Title: A
THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU
Author: Claudia
Gray
Release
Date: November 4, 2014
Pages: 368
Publisher: HarperTeen
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook
Every Day meets Cloud Atlas in this heart-racing,
space- and time-bending, epic new trilogy from New York Times bestselling
author Claudia Gray.
Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their radical scientific
achievements. Their most astonishing invention: the Firebird, which allows
users to jump into parallel universes, some vastly altered from our own. But
when Marguerite’s father is murdered, the killer—her parent’s handsome and
enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can
touch him.
Marguerite can’t let the man who destroyed her family go free, and she races
after Paul through different universes, where their lives entangle in
increasingly familiar ways. With each encounter she begins to question Paul’s
guilt—and her own heart. Soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death
is more sinister than she ever could have imagined.
A Thousand Pieces of You explores a reality where we witness the countless
other lives we might lead in an amazingly intricate multiverse, and ask
whether, amid infinite possibilities, one love can endure.
Now on to chapter 3!
Chapter 3
I hug myself as I walk through the mist. It feels as though I’m splintering into a dozen directions at once—grief, then rage, then panic. The last thing I need right now is to lose it. Instead I force my mind to go to the place that always calms and centers me: painting.
If I were going to paint the dimension I see in front of me, I’d load my palette up with burnt umber, opaque black, a spectrum of grays—nothing brighter than that. I’d have to grind something into the paint with my thumb, some sort of grit or ash, because the grime here goes deeper than surfaces. Even the air feels dirty against my skin. There’s less old stone in this London than I remember, more hard metal. Fewer trees and plants, too. The chill in the air is sharp; this is early December, and yet I’m wearing only a short black dress and a flimsy jacket brighter than tinfoil.
(Yes, it’s definitely December. The devices allow dimensional travel, not time travel. “That’s another Nobel Prize altogether,” Mom once said cheerfully, like she might turn to it whenever she got a spare moment.)
Imagining painting helps a little, but my freak-out only halts when my ring starts blinking.
Startled, I stare down at the silvery band around my right pinky, which is shimmering in loops. My first thought is that it’s some kind of LED thing, meant for showing off in nightclubs. But if metal tabs on my jacket create holographic computers, what might this do?
So I reach over and tentatively give the ring a tap. The glow swirls out, a miniature spotlight, and a hologram takes shape in the space in front of me. I’m startled for the one instant before I recognize the face painted in the silver-blue shimmer: “Theo!”
“Marguerite!” He grins, relief shining from him as brilliantly as the hologram beams. “It is you, right?”
“It’s me. Oh, my God, you made it. You’re alive. I was so scared.”
“Hey.” His voice can sound so warm, when he wants it to; for all Theo’s faux arrogance—and his real arrogance—he sees more about people than he lets on. “Don’t waste any more time worrying about me, okay? I always land on the right side. Just like loaded dice.”
Even in the middle of all this, Theo is trying to make me laugh. Instead I feel a sudden lump in my throat. After the past twenty-four hours—a day in which my father died, my friend betrayed us, and I leaped out of my home dimension into places unknown—I’m running on empty. I say, “If I’d lost you, I don’t think I could have taken it.”
“Hey, hey. I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. See?”
“You sure are.” I try to make it flirtatious. Maybe it works, maybe not. I kind of suck at flirting. At any rate, the attempt makes me feel steadier.
He becomes businesslike, or at least as businesslike as someone like Theo can get. His dark eyes—strangely transparent through the hologram—search my face. “Okay, so, you recently had a reminder, because you remember me. That or I’m making one hell of a first impression.”
“No, I didn’t need a reminder. I remembered everything anyway.”
“You said you remembered yourself anyway?” He leans forward intently, temporarily distorting the holographic image. “No periods of confusion?”
“None. Looks like it’s that way for you too. Guess Mom was wrong about dimensional travelers forgetting themselves.”
But Theo shakes his head. “No. I needed—you know, I used a reminder right when I got here.”
“Weird.”
Theo seems slightly freaked by the fact that I remember things so easily. That works against all Mom’s theories—and, apparently, his own experience—but I guess traveling between dimensions is different for different people. Theories only get refined through experimentation. Mom and Dad taught me that much.
He says only, “Well, about time we caught a lucky break, because we were seriously overdue.”
“Where are you?”
“Boston. Looks like I’m at MIT in this dimension. I’m doing my best not to acknowledge all the Red Sox shirts in this closet.” Theo doesn’t care for sports at all—at least, in our dimension. “I thought I’d gone a long way, but damn, Meg. You landed all the way in London.”
Theo started calling me Meg a couple of months ago. I’m still not sure whether it’s annoying or cute. But I like how he always smiles when he says it. “How did you track me down so fast? Did you hack my personal information, something like that?”
He raises one eyebrow. “I searched for you online, found your profile, and put through a call request, which the local equivalent of Facebook offers as an option. When I called, you answered. Not exactly rocket science, and I say this as someone who seriously considered rocket science as a career.”
“Oh. Okay.” Well, that’s a relief. Maybe not everything has to be hard. Maybe we can catch the occasional break, and get lucky like we did this time.
Even though our devices are both set to follow in Paul’s footsteps, there are no guarantees. We could be separated at any jump. Not this time, though. This time Theo is with me. I look at his face, hazy in the ring’s glow, and wish he were here by my side already.
“Have you managed to . . .” Then my voice trails off, because for the first time I’m calm enough to realize I have an English accent now. Just like Dad’s.
Which makes sense, of course, because I live here. I guess speaking is a kind of muscle memory that lingers even while the other Marguerite’s consciousness is in the passenger seat, so to speak. But it hits me as the weirdest, coolest, funniest thing imaginable.
“Bath,” I say, relishing the short A of my new accent. “Baaaath. Privacy. Aluminium. Laboratory. Tomato. Schhhhhhedule.”
The giggles come over me, and I stop right there, hand against my chest, trying to catch my breath. I know I’m laughing mostly because I refuse to give in and start crying. The grief for my father has nowhere to go and is twisting every other mood I have into knots. And . . . tomahhhhto. That’s hilarious.
As I wipe away tears of laughter, Theo says, “You’re kinda shaky right now, huh?”
My voice is all squeaky as I try to hold it in. “I guess.”
“Well, if you were wondering, you sound adorable.”
The silly moment passes as soon as it came, replaced by anger and fright. This must be what the brink of hysteria feels like; I have to hold on. “Theo, Paul’s very close to London. If he knows we’ve come to this dimension, he could be on his way here, now.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“You’re not the only one who’s used a computer before, you know. I tracked Paul down at Cambridge.”
I look through the night at the harsh cityscape across the river, where the jagged dark outlines of skyscrapers dwarf the dome of the cathedral. Paul might be here already. How long would it take him to reach London?
Fiercely I remind myself that if Paul’s chasing me, it saves me the trouble of chasing him. The next time we meet, one of us is going to be sorry, and it won’t be me.
I must look murderous, because Theo says, “We have to remember one thing, okay? There’s a slim chance I calibrated wrong. We could have jumped into the wrong dimension. The Paul Markov in this dimension might not be our Paul. So we can’t overreact until we know the facts.”
What he’s really saying is, I can’t kill an innocent man. I’m not even sure I can kill the guilty one, though I mean to try. My limited skills with the Firebird mean I can’t tell the difference between our Paul and any other; it’s just one more reason I need Theo with me.
“How fast can you get here?” I ask.
Theo gives me that sly grin of his. “Already bought my ticket, Meg. Couldn’t take my pick of flights, traveling last minute—gotta go all the way to Germany and back again, so thanks, Lufthansa—but I should be there by midnight tomorrow. Fast enough for you?”
He’s already crossed a dimension to help me; now he’s going to cross half the globe, as fast as humanly possible, and the one thing Theo asks is whether he’s doing it all fast enough. I whisper, “Thank you.”
“We’re in this together,” Theo says, like it’s no big deal. “Listen, if I’ve figured these ring-phone things out, and I think I have, you can give me tracker access.”
“What is that?”
“Hold your ring up to the hologram, okay?” I do it. The ring glitters, and in the holographic screen, I can see his ring light up as well. Theo grins. “Okay. Now I can find you any time you’ve got that ring on, or you can find me. Once you figure out the interface, that is. Okay, where are you headed?”
“Home, I guess. Once I figure out where it is,” I laugh. Suddenly Theo looks stricken. Why should he look like that?
“Marguerite—” His voice is very quiet, very serious, not like the usual Theo at all.
Fear flickers stronger within me, and quickly I search for HENRY CAINE AND SOPHIA KOVALENKA. Results pop up instantly: physics papers, a few faculty photos from when they were younger, and video clips.
Video of the hovership accident from years ago, the one that killed three dozen people, including two promising scientists and their older daughter.
I don’t have Dad back. He’s dead here too. The only difference is that Mom is gone too. And Josie.
My whole family is dead.
I suck in a breath, hard, as if I’d been struck. As though at a great distance, I hear Theo’s voice say, “Marguerite? Are you okay?”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
The holographic screen helpfully starts showing me the video of the wreck, which apparently was a big thing on the news. Right now it feels like that explosion is happening inside my head, white heat and blinding light and everything I love, everyone who really loved me—Dad and Mom and Josie—burning to cinders.
It happened above San Francisco. The news articles say bits and scraps of the wreckage turned up as far away as Las Vegas, drifting down to earth, sometimes washed down with the rain.
“Marguerite?” The shimmering of the hologram doesn’t hide the concern on Theo’s face. “Your folks—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. When I came to in this dimension, I looked them up first thing—thought they could maybe help us, you know? I didn’t realize you hadn’t learned what happened to them yet.”
My heart has been crying out for Dad, over and over, since the moment the police called our house. I’d even cherished a small hope of seeing him again here, at least a version of him.
But he’s still gone, still dead, and now Mom and Josie are as lost as he is.
They’re fine! I try to tell myself. That happened in this dimension, but not yours. When you go back home, Mom and Josie will be there waiting for you—it’s not like here, you didn’t lose everything, not absolutely everything—it’s going to be okay—
But it’s not. Dad is still gone.
“Why does anybody want to travel through dimensions, anyway?” I choke out. My fingernails dig into the flesh of my forearms, which are crossed in front of me like a shield. The physical pain keeps me from crying; no matter what, I refuse to cry. “They haven’t thought enough about what they might find.”
“I’m sorry,” Theo repeats. He looks like he wants to step forward through the hologram to get to me. “I’m so sorry.”
I think, Is this what you wanted, Paul? Did you hate them so much that you ran to a world where they were already dead? So your work would be done for you?
Once again I remember Paul’s unsmiling face, his gray eyes that seemed to stare through me. I remember the day he watched me painting, his gaze following every stroke my brush made on the canvas. It sickens me now to think that for a little while I almost—
Theo speaks again, his voice firmer this time. “That accident was a long time ago, and a lifetime away. You’ve gotta think of it like that. All right?”
His words break through my melancholy, bring me back to the now. “All right. Yes. It was just a shock. I won’t let it get to me again.”
He does me the courtesy of pretending to believe me. “Until tomorrow, hang in there and stay safe. And if you see Paul . . . don’t let him see you.”
The hologram blinks out. Though I stare down at my ring, hoping against hope that he’ll call back, it remains dull metal, silent and dark.
So I go home.
My blinky ring also has a GPS system, and when I ask it to guide me home, it does. I follow its directions without any idea of where I’ll end up.
Turns out home is in a particularly posh building—less garish than most of those around, but no less cold. The elevator is one of those glass ones on the outside, which I think are designed specifically to terrify the acrophobic. I expect to feel a little comforted when I walk inside, because her apartment must be, in part, my apartment too. But the minute I see it, I think that I’ve never seen any place that looked less like home.
It feels like an art gallery, but one of the ones that only shows weird, pop-kitsch art like rhinestone-studded cow skulls. Or maybe it’s like a hospital where they do plastic surgery on celebrities. Stark white and brushed metal, no soft seats, nothing comfortable or cozy, and so brightly lit you could see a single speck of dust—which I guess is the idea. I stand there, dripping wet from the rain, aware of myself as grubby, awkward, and misplaced.
Never could I have felt like I belonged here.
“Marguerite?” Aunt Susannah steps out from the hallway in a dressing gown as pristinely white as the decor. I guess I was put into the custody of my Aunt Susannah, of all people.
Her hair is loose, ready for bed, but still falls neatly to her shoulders as if it didn’t dare put one wisp astray. She doesn’t seem to be that different in this dimension. As she rubs some expensive cream into her face, she says, “You’re back awfully early tonight.”
It’s after one a.m. What time do I normally come home? “I was tired.”
“Are you feeling well?”
I shrug.
Aunt Susannah lets that go. “Best get to bed, then. You don’t want to make yourself ill.”
“Okay. Good night, Aunt Susannah.”
She pauses. Do I not say that to her often? I don’t sense maternal warmth from her; she’s not the maternal type. It’s not that I don’t love her—I do. And she loves me, too. But I’m guessing parenting didn’t come easily to her. Aunt Susannah says simply, “All right. Good night, dear.”
As she pads down the hall to her room, I go to the other door, to the room that must be mine.
It’s so—blank. Not as fancy as the rest of the flat, but there’s nothing about this space that makes me feel like it belongs to me. It might as easily be a room in a luxury hotel.
But that, I realize, must be the point.
The Marguerite who lost her family so young is one who has spent the rest of her life trying not to love anyone or anything that much again.
I haven’t decorated a bulletin board with postcards and prints of images I find inspiring. No easel stands in the corner with my latest canvas; do I paint in this dimension at all? No bookshelves. No books. Although I try to hope this dimension’s Marguerite has some kind of technologically advanced e-reader in her earrings or something, that’s beginning to seem unlikely. She doesn’t appear to be the bookish type.
The clothes in my closet include a lot of designer labels I recognize, and some I don’t, but I’d wager they’re high-end too. None of them are the kinds of things I’d wear at home—instead they’re all metallic or leather or plastic, anything hard and shiny. Maybe I ought to be enthused that the Caine family money apparently held out a couple of generations longer in this dimension, but all I can think about is how cold this life is.
Now I have to live in it.
My hand closes around the Firebird locket. I could take it off now if I wanted, since it doesn’t seem I need the reminders. But even the thought of being separated from it terrifies me. Instead I close my eyes and imagine that it could help me fly away to a new place, not this life or my old life, but some newer, shinier reality where everything is okay and nothing can hurt me ever again.
My legs seem to give out, and I flop down on the immaculately made bed. For a long time I lie there, curled in a ball, wishing to be home—my real home—more desperately than I’d known I could ever wish for anything.
Can't wait to read chapter 4 now right?? Make sure to go to Fangirlish tomorrow to read it!
