“Obviously I
can,
Miss Lawson, because I
have
. You can scream and cry and throw tantrums and make nasty remarks all you like, but that will not change the plain fact that I have you trapped here in Aurora and there is no way for you to get home. Now,” he continued. “I could be persuaded to
send
you home, and soon, provided you do everything I ask of you, without question.”
“How soon?”
“Six days,” the General told me. “Six days during which you give a convincing performance as Juliana and follow every order that descends from my office. That will be your ticket out of here. Do we have a deal?”
“Why six days?” It seemed like an awfully specific period of time, and something told me the General hadn’t chosen it at random.
“Ah, well, there remains a part of our situation that I haven’t yet informed you of. The UCC comprises the eastern half of the landmass you know as the United States, but there’s another country, called Farnham, that controls the rest. Without boring you with centuries of bloody history, I can tell you that Farnham and the UCC have been at war almost continuously since our countries were founded around the turn of the nineteenth century. Six months ago, diplomatic representatives from both countries reached an agreement; a peace treaty would be signed that would prevent any further conflict, and to seal that treaty, the princess of the Commonwealth would marry one of the princes of Farnham. And that wedding is finally going to take place—a week from today.”
“You want me to get married? I’m
sixteen
!”
“So is Juliana. And yet …” The General shrugged. “We all must do what is necessary to fulfill our obligations. I’m sure you don’t care what happens to the people of this country, and I can’t blame you for that. Why should you give a damn about a place where you don’t belong? However, I’m quite willing to go to the ends of the world—and beyond—to preserve the safety and happiness of the citizens of the Commonwealth to which I’ve pledged my life and service for the past forty years. Your presence here is proof of that fact.” He sat back, hands clasped in his lap, and gazed at me. After a moment of silent contemplation he continued:
“You’ll do as I say. Six days as Juliana and you’ll go free. I’ll return you to your home and this will all be a distant memory.” He stood and walked to the door. When he reached it, he turned back to me. “Agent Mayhew will take over from here. You’ll regard everything he tells you as a directive from me; you’ll obey and follow him, wherever he leads you. Do I make myself clear?”
I lifted my head, my eyes burning with defiance. “What if I refuse?”
“Then I will have Agent Mayhew draw his sidearm and shoot you,” the General said coolly, as if he was talking about the weather. “I caution you not to treat this as a game, Miss Lawson, because I certainly don’t.” He glanced at Thomas. “She’s yours. Don’t let me down.”
“I won’t, sir,” he said, the weasel.
“Good.” The door slid open, and the General left as quietly as he had come. When he was gone, the dam broke; I dropped my face into my hands and sobbed.
It was only later that I realized the General had said Juliana was supposed to be married in a week, yet he was only forcing me to act as her for six days. I couldn’t imagine there was anything wrong with his math, which raised the question: what was going to happen in six days?
ELEVEN
Thomas appeared at my side. He reached out and I shrank away.
“Don’t touch me!” I cried, my voice wet with tears.
“I was only trying to give you this.” He held out a handkerchief. I ripped it from his hand and used it to wipe my face, but as soon as my eyes were dry another flood came. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Just days ago, I was in Hyde Park, living out my normal, uneventful life, and now here I was, trapped in another world, being forced to pretend to be someone else under threat of death. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t figure out a way to make sense of it. I just wanted to be alone, but Thomas refused to leave.
“I have to stay with you,” he said. “General’s orders.”
“I hate you,” I seethed. Every time I looked at him, all I could think was how betrayed I felt. And the worst part was, it didn’t matter. He’d made me no promises, had no loyalty to me. If I’d trusted him, that was my mistake. I could be angry with him all I wanted, hate him with all the strength I had left in me; that was my right. But how could I feel betrayed by someone who had come into my life with the explicit intention of deceiving me?
Thomas nodded. “I don’t blame you.”
I scoffed into his handkerchief. “Yeah, right.”
“Believe what you want,” he told me. “But I’d hate me, too, if I were you.”
I turned my back to him. He moved behind me, toward the wide black screen, and my ears caught a soft, mechanical whirring. I wanted to know what he was doing, but I was too proud to show interest. After a while, the whirring stopped, only to be replaced by a humming noise. It took me a second or two to work out that it was Thomas singing softly to himself.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I whirled around and glared at him. I recognized the song. The dj had played it at our—my—prom. We’d danced to it under a cheesy disco ball. A rush of memory threatened to overcome me, but I stood my ground against it; I wasn’t going to be drawn back into everything I’d felt when I believed that lie, when I’d thought it was the start of something instead of the end of my life as I knew it.
Thomas shrugged, feigning innocence. “I like that song.”
“You’d never even
heard
that song before … before then,” I said, fumbling for words. I wanted to appear as aloof and untouched by our time together as he did, but I was struggling to balance detachment with bitterness. “You’re just trying to upset me!”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to get your attention. And look—it worked.”
“What’s
wrong
with you?” I shouted. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done? Doesn’t it bother you at all that your boss just threatened to have you
shoot
me if I don’t pretend to be this—this other girl?”
“Juliana,” he said flatly.
“I don’t care what her name is!”
“Well, you should,” Thomas told me, a little peevish, which was rich, coming from him. “You should want to know everything about her. If you’re going to pretend to be somebody else, knowledge is crucial. Believe me, I know.”
I almost told him then. I don’t know why, but I felt an overwhelming need to tell
somebody,
and he was the only person in the room. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying that I knew more than he thought I did about Juliana, because I’d been seeing her in my dreams ever since I could remember.
But what
did
I know? It was hard to put my finger on it, and even harder to explain it. I wouldn’t have been able to name a single person that she knew. I only had flashes of her life, buried deep in my memory, pieces I had never before thought to analyze for anything significant, because I’d had no idea that the dreams were anything more than that:
dreams
. Images that my tired brain threw off like light from a dying sparkler. If I was seeing into her life, was she seeing into mine as well? Did she know I existed, like
really
existed, or did she think that I, too, was just a fantasy born of secret wishes and an overactive imagination?
“Then tell me something useful,” I demanded. “What do I need to know?”
The weight of Thomas’s gaze was heavy. He looked at me like I was some sort of code he was trying to decipher, as if staring at me long enough would tell him something about me, something he didn’t already know. He indicated the wall behind him; the screen had pulled back to reveal a large, floor-to-ceiling picture window. The overhead lights gave the glass a mirrored effect. I stared at my reflection, trying to imagine it having a life, a name, a personality of its own.
Juliana
. It just didn’t seem possible. My face was my face; it belonged to me, and nobody else. Even when I could be sure of nothing else, I knew that to be true. I was me, and me alone, something no one else could claim. The thought that there was someone out there who saw the same thing as I did when she looked in the mirror was almost too much to contemplate.
But how do we get to the other universes?
I’d asked Granddad once, when I was a kid.
We don’t,
he’d said.
But why?
I knew that the worlds we invented together were silly, but Granddad seemed to sincerely believe that other universes besides ours existed. If so, where were they, and how could I get there? I wanted to know so badly.
Because,
he’d said.
We were all made for one world, and one world only, Sasha. If universes were to collide, bad things would happen. They’re separate for a reason.
At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, but now I was starting to get it.
“Would you like to see the city?” Thomas asked. “It’s a clear night.”
“I’ve seen a city before, thanks,” I snapped. “How different could it be?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said, unshaken by my tone.
I inched closer to the window, taking care to maintain a distance between Thomas and me. He reached to the side and pressed a button I couldn’t see; the room went dark.
“You can see it better with the lights off,” he explained.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but when they did I saw it: a river of undulating green light high in the sky. If I needed any more proof that Juliana’s world, the one I saw when I slept, was real, this clinched it.
“I don’t understand,” I breathed. I was captivated by the glow of the aurora borealis, something I never imagined I’d see in person. It had always been my favorite part of the dreams. A feeling of calmness and relief flooded my body.
I had to tear my eyes away from it in order to assess the view from the window. We were more than a hundred stories up, which, aurora or not, made me feel wretched. I’d never been very good with heights; when my class had gone to visit the Sears Tower in the fourth grade, I’d had to stay inside one of the gift shops with a chaperone because I couldn’t bear standing so close to such a long, steep drop. The window spanned from floor to ceiling, making it seem like I could step out over the edge and plunge straight to the ground below. Just standing so close to such a terrifying precipice made my palms sweat and my heart race. I stayed far away from the glass and stared off into the distance.
We were towering over a star-shaped complex of squat, dark buildings, before which was a long, tree-filled park and, beyond that, a glittering city, spread like a blanket beneath our feet, an imprecise but lovely replica of the star-filled sky above our heads where the aurora danced and spun. Cars like insects moved through the streets below, which were laid out in a meticulous grid; elevated trains glided like eels above them, their steel roofs glinting in the moonlight. As far as I could see, we were standing in the tallest building for miles; none other even came close to half our height. The room was up so high that I could see the shadowy contours of the city, how it tapered to a point and ended on the shores of a placid river.
I heard a faint rustle of plastic and looked over to see Thomas pulling a handful of candies out of his pocket. He popped them in his mouth one by one and chewed them in a slow, rhythmic fashion that by the fourth or fifth time was pretty much annoying the
crap
out of me.
“You’re eating right now?” Once I said that, I realized that I was starving.
He fished the entire bag out of his pocket and offered it to me. “Want one?”
I eyed them suspiciously. “What are they?”
“Toggles,” he said. “They’re chocolate with fruit jelly in the middle. Red’s strawberry, purple is raspberry, blue’s watermelon, although I’ve never seen a blue watermelon in my life so I’m not sure where they get off—”
“No thanks,” I interrupted. “That sounds disgusting. Plus, I’m allergic to chocolate.”
“You are?”
“What? You don’t have my medical records taped up somewhere in here?”
His eyes skimmed over the paper-covered walls. “I thought I did. …”
“Forget it. Just stop talking to me.”
I turned my attention back to the cityscape below.
It’s an island,
I thought in passing. But where? I’d assumed we were in North America, but if the aurora was in the sky, we had to be somewhere very far north. The aurora was … there were no words for what it was. “Beautiful” felt used up, meaningless. The way the green waves moved through the indigo sky called to my mind the weightless grace of ballet dancers, the spreading of ink through water, the way ribbons spun in a breeze. It was mesmerizing, and as I watched it fatigue began to settle over me. It was hard to believe that a place that contained something so amazing as the aurora could also be my prison, but Earth had the aurora, too, and possessed countless horrors of its own.
“Manhattan,” Thomas told me. I bit my lip in frustration. When the General was giving me my marching orders, Thomas hadn’t said a word; now, he seemed incapable of staying silent.
“This can’t be Manhattan,” I protested, realizing I was going to have to talk to him since I was stuck with him for the next six days. “New York is too far south to see the aurora borealis.”
“That’s not the aurora borealis. It’s the aurora universalis.” He swiped a finger across the length of the sky, not quite touching the glass. “You can see it everywhere here. That’s how the planet got its name. It’s one of the differences.” He looked over at me, as if trying to judge how this information was landing. “And I never said this was New York.”
“But Manhattan is part of New York,” I pointed out, although as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized I was being a little dim. This wasn’t Earth; I couldn’t expect everything to be the same.
“Not here. Like the General said, this is Columbia City. It used to be New York, a long time ago, but they changed the name when the split from England was final, as a kind of symbolic act.”