“Exiled?” It sounded like such an old-fashioned punishment for a woman whose sole crime was being a wife the king had grown bored with. Although, kings on Earth had done far worse than that with wives they considered extraneous. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Alana fought the divorce,” Gloria said, pursing her lips in displeasure. She was clearly not enamored of the king or the queen regent. “It was all over the press boards for years, and everyone came out looking just awful. The king considered the bad publicity to be traitorous and forced her out of the country. She now lives just over the border in the Canadian Republic. Juliana is allowed to visit her, but Alana hasn’t been back to the Commonwealth since the divorce was final. She’s not even being permitted to attend the wedding.”
It was hard not to feel sorry for Juliana. I missed my parents every second of every day, but even though they were gone, I was sure that they’d loved me, and each other. It was cold comfort sometimes, but other times, it actually helped to remember that.
Oh my God, I thought with a start. My parents.
“If I’m Juliana’s analog,” I said, the words coming out in a rush. “Then are her mom and dad analogs of my mom and dad?” It seemed like too much to hope for, but was it possible that I might be able to see my parents for the first time in a decade?
Thomas shook his head, and something inside me crumpled.
“It doesn’t really work like that,” Thomas said. “Our worlds … they’re too different now. Maybe a long time ago that would’ve been the case, but too much has changed.”
“What do you mean, too much has changed?”
Thomas took a seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He looked worn down, tired. I tried not to sympathize with him too much—after all, he’d chosen a life that had put him in the path of danger. But exhaustion didn’t diminish his handsomeness, which at this point seemed to exist only to torment me. It got under my skin, how good-looking I couldn’t help thinking he was, even after everything. Why couldn’t awful people be ugly and good people beautiful, without exception? It would’ve made things so much easier.
“It might be helpful if you can manage to think of all the possible universes as many branches of a tree,” Thomas began. “In the beginning, they were all the same—like a trunk. But as time goes on, changes start to happen—just small ones at first—changes that differentiate the universes, make them unique. In one world, you get up on time for school, and in another you’re late. In one world you eat pizza for lunch, in another you have a turkey sandwich. No big deal, right? But change causes more change, and before you know it, the universes aren’t so similar anymore. Does that make sense?”
Sense? None of this made any sense, really, but it wasn’t so far off from things I’d heard Granddad talk about in the past. “Your basic ripple effect,” I supplied.
“Exactly. At least, that was how it was explained to me.” Thomas fixed his eyes on me, and I could’ve sworn they were brighter than before. “It doesn’t even have to take that long. It’s only been a couple hundred years since the Aurora-Earth LCE and look how different our two worlds already are.”
“LCE?”
“The Last Common Event,” Thomas said. “The moment where the timelines on Earth and Aurora fully separated.”
“What was that?” Granddad would’ve been fascinated by all this information; so would my parents. They had spent their entire careers searching for proof of alternate universes—they would’ve been amazed to find out just how right their theories were.
“George Washington was killed during the Revolutionary War,” Thomas said. “Or, as we call it, the First Revolution. There was a Second Revolution in 1789, this time led by a British nobleman named John Rowan who used his power as the governor of the New York Colony to raise an army against the Crown. After he succeeded in overthrowing British rule, he crowned himself king and renamed the country the United Commonwealth of Columbia, after Christopher Columbus. He established his capital in New York and renamed it Columbia City.” Thomas smiled. “Aurora 101.”
“So what you’re saying is, even though Juliana and I look the same, we don’t have the same parents, or backgrounds, or anything?”
“Juliana’s a different person,” he said with a helpless shrug. “Wholly and completely. I’m not a physicist; I can’t explain it more than that.”
“But my parents do have analogs in Aurora, don’t they? Even if they’re not Juliana’s parents, they still exist?” Thomas drew in a deep breath. “You know who they are, don’t you?”
“Your mother’s analog is a schoolteacher in Virginia Dominion,” Thomas told me. “She’s got three kids, two boys and a girl.” I blinked. Three kids? I would’ve given anything for just one sibling—sister, brother, I couldn’t have cared less, as long as I had someone who understood, who knew what it meant to have had my parents and then lost them.
“And my dad?” I asked, trying to keep all emotion out of my voice but hearing a tremor in it nonetheless.
Thomas sat up straight and rubbed the back of his neck. “Your father doesn’t have an analog in Aurora. Sometimes that happens. Nobody knows why, but it’s more common than you might think. We don’t all have analogs in every universe.”
“Can I see her?” I asked. Please, please, please just let me see her, I thought desperately. Even though I knew my mother’s analog wouldn’t actually be my mother, I needed to know what she would’ve looked like now, if she had lived.
He shook his head. “Virginia’s too far. There’s not time.”
I nodded. I should’ve known better than to believe something good might come from this experience. Aurora seemed to delight in crushing every faint flutter of hope I dared to have.
“All right, that’s enough,” Gloria interjected. I started at the sound of her voice; I’d forgotten she was even there.
“It’s—” Gloria consulted her tablet. “Four-thirty-seven a.m., so we don’t have much time. Juliana rises precisely at seven thirty every morning when she’s at the Castle, unless she has an early engagement; I come in at eight o’clock on the nose to go over her schedule for the day and she eats breakfast while she’s being prepped.”
“Prepped?” I repeated, my voice hollow. “Prepped how?”
“Clothes, hair, makeup,” Gloria said, as if this was all self-explanatory. It made sense; clearly, as a public figure, Juliana had to look her best every day. But the thought of being primped like some kind of life-size Barbie made me slightly ill. I already felt like an object in this world, a curiosity rather than a person in my own right. To them, Juliana was the real one; I was just a stopgap illusion they had no choice but to tolerate. “Juliana often changes several times a day, and her stylists are on call around the clock to make sure the princess is always perfectly presentable. I manage Juliana’s staff and master calendar, and act as a sort of … turnstile in the princess’s life. I control access to Her Highness; nobody outside the royal family gets to her without first going through me.
“Of course, that still leaves the matter of the queen and her children,” Gloria continued. “As Thomas may have told you, Juliana and her stepmother don’t play well together. They never have, not even when Juliana was a child, and things have only gotten worse since the regency.”
“Why?” I vaguely remembered what a regent was from my sophomore year European history class; they took over the throne of a country when the real monarch was for whatever reason incapable of ruling on their own.