I hug myself as I walk through the mist. It feels as though I’m splintering into a dozen directions at once—grief, then rage, then panic. The last thing I need right now is to lose it. Instead I force my mind to go to the place that always calms and centers me: painting.
If I were going to paint the dimension I see in front of me, I’d load my palette up with burnt umber, opaque black, a spectrum of grays—nothing brighter than that. I’d have to grind something into the paint with my thumb, some sort of grit or ash, because the grime here goes deeper than surfaces. Even the air feels dirty against my skin. There’s less old stone in this London than I remember, more hard metal. Fewer trees and plants, too. The chill in the air is sharp; this is early December, and yet I’m wearing only a short black dress and a flimsy jacket brighter than tinfoil.
(Yes, it’s definitely December. The devices allow dimensional travel, not time travel. “That’s another Nobel Prize altogether,” Mom once said cheerfully, like she might turn to it whenever she got a spare moment.)
Imagining painting helps a little, but my freak-out only halts when my ring starts blinking.
Startled, I stare down at the silvery band around my right pinky, which is shimmering in loops. My first thought is that it’s some kind of LED thing, meant for showing off in nightclubs. But if metal tabs on my jacket create holographic computers, what might this do?
So I reach over and tentatively give the ring a tap. The glow swirls out, a miniature spotlight, and a hologram takes shape in the space in front of me. I’m startled for the one instant before I recognize the face painted in the silver-blue shimmer: “Theo!”
“Marguerite!” He grins, relief shining from him as brilliantly as the hologram beams. “It is you, right?”
“It’s me. Oh, my God, you made it. You’re alive. I was so scared.”
“Hey.” His voice can sound so warm, when he wants it to; for all Theo’s faux arrogance—and his real arrogance—he sees more about people than he lets on. “Don’t waste any more time worrying about me, okay? I always land on the right side. Just like loaded dice.”
Even in the middle of all this, Theo is trying to make me laugh. Instead I feel a sudden lump in my throat. After the past twenty-four hours—a day in which my father died, my friend betrayed us, and I leaped out of my home dimension into places unknown—I’m running on empty. I say, “If I’d lost you, I don’t think I could have taken it.”
“Hey, hey. I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. See?”
“You sure are.” I try to make it flirtatious. Maybe it works, maybe not. I kind of suck at flirting. At any rate, the attempt makes me feel steadier.
He becomes businesslike, or at least as businesslike as someone like Theo can get. His dark eyes—strangely transparent through the hologram—search my face. “Okay, so, you recently had a reminder, because you remember me. That or I’m making one hell of a first impression.”
“No, I didn’t need a reminder. I remembered everything anyway.”
“You said you remembered yourself anyway?” He leans forward intently, temporarily distorting the holographic image. “No periods of confusion?”
“None. Looks like it’s that way for you too. Guess Mom was wrong about dimensional travelers forgetting themselves.”
But Theo shakes his head. “No. I needed—you know, I used a reminder right when I got here.”
“Weird.”
Theo seems slightly freaked by the fact that I remember things so easily. That works against all Mom’s theories—and, apparently, his own experience—but I guess traveling between dimensions is different for different people. Theories only get refined through experimentation. Mom and Dad taught me that much.
