The Firebird! He’s going to steal the Firebird! I struggle to get him off me, but I can’t, not even when I realize he isn’t going for the Firebird at all. Not even as the lace scarf tightens around my throat.

I can’t breathe.

Theo is strangling me.

My larynx feels like it’s being smashed into my spine. My pulse is fast and hard and with every beat the scarf seems to be cutting into my skin.

“Jump,” Theo says. He’s crying; tears trickle down the cheek he’s turned toward me so that he won’t have to see my face while he does this. “I left you one hand free. Grab the Firebird and jump.”

I could do it, but then this Marguerite—and maybe this entire dimension—dies.

Desperately I thrash beneath him, or try to thrash. I paw feebly at his tense arms. It’s no use. Theo has me pinned with all his weight and strength, and I can’t breathe. Dizziness floods me. My tongue feels too thick for my mouth. I can hardly hear over the roar of my own blood in my ears.

“Meg, please!” Theo sobs once. “Please, don’t make me kill both of you.”

I’m about to black out. With my last strength, as Theo begins to blur and darken above my eyes, I hit the controls on the Firebird and—

I am surrounded by the void.

Complete darkness. Complete silence. I have no weight, no body.

Oh, God.

I’m dead.

 

 

8

I CAN’T BE DEAD.

I mean it—I can’t. My heart beats in my chest, harder and faster as it responds to the mortal fear of another dimension, another Marguerite. So I must have leaped through dimensions. But I can’t feel where my arms and legs are. There’s no up, no down.

Before I jumped, I had no chance to ask myself whether or not I could. If Wicked hadn’t moved along, I would’ve been stuck there with Theo strangling me to death . . .

I shudder. I must be alive, if I can shudder. And yet now I remember how it feels to die.

Did I leap into the same body as Wicked after all? I know that’s impossible, but I can’t come up with any other explanation for why I’m here in a total void. Am I just stuck in the corner of this Marguerite’s mind until Wicked moves along? Maybe this is how it feels to exist only in someone’s imagination.

Something brushes against my cheek, and I startle. The hands I couldn’t sense a couple of seconds ago automatically come to my face to check. Turns out my curls are floating around me as if I were underwater. Okay, body parts intact equals good, but what the hell is going on?

Metal begins to clank and whirr, the unmistakable sounds of machinery at work. Light filters in from behind me, dim at first, then brightening. Turning around is difficult; I have to writhe with my whole body to do it, and by now nausea has begun to wring my stomach. Finally I manage to get a look at what’s going on. Enormous plates are shuttering upward as if being folded, and as they fold they reveal—

—Earth. As in, the whole planet. Which I am not currently on.

Outer space. You’re in outer space. Deep breaths. I can’t talk myself down. Oh, my freaking God I’m in outer space! There’s no oxygen in space!

Of course there’s oxygen here—wherever this is—because I’m breathing. But for how long?

Never, ever have I liked heights. I’m not phobic or anything, but I’m one of the ones you have to tell not to look down no matter what. Now there’s nowhere to look but down.

Red lights begin to flash, and I hear a female computer voice say, “Warning. Plasma venting in four minutes.” A male computer voice says something else afterward in another language, one I can’t identify, because I’m facing my second life-or-death crisis in five minutes and this is the closest I’ve ever come to passing out from terror.

Pull it together! Nobody’s going to save me but me. Now that there’s enough light in this chamber, I can see tons of openings—most of them square and small, as well as a single, large, round one that looks like it might be some kind of door. Please, let that be a door. It’s the only chance I’ve got.

I try to move toward that opening, basically attempting to swim through whatever air is in here, but that doesn’t work. It leaves me simply flailing in space, barely moving forward at all. Quickly I scan the area being revealed around me, this section of whatever enormous machine contains me now. If I could touch one of the walls, I could pull myself along the surface until I reached what I really, truly, sincerely hope is a way out.

The closest one is beneath me, if “beneath” has any meaning up here. So I wriggle in that general direction, moving so slowly I want to scream.

“Three minutes to plasma venting,” intones the computer voice, with her male echo just after. Three minutes isn’t long enough—at least fifty feet separate me and that opening, and I don’t even think I’ll be able to touch the nearest surface before then.

Another voice echoes through the chamber. “Marguerite? What are you doing?”

“Mom!” Where is she? I can’t see her, but it doesn’t matter. She can see me. “Get me out of here!”

The metal plates stop moving. My vista on planet Earth gets no wider. The computer voice intones, “Plasma venting aborted.”

I should be happy. I should be cheering and laughing, especially now that a mechanical tow arm is unfolding from the wall to bring me in.

Instead, I want to cry.

I lost the Egyptverse Marguerite too. I had chances to save them and failed. And this time Theo was the one who did it—Theo—

Will I be able to save anybody? How many Marguerites have to die?

“What were you thinking?” My dad is questioning my sanity for the second time in two days, and I don’t blame him. Wicked leaves a trail of crazy wherever she goes.

Dad and Mom sit on either side of me in the space station Astraeus—at least, that’s the symbol and name stamped on the sleeves of the pale blue coveralls we wear. Mercifully, this place has gravity, or at least a good approximation of it, in its rotating central sphere. This appears to be the safe area where scientists and their families work and live. The four huge fans that spread out around it collect solar energy; the pods beneath the fans collect unnecessary plasma (whatever that is), the better to vent it into space.

I was less than three minutes from being shot into outer space along with the plasma when Mom picked up on some odd readings in the atmospheric chamber.