Tandem (15 page)

“What do you mean ‘
one
of the differences’?”

“Your planet—Earth—and this planet—Aurora—are analogs,” he said.
That word again,
I thought.
Analog
.

“Why do you call them that? If they’re doubles, then why don’t you just say ‘double’?”

“Because ‘double’ is an imprecise term,” he said. He sounded like he was quoting someone, the words not quite his own. “A double is an exact copy, with absolutely no differences. An analog
can
be a double, but it doesn’t have to be; analogs can be different in some ways, large or small, but still similar, if that makes any sense.”

“Um, not really. How can something be the same, but also sometimes different?”

“Well, take this, for example,” he said, gesturing toward the view from the window. “Earth and Aurora are essentially the same planet: same mass, same orbit, same axis, same natural surface geography. The only thing that makes Aurora special is that its magnetic field is two and a half times that of Earth’s. That’s why you can see the lights so far south. You see? They’re similar, but not the same. Equivalent is probably the best word. Essentially equal, but not identical.”

“Is that why you look like Grant but your name is Thomas?”

He nodded. “And why you look like Princess Juliana but you have a different identity. Not copies. Not twins. Not look-alikes. Analogs.”

“Analogs,” I repeated. “But why?”

“Why?” He appeared genuinely confused by the question.

“Why you and Grant? Why me and … her? What connects us to our analogs?”

What I really wanted to ask was “Why can I see Juliana’s life in my dreams?” It couldn’t have been normal, otherwise he would know I could do it, and I was pretty sure he didn’t suspect anything of the sort. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t trust him, and I wasn’t ready to hear the answer.

Thomas shrugged. “Nobody knows. Not for sure, anyway. Until about thirty years ago, all this was completely theoretical—in your world it still is.”

“Tell me about her.” Though I’d been glimpsing Juliana’s life in my dreams ever since I could remember, I didn’t know much about her, but I wanted to.

“Juliana?” I nodded. “Well, she’s … she’s tough. The way she was raised, it seems like a fairy tale, but it hasn’t been, at least not for a long time. Life’s been cruel to her, especially recently.”

“You mean the wedding?” I couldn’t imagine being forced to marry someone I didn’t know just to satisfy someone else’s political agenda. And if the General’s explanation had been anything to go by, Juliana’s fiancé was practically her enemy, the prince of a country that had been at war with her own since before she was alive.

Thomas bit back a bitter laugh. “Actually, that’s the least of it.”

“What’s the worst?”

“A couple of months ago, her father, the king, was shot during a public event,” Thomas told me. “By Libertas,” he added.

I felt as though I’d swallowed a stone; a great heaviness settled in my stomach, the echoes of a grief I knew all too well. It must’ve shown on my face, what I was thinking, because Thomas rushed to assure me that the king hadn’t died. “Although some people might think it would’ve been better if he had.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s not himself anymore. The bullet lodged in his brain, and while it didn’t kill him, the surgeons couldn’t remove it. He’s in this strange sort of in-between state. Not a coma, really, because sometimes he’s awake, but he’s pretty incoherent most of the time. He doesn’t talk much, and he definitely can’t rule.”

“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
could
do that,” Thomas said, after pausing to think it over. “It’d require a huge amount of energy, and unless it landed in exactly the right way, the whole thing could just fall apart. The disruption would be big, too, which would cause major structural damage to the building and those around it. Why do you ask?”

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 getting kidnapped. Another question pushed its way past the walls I’d erected against these strange sensations and lodged itself in my brain: would I continue to see life through her eyes now that I was in her world? Only time would tell, but I had the distinct impression that I’d had other dreams while I was unconscious—both times—though I didn’t remember them. But I couldn’t count on that now. I had to dredge my memory for any lucid details that could be useful to me here, and hope for the best.

“Now what?” I didn’t want to bring up the future; the conversation about the tandem and its idiosyncrasies had relaxed me a bit, and Thomas’s earlier stiffness and formality had given way to something much more human, much closer to the boy he had been on Earth, when I’d thought he was Grant. I didn’t want to scare that all away by calling his attention back to the situation at hand, but there wasn’t a choice. We had to move forward—
I
had to, if I was ever going to get home.

“Now,” he said. “We call Gloria.”

TWELVE

“Who’s Gloria?” I asked. All the easiness I’d felt in talking to Thomas before dissolved in the face of meeting someone else from this world.

“Gloria is Juliana’s personal secretary and aide-de-camp,” Thomas explained. I tried to imagine what this person might be like, but couldn’t. “She knows who you are.”

“She does?”

“She has to,” Thomas said. “I’m going to give you as much help as I can, but there’s only so much I can do—there’s only so much I know. Gloria’s been with Juliana since the princess was twelve. She keeps her schedule and manages her staff. She’ll be an invaluable resource for you.”

“How many other people know?”

“Of the ones you’ll actually meet, it’s just me, the General, and Gloria. And Fillmore, of course.” I grimaced. I thought I saw him smile, but it might’ve just been a trick of the light. “There are a few others, but nobody you need to worry about. I would save all your energy for the people who
don’t
know who you are.”

He pressed a button on a small console to the right of the door. It beeped and he spoke into it. “Send Gloria in.”

In moments, the door slid open and a tall, brown-skinned woman entered. Her hair was pulled back into a tight French twist and she was dressed professionally, despite the hour, in a gray twill pencil skirt, perfectly pressed black blouse, black sheer tights, and a pair of high black stiletto heels. She carried a square glass tablet in her hand and wore a serious expression.