And what was he seeing when he looked at me? Whatever it was, it made him part his lips slightly, as if in surprise.
We glanced away from each other right away. Paul tore off the tinfoil, and once the lasagna was in the oven to bake, he said he had some equations he needed to work on. I went to my room to paint, which actually meant me staring down at my tubes of oils for several minutes as I tried to catch my breath.
What just happened? What does it mean? Does it mean anything?
Ever since my father’s death, I’ve wished I could take back that moment with Paul. But I can’t.
Paul Markov is dangerous. He killed your father. You know this. If you can’t hate him for that, what kind of weakling are you? Don’t waste another chance. The next time you see him, you don’t hesitate. You don’t think about cooking lasagna together, or listening to Rachmaninoff.
You act.
We manage to follow Paul out of the Tube station without him seeing us.
“That reaction you saw?” Theo mutters. “Probably a reminder. He’ll know us now. Stay behind him.”
Theo’s instinct was right; Paul is headed to the tech conference where Wyatt Conley is going to appear. For an event dedicated to the latest in cutting-edge technology, it’s held in an odd venue—a building that has to be a hundred years old, all Edwardian cornices and frills. The people filing in are an odd mix, too: some are sleek professionals in suits the color of gunmetal or ink, talking to multiple holographic screens in front of them the entire time they walk up the steps, while others look like college freshmen who just got out of bed but have even more tech gear on them than the CEO types.
“Told you I was overdressed for this,” Theo mutters as Paul vanishes through the door.
“How is he getting in?” I say. “Does he have a badge already, or is he sneaking through security?”
“No point in worrying about how he’s getting in until we get in ourselves. Leave this to me, will you, Meg?”
Apparently Theo spent his entire journey over to the UK figuring out exactly how these advanced computer systems work. As we huddle on the steps, pretending we’re blasé about going in, he manages to hack into the organizer’s database. So when we show up at registration, acting shocked—shocked!—that they don’t have our badges ready for us to pick up like we’d arranged, they actually find our names in the system. Two hastily printed temp badges later, and we’re in.
Theo offers me his arm; I loop my hand through it as we walk into the conference hall. It’s a large space, already slightly darkened, the better to show off the enormous, movie-size screen waiting on the stage. “I have to admit,” I whisper to Theo, “that was pretty smooth.”
“Smooth is my middle name. Actually, it’s Willem, but tell anybody that and, I warn you, I will take revenge.”
We sit near the back, where we’ll have a better chance to survey the whole room and see Paul make his move . . . assuming he’s going to make one. He doesn’t seem to be in the audience.
If Theo has noticed my dark mood, he gives no sign. “Glad I got to know this dimension the best I could, as soon as I could. It makes a difference.” It’s obviously as safe to talk here as it was on the Tube; most people are surrounded by tiny holographic screens, having a conversation or two. “We’ll have to put that in the guide to interdimensional travel you and I get to coauthor someday: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Multiverse.”
Letting scientists go off on Douglas Adams routines is a bad idea, so I ask a question that’s been on my mind since shortly after I got here. “How is this the next dimension over?”
“What do you mean?” Theo frowns.
“I guess I thought—you know, the dimension next door would be a lot closer to our own. With just a couple of differences. Instead it’s totally not the same at all.”
“First of all, this? This is not ‘totally not the same.’ National boundaries are the same. Most major brands seem to be the same, present company excepted.” He’s referring to the “ConTech” logo projected upon the onstage screen; in our universe, Wyatt Conley means Triad. “Trust me, the dimensions can be much more radically altered than this.”
“Okay, sure.” I can see his point. It’s not like the dinosaurs are still around or anything.
Theo—always enamored of any chance to show off what he knows—keeps going. “Second, none of the dimensions are technically any ‘closer’ or ‘farther’ from one another. Not in terms of actual distance, anyway. Some dimensions are mathematically more similar to each other than others, but that wouldn’t necessarily correlate to the dimensions being more similar to each other in any other way.”