* * *

  Sarah sat down on a bench still damp from morning dew. Other than the boys they’d met earlier, no other humans had ventured out into the tentative sunlight.

  She looked up at Pegasus. “This is where we first met.”

  Pegasus took a seat next to her, watching their surroundings.

  Sarah looked down at her wrist, staring at the fading words Pegasus had put there. “So that’s Jeremy.”

  “Seems so.”

  “What are the options?”

  “You’re remembering him from some past meeting.” Pegasus extended a finger to count as he spoke. “You saw him in a hallucination from another world.”

  That sounded even crazier when he said it like that. “You forgot one.” She unwound a third finger from his hand. “Maybe I’m dreaming all of this, this entire life. You might all be figments of my imagination.”

  He laughed, taking her hand in his.

  Sarah shrugged, gaze distant. “I could be lying on the floor of that abandoned building, bleeding out, and this is all my brain’s elaborate fantasy.”

  “What will you do if it is?”

  What could she do from within a dream? “Nothing.”

  He retracted the third finger. “Then it doesn’t matter and you can cross that one out.”

  Sarah watched as a couple of joggers went past on the other side of the street. “Are we still working under the assumption that I’m not crazy?”

  He smiled at her, pure mischief. “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “There’s something that’s been bothering me.”

  “Just one thing?”

  “How sure are we that there are only two worlds?”

  “It’s the accepted theory,” he answered after a pause. “There’s been no actual proof.”

  “So what if…” Her voice faltered as she ran a finger along the words on her wrist. “What if everything I’ve seen is real somewhere, in a different world? Is that even possible?”

  “What made you think of that?”

  “I vaguely remember Robyn talking about Jeremy in some of the dreams I had of home. I don’t think I’ve ever met him, but my subconscious could’ve planted him in my dreams.” She was embarrassed at the thought that her mind had made some random stranger into someone she had a relationship with, but she had bigger issues.

  Pegasus drew her hand to his lips. “I don’t think you have a hidden obsession with Jeremy.”

  “I don’t either. And he’s not the only inconsistency. If he’s real…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. If Jeremy was real, the Sarah that was with him would also be real, and that would mean Robyn…

  She shook her head, dispelling the thought. “You were always with me tonight, when we died. But you couldn’t have been, because you would’ve already been dead.”

  “Because I died in that alley.”

  Sarah squeezed his hand tightly. The thought she’d been avoiding surfaced with full force then, and she let herself be hopeful, voice barely a whisper. “What if all those times I saw Robyn and my parents were also real?”

  Pegasus wrapped his arms around her. “Since we don’t know anything about the gate itself or how it works, everything we’ve been working with so far is conjecture. If we consider that there are other worlds other than the one messing with us, and that all the visions you’ve been having are real, it’s not that far-fetched to think that each might belong to a different world.”

  “So maybe there’s a world where neither Robyn or I ever joined the W.R.O., where our parents are still alive. Maybe Dad never even knew about you all.”

  “Or you’ve been seeing possibilities from our two worlds.” He planted a kiss on her temple. “There’s no way to know.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Unwilling to give up her first thought, Sarah’s mind ran away with it, revisiting all she’d seen in her dreams. “There would be a world where I never found out that Robyn worked for you, and a world where both Robyn and I work at the W.R.O. A world where I made out with you at the party.” Sarah buried her face in her palms.

  A burst of laughter escaped him. “What party?”

  When she looked up again, Pegasus was staring at her.

  “The Foundation Day party.”

  Pegasus’ gaze lingered on her face, drifting down to her lips. “I’m not sure if I should be jealous. Should I be jealous?”

  “Oh yeah, definitely,” she teased. She regretted it instantly when mischief came to his eyes.

  Sarah untangled herself from his embrace before he could pull her closer.

  Apparently content with her reaction, he leaned back in his seat, stretching an arm out—a more demure invitation. Sarah took a deep breath and readjusted herself, leaning against him.

  “If I am seeing things from various worlds, it would also explain why the dreams are slightly different even when they’re the same dream,” she whispered. “Like the one where Robyn kills me. It’s kind of the same, but kind of not.”

  “I can try looking into previous theories about the gateway.” His fingertips brushed along her shoulder in a repeating pattern. “If there are other worlds, I wonder if the puppeteers can move freely between them.”

  “Can they pick and choose where they go, you mean?”

  “Or would the gate have its own whims and will?”

  “If there’s no way for them to direct it to one place or another, then I’d imagine it would be used only between our two worlds, right? I wouldn’t think they wouldn’t risk losing the connection here.”

  He shrugged. “Them having access to several worlds would explain how they could find a version of Robyn so perfect that they exchanged her without us noticing.”

  “But she wasn’t perfect.”

  “True. The replacement didn’t have a shoulder problem, for one.”

  “I wonder if her sister was like me.” It was sad to think that even the versions of her that had escaped this fate would still be plagued by it. Were they also having nightmares and waking dreams where they were dying over and over again without even knowing why?

  Pegasus was staring out into the distance, brows furrowed.

  “What?” she asked.

  He turned to her, gaze so removed it brought a chill to her. “When you’re dreaming these things, when you’re confused about where you are, is it still you?”

  Taken aback by the question, she hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

  She hadn’t thought about that. Was she living someone else’s life during her episodes? And if so, did that mean that every once in a while, someone else was living hers? She shivered.

  “I’m sorry I brought that up. It was a random thought,” Pegasus said with a softer tone.

  She forced a smiled. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about upsetting me.”

  “I’ll try.” He kissed her cheek. “I wonder what could be affecting the events in each world, causing them to be different.”

  “Are we going to start discussing parallel dimensions branching out from each decision we make? Like how today maybe in some world, we never left the compound, never saw Jeremy?”

  “I was thinking about my death in the alley. You said you were there when it happened, but when you saved me, you weren’t scheduled to be there. The events leading up to my death would have played out the same, so maybe enough factors were the same that you being there or not didn’t alter the result.”

  “I’m not sure how comfortable I feel with how easily you remove yourself emotionally from your own death.” Maybe it was because he hadn’t lived through it.

  He kissed her cheek. “I’m not dead, not here.”

  “But somewhere you are. Maybe in lots of somewheres.”

  Pegasus nodded. “If we entertain the possibility of multiple worlds, we have no way of telling how many worlds would exist. So yes, I may have died dozens or hundreds of times by now. We all may have.”

  “There go my hopes for a good night’s sleep.”

  He gestured to where the golden sunlight filtered through the houses. “It’s not night anymore.”

  That wasn’t a problem. She could fool herself into believing it was nighttime as soon as she got back to her windowless room. “We should probably head back, shouldn’t we?”

  “We can think about it some more tomorrow with clearer heads.” He got up, offering her a hand.

  Sarah let herself be pulled to her feet. “I’m not sure that’ll make a difference.”

  “How do you feel about telling Zeus your theory?”

  “I don’t know.” Zeus seemed content to test her while keeping her out of the spotlight for now. “But it seems inevitable, doesn’t it?”

  Pegasus shrugged.

  “Besides, he’d be in a better position to look into things on a bigger scale.”

  “Alright, I’ll tell him then.”

  Sarah was slightly surprised that he wouldn’t have said anything if she’d refused. Or maybe he had been that sure of her answer, thus why he asked. She smiled to herself. She was being a bit paranoid again, wasn’t she? He didn’t need to play those games.

  They walked back to the car in silence. Jeremy and his friends were long gone.

  Cars and joggers multiplied along the streets under the sunlight. If she screamed at the top of her lungs right now, how many lives would that affect? Would that create new possibilities? New deviations from the set path of this world?

  She couldn’t help thinking of all the other versions of her that were dead in that room, shot by Robyn. How many other events had she not seen? How many more ways could she die?

  Pegasus unlocked the car and opened the door for her. Like a zombie, she sat down. It took her longer than she’d care to admit to notice that they weren’t moving. Sarah looked up to find Pegasus staring at her expectantly. Satisfied that she’d snapped out of it, he leaned over to pull her seatbelt.

  He lingered close even after she heard it click into place, a smile spreading slowly to the thinning blue band of his eyes. “Tell me more about the party and how you made out with another version of me, but not me.”

  Sarah tried to school her expression. “How’s that important?”

  Pegasus did not move away. “It is to me.”

  Sarah met his gaze, but all she saw was mischief. Was he trying to distract her?

  “Well, you were being annoying that day,” she said defensively. “And I thought I was dreaming.”

  His smile spread even further. “Oh, so you’d been dreaming of me?”

  Sarah gave him a dirty look. “Not like that!”

  “You’re not dreaming now,” he whispered.

  “You always say that.” She grabbed his collar, pulling him closer for a kiss.

  Maybe the problem was he was always right.