“And then you’ll take me home?” I asked, although I suspected the answer was
no
. He wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of bringing me here just to turn around and let me go.
His face betrayed nothing. “Get changed. Then we’ll talk.”
“First tell me why I’m here,” I insisted.
He turned sharply. “Let me explain how this works,” he said, in a voice so cold the temperature in the room seemed to dip ten degrees. “I give the orders, you follow them. I tell you what I want you to know, when I want you to know it. You want to go home? Then follow my instructions. Now: Go. Get. Changed.”
I stared into his eyes with as much bravado as I could muster, but he didn’t back down or look away. I hated to admit it, but it didn’t look like I had a choice. Anger—pure and unalloyed—had rushed in to replace the fear I’d felt before, burning it away. His word would not be the last. I was going to get away. It was only a matter of time before Grant slipped up and gave me an opportunity to escape, and when he did, I’d be ready. But for now I had to play the game his way. Realizing this made me calmer, my mind sharp and alert where it had previously been foggy and muddled.
I’m going home,
I thought with sudden clarity and conviction.
Nothing he can do or say is going to stop me.
SIX
Staying as far away from Grant and his crony as possible, I took the backpack into the bathroom. The door slid open without a touch, as if it was on some sort of sensor. The place looked as though it had once belonged in one of those sleek, modern hotel rooms I’d seen in the movies, but everything was old and run-down.
The door closed by itself and I slumped against it. I wanted to cry, but I struggled not to, knowing that if I started I might not stop. A few tears escaped anyway. I covered my face with my hands and breathed deeply. At least I was alone, a small relief.
How could I have thought, even for a second, that I was falling for Grant? How could I have forgotten how little I knew him? Even though I knew it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t help but hold myself partially responsible for my current situation. I’d let myself be seduced by his good looks and charm, soft words and romantic overtures. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.
When I’d gathered myself as best I could, I picked up the bag and began rummaging through it. My hands closed first around a stick of deodorant, half-used, from my own medicine cabinet. I applied some, feeling sticky, then tossed it back and took out a brush, which I pulled through my tangled hair. The curls Gina had so painstakingly created had fallen into limp waves. I bit my lip and kept fixing myself up; the ritual of getting ready was a soothing and welcome distraction.
When I was finished, I ripped off the corsage Grant had given me, reveling in the feeling of flower petals crumpling between my fingers as I crushed it in my fist before dropping it unceremoniously in the wastebin. It felt good to take my anger out on something, however small.
I turned the bag upside down and shook it. A bundle of folded clothes fell to the floor—jeans, a T-shirt, my navy blue zip-up hoodie, and my favorite brown leather boots with a pair of thick socks. Everything in the bag belonged to me. The idea of Grant in my bedroom, going through my drawers and touching my belongings, made me shudder. I splashed some water on my face, put my hair up in a ponytail, and got dressed.
I took another long, ragged breath and let it out again.
It’s going to be okay,
I assured myself, staring at my reflection in the grimy mirror above the sink.
It’s going to be okay.
There was a knock at the door. Grant called out from the other side. “Are you almost done? Hurry up, we need to leave.”
I emerged from the bathroom with my bag, now almost empty, over my shoulder and my prom dress slumped in my arms like a fallen comrade. When I’d taken it off, a stream of sand had cascaded out of the bodice. I’d been on that beach. Those memories, what I had left of them, were real.
I glanced down at my wrist to check if the bracelet he’d given me was still there and found that it was. A flare went off in my brain; I had to get free of it. I would never have imagined that it was possible to hate a
thing
as much as I hated that bracelet. Somehow I knew—beyond all reason—that it had something to do with why I was there in that basement instead of home in bed. I tugged and pulled and pressed every inch of the bracelet’s slim surface, desperate to remove it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Good luck getting rid of that,” the old man muttered.
“Screw you,” I snapped.
“It won’t come off,” Grant said.
“What is it?” I demanded. It might’ve looked like a regular bracelet, but it obviously wasn’t. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Grant wasn’t wearing his anymore. Sometime while I was unconscious he’d changed into a pair of sturdy cargo pants, T-shirt, and hoodie, all black. The sleeves of his jacket and hoodie were shoved up to his elbows and his bare wrists were on full display. He was wearing a ring, though, one I’d never seen before, on the middle finger of his right hand, but I didn’t have time to wonder about it.
“You can leave that here,” he said, indicating the dress and ignoring my question. “You won’t need it anymore.”
I hesitated. As stupid as it was, under the circumstances, I didn’t want to give up my dress. It was
mine,
goddamn it. “What are you going to do with it?”
Grant shrugged. “Fillmore will burn it, probably.”
“Burn it?”
“No one can know you were ever here,” Grant said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“For who?” I demanded. My stomach dropped. They were going to cover up all proof of my existence. Soon there would be no trail of bread crumbs for anybody to follow.
“For all of us, including you,” Grant said. “I told you nobody would hurt you, didn’t I? This is for your protection.”
Something went slack within me. I felt as if I was falling down a long, dark shaft; black clouds roiled in my peripheral vision and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed before I fainted. The dress slipped out of my hands and onto the floor.
“Grant,” I murmured. It was the only call for help I could find the strength to make. He passed in front of me, crouching down so that our eyes were level. I searched his for any sign of tenderness and he, maybe sensing my intentions, avoided meeting my gaze.
“Just breathe,” he advised, his own breath growing shallow as he sat there watching me. I gripped my knees, riding out wave after wave of nausea.
What is
wrong
with me?
I thought.
“Grant, I swear to you, if you just take me home I won’t tell anybody what happened,” I begged. It was the only offer I could think to make, though it was a lie. My knuckles had turned a ghostly white color. “My grandfather has incredibly high blood pressure—if I don’t show up, like, yesterday, he could have a heart attack!”
My own heart buckled at the thought of what Granddad must be going through. I imagined him waking up at dawn and going to check on me, only to find me missing. In my mind’s eye he was picking up the phone, dialing my cell—once, twice, fifteen times before giving up—then Gina’s house, then Grant’s if he could find the number, and then, finally, with a heaviness he almost couldn’t bear, the police.
Grant fixed me with a hard look. “I’m going to say something that won’t make very much sense to you at first, but I need you to listen. I need you to hear me say it.”
“There’s nothing you can say that will make me understand.”
He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “I’m not Grant Davis.”
Of all the lies in the world, that was the one I was least prepared to hear.
“My name isn’t Grant,” he continued. “It’s Thomas. Thomas Mayhew.”
“You must think I’m a real idiot,” I snapped.
He shook his head somberly. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I’m not lying to you. I’m not Grant Davis. You don’t know me. My name is Thomas Mayhew. I need you to understand that.”
“This is ridiculous,” Fillmore barked. “Who cares if she understands? It’s not going to change anything. She’ll do what you tell her to do because if she doesn’t you’ll shoot her and leave her here. If there’s two, then there’s more, am I right?”
What the hell did
that
mean? This was nonsense, all of it. I wanted to grab Fillmore and throw him to the ground. Grant, at least, looked about as sick of him as I was.
“Fillmore, shut up!” he growled. He turned to me. “Don’t listen to him. He talks a big game, but he won’t do anything without my permission, and I’m not going to let him touch you, all right? I’m not the guy you thought I was back … back there, but I have no intention of harming you.”
He looked away at the oblique mention of Oak Street Beach, the prom, the living room of Granddad’s Hyde Park Victorian, the quiet caverns of 57th Street Books—all those things that signified
back there
.
“If you’re not Grant, then who are you?”
“I already told you,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You told me your name is Thomas Mayhew,” I said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“If it did, I’d be surprised.” He lifted his eyes to mine. It was shocking, how familiar they were, and yet how foreign, like I’d never seen them before in my whole life.
A horrifying suspicion tugged at me: what if Grant was crazy? I’d been operating this whole time on the assumption that he was a reasonable, rational being—I’d even considered the possibility that this was all a misunderstanding, although that seemed like too much to hope for. But what if he was insane?
Because what he was proposing was ludicrous. Was he saying that Grant Davis had never existed, that since infancy he’d been someone else, this “Thomas Mayhew” that he claimed to be? Or was he telling me that he—whoever he thought he was—had
replaced
Grant, pretended to be him? Of the two options, I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to swallow, but the idea that there could be two unrelated people who looked exactly the same was so unlikely that it made my head hurt.
“So you’re … what? Grant’s evil twin?” That was the only possible explanation, if he was telling the truth, although it was very
telenovela,
and in no way easy to believe.
A short, harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Not exactly.”
“Then what
are
you?”
“Sasha,” he said deliberately, “what do you know about parallel universes?”
SEVEN
Now I laughed. “Parallel universes? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“Your grandfather is a theoretical physicist,” Grant said. “You must have heard him talk about them at some point.”
“You’re not trying to tell me that you’re from a parallel universe!” I considered again my hypothesis about his mental stability.
Parallel universes?
That sealed it: Grant was officially bonkers.
“Actually,” he said, standing up, “I’m trying to tell you that
you
are.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d hit it on the head when he said that Granddad was a theoretical physicist, because that’s what parallel universes were—
theoretical
. No one had ever proven that they existed.
He shook his head. “I know it’s a shock. But you know that it’s not impossible.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said, folding my arms obstinately across my chest.
He rubbed the back of his neck; he was trying not to get frustrated, a battle he was clearly losing. “I don’t have time for this to sink in gradually, so I’m going to be very frank with you. You’re from one universe and I’m from another. This one. We’re not in your world anymore—we’re in mine.”
“And what world would that be?” I struggled to suppress the wave of hysterical laughter that was rising up. “Oz?”
He was right about one thing: Granddad
had
told me about parallel universes. When I was young, inventing worlds was part of my nighttime ritual. I would climb into my bed while Granddad took a seat in a nearby chair and we’d spin all kinds of crazy stories about universes inhabited entirely by sentient Popsicle sticks, or talking flowers that ate cotton candy, or wizards who could only use their magic to conjure pancakes. But never this. Never universes so similar to ours that they contained doubles of people we actually knew. Because the implication of such worlds only made us remember, with sharp pangs of grief, what was missing in our own.
“That’s not an easy question to answer, but I guess you could call it Aurora,” he said. I took a few seconds to assess him as if I was just looking at him for the first time. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was crazy. He wasn’t acting shifty or unhinged. It was precisely the opposite, in fact; he seemed alarmingly serious.
“Grant—”
“My name’s not Grant,” he insisted, his voice tight and agitated. “It’s—”
“Thomas?” He nodded. “You want me to call you Thomas? Fine. That’s fine. I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll call you Rumpelstiltskin if it means you’ll let me go.”
“I liked her better when she was unconscious,” Fillmore said.
“Fillmore!” Thomas snapped, throwing a glare over his shoulder at the older man. His jaw tensed as he gritted his teeth. He turned back to me with barely contained exasperation.
“My name
is
Thomas,” he said. “I know I look like Grant. I know I sound like Grant. I know that, briefly, I pretended to
be
Grant, but I’m not him. Grant is from your world. Earth. I’m not. I’m from here.”
“Aurora.”
“That’s right.”
I shook my head, drowning in disbelief. The insanity of this conversation had even managed to distract me from how badly I still wanted to throw up.
“Okay, well, if we’re in some parallel universe,
Thomas,
then how exactly did we get here? Even if parallel universes exist, there’s no way to move between them.”
“We found a way.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“You’re wearing it.” He pointed at the bracelet on my wrist. “It’s called an anchor; it helped transport you to Aurora and, as long as you have it on, it’ll keep you here.”