the cover slid away, revealing the screen, which demanded a thumbprint and a numerical code to be entered before it would show him what he wanted: the time. Nearly one in the morning now. Right on schedule.

  We’re about to miss curfew. The thought caught him off guard. No point worrying about that. And yet, he couldn’t stop imagining Sasha’s grandfather waiting up for her, wondering where she was. He tried not to feel guilty about it; after all, he was just doing his job. It’s for the greater good, he told himself. Remember that.

  Fillmore arrived in minutes. They’d chosen this spot because it was deserted at nighttime in both worlds. That was the trouble with going through the tandem, at least the way they did it—you always landed in the exact same geographical location in the destination universe as you were in the universe you’d just left. It would’ve been much easier to take Sasha from the Chicago of her world straight to the heart of Columbia City, where they were ultimately headed, but unfortunately it just didn’t work that way.

  “How was the dance?” Fillmore asked sarcastically as he bent over Sasha’s body. He was a short, squat man with the face of a troll and the smile of a Cheshire cat. How he’d come to work for the King’s Elite Service, Thomas didn’t know. There had to be a reason the General kept him around, and it must’ve been a good one in order for the General to have assigned him to Operation Starling, but Thomas couldn’t imagine what it was.

  “Don’t touch her,” Thomas said, grabbing Fillmore by his jacket collar and yanking him back. “I’ve got it.” A wave of protectiveness surged through him; Sasha was his assignment, his responsibility—Fillmore had no business getting anywhere near her.

  “Did she let you kiss her?” Fillmore teased, unfazed by Thomas’s poisonous glare. Fillmore was a creep, and insubordinate to boot. Thomas was light-years above him in the KES chain of command, and yet Fillmore pressed his luck at every opportunity. This happened from time to time, older agents thinking they could jerk him around in spite of his rank and connections, but he tried not to let it get to him. He knew where he stood.

  “I said don’t touch her!” Thomas snapped as Fillmore bent toward Sasha once more. “You were supposed to bring the moto around. Is it close?”

  Fillmore pointed. “Just up there, over the hill. What’s wrong with your hand?”

  Thomas realized he was cradling the bruised appendage. He shrugged. “Nothing, it’s fine. Go start the moto. I’ll bring her.”

  Fillmore, apparently sensing, finally, that Thomas was in no mood for games, nodded and, for once in his life, followed orders. He scrambled up over the grassy knoll and was gone.

  Thomas lifted Sasha up into his arms, taking care to avoid putting any pressure on his left hand. Other than loss of consciousness, she seemed to have suffered no ill effects from going through the tandem. Her vitals were normal, and she’d sustained no visible injuries. Everything was as expected, which was a relief. He was used to taking chances with his own life, but risking someone else’s was another matter altogether. Besides, if something happened to Sasha, it would likely mean the end of his career.

  When they got her back to the safe house he would give her a sedative in the hopes that she would sleep through the majority of the tandem sickness. A first crossing could be uncomfortable, to say the least. It got a little easier every time, so it wouldn’t be quite as bad when she returned home; he had done over a dozen trips through the tandem and now it didn’t even affect him. Still, she would be better off if she got some rest.

  This did pose a problem, though. It would be much easier to transport Sasha to Columbia City in the middle of the night, but he couldn’t move her now. Thomas hated the Tattered City,
and spending time in Sasha’s Chicago had only made him hate it more. The Tattered City was a shadow of its Earth counterpart, with less open sky and green space, more deserted high-rises and garbage. Once it had been a major metropolis, a cultural mecca and an important financial center, but that had been eroded away by the revolutionary assault of Libertas. They’d all but seized the city; you couldn’t go anywhere without having to dodge Libertas “security,” commandos dressed in black who carried unlicensed military rifles and prowled the streets like panthers. The local police were useless, because Libertas controlled them from within, and KES agents like Thomas weren’t exactly welcome, although the city still technically fell within their jurisdiction; everything in the Commonwealth was under KES jurisdiction.

  But as much as the idea of getting into it with Libertas appealed to him, that wasn’t why Thomas was in the Tattered City. No one save Fillmore could know that he was there, not even the undercover KES agents on assignment in the area, and especially not Libertas; if they caught the faintest whiff of the General’s plan, they would certainly attempt to intervene, and he and Fillmore—and, worse, Sasha—could die as a result. Once he managed to get Sasha past the boundaries and on her way to Columbia City, everything would be much easier, but the next twelve hours would be tricky. He had to make sure nobody saw her. That was the most important thing.

  “I want to speak to the Monad,” she insisted. She’d lost count of the times she’d made this demand, but this was the first time she was making it of him. She hadn’t seen him since the night he brought her to the Libertas bunker, but he had appeared today, sudden as a summer storm, without warning or explanation. “You promised.”

  “The Monad is a busy man,” he told her. “He’ll see you when he’s ready, Juli.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “You’ll address me as Your Highness, or Princess Juliana. Nothing else.”