He nods. Even that one small thing—my telling him to be careful—for him, it’s like a beacon. A reason to hope. I wish I could tell him he was right to hope; I wish I knew.

Then Paul turns and walks away from me, heading straight toward the passageway to the airport. But right before he passes out of sight, he looks over his shoulder at me one last time.

We’ll find each other, I tell myself as he disappears. We always do.

I take the Firebird in hand, counting off the seconds before I can follow Paul.

24

THIS TIME, WHEN I SLAM INTO THE NEXT VERSION OF ME, I wake myself up; I feel like I just got thrown into bed. Groggily I shift onto my elbows to look around. Although this bedroom is much smaller than the one I have at home, it’s recognizably mine—artwork hangs on the nearest wall, and there’s a brightly patterned scarf on the bedside table that looks like something I’d own.

It must be the dead of night, to judge by the darkness in my room. That makes me wonder where I am. The Firebirds allow me to travel through dimensions, but not through time. Since I left my home in California sometime after lunch, I must be halfway across the globe, someplace where it’s either very late or very early.

Three of the portraits on my wall are more than familiar: Mom, Dad, and Josie each look out from their canvases. As long as we’re together, this dimension is probably okay.

Yet the portraits are different here—Mom’s hair is shorter, and Josie’s is tied back. Dad seems more driven, less distracted. And my technique isn’t quite the same, either: I’m layering paint much more thickly, going for a more impressionistic take. It’s different from both my usual photorealistic style and the delicate, detailed sketches by Grand Duchess Margarita. I run my finger along Josie’s picture, feeling the thick ridges and swirls of dried paint against my skin.

From my bedside table, my alarm goes off, cuing up some pop music I don’t recognize. As I shut it off, I frown down at the time: 7 a.m. Even in winter, I’d expect some light outside at this hour. Then I remember Russia, and how St. Petersburg only received a few hours of daylight per day in December. Do we live in the far north here, too?

I swing my feet out of bed and walk toward one of the dark, oddly curved windows, hoping to get a sense of my new surroundings. When I look out, at first I see nothing—

—and then a school of tropical fish swims by.

It’s dark outside because we’re underwater.

Well, this is new.

My home turns out to be the oceanographic station Salacia, located in the heart of the Coral Sea. Salacia is one of the most sophisticated stations of its kind in the world, which is why the man in charge is the illustrious oceanographer Dr. Henry Caine.

A quick review of the internet reveals that, in this dimension, global water levels have risen much farther and faster than at home—more like the worst-case projections for climate change a century from now. Is this because of greater pollution? Some other phenomenon? Believe it or not, politicians are still arguing about this on a planet with continents now shaped completely differently than the ones I recognize. While people bicker about the cause, humanity has had to find new ways to live. The vast majority of the world’s population continues to dwell on land, though sometimes in new cities that don’t exist in my dimension, or in semi-aquatic versions of the old ones. (New York City looks more like Venice now.) But increasing numbers of people are casting themselves onto the water in vast ships that function as towns, or on science stations like this one.

Here, oceanography is the most important subject for scientific study. What’s happening with marine life; iron, oxygen, and contaminant levels in the water; the behavior of newly unpredictable tides and rogue waves—this is the information people need in order to create a new society that has to be at least partially aquatic. So Dad never left oceanography to devote himself to Mom’s research; here, Mom went into oceanography too, and the two of them met while crewing on a science vessel. (At least, according to their Wikipedia entries—my parents aren’t quite as well known here as they are at home, but they still rate bios online.) We’ve been on the Salacia for five years now. For me, this is home.

But on an oceanographic station, nobody gets to just hang out, not even kids. Everyone who lives here works hard to keep it going, as I discover when my computer lights up with DAILY ASSIGNMENT ROSTER.

This is why I find myself climbing through one of the maintenance tubes before breakfast, going out to manually check the wind sensors (whatever that means). I ascend through water that shifts from nearly black to translucent blue, and then into daylight. The sight of the ocean stretching out to the horizon in every direction takes my breath away. The quality of the light on the waves changes in brilliance and depth each second, and the effect is dazzling.

Does the other Marguerite still see how amazing this is, even though it surrounds her every day? I smile as I realize she must, if we have anything in common at all.

In my jeans and T-shirt, I walk out onto the surface platform—metal ridged to add traction when it’s wet, which must be always. Everything smells like salt and sunshine. The sea breeze catches at my curls, and immediately I see why Josie and Mom wear their hair differently here. As I hurriedly tuck mine back into a sloppy ponytail, I hear a call from the other edge of the platform: “Took you long enough!”

I glance over to see Josie, who’s scrubbing algae off something right at the surface of the water. She must have been out here a while already, but in any universe, I know how to handle Josie’s teasing. I grin as I flip her off, then start climbing the metal ladder up to the wind sensors.