“Sure of what?” he asked, his voice going soft.
“That you would help me,” I said. This was the point of it, after all, the reason I’d told him. Because I thought I finally had some useful information to bargain with. But you can only barter for your freedom with someone who wants something else more than keeping you trapped.
“I see,” he said, a bit coldly. “Why don’t you just tell me what you were thinking, then? Get it all out in the open.”
“Thomas, what if I could control it?” He looked at me as if I’d grown a second head. “Wait, listen. Obviously I’m connected to Juliana. I don’t know why, but I do know that it’s not an accident. It’s been happening my whole life. There has to be a reason. If I could control the visions—if I could force them to happen instead of just waiting for them to come to me when I was asleep—I might be able to figure out where they’re hiding her. And if I could do that—”
“Then we could bring her back,” Thomas finished. “And you could go home.” His voice was flat, and I could see him pulling away, receding behind his KES mask. The way Thomas was reacting made me feel guilty, like I was turning my back on him, which was ludicrous. I didn’t owe him anything … did I?
“The General’s not going to let me go,” I said. “I need to find another way.”
“You don’t know that,” Thomas insisted.
“Six days,” I reminded him. “Six days. That’s what he told me. That’s what he promised. But you said it yourself: the KES has no idea where Juliana is. How can he be so sure he’ll find her before my time is up? He’s planning something, Thomas.”
“Like what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. You’re the expert. You tell me.”
There was a long pause while Thomas sorted through things in his head. Finally, he said, “So what do you want from me, then?” The connection I’d felt forming between us had all but vanished, and I sensed that he was creating the distance on purpose. He was talking to me like a stranger he was haggling with over a trinket, not … whatever I was to him. Maybe I was nothing. Maybe it was—and had always been—just in my head.
“If I can tell you where Juliana is—exactly where she is—I want you to promise you’ll get me home as soon as possible. No matter what.” I held my breath, waiting in agony for him to respond. This was it. The only chip I had to play. I hoped I’d played it right.
“Fine. You help me find Juliana, I’ll make sure you go back to your own world, even if it’s against my orders.”
“You’d really do that?”
“It’d be worth it, to bring her back. To make things right again. Besides,” he continued, with a resigned shrug. “What can he do to me? I’m his son.” Something in the tone of his voice told me he didn’t quite believe that, but he was trying very hard to convince himself it was true.
“Right.” I stared at my hands. “Now all I have to do is figure out how the hell I’m going to do it.”
“Actually,” he said. “I might know someone who can help you.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and so do you. Come on,” he said. “We’re going to see Dr. Moss.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Dr. Moss … the doctor who treated me last night?” That incident seemed so long ago. I’d nearly forgotten it in the hubbub surrounding Callum’s arrival. I glanced at Thomas’s wrist, hoping to catch a glimpse of his watch, but he caught me looking and raised his eyebrows with a hint of comedy that I was glad to see.
“I’ll have you back in plenty of time for dinner,” Thomas promised. “I’d rather face down a squad of ten Libertines than Gloria when her schedule’s been compromised.”
I laughed. The tension that had gathered up in my shoulders melted a bit. I took a deep breath to center myself. We’d crossed over from the Castle to the Tower via one of the glass sky bridges that connected the two buildings and were now standing in a circular elevator bank. Each elevator was marked with the floors it served, but the one we were waiting for simply said DOWN, which struck me as more than a little ominous. When it arrived I stepped into it beside Thomas and watched him hit the button labeled SUBBASEMENT F.
“Dr. Moss is your friend with all the theories about analogs, isn’t he?”
Thomas nodded. “About Dr. Moss,” he said cagily, tugging at the cuffs of his suit jacket. “He’s not technically a medical doctor.”
“What are you talking about? He gave me a shot!”
“I couldn’t call a real doctor,” Thomas explained. “Dr. Rowland, the royal physician, wouldn’t have been satisfied with giving you a little antihistamine and going about his night. He would’ve been suspicious; he would’ve wanted to do blood work and all kinds of tests on you, and I think you know what that might’ve yielded.”
“Would it have proven I wasn’t Juliana?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas shrugged. “But it’s possible. I knew the General wouldn’t want to risk it, so I took the liberty of calling Dr. Moss instead.”
“What kind of doctor is Dr. Moss?”
“Theoretical physicist,” Thomas said with a wry smile, perhaps thinking of my “family business.” My stomach dipped with the impact of a sudden sadness at the thought of Granddad and my parents, but I did my best to put it out of my mind. I couldn’t allow myself to fall apart with missing them, not when I was so close to getting answers about my mysterious ability and its implications for my quest to return home. “He’s completely brilliant, Mossie. He invented the anchors. He knows everything there is to know about parallel universes and analogs.”
I fiddled with the anchor. Most of the time I forgot it was there. “Mossie?”
A shy grin transformed his face. “I like Dr. Moss. And you’ll like him, too.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because,” he said with confidence as the elevator arrived at Subbasement F. “The General hates him.”
The F level contained only a short hallway with one steel door opposite the elevator. A sign on the door read:
SUBBASEMENT F
HIGHLY CLASSIFIED
NO ONE BELOW LEVEL 6 CLEARANCE ADMITTED WITHOUT A DOD ESCORT.
The LCD screen next to the door wasn’t green, or even blue, but bright red and pulsing, a very clear sign that no one was welcome down here, me included. But Thomas had Level 6 clearance; his handprint changed the screen to blue, and the code he punched in unlocked the door. It swished open, revealing a large, slick laboratory just beyond the threshold. Loud music blasted out of unseen speakers, and strangely enough, the song was one that I recognized.
“Mossie!” Thomas shouted. I glanced around the windowless laboratory, taking in several imposing machines, digital boards covered with hastily scribbled mathematical formulas, and tables cluttered with all manner of things: burbling Bunsen burners, stacks of files, and piles and piles of books. There was one thing missing, however—Dr. Moss.
“Mossie!” Thomas cried again. The elderly man popped up from behind one of the shuddering machines. When Dr. Moss saw Thomas, he grinned and shuffled over to an old-fashioned record player. An earsplitting scratch filled the air as he removed the needle from the spinning LP.
“Thomas!” He rushed forward to shake Thomas’s hand. When his eyes landed on me, his grin grew so wide I thought it might crack his face in half. “And look who you’ve brought! Our little Earthling.”
I wrinkled my nose at the term, despite the fact that it was as accurate a description of what I was as anything else. I preferred it to “analog,” but all I could think of were the alien movies I’d seen as a kid.