“Gloria Beach,” Thomas said, stepping aside to let the woman pass. “This is Sasha Lawson.”
Gloria allowed several seconds of silence to go by, fixing me with a penetrating look. “I would say it’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Lawson, but I don’t think that would be true for either of us. That said, I hope you understand that I’m here to help you. Nobody wants Juliana back more than I do, but until the General manages to locate her, I’m afraid we have no choice.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t.” The words came out harsher than I’d intended, but Gloria nodded in understanding.
“Thomas, turn the lights on,” Gloria commanded. “I want to get a good look at her.” The fluorescents flickered for a moment before dousing the room in bright white light.
Gloria walked a circle around me, regarding me closely. “It’s amazing, really, how much you look like Juliana.”
“I’m not her,” I insisted.
“No, of course not,” Gloria said. “But how you look is the single most important factor in whether or not people will
believe
that you’re Juliana, which is the ultimate goal. With the right clothes, hair, and makeup, even her own mother couldn’t tell the difference.”
“Where is Juliana’s mother?” I asked. Thomas had mentioned a stepmother, the queen regent, and her incapacitated father, but surely Juliana had a mother as well? My heart burned with jealousy. It wasn’t fair that she had two parents—three, counting her stepmother—while I had none.
It’s one of the differences,
I imagined Thomas saying. To me, at least, it was the greatest difference of all.
Thomas looked to Gloria, who explained. Juliana’s parents had married when her mother, Alana Defort, was very young; up until then, the king was considered to be a confirmed bachelor, and everyone was shocked that he had not only decided to marry, but also that his wife was so dramatically his junior. She was from an old Commonwealth family that had made millions in textiles several generations earlier, and the only heir to their considerable fortune. Their marriage had lasted just short of ten years, and they divorced when Juliana was eight because the king had met someone else.
“Her name was Evelyn Eaves, then,” Gloria said. “She was a lawyer with the Royal Counsel. Everyone knew that the king had affairs, but to actually marry one of his mistresses was nothing short of scandal. Needless to say, Juliana and her stepmother don’t get along, especially since the king had Juliana’s mother exiled.”
“Exiled?” It sounded like such an old-fashioned punishment for a woman whose sole crime was being a wife the king had grown bored with. Although, kings on Earth had done far worse than that with wives they considered extraneous. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Alana fought the divorce,” Gloria said, pursing her lips in displeasure. She was clearly not enamored of the king or the queen regent. “It was all over the press boards for years, and everyone came out looking just awful. The king considered the bad publicity to be traitorous and forced her out of the country. She now lives just over the border in the Canadian Republic. Juliana is allowed to visit her, but Alana hasn’t been back to the Commonwealth since the divorce was final. She’s not even being permitted to attend the wedding.”
It was hard not to feel sorry for Juliana. I missed my parents every second of every day, but even though they were gone, I was sure that they’d loved me, and each other. It was cold comfort sometimes, but other times, it actually helped to remember that.
Oh my God,
I thought with a start.
My parents
.
“If I’m Juliana’s analog,” I said, the words coming out in a rush. “Then are her mom and dad analogs of
my
mom and dad?” It seemed like too much to hope for, but was it possible that I might be able to see my parents for the first time in a decade?
Thomas shook his head, and something inside me crumpled.
“It doesn’t really work like that,” Thomas said. “Our worlds … they’re too different now. Maybe a long time ago that would’ve been the case, but too much has changed.”
“What do you mean, too much has changed?”
Thomas took a seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He looked worn down, tired. I tried not to sympathize with him too much—after all, he’d chosen a life that had put him in the path of danger. But exhaustion didn’t diminish his handsomeness, which at this point seemed to exist only to torment me. It got under my skin, how good-looking I couldn’t help thinking he was, even after everything. Why couldn’t awful people be ugly and good people beautiful, without exception? It would’ve made things so much easier.
“It might be helpful if you can manage to think of all the possible universes as many branches of a tree,” Thomas began. “In the beginning, they were all the same—like a trunk. But as time goes on, changes start to happen—just small ones at first—changes that differentiate the universes, make them unique. In one world, you get up on time for school, and in another you’re late. In one world you eat pizza for lunch, in another you have a turkey sandwich. No big deal, right? But change causes more change, and before you know it, the universes aren’t so similar anymore. Does that make sense?”
Sense?
None of this made any
sense,
really, but it wasn’t so far off from things I’d heard Granddad talk about in the past. “Your basic ripple effect,” I supplied.
“Exactly. At least, that was how it was explained to me.” Thomas fixed his eyes on me, and I could’ve sworn they were brighter than before. “It doesn’t even have to take that long. It’s only been a couple hundred years since the Aurora-Earth LCE and look how different our two worlds already are.”
“LCE?”
“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 everything in a butter-yellow glow.
But it wasn’t the suite’s beauty that had stunned me—it was the fact that I had seen it all before. I was just as comfortable in this room as I was in my own back at home, a bizarre sensation I wasn’t prepared for. It all felt like it belonged to me, and I had to remind myself very sternly that it didn’t, that it never would, and that in six days I would be gone. My eyes landed on a painting hanging on the wall; it depicted a country house, large and sprawling, set against a beautiful emerald wood, with a glittering lake in the foreground.