Ten Thousand Skies Above You (18 page)

“What tattoos do you have?” He can't have done terrible things like his father, or those awful men upstairs. Paul's not like them, and never could be. Yet I see the lines of ink at his open collar, testament to a divergence between this Paul and my own.

Paul notices my gaze on his skin. He says, “This is just to show you. No other reason.” And then he starts unbuttoning his shirt.

Once again I remember the day Paul posed for me as my model. Not what I need to think about right now. Instead, I concentrate on the fact that he told me not to be afraid, that he's trying to comfort me as much as he can.

He doesn't strip off his shirt, doesn't even open it all the way. But the top half of his chest is mostly exposed now and I can see the tattoos for myself. They're simple, drawn only in blue-black ink, but artfully done. The largest tattoo is in the middle of his chest, a surprisingly devout image of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. On one shoulder is a rose that looks withered, or dried; on the other, a dove perches on a twig.

In my mind I hear Lieutenant Markov whisper,
Golubka
. He called me his little dove as he held me in his arms.

“You like this one?” Paul gestures toward that shoulder. “It means ‘deliverance from suffering.' The rose, that says I would prefer death to dishonor. And the Madonna tells anyone who understands that I was born into—what you call ‘this life.'”

The Madonna requires no explanation. The meaning of the rose doesn't surprise me either; Paul's sense of decency and kindness holds true even in a reality where he didn't escape his parents' corruption. But the dove . . .

I look into his eyes. “What suffering were you delivered from?” I ask as gently as I can. “Or are you still waiting for deliverance?”

Paul stiffens. Immediately he begins buttoning his shirt. “You ask too many questions.”

“But you want to answer me. Don't you?”

He pauses for a long moment, and I know he feels it too—the electric connection between us that spans the worlds. Yet Paul can't understand why he has this bond with a stranger, why he felt the need to show me the secrets inked on his skin, or why I reach out for him even now. Baffled, almost hurt, he simply goes up the stairs without another word.

As the door shuts and locks again, I take a deep breath and realize I'm shaking. I trust him so deeply, but this scenario is unlike any I've ever faced while traveling between the universes; I could make the wrong move at any moment and upset a very delicate balance.

Getting closer to Paul in this dimension means playing with fire.

WHEN THE HIGHLIGHT OF YOUR DAY IS SOMEONE GIVING
you a fresh bathroom bucket—it's not a good sign.

Masked Guy hauled the old bucket upstairs. He seemed about as thrilled with his errand as you'd expect, but I was still sort of sorry to see him go. After so long in this featureless underground cell, seeing anyone—even him—was fuel for my understimulated mind. But by now he's been gone for a while, however long a while is, and I feel the room shrinking around me, sealing me farther away from the real world.

My sense of time has all but collapsed. I have no idea how long I've been down here. More than three hours since they brought me food, though, because I'm hungry. Beyond that, I can't tell.

I'm exhausted. At this point, this world's Marguerite must have been awake for more than twenty-four hours straight.

Surely the negotiations for my release have begun. Wyatt Conley might already have bankers bringing him a million dollars in unmarked bills. Or instead of collecting a cash-stuffed briefcase from under a park bench, Leonid's probably giving Conley the number of some Cayman Islands account that will mysteriously disappear the moment after the ransom deposits.

The door at the top of the stairs swings open. The same strange cocktail of emotions swirls within me—fear, hope, the peculiar happiness of knowing that at least
something
is happening—

—when I see Paul returning to me, and hope eclipses all the rest.

“Here,” he says. He's holding a white Styrofoam container and a can of ginger ale. “You must be hungry again.”

“I am. What time is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“I'd just like to know.” My voice shakes, but I swallow hard and continue. “Being in this room for so long—it's weird, not knowing anything that's happening outside.”

Paul hesitates. His gray eyes are almost unreadable, but I can see that he doesn't like realizing how scared I am. When he answers me, his words are simple and precise. “It's early afternoon. Cloudy. We had rain earlier, but it stopped.”

Who knew it could feel like such a relief just to hear what the sky looks like? “Thanks.”

“Your lunch is late. I'll make sure dinner gets here faster, if you're still . . . with us.”

Does that mean “still with us” as in “not yet free,” or as in “alive”? I'm about 99 percent sure he means the former. In this situation, though, 99 percent is not enough.

Paul pulls back the Styrofoam lid to reveal lasagna and garlic bread. The smell of tomato sauce, cheese, and garlic almost makes me reel; I'm that hungry.

But I also remember the night Paul and I made lasagna together in my family's kitchen. We listened to Rachmaninoff, and our shoulders brushed against each other, and we laughed every time we screwed something up, which happened constantly. That was the first night I recognized that my feelings for Paul had begun to change. Sometimes I think of it as the first night of “us.”

“Any chance of taking these off?” I offer my bound wrists to Paul. “If I try to eat Italian food with my hands tied, I'm going to get it all over myself. Or do you need a chance to laugh at me?”

Paul would never laugh at someone for a thing like that. He'd be offended by the very suggestion, which is what I'm counting on.

But he doesn't cut through the zip ties. Instead, he says, “I'll help you.”

As he takes the white plastic fork from its plastic sleeve, I say, “You mean you're going to feed me?”

“It's like you said. Otherwise, you'd make a mess.” He hands me the thin paper napkin. “The ties have to stay on.”

He starts to sit on the edge of my cot, then pulls back. No doubt he thinks I'll feel threatened if he comes close to me
too quickly—which I would, under normal circumstances. Actually, as he finally settles next to me, I feel comforted.

This hesitation means he's thinking of me. Trying to make this easier.

And even though I can't make my move yet, it helps me to know he's this close to the Firebirds.

Paul carefully gets a forkful of lasagna, lets the first droplets of sauce fall, then brings it to my mouth. I feel weirdly self-conscious about taking the initial bite. After that, though, I don't care. The first taste of tomato sauce against my tongue makes me salivate so quickly my mouth almost hurts. I can handle the garlic bread myself, so I sop that in the sauce and eat some before he offers me the next bite. I could swear I've never eaten anything this good before in my life.

“You were hungrier than I thought,” Paul says.

I must be wolfing this stuff down like a stray dog. Forcing myself to chew slower, I dab at my mouth with the flimsy paper napkin. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize. The fault was mine.”

Paul feels guilty. Maybe I can use that. “Does this establishment offer showers? A bath?” He'd take off the zip ties to let me bathe, surely. “Between the crazy eating and the crazy hair, I bet I look like the Tasmanian Devil.”

“You've looked better.”

Ouch.
I glare at him. “How would you know?”

“I would assume.”

Once again I remind myself that Paul's rudeness is always a kind of honesty. Since last night, I've been thrown in the
back of a van, terrified, imprisoned, and duct-taped. Plus I'm sleep-deprived. I
hope
I've looked better than I must right now.

“Why did it take so long for the food?” I ask. “You only get your ransom money if I'm returned safe and sound, right? Starved to death definitely wouldn't count as ‘safe.'”

“It takes weeks for a human being to die of starvation. Thirst kills faster, within days.” Another thing that's the same in this dimension? The way Paul's face looks when he realizes he's just said something amazingly tactless one second too late to take it back. “Nobody's going to deny you food or water. Let's leave it at that.”

“Did you get some dinner too? I'd bet anything you love lasagna.”

He hesitates. “Everyone loves lasagna.”

“But you really love it.” I say this as innocently as I can, between bites. “I bet you've even learned to make lasagna yourself.”

He isn't fazed—at least, visibly. “You like to pretend that you know me very well.”

“I have instincts about people.”

“Unlikely. What most people call
instinct
in people is really the interpretation of small subconscious cues.”

“Maybe I picked up on some of those.”

“There are no subconscious cues that could tell you I enjoy lasagna.”

I laugh out loud. Paul does that thing where he realizes something he's said in seriousness is funny—his expression
clouds, and he tries to smile, but it never quite works. Moments like that make him feel vulnerable. So I quickly say, “It's like you said. Everybody loves lasagna. That's all.”

“That's not all.”

“What else could it be?” He offers me one more bite, and I take it, the conversation flowing smoothly around my meal.

“I don't know,” he says. “But I don't believe in instincts.”

“What about psychic powers?”

This earns me a stare as withering as the one I'd get from my scientist Paul back home. I decide to mess with his rational head, for once; besides, after hours tied up and freaking out, I need to remind myself how much I know. What power I still possess.

So I say, “For instance, my instincts—or powers, you decide—they're telling me you wanted to follow a very different path in life. Something that wasn't illegal. Something more than this, bigger and more meaningful. Personally, I think you would've been a good . . . scientist.”

If the situation were less terrible, the look on his face would be hilarious. He puts down the Styrofoam container and stands up. “How could you guess that I wanted—?” His words stop as he catches himself.

How
would
I have guessed that? “The way you always seem to be analyzing things. You're smart. I can tell.”

Paul paces in front of me, his footsteps loud in this small, dark cell. “Someone else has told you about me. There's no other way you could know that.”

“Who knew that, besides you? Nobody, I bet. You don't open up to many people.” Which means any people.

He takes a step backward to consider me from a different angle. “What else do your ‘instincts' tell you about me?”

I remember the things I shouted after the last dimension's Paul. They were too intimate, too exact. This time, my answer will be simple. It will be honest. But it will still be some of what I love about him.

After all, a splinter of my Paul is within this man, even now.

“You like facts. You want to be objective. So sometimes people assume you're cold, but you're not. Not at all. I think you feel more deeply than most people ever do; you just don't know how to show it. You always feel—out of step. You're not like the people around you, and they know it as well as you do. And you think it's because something's wrong with you, so you retreat deeper into the background. That just means people don't get to know the real you.”

Paul takes one step backward. I think he doesn't know whether to be moved or frightened.

“You're lonely,” I say, more softly. “You've been lonely so long I think you've forgotten there's any other way to be.”

He breathes in deeply. By now the way he looks at me reminds me more of my own Paul—that mixture of uncertainty and awe I remember from our first days together.

Is that part of his soul shining through? Will he save me after all?

I lean forward, willing him to understand it's okay for
us to be close. “You want a family. Not your own—a real family, made up of people who take care of each other. And when people are scared of you, because you're so big, it kills you a little inside. Because you can be so gentle. So kind.”

“You don't know me,” Paul says, as if by pronouncing the words he can make them true.

“I wish you could learn how to show more people the real you. If you could, nobody would ever be scared of you again.”
Nobody could help but love you,
I want to add. But that's a step too far.

After a moment, he laughs, a hard, strange sound. “You learned all this already?”

“First impressions can tell you a lot.” I smile. “So, what do you see when you look at me?”

I'm not expecting much of an answer—but I get one.

“You're insecure,” Paul says flatly. “So you exaggerate your knowledge or emotions to draw attention you think you won't get otherwise. You have genuine talents, however. If you didn't, you wouldn't be willing to put yourself forward. Why they're not enough for you, I don't know. You're sophisticated for your age in some ways, naive in others, which makes me think you went to one of the experimental schools—a Waldorf school, maybe—or you could have been educated at home by intelligent people. You come across as a normal young girl, but when angered, I suspect you're dangerous. I say that even though I'm the one with the gun.”

His little joke gets lost in all the rest. I'm too astonished,
too hurt, by this bald accuracy. Naive? Insecure? Is that what my Paul thinks too?

The last part is the only one I can bring myself to talk about. “Dangerous?”

“You're calm under pressure. Calmer than you should be.” Paul's gaze rakes over me, as though his perception alone could scour me raw. “Maybe you did reach out to me by accident. But now you taunt me with this life I can never have—that's either courage or madness. I don't know which. All I know is that you're not an ordinary girl. You've seen things others haven't. Done things others couldn't.”

I feel like I'm going to cry, but I won't. Not in front of him, not now.

He sees my weakness, but doesn't spare me the last: “You think your specialness makes you invulnerable. It doesn't.”

With that Paul walks upstairs. His only goodbye is the door slamming shut.