Tandem (47 page)

I stared at Juliana. She stared back. Neither of us was willing to speak, or capable of doing so. The silence in the room was so oppressive that I sagged in relief when Thomas finally said something.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Juli, for God’s sake, where have you been?”

“Didn’t you get my note?” she asked.

“Yeah, I got it,” Thomas snapped. “It was … concise.”

“I meant it,” she told him, with a hint of desperation. Juliana was disheveled, her eyes wild, and in her normal-person clothes, with that hideous bleached hair, she looked nothing like the princess from the photos and paintings that covered the Castle walls, nothing like the image I’d seen in the mirror when I was pretending to be her. But my soul recognized her even as my eyes did not. Did she even know or understand just how much we were connected?

“I’m sure you did.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to your lofty expectations,” she bit back, her voice trembling. “I couldn’t stay there. He would’ve killed me. You know he would.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t bother asking who she meant by “he.” We all knew who she was talking about. “I asked why you were here.”

Juliana glanced at Lucas, so we turned our eyes on him as well. He affected surprise. “Oh, is it my turn to talk?” He nodded at me. “We’re here for her.”

Thomas used his arm to block me. “I’m not going to let you lay a hand on her.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll leave her intact,” Lucas said. “All Juli’s got to do is touch her and my work here is done.”

“Touch me?” A horrible realization struck me.
She’s going to use me to pass through the tandem.
I glanced down at the anchor around my wrist. As long as it was activated, I was stuck fast to Aurora and nothing could dislodge me. If Juliana touched me now, she would be sent to Earth, not me.

She’s going to steal my life
.

“You can’t do that!” I cried. “You can’t take my place!”

“Why not?” Juliana snapped. “You took mine.”

“Because I was forced to! You can have it back, I don’t want it. I want to go home.”

Juliana hesitated, and I could see that she was conflicted. “Please,” I begged. “Don’t.”

“I won’t let her get close enough,” Thomas assured me. There was a pause as he and Lucas sized each other up; then Thomas darted forward like he was going to try to take the gun from his brother, but even I could tell they were too far apart for that to actually work.

I shouted at Thomas in warning, but it was too late. A shot cried out in the cell as Lucas pressed the trigger of his gun. Juliana and I both shrieked, identical sounds from identical mouths that lingered in the air long after the ring of the bullet bursting from the chamber had lost its echo. Thomas clutched his right shoulder and stumbled backward, narrowly missing me as he fell to the ground and cracked his head against the wall.

“Thomas!” I screamed, dropping to my knees. My hands shook as I pressed them against his wound, trying to staunch the flow of blood. He winced, sucking air through his teeth in pain. I followed Thomas’s hateful gaze to his brother; Lucas’s face was white as paper and he was breathing heavily. Juliana stood immobile with shock.

“Touch her,” Lucas commanded, his voice shaking, but Juliana didn’t move. He swung around and pointed the gun at her, only inches from her temple.
“Do it now, Juliana!”

She stumbled forward, and I was sure that she would collapse, but she didn’t. She crouched down in front of me, and I shrank back until I hit the wall. With Lucas training a gun on me there was nowhere to go.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” Juliana said, her eyes meeting mine. I stared unfeelingly back at her, bracing myself for what was about to come. I felt weightless and numb as she closed in on me, reaching out to touch my face, tentatively, as if she still didn’t believe, after all she’d seen, that I was even real. My fingertips itched with adrenaline. The air crackled with electricity and smelled like an approaching storm. I wondered just how much this was going to hurt.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Thomas reach into his pocket.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told Juliana. She hesitated. For a split second I thought she might reconsider.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. She sounded like her heart was shattering, but I felt no sympathy. She was a coward and a traitor, if not to her country, then to Thomas, and through him to me. I had no pity for traitors. “I can’t. I wish I was better, but I’m not.”

I glanced down and saw that in his hand Thomas held a small black rectangular device. As Juliana extended her hand to make contact with my skin, Thomas’s finger hovered over the remote’s solitary button. Our eyes found each other and I knew what he was going to do.

“Get your own life, Juli,” he said with great effort. Then he pushed the button and deactivated my anchor.

The space around me expanded and contracted, stretching out infinitely in an infinite number of directions. Time no longer seemed to exist. The scene in the cell receded from me at an extremely high velocity, and I felt as if I was being pulled apart atom by atom.

Then, like the flame of a candle, I was snuffed out.

THIRTY-NINE

I was awake, but I couldn’t move. My body felt like one giant bruise. At least I was breathing. The air was sweet and clean, and smelled like … home.
This will pass,
I told myself, to keep from panicking. It was just the kickback from going through the tandem.

I waited for it all to drain away, and while I did I thought of Thomas. I’d known, in those last few seconds, what he was about to do. He’d decided that whatever unknown fate awaited me back on Earth, it was better than having Juliana steal my life.
My life
. The one I’d been born into. The one I missed so much I ached for it. But I ached for Thomas, too. I didn’t want to imagine what was going to happen to him, but I couldn’t help it. If Juliana and Lucas didn’t kill him, they would certainly leave him in that Farnham jail cell to rot. And what then? What would Queen Marian do with the spy she’d caught, especially when she saw that the princess she thought she had in custody had magically disappeared? Nothing good, I was sure of that.

Oh, Thomas,
I thought. Tears rolled down my cheeks, dripping off my face and soaking my hair.

And what about Callum? What would become of him now that the wedding was off, the treaty broken, and the Juliana he knew nowhere to be found? And the war that was sure to come. How much of Aurora would be left standing once it was over?

Eventually I found that I could move my left hand, then my right. I rested until I had enough strength to open my eyes, to sit up and look around. I was in a vast field filled with the shoots of some kind of grain—corn, maybe? So I hadn’t landed in the foundation of a house after all. I wished I could let Thomas know I was all right, but that was impossible. He would have to live without knowing what happened to me, and I’d have to live without knowing what happened to him. This was the part of love I hated, the pain of losing the person you wanted to keep more than anything in the whole world. All the worlds.

I sat there for a long time, too weak to stand, too turned around to know where to go when I did manage to move. My hands were crusted with dried blood from Thomas’s arm; the anchor I’d worn around my wrist now lay scattered in pieces close by. Not knowing what else to do, I drew my knees up to my chest, buried my face in them, and wept. Like a child I wept.

As the sun rose over the horizon, I saw a figure coming toward me, one that I would recognize anywhere. Except it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. It would never be him. But it was someone. Someone I knew. Someone who understood at least a small portion of what I’d been through, because he’d been through it, too.

“Grant,” I said as he approached. My voice was hoarse, my throat as raw and sore as the rest of me. I wanted to cry at the sight of him, but I’d shed all the tears I had.

“I was hoping I’d find you here,” he said, helping me stand. “I knew it was a long shot, but I thought, maybe … I don’t know.”

“I’m glad you came,” I said. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Are
you
all right?” he asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t think I’d ever be all right. Not in a million years, not in an infinite number of lifetimes. But I had to go on. I couldn’t give up. Thomas had risked his life to return me to mine, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

Grant nodded. He got it. I was grateful for that, at least. “What do we do now?”

I gazed out at the horizon, at the sun climbing in the sky. “Let’s go home,” I said.

So we did.

NOT THE END; ONLY THE BEGINNING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my family, my friends, and everyone who has dedicated time and energy to making this book the best it can be, particularly my agent, Joanna MacKenzie, and my editor, Françoise Bui. I’m incredibly grateful for the advice and/or enthusiasm offered by Emilie Bandy, Alex Bracken, Mary Dubbs, Kendra Levin, Ari Lewin, Eesha Pandit, Nicole Rodney, and Kim Stokely, all of whom read drafts along the way. Special thanks go out to Cambria Rowland, who styled Sasha like a boss, and Sarah Hoy, who designed Tandem’s beautiful cover.