“Oh, my God, you’re back!” Josie comes barreling out of the kitchen to tackle me onto the sofa. “I’m going to kill you for scaring us like that. But first I have to tell you I love you, you crazy little brat.”
“I love you, too,” I say as I hug her close. “But there’s so much we have to talk about.”
“Triad,” Mom says, and her smile dims, but only slightly. “We know. That doesn’t matter now, sweetheart, as long as you’re home and safe.”
“You know? But how . . .” My voice trails off as a third person steps out of the hallway.
Theo.
He tries to grin at me, but it doesn’t quite work. “Welcome back.”
At first all I can feel is panic. He followed me here, somehow he got out of the sub and followed me here—and then I realize what this actually means. The guy standing here in his Mumford & Sons shirt and cargo pants is my Theo, the one Triad took over months ago so that their spy could act in his place. This Theo would never have done any of this to me or to anybody in my family.
I know that. I believe it. And yet it’s hard to make my heart accept it.
“You know the truth, then. I can see it in your face.” Theo grimaces. “You never used to be scared of me.”
Quickly I say, “I’m not scared. It’s just—it’s a lot to take in. And, yeah. I know.”
“Did he hurt you?” Theo’s voice breaks. “If that son of a bitch hurt you—”
“No,” I say, which almost isn’t a lie.
“And Paul? Is Paul okay?” At that moment, when I see that Theo’s as frightened for Paul as he was for me, I remember the love between them, and that even now, a dimension away, Paul is risking his life to save a Theo he doesn’t even know—and a Theo who tried to kill him.
“Paul’s all right. He’ll come back soon,” I say. Josie breathes out a sigh of relief, and I can see the tension in Theo’s shoulders relax the tiniest amount.
Mom interjects, “Theo came to us the moment Triad’s spy left. He told us everything. But by then it was too late—you were gone, and we knew Triad could get to you and we couldn’t, so there was nothing we could do or even say without endangering you. We’ve been working on our own Firebirds, hoping to follow you, but that work doesn’t go quickly. The last month has been hell.” She sounds more than four weeks older as she says it. “But now you’re here. You’ve come home.”
I wrest myself from Josie’s embrace, my smile returning to my face. “And now we have to go. All of us, right this second.”
“Go where?” Mom asks, frowning.
She doesn’t understand. None of them do. None of them know yet, the best news of all.
“To the university.” I take my mother’s hands to ease the shock, and look into all of their faces in turn before saying, “We have to pick up Dad.”
Despite everything that’s happened to me in the past couple of hours, I’m the only one calm enough to drive. So I steer Josie’s silver Volkswagen through the hilly streets. In the back seat, Mom and Josie are alternating between sobs of joy and horrible moments of doubt. They’re still overwhelmed, still afraid to believe.
Theo rides in the seat next to me, his expression stark as he stares straight ahead. Neither of us has spoken to the other since we got in the car. I don’t think we have any idea what to say.
Then I realize the first thing I need to know. “What was it like when you were, you know—taken over?”
Although he still doesn’t look at me, he relaxes a little. “At first it was like I was just losing time. Blacking out or something. I thought I was working too hard on the Firebird project, skipping too much sleep, something like that. Didn’t mention it to Henry or Sophia, because I thought they’d tell me to take it easy and I might miss out.” Theo sighs. “If I had, maybe one of them would’ve realized what was going on. So, that was pretty stupid.”
“You couldn’t have known.” Inside I find myself thinking of every other Marguerite I inhabited. At the time, I felt as though I was making responsible choices—or that if I made mistakes, they were the mistakes those Marguerites would have made in my place. But now that I see Theo’s profound sense of violation, I wonder if that’s how they feel, too.
“After he started using that green stuff, everything changed. I was aware of what was going on, but it was—distant. Foggy. It reminded me of twilight sleep at the dentist. Then he’d leave. Go back to his own dimension to, I don’t know, report in or whatever. By the time I could feel myself sobering up, he’d be back.”
I remember now, back in the Triadverse, the talk about Theo’s time-consuming “internship” with Conley. Really Theo was traveling between dimensions as Conley’s spy—going back only often enough to maintain his cover story.