A Thousand Pieces of You

It’s all right, I tell myself. You’ll find Colonel Azarenko tomorrow. Anyway, Paul’s here. You don’t need anyone else.

My mind fills with thoughts of Paul. How could I have completely failed to understand him?

“In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.”

The scene is as vivid for me now as it was on that day: Theo in a faux-weathered RC Cola T-shirt. Paul in one of the heather-gray Ts that I knew he only wore because he had no idea how much they showed off his muscles. Me tucking my hair behind my ears, trying to look and feel as grown up as they were. All of us together in the great room, surrounded by Mom’s houseplants and the summer warmth from the open doors to our deck.

I was joking when I spoke about fate, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”

Although I knew Theo thought the idea was silly, it intrigued me. Anytime the physics discussions around me shifted from complicated equations to concepts I could connect with, I seized on it. So I sat beside Paul at the rainbow table and said, “How does this work, then? Fate.”

He ducked his head, shy with me even after spending more than a year practically living in my house. But like any scientist, he was so fascinated by ideas that he couldn’t stay quiet about them for long. He steepled his large hands together, fingertip to fingertip, holding them in front of me, as our illustration of a mirror image. “Patterns reoccur, in dimension after dimension. Those patterns reflect certain resonances—”

“And people each have their own resonance, right?” I thought I’d picked up on that much.

He smiled, encouraged. Paul’s smiles were rare—almost out of place on someone so large and brutish and serious. “That’s right. So it looks as though the same groups of people find each other, over and over. Not invariably, but far more than mere chance would suggest.”

Theo, who was across the room settling back into his own math, made a face. “Listen, little brother, if you write your theory up like that, and you stick the numbers, you’re golden. It’s when you get into this souls-and-destiny crap that you sink your thesis. Seriously, you’re going to get up before the committee and defend that?”

“Stop knocking him,” I told Theo. At the time I’d been too enchanted by Paul’s idea to listen to even good objections. “Everybody gets to have wild theories here. Mom’s rule.”

Theo shrugged, already too absorbed in his work to protest further. Yet Paul looked over at me as though he were grateful for the defense. I realized how close we were sitting—closer than we usually did, so near that my arm nearly brushed against his—but I didn’t move away.

Instead I said, “So does destiny create the math, or does math create our destiny?”

“Insufficient data,” Paul said, but I could tell, in that moment, how much he wanted to believe in destiny. It was the first time I thought of him as someone who, all appearances to the contrary, might have some poetry in his soul.

Maybe it was the only time I ever understood him at all.

The next day, I discover what it’s like to have people get you ready in the morning.

I mean, totally. My maids appear around my bedside as I wake, serving me tea on a silver tray, running me a warm bath in an enormous tub carved of marble, even soaping my back.

(Yes, it’s completely embarrassing bathing in front of an audience, but it seems this Marguerite does it every day, so I have to roll with it. I guess they already know what I look like naked, which . . . doesn’t help that much.)

These women even put the toothpaste on my toothbrush.

They select a dress for me: a soft yellow the color of candlelight, floor length, so formal for everyday that I can hardly keep myself from laughing at it. They braid my hair back and fasten it with pins set with small white enameled roses. I stare at the mirror in disbelief as my uncontrollable, lunatic curls are tamed and settled into a style as complicated as it is beautiful.

I could almost believe that I’m beautiful, though really this is a testament to what personal stylists (or their nineteenth-century equivalents) can accomplish.

No makeup is to be seen anywhere, but they rub sweet-smelling creams into the skin of my face and throat, then dust me with lilac-scented powder. By the time they’re finished clipping on my pearl earrings, I actually feel like a grand duchess.

“Thank you, ladies,” I say. Good manners are expected of royalty, right? Feeling both ridiculous and grand, I open the door and see Paul.

Correction: Lieutenant Markov.

He stands at attention, entirely proper and correct. His clear gray eyes meet mine, almost guiltily, before he glances away. Maybe staring at royalty is forbidden. I seem to remember that megastars like Beyoncé sometimes have riders in their contracts saying that nobody can look them in the eyes; as Beyoncé is to our dimension, a grand duchess is to this one.

Paul—Lieutenant Markov, better think of him that way—doesn’t say anything. Of course. It’s probably the rule that he can’t say anything unless I speak first. “Good morning, Markov.”

“Good morning, my lady.” His voice is so deep, and yet so gentle. “I hope you feel better today.”

“I do, thank you. Tell me, Markov, where might I find Colonel Azarenko?”

He frowns at me. “My commanding officer?”

“Yes. Exactly. Him.” Paul might not have been able to retrieve Azarenko from the grand ball last night, but now he can tell me the officers’ daily routines, all of that. We’ll have his Firebird back by lunchtime, and mine fixed by tonight.