Ten Thousand Skies Above You (21 page)

“Do you think she might have come to see you on purpose?” Dr. Nilsson is humoring me now. “To take the actions you were afraid of? To do things otherwise forbidden?”

“I need to think about that some more.”

That wins me a very slight smile. She definitely believes
we're making progress. “Have you had any dreams lately, Your Imperial Highness?”

How would I know? But the words well up anyway, spilling out to the only person I have to tell. “I dreamed that I was captured by armed men.” What's the closest equivalent to the Russian mob in this dimension? “By soldiers loyal to the Grand Duke Sergei, the ones who rose up against us.”

“What happened during your captivity, in this dream? Were you sexually violated?”

“No.” Um,
rude
. Then again, I remember studying that the early Freudians believed absolutely everything came back to sex in the end. Dr. Nilsson's overly personal questions are going to keep coming. “But one of the soldiers turned out to be Paul Markov.”

“What role did Markov play in your dream?”

“I thought he was there to protect me. To rescue me, no matter what.” I swallow hard. “Instead, he turned out to be just like all the rest. Someone else came to save me, and Paul—Paul shot him. The man who tried to save me didn't die, but there was so much blood, and I thought he might lose his legs.”

Dr. Nilsson nods. “How did this make you feel?”

“Guilty. Sad. Scared. Doctor, what do you think my dream means?”

“Only you can answer that, Your Imperial Highness.”

“I know, but—I just wondered what it looked like to you. Please tell me.”

She puts the notepad in her lap and folds her hands on
top of it. Instead of answering right away, she thinks for a moment—trying to give me an honest answer.

Finally she nods, as if agreeing with her own inner assessment. “Someone whom you have always regarded as a loving, protective figure instead, in your mind, became someone who could hurt you. In your dream, you only saw him attack another; this may have been your subconscious softening the blow.”

“But Lieutenant Markov never would have hurt me. I know that. I know it.”

“The dream of him can,” Dr. Nilsson said. “So can the illusion that you might find him again.”

My belief that Paul and I are destined to be together no matter what—that's the illusion. It shattered along with Theo's bones in that rain of bullets. And it feels like I've been destroyed along with it.

After Dr. Nilsson leaves, I sink back onto the sofa. This enormous room's grandeur seems to taunt me, because as beautiful as it is it's empty. I'm alone in ways I thought I never would be again, because I always thought that even when Paul wasn't with me, he was a part of me.

Before long I have to move on. No matter how unsure I am about Paul at this moment, I will never, ever abandon him to Conley. Yes, Theo has gone to the home office in the Triadverse; by now, Conley should have given him the coordinates for the dimension where the fourth and final splinter of Paul's soul is hidden. I've done Conley's dirty
work. But Conley will never let it go at that. He'd endanger Paul again, if that was what it took to get me out of this universe and back under his thumb. So I can't remain in Paris for much longer.

What I need to do now is figure out what comes after.

My reverie is interrupted when the maid brings in my luncheon tray. She smiles as she delivers it to the dining area—which has a table and chairs so ornate they seem less like something you'd eat at, more like where you'd sit while writing the Constitution. I take a seat, primly as I did back in the Winter Palace, so the illusion of royalty is complete until she lifts the silver cover from the tray.

What awaits me isn't anything out of the ordinary—some kind of fish soup, I think, plus vegetables—but for some reason, the fishy odor hits me like a blow. Never have I smelled anything so disgusting; the scent seems to seep into my nose and lungs and gut like poison. Everything inside me turns over, tightens.

My stomach wrenches as the nausea turns from figurative to literal.

“I'm going to throw up,” I say. The maid skitters back as I push away from the table and make a run for the nearest bathroom. I make it just in time to barf into the sink.

The smell of my own vomit almost makes me sick again. And in the bathroom there's the scent of cleanser, and perfumed soap that for some reason now seems repulsive—I can't stand it. Weakly I stumble out of there, and the maid gets me back to my bedroom. “I'll leave your luncheon
under the tray. If you want another later, ring,” she says as she backs out and closes the door behind her.

I flop onto my bed, now too queasy to be miserable about anything else.

It would serve me right, if after everything else I put the grand duchess through, I had to endure her bout of the flu. Groaning, I roll onto my stomach—but my breasts are tender, and I wince.

My eyes open wide.

The grand duchess has gained weight. Mom and I have the same problem: we almost
can't
gain weight. Don't even give me that crap about
boo hoo hoo that's not a real problem eat a sandwich.
Easy to say when you're not slightly wired all the time by your crazy metabolism. My body simply burns too many calories, too fast.

But here I am in a body that's heavier. Some of that weight is in my breasts, which must be a cup size larger. My sense of smell has turned sharp, and I'm vomiting for no reason at all.

Three months after Lieutenant Markov and I slept together.

Oh God. I'm pregnant.

I CAN'T BE HAVING A BABY. I
CAN'T
.

I sit on my bed, hands on either side of my head, trying to talk myself out of it.
Maybe you're premenstrual. That would explain the boobs, plus my belly could be water weight.
But my body never reacted like that to PMS before. Mostly I just break out, and start crying at the least little thing.
You could have the stomach flu. That would explain why you're throwing up.
People don't usually gain weight when they have stomach flu, do they?

All my denials fail. The truth is unmistakable on some level that goes beyond logic or even emotion; my body is telling me something that outweighs anything my brain could say. I'm pregnant, for real.

Slowly I reach down to splay my hand across my belly. No, it doesn't yet look like I have a “baby bump,” but the weight I've gained there has a certain . . . solidity. A firmness
that fat doesn't have. I don't feel the baby moving, but maybe I wouldn't yet.

Does anyone know I'm having a baby? No—they can't. Dr. Nilsson would have asked me how I felt about it. The tsar? I shudder at the thought. He probably would've locked me in a convent, if not a prison cell.

I'm horrified because
this isn't my body.
I did this to the Grand Duchess Margarita. I made the decision, I slept with Paul, and now—

How smug I was, telling Theo how hard we tried to do right by the other selves we visit. I'm so full of it. I took more than this Marguerite's only night with the man she loved; I took away her choices.

As bad as it would be for me to be pregnant at eighteen, for the grand duchess it's about ten thousand times worse. This society believes in virginity until marriage—for women, anyway, because they've got all the nineteenth-century hypocrisy to go with the nineteenth-century tech. And the tsar wanted to marry me off to the Prince of Wales! I'm pretty sure showing up with an illegitimate child wasn't part of that deal.

I have already endangered you
, Lieutenant Markov whispered to me that night as we lay together in bed. He understood this society; he knew the risks. And he had the sense to fear the consequences.

No, I was the careless one. And these are the consequences.

I flop back onto the bed, and close my eyes tightly as if I'm holding back tears. But the remorse goes too deep for me to
cry about it. There's nothing I can do to help her.
Nothing.
I have to assume she doesn't want to terminate the pregnancy, because surely she'd have done it by now if she could.

This must be why the grand duchess came to Paris. She knew she was in trouble, so she ran all the way across Europe. Obviously she needed to get out of Russia before her pregnancy began to show, before the tsar or any of the court nobles could guess the truth. Once the king of England learned that the grand duchess was not exactly sane—the engagement would be called off long before the truth could be revealed, and that would buy her more time.

The grand duchess might be smarter than I am.

I put my hand back over my belly, still trying to convince myself that there's an actual baby in there.
Paul
's baby. Paul's and mine, together.

On the night my parents were such bad role models about Paul and me getting together, my mother wound up saying to me that the real reason he and I shouldn't have a baby together yet didn't have anything to do with our education or our careers, as important as those things are. She said,
When you have a child with someone, you're bound to them forever. That can be beautiful and miraculous, and yet a burden, too—the knowledge that your life is intertwined with another's, for all time. It transforms your relationship in ways I can't begin to describe.

Before you take that step with someone, you must be ready to accept the destruction of the life you had together beforehand—and have faith that what you two create afterward can be even greater.

There is no “afterward” for the grand duchess and Lieutenant Markov. That night in the dacha was all they ever had.

I remember the way he held me, and whispered against my temple, calling me his little dove. Even though that Paul is dead, something of him lives on. He'll have a son or a daughter, someone who might have his gray eyes and his good mind. When I imagine holding that baby in my arms, I know—beyond any doubt—that the grand duchess wants this child.

But I now know something she doesn't: Paul Markov is more than the shy, devoted lieutenant I fell in love with in St. Petersburg. He can be cold, cruel. He could be a murderer.

On the train to Moscow, when the uprising began, Lieutenant Markov shot a guard who would have killed me and Katya. Since then I've remembered that moment as proof of how protective he is, how he would do anything to keep me safe. Now I remember how he never even looked down at the man he'd shot, bleeding to death at his feet.

The afternoon passes in a kind of daze. It feels like hours before I even move from my bed, and I do that only when I realize I'll be more nauseated if I don't eat than if I do. Every action I could possibly take—even something as inconsequential as sitting at the window to look out at the Place Vendôme—seems as if it could backfire disastrously. This is ridiculous, of course; watching the Paris scene is a lot less
risky than having unprotected sex. But after screwing up this badly, I don't trust myself right now. Guilt paralyzes me.

As the pale sunlight begins to dim at dusk, the maid arrives to prepare me “for dinner.” I remember the line in my planner—tonight I'm dining at the home of someone called Maxim. I wish I could tell the maid to go away, burrow back under the silk coverlet, and try to shut out the reality I'm in, the one I created for the grand duchess.

But I've screwed up her plans enough for one lifetime. The least I can do is keep her appointments.

I submit to the maid's ministrations. While she's not the equal of the attendants I had in St. Petersburg, she shares their knack for making the most out of my few good features. My curly hair is tamed into a soft cloud by ornate gold combs, enameled with cobalt-blue lotuses that seem vaguely Egyptian. The dress she gives me is a darker shade of blue, beaded with jet, and while it fits snugly around my newly acquired bustline, it flows down beneath that in loose folds. Even the closest observer wouldn't be able to spot the slight thickness at my middle.

I watch the maid carefully, wondering if her eyes will linger at my waist. Whether she knows. If so, she's too smart to give any sign.

She's not one of the women who attended me in St. Petersburg
, I remind myself. I don't know how long I've been in Paris, but I almost certainly wouldn't have left until after I was sure of my pregnancy, so no more than a month to six weeks.
The maid doesn't realize my body doesn't always look like this.

That buys me time, but how much? Another month, at most—

For jewelry, the maid chooses heavy, screw-on earrings of black pearls and a ruby ring so enormous it dwarfs my skinny fingers. (The Firebird remains around my neck, all but hidden under the dark gauze at the dress's neckline, unnoticed by the maid.) Then dark slippers are slid onto my feet, an elaborately beaded bag is put in my hands, and a heavy wrap of burgundy velvet and black fur is draped around my shoulders.

Turns out I'm staying in the “Suite Imperial,” but the rest of the Ritz is nearly as swanky as my rooms. Red carpet, gilded ceilings—the splendor doesn't
quite
reach the levels of the Winter Palace, but it comes pretty close.

The doors that separate my area of the hotel from the rest swing open to reveal two large, stern men dressed in black. Instantly I realize they're my personal guard. I remember Lieutenant Markov, always standing at my door, always protecting me, his gray eyes searching mine every time we dared look at each other.

“Your Imperial Highness?” says one of the guards. “Are you unwell?”

I've stopped in my tracks, one hand over my heart. Through the beaded gauze of my dress I can feel my Firebird. “I'm very well, thank you. We can leave now.”

They shepherd me through a corridor that offers only a glance of the opulent lobby, but I glimpse women in dresses as elaborate as mine, men in tuxedos and the occasional top
hat. A rush of whispers trails behind me like smoke. If this dimension's technology had developed as quickly as our own, paparazzi camera flashes would light up around me. I have to maintain a neutral, pleasant expression even though on the inside I feel like crying.

The car is a low-to-the-ground roadster with running boards and a canvas top, the kind of thing they'd drive on
Downton Abbey
. Numbly I lean back in my seat and take in the view of this wholly different Paris. A few horse-drawn carts still travel on the streets, most of them apparently bringing in agricultural products from the countryside. I see one stacked with old-fashioned metal milk jars, another laden with enormous wheels of cheese. Stores and shops are smaller and darker, and each one looks individual, with hand-painted signs advertising their wares.

Most people I see on the street aren't dressed as elegantly as those of us staying in the Ritz, but compared to the fashions I'm used to back home, everyone looks more formal. Every man has a jacket and a necktie, even the ones walking into pubs with their friends. Every woman wears a long skirt, most of them with elaborate hats to match. Nobody eats or sips coffee while they walk; instead of cell phones or plastic shopping bags, they hold walking sticks, or fans.

I expect the car to pull up in front of some mansion or stately apartment building, wherever the mysterious Maxim lives. Instead, we stop at an enormous gaudy neon sign over what looks like the biggest, most bustling restaurant in the city: Maxim's.

“Your Imperial Highness! Welcome back.” This man in the tuxedo must be the maître'd, or the owner. Whoever he is, he's really glad to see me. No wonder—having a Russian princess as a regular customer must be great advertising. “Your private room awaits you.”

“Thank you,” I say evenly, trying to disguise my relief. Whoever I'm meeting here, I won't be able to miss them, and any little mistakes I make won't be noticed by as many people in a private area. Either way, the delicious smells of beef and bread and cheese make my mouth water; my earlier nausea has given way to intense hunger.

Maxim's turns out to be almost as lush as the Ritz. Sinuously carved frames surround long oval mirrors that hang throughout the hall. The wood that panels the walls ripples in gold and brown as if it were tortoiseshell. Light shines from flower-shaped lamps held by bronze angels or through the enormous stained glass mural overhead. The other patrons are a blur of fur, satin, jewels, and candlelight.

The doors open to reveal an intimate dining room, complete with bookshelves and a chaise longue. At one end of the small table, rising to greet me, is the last person I expected.

“Your Imperial Highness,” says Theo. “How enchanting to see you again.”

The next brief flurry of activity—accepting menus and the fawning team of waiters—gives me a second to take this in. After leaving Theo in New York, where he was bruised and bloody, just the sight of him alive and well buoys me. And
yet he's not precisely the Theo I know.

His suit is black, cut closer to the body than most men's seem to be—an avant-garde style, I'd guess. He has facial hair, which I find sort of hilarious even though the mustache and Vandyke beard look good on him. He's combed his hair back with that oil or pomade or whatever men used for gel back in the day. He speaks French to the waiters but English to me—with a slight Dutch accent. I've heard my own voice change accents before, but hearing someone else's change is even weirder.

Yet the way he smiles, the flourish when he hands the wine list back to the waiter, even the slightly rakish tilt of the deep red scarf knotted around his neck: All of that is very familiar.

I knew Theo lived in Paris; I hadn't forgotten the letters he sent me while I was in St. Petersburg, talking about the Moulin Rouge. But it hadn't occurred to me to look Theo up, mostly because I can't figure out how they would know each other. It's not like our Russiaverse selves have anything in common. Theo is a leading student of chemistry; I'm a member of royalty from the other side of the continent.

Together we fight crime
, I think, and my own stupid joke makes me silly. I muffle my laugh with my lace handkerchief, trying to make it sound like a cough.

“Your Imperial Highness?” Theo asks as the waiters step out of the room, closing the doors behind them. Though my security detail waits just outside, for now Theo and I are alone. “Are you well?”

“Very well, thank you.” How do I put this? “I'm just—I've been absentminded lately, and I completely forgot what you and I had intended to talk about—”

His eyes widen. “The amnesia has affected you again?”

“Amnesia?”

Theo nods, like he knows he needs to take this slowly. His voice is patient as he says, “The malady overtook me in December. It was during this time I wrote to you, forging our acquaintance. You contacted me in January with your intriguing ideas about our other selves who knew one another, the shadow worlds—”

She remembered
everything
. “Shadow worlds,” I repeat.

“If your theory is correct,” Theo says, “it was my shadow-self who inhabited my body last December, acting in my stead. Do you remember none of this?”

Then he sits up straighter, his smile fading. He's guessed the truth, now; the only way to keep his trust is to admit it.

“As a matter of fact, I'm from one of the—shadow worlds,” I say. “I don't mean any harm, to the grand duchess or you or anyone.”

Besides Wyatt Conley. But he doesn't count.

Theo doesn't know what to make of that, and no wonder. After a moment he says, “Can you explain the scientific principles at work?”