“I had another project for you, if you were willing to take a look at it.” Carefully I place the broken egg on a small side table, then reach into my pocket. There, wrapped carefully in my lace handkerchief, are the pieces of the Firebird. “This locket of mine is broken.”
Dad glances from the egg over at me, smiling. “I believe you’re trying to make a jeweler of me, to avoid any future exams in French.”
“No, I promise. This is important to me, and it’s complicated—” I stop talking before I begin to sound panicky. If Dad (or Paul, standing guard at the door) realizes how worried I am about the Firebird, there might be questions I won’t be able to answer. “The locket’s meant to be more than decorative, you see. When all the pieces are put together properly, then it will function again.”
“What does it do?” Dad pushes his glasses up his nose as I unwrap the handkerchiefs a little to reveal the bronze-colored pieces within. “Play music?”
“No.” But what am I supposed to tell him? He’d hardly believe the truth. “I’m afraid I’m not sure.”
“Then I doubt I’d be able to set it right, not knowing how it should work. Of course I want to help you, Your Imperial Highness, but this might be a task best given to a professional.”
Oh, no. If Paul and I are going to have any backup plan for getting out of this dimension, I need someone like Dad to work on the Firebird. Okay, he’s gotten stuck playing tutor in this lifetime, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a genius. He’s my best chance, maybe the only one I have.
There’s no guarantee Colonel Azarenko won’t have thrown away or sold Paul’s Firebird locket by the time he returns from Moscow; if mine doesn’t get fixed, Paul and I will both be trapped here forever.
To still my rising panic, I take a few deep breaths and watch as my father works on the red Fabergé egg. He deftly works with a tiny pair of prongs to twist the hook back into shape, but it’s what he does next that takes my breath away.
Dad picks up the charm portrait of my mother, the one commissioned by Tsar Alexander V, who probably never looked at it again. But Dad holds the charm for a long moment, his eyes drinking in the image of her face, and within him I glimpse the deepest sadness and longing I’ve ever seen.
(“I had no idea what your father looked like, the first time he came to visit me,” Mom said once as we cooked out in the backyard on a hazy summer afternoon. “But I was already half in love with him.”
Dad had laughed as she hugged him from behind. “And I’d picked out the wrong faculty photo, so I thought this ‘Dr. Kovalenka’ was rather elderly.” He lifted her hand to his and kissed it. “Still, some very enticing equations had already been exchanged. I was half in love too. So you see it was a very intellectual courtship—at first.”
“At first.” Mom’s smile became positively wicked. “Now, the other half of falling in love came when we met at the airport and I discovered you were incredibly sexy.”
“Same here,” Dad confessed. “I came near tackling you at baggage claim.”
Josie and I had made gag-me faces, because we were younger and still thought it was gross to see our parents cuddling like that. It was before I realized how incredibly rare it is to watch two people actually stay in love their whole lives.)
Maybe it’s wrong of me to use his feelings against him, but down deep I know Dad would want to help me, and to comfort the version of Mom back home who’s mourning him and desperate for me to return to her. So that makes this all right. At least, I hope so.
“This was my mother’s,” I say, holding out the lace-wrapped Firebird again.
That does it. Dad turns from the Fabergé egg. “Your mother’s?”
“She always used to show it to me, when I was little.” The first rule of lying, Theo once explained, is Keep It Simple, Stupid. “I can’t remember the trick, the thing it did—but I remember loving it. Mom always used to share this with me, so when I found it a few days ago, I was so excited. But you see, it’s in pieces. Someone’s got to put it together again. You could—I know you could.”
Very gently, Dad hangs Mom’s tiny enameled portrait back within the wine-colored egg and closes it again. Then he takes the lace handkerchief in his hands and lifts one piece of the Firebird, an oval bit of metal with computer chips inlaid. There’s no way he has any idea what the hell a computer chip is, I realize, my heart sinking. Am I fooling myself to believe this is possible?
“Do you have any idea of its basic framework, Your Imperial Highness?” he says.
I tap the locket cover. “It all fits in this locket, folds up until you’d think it was only a piece of jewelry. And I don’t think anything’s missing or broken, just knocked apart. But—more than that—no.”
Dad considers it for another moment, then says, “Most devices have a sort of internal logic. I might be able to work it out, given time.”
“Would you try?”
“Why not? I always enjoy a good puzzle.”