Ten Thousand Skies Above You Read Free

pull out his Firebird.
    He still has it? I’d brought a second one with me, believing Conley would have stolen Paul’s. Maybe it’s broken. That would explain a lot.
    Paul stares at the necklace he just discovered hanging against his chest. To him it must have seemed to appear by magic. Obviously he can’t imagine what I’m up to, but he remains silent, trusting me completely. That makes it a little harder to manipulate the Firebird controls into the combination for a reminder. Because reminders hurt.
    Paul shouts in pain and jerks backward. But this is the partwhere my Paul wakes up inside him, when we’re together again and we can go back home.
    Except that the reminder doesn’t work.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” Father Paul lifts the Firebird and frowns. “What manner of device hangs around my neck?”
    He doesn’t know. He really has no idea. Nothing like this has ever happened before. How could a reminder just . . . not work?
    I run one hand through my curly hair, thinking fast. “It’s my parents’ latest invention. It wasn’t supposed to hurt you—probably it’s broken. Here, let me have it.”
    Paul hands it back, still trusting me, but now wary of the Firebird itself. I don’t blame him. If only I were another science geek instead of the artist in the family, because then maybe I could fix this on my own. As it is, I might have to go home without Paul. Even though I know I could come back for him, maybe in only a few minutes, I can’t bear the thought of losing him again.
    You’re the scientific wonder of the twenty-first century! I think as I look down at the Firebird. How can you go dead on me now? Maybe Conley broke it. But why bother breaking the Firebird when he could have stolen it for his own use?
    The Firebird hasn’t gone dead. It isn’t broken. Every control reads normal. Yet when I double-check, I see that the Firebird is showing a reading I’ve never seen before.
    Another man steps into the room, and my eyes go wide.
    â€œAllow me to interpret it for you,” he says with a smirk. “That’s what splintering looks like.”
    His red robes look as if they belong in this strange medieval world, but his face is familiar. Too familiar.
    Fate and mathematics don’t only bring you back to the people you love. They can also bring you to the people you hate.
    In this world, they brought me back to Wyatt Conley.

2
    WHO IS WYATT CONLEY, AND WHY IS HE SUCH A SON OF A bitch?
    My parents explained the situation pretty well the day after I brought my father back home from our first adventure through the dimensions. That night we’d all been crying and happy and too freaked out to even think; then, once we woke up, we couldn’t stop talking about our adventures—everything we’d seen and done. Everyone we’d been.
    That morning, it turned out, the physics faculty was holding a departmental meeting. Mom said that was as good a place to begin explaining as any, so my parents, Paul, Theo, and I headed to the university. As usual, I felt out of place as we walked through the hallways of the physics building. It’s like you can almost smell the math.
    All of us went in together, interrupting the meeting in progress. All the science professors seated around the longoval table sat upright and stared.
    â€œForgive our lateness,” my mother said. Even in her faded cardigan and mom jeans, she was immediately the person in charge. Mom has this effect on people. “I need to raise an urgent issue not on the agenda, namely Triad Corporation’s role in funding research into the Firebird device.”
    â€œAs in, they shouldn’t have one anymore,” Theo chimed in. “We need to be independent from them, now .”
    Dad stepped forward. “Triad has brought agents from another dimension into our own. These agents have been spying on us and attempting to direct and control