Ten Thousand Skies Above You

“There was a guy with her,” grunts one of the men behind me. “We knocked him down. Out, maybe. Didn’t have time to handle him permanently.”

Theo. By now he will have phoned the police, my parents, everyone. They must all be so scared.

Paul says, “Then we don’t have any time to waste. Either we have to get rid of the evidence, or we have to work out a deal.” He steps closer to me. “I don’t want police attention. How can I best avoid it, Miss Caine? By eliminating you as a witness, or by setting you free to tell the police you have no idea what happened to you?”

“Option two,” I say. “Definitely.”

“You can’t trust her to do that!” objects one of the goons.

“I don’t think she’s stupid,” Paul says. “She knows that if we found her once, we could find her again. The police might take me in for questioning, but by now she knows I have many friends. Don’t you, Miss Caine?”

“All I want to do is get out of here.” But not too quickly. “You’ll drop me off? Don’t send me with the others. I don’t trust them.”

If he’s the one who drives me to God knows where, I’ll have a chance to bring the Firebird into contact with his body and rescue that splinter of my Paul’s soul. Then I can leave this dimension. Just leap out of here. Theo’s Firebird will tell him that I’ve left; he’ll follow me to the home office, where we can finally have it out with Conley. And this world’s Marguerite can wonder why the hell she came to on a strange street corner, call her parents or the cops, and go home without suffering anything worse than a few bruises, some confusion, and a nasty rip in her tights.

“She’ll stay quiet,” Paul says to the others. “If she doesn’t—we can remind her of the bargain we’ve struck.”

“Leonid has his ways,” someone behind me says. Which is his way of agreeing with Paul. Even with the duct tape around my chest and arms, I feel like I can breathe better. Within a couple of hours, this will only seem like a bad dream.

Later, I know, I’ll have to question how Paul got mixed up in this—I mean, seriously, the Russian mob? But I can’t think about anything that complicated right now. My mind boils it down to the absolute basics: Stay quiet. Trust Paul. Get home.

But Paul hasn’t said he’ll be the one to drop me off—

A metal door slams. My entire body tenses so hard the tape pulls tight across my belly and my arms. Heavy footsteps walk through some kind of hallway—slightly behind me—and then I hear a deep, strongly accented voice. “You went fishing, I see.”

While all the other men chuckle in a sheepish, brown-nosing kind of way, Paul’s face falls.

I don’t even need anyone to say the name. This is the man in charge. Leonid.

The footsteps circle around until I can see Leonid himself—still a shadow, mostly, lit from behind. He doesn’t look directly at me; the guy knows better than to show anyone his face. “This is a child. My grandmother could catch this one.”

Screw you too, I think.

But I know better than to say anything out loud. I’m not even going to look directly at Leonid—see, I can’t identify you, it’s okay to let me go—and I don’t want to draw any more attention. He’s not getting any reaction from me whatsoever—

—until he steps into the light, and I have to bite down on my own tongue to keep from crying out.

Not because he’s shown me his face, and proved he doesn’t care whether I live or die.

Because the face looking at me now is Paul, through a mirror darkly.

He’s older—rougher—hair as gray as his eyes—and coarser in every way, as if someone had taken Paul and stripped away everything that makes him beautiful, leaving only the brute behind. The nose has been broken a couple of times; his teeth are yellow from decades of coffee. Yet the resemblance is powerful, and unmistakable.

Behind him, Paul says quietly, “I’m handling this, Papa.”

Leonid is Paul’s father.

The puzzle pieces snap together at last. This is why Paul never goes home at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Why he doesn’t like his parents, won’t even talk about them. Why he has to get by on a modest grad student stipend, with no help from home ever. Paul’s dad is mixed up in organized crime. The reason they cut him off must be because he refused to join the family business.

Except in this dimension, Paul stayed. Now he’s trapped in the last possible life he could ever want to lead.

“You’re handling it, are you?” Leonid says to Paul. “You found out who she’s with?”

“No one.” Paul stands almost at attention. I always thought he was awkward with us—because, well, he is. But with his father, he’s even worse. Tense and uncertain. Scared. “The entire situation arose out of a misunderstanding.”

“You believe that?” Leonid’s finger brushes against my cheek, a cold, impersonal appraisal.

Paul nods. “Yes, I do.”

The guys standing behind me don’t even seem to breathe. I realize they’re nearly as terrified of Leonid as I am. Leonid’s not just in the Russian mob; he’s high up. Very high.

Enough so that he doesn’t care if I see his face or not. He’s too big a fish for the cops to net easily.

Leonid Markov cocks his head, and finally he speaks to me. “You’re a sweet little girl who knows nothing about business? I think maybe you are. You don’t remember any of this, even our names?”

My entire knowledge of criminal activity comes from Law & Order reruns. Probably not reliable. I stick to what Paul said before. “If I tell the police I don’t remember anything, you won’t come after me again. That’s all I want.”

He laughs out loud, pats my cheek. “Good girl.”

Was that stupid, persuasive, or both? At any rate, Leonid is out of my face now, standing up and looking at Paul instead. Paul says, “I’ll drop her off myself. Drive her to another borough. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”

He speaks so evenly that someone could almost miss the fact that he’s pleading for my life. Joy spreads its wings inside me. Paul’s going to be the one to drive me away from this place. I have a chance at rescuing my Paul’s soul. This will all be over soon.

“You’re right,” Leonid says. “It wouldn’t have to be, if I didn’t have such idiots working for me.”

Silence falls. Danger has become palpable in the room, but suddenly the threat is no longer directed at me.

Leonid steps back. In the harsh light of the single bulb dangling down, the wrinkles on his face cast strange shadows. “Idiots kidnap a girl where people can see them, where they knock down a witness and leave him there to call the police. Idiots kidnap a girl in front of a building with a security camera in the front. Idiots get us on the news!”

At first my heart leaps at the thought the authorities know I’m in danger—but that’s only instinct. In this situation, instinct is completely wrong. I was out of trouble; Paul had found the way to save me. Now those plans don’t count anymore.

Leonid reaches inside his heavy coat, and something about the way he moves reminds me sharply of Paul. For a moment father and son are superimposed on each other—old over young, corrupt versus good—confusing me enough that at first I don’t recognize the gun.