So when they finally had one that seemed like it would work, only a couple of weeks ago, we had to celebrate. Mom and Dad, who usually drink nothing stronger than Darjeeling, opened a bottle of champagne. Theo handed me a glass too, and nobody even cared.
“To the Firebird,” Theo said. The final prototype lay on the table around which we stood, its workings gleaming, intricate layers of metal folded in and atop each other like an insect’s wings. “Named after the legendary Russian creature that sends heroes on amazing quests and adventures”—here Theo nodded at my mother, before continuing—“and of course after my own muscle car, because yes, it’s just that cool.” Theo is a guy who says things like “muscle car” ironically. He says almost everything ironically. But there was real admiration in his eyes as he looked at my parents that night. “Here’s hoping we have some adventures of our own.”
“To the Firebird,” Paul said. He must have been plotting what he was going to do right then, even as he lifted his glass and clinked it against Dad’s.
Basically, after decades of struggle and ridicule, my parents had finally reached the point where they’d gained real respect—and they were on the brink of a breakthrough that would take them far beyond that. Mom would’ve been heralded as one of the leading scientists in all history. Dad would have gotten at least Pierre Curie status. We could maybe even have afforded for me to take a summer art tour in Europe, where I could go to the Hermitage and the Prado and every other amazing gallery I’d heard of but never seen before. Everything we’d ever dreamed of was on the horizon.
Then their trusted research assistant, Paul Markov, stole the prototype, killed my father, and ran.
He could have gotten away with it, slipping into another dimension beyond the reach of the law: the perfect crime. He vanished from his dorm room without a trace, leaving his door locked from the inside.
(Apparently when people travel between dimensions, their physical forms are “no longer observable,” which is a quantum mechanics thing, and explaining it involves this whole story about a cat that’s in a box and is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box, and it gets seriously complicated. Never ask a physicist about that cat.)
Nobody could find Paul; nobody could catch him. But Paul didn’t count on Theo.
Theo came to me earlier this evening as I sat on the rickety old deck in our backyard. The only illumination came from the full moon overhead and the lights Josie had strung on the railing last summer, the ones shaped like tropical fish that glowed aquamarine and orange. I had on one of Dad’s old cardigans over my ivory lace dress. Even in California, December nights can be cold, and besides—the sweater still smelled like Dad.
I think Theo had watched me for a while before he came out there, waiting for me to pull myself together. My cheeks were flushed and tear streaked. I’d blown my nose so many times that it felt raw every time I inhaled. My head throbbed. But for the moment, I’d cried myself out.
Theo sat on the steps beside me, jittery, on edge, one foot bouncing up and down. “Listen,” he said. “I’m about to do something stupid.”
“What?”
His dark eyes met mine, so intent that I thought, for one crazy moment, despite everything that was going on, he was about to kiss me.
Instead, he held out his hand. In it were the two other versions of the Firebird. “I’m going after Paul.”
“You—” My wavering voice, already strained from crying, broke. I had so many questions that I couldn’t even begin at first. “You still have the old prototypes? I thought you broke them down afterward.”
“That’s what Paul thought too. And—well, technically, always what your parents thought.” He hesitated. Even mentioning Dad, only a day after his death, hurt so terribly—for Theo nearly as much as for me. “But I kept the parts we didn’t reuse. Tinkered with them, borrowed some equipment from the Triad labs. Used the advances we made on the last Firebird to improve these two. There’s a decent shot one of these will work.”
A decent shot. Theo was about to take an incredible risk because it gave him a “decent shot” at avenging what Paul had done.
As funny as he’d always been, as flirty as we occasionally got, I’d sometimes wondered whether Theo Beck was full of crap underneath his indie band T-shirts and his hipster hat and the 1981 Pontiac he’d fixed up himself. Now I was ashamed to have ever doubted him.