But that answer is too easy. It lets me off the hook. If I’m going to beat Wicked at her own game, I have to understand her. That means I have to stop shielding myself behind all the ways I’m different from her.

I have to face the same darkness Theo had to acknowledge. The same darkness Paul is doing battle with even now. I have to take a hard look at Wicked and learn what we share. I have to learn how the two of us are the same.

So I try to imagine being the girl from the Home Office. Being me, there, in that dangerous, status-obsessed megalopolis, the daughter of two of that world’s greatest inventors. Why would that mess me up? I don’t understand how that would make me a murderer, but I can see how it would make me vain or snobbish. I can even see how it might distract me from my painting, or make me think less of it. In my own world, Mom and Dad have always encouraged me: buying brushes and canvases, convincing professors in the art department at the university to let me audit technical classes, and never once asking questions like But how will you make a living?

In the Home Office, though, money is more than power—it’s also virtue. You are what you make. You bring cash value or you are worthless.

So Wicked would always have been overlooked. Underappreciated. And when Triad chose Josie to be that universe’s perfect traveler, and Wyatt Conley even fell in love with her . . . she must have felt totally invisible.

It’s not an excuse. It’s not even an explanation. But on a fundamental, inexpressible level, I know that I have finally seen something in her soul that might be like mine.

The vandalized canvases lie across my legs, staring up blankly. When Josie died, both my parents and Conley became obsessed with getting back the splinters of her soul, because they believed that might bring her back. They plunged into this multi-universe conspiracy and became willing to collapse other universes. Josie eclipsed the other me even more completely after her death than when she was alive.

The Home Office’s Paul told me my counterpart there was Triad’s most enthusiastic volunteer. Home Office Theo, less politely but maybe more accurately, called her a bitch. Now I see her doing everything she can to prove herself—braver, more ruthless, more unstoppable than even Josie had ever been, all for the sake of people she must have resented deeply.

If she wins, what’s her reward? Josie returns to life to overshadow her once more.

Wait. This happened three years ago? My eyes widen. This universe wasn’t a neutral one chosen at random—this was the one where their Josie died. When Wicked came here, she would’ve found my mom broken and depressed. She would’ve seen this house falling apart even though I was still here. Instead of having empathy, Wicked must have thought, See, I’m still not enough. I’ll never be enough for her. When she realizes she lost me too, then she’ll finally be sorry.

It’s almost as if I can feel myself in the driver’s seat of that car, looking at the water. I’ll show her, Wicked would’ve thought in the moment before she stomped down on the gas.

There’s more to it than this, I’m sure. Wicked’s glee in what she’s doing is still unfathomable and unforgivable.

But I’ve gotten at the root. I know what drives her. Behind her endless malevolence is pain she can’t heal, no matter how many universes she tears down.

Maybe the time will come when I can use this knowledge against her.

Already I know that I have to start fighting back wherever and whenever I can every single time.

“Mom?” I call as I walk toward her bedroom. I’ve spent hours mulling this over. The sky outside has started to lighten, hinting at dawn. “Mom, get up.”

From behind her door I hear her mumble, “Marguerite?” I take that as permission to come in, and I do. When I see what her room looks like, I wish I hadn’t. It smells like unwashed laundry in here, and the other side of the bed—where Dad would’ve slept—is piled high with junk mail, crumpled socks, and a couple of used paper plates. Mom sits up from the rubble, scratching her head. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

“Mom, you do research on parallel dimensions, right? On different quantum realities?”

She frowns in consternation. “I—you know I’m on academic leave—”

“But that’s your field of research. Yes?”

“Of course it was. Your father and I worked on that together.” Now she’s irritated. “Why did you wake me up to—”

She cuts herself off the moment I reach for the chain around my neck and pull out the Firebird. “I’m not your Marguerite, Mom. I’m here from another dimension.”

“What is that supposed to be?”

“Look at it, Mom.” I sit beside her on the bed. “Look at the Firebird and tell me you didn’t make this.”

“What the—” Her hands curve around the locket, and her jaw drops open.

“You’ve invented the Firebird in several dimensions now.” For the time being I stick to the simplest part of the explanation. I’m not sure how much Mom can take all at once. “I’ve been traveling through several of them, and the Firebird finally brought me here. It brought me to you.”

My mother says nothing. She just sits there examining it, not saying a word—until she starts making a sound I think must be crying. But when Mom looks back up at me, she’s laughing. “We did it,” she says, tears in her eyes and a huge smile spreading across her face. Thin and filthy as she is, suddenly she’s Mom again. “Henry and I. We did it.”

I hug her tightly. “You better believe you did.”

By the time we eat breakfast, I’ve filled Mom in on the essentials. Although we’re both exhausted from lack of sleep, I can tell Mom is awake again in a way she hasn’t been since Dad and Josie died.

“You were acting strangely the past couple of days.” She sips from her cup of Darjeeling. “But never in a thousand years would I have suspected this.”

“Did you ever work with a grad student named Paul Markov in this dimension?” I ask. “Or Theo Beck?”

Mom shakes her head no. “I haven’t served as an advisor for any students since . . . well, since.”

Both Paul and Theo probably enrolled in different graduate programs, in search of different mentors. “Do you have any former students you can reach out to who might work with you on this?”