then you and he can make each other thoroughly miserable while I go and try and salvage something from the wreck of my life. Agreed?”
She nodded brightly. “Sure,” she said. “You won’t regret it, I promise you.”
“You’d be amazed what I can regret if I put my mind to it.
She laughed. He recognised the distinctive timbre. It was the noise a girl makes when she’s laughing at a joke her boyfriend’s just made; she hasn’t actually got the joke, or she doesn’t think it’s particularly funny, but she’s doing the best she can. From Matasuntha, it sounded dangerous, and it occurred to him that if Max was rescued and restored to her loving arms, it wouldn’t be all that long before he started thinking wistfully of the quietly idyllic life he’d led in the cave, being waited on hand and foot by Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, Dozy, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. In fact, if ever a couple truly deserved each other, they did. You’d need a far darker imagination than Theo could lay claim to in order to dream up any punishment more exquisitely suitable.
“First, though,” he said, with an entirely authentic yawn, “I’m going to get some sleep. Please go away, using the door provided.”
She was smiling at him. In any number of parallel universes, many of them only slightly different from this one, he’d have liked that a lot. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell Uncle Bill we’re nearly there, he’ll be thrilled.”
“Oh, and the powder compact.”
“Yes?”
“Leave it on the desk on your way out.”
She paused and looked at him, and he couldn’t quite read what her face was saying. “I was going to see if I could download—”
“Leave it,” he said. “On the desk.”
“OK.” There was a slight click as she put it down. “I just thought, I could study it for a bit while you’re resting. One less thing for you to do.”
“That’s very sweet of you, but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” She hadn’t moved. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“There’s one thing you can do for me.”
“Yes?”
“Go away,” Theo said firmly. “That’d be a major contribution to the success of the project.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
Theo grinned sadly at her. “That’s the trouble with the truth,” he said, “it’s got such appallingly bad manners. Tall rectangular thing over there, hinges on one side, opening and shutting mechanism on the other. Let’s see if you can figure out how to make it work.”
She still didn’t move. “Why are you so keen to get rid of me all of a sudden?”
He broadened the grin into a beautiful smile. “Because I don’t like you,” he said. “Bye.”
She shot him a high-velocity sigh, stalked to the door, dragged it open, walked through it and slammed it behind her. It was a magnificent slam, executed with plenty of wrist and forearm to achieve the maximum terminal momentum, and the aftershock vibrated right through the wall, into the bookshelf over the desk, right down to the bottom shelf, on which she must at some point have placed the YouSpace bottle. It quivered for a moment, walking a millimetre or so towards the edge like an old-fashioned washing machine. Theo only noticed it as it quivered over the point of no return. He dived, his invisible arm extended, grabbing at it as it finally toppled and dropped into empty air. It was a splendid effort, and fell only a couple of centimetres short.
Theo crunched down on to the desk, heard a crack and felt first his elbow and then his head bash against something hard. The impact jarred his bones and rattled his teeth, but he barely noticed. He was totally preoccupied watching the YouSpace bottle tumble once, twice through the air before catching the edge of the desk. There was a snap, like a bone breaking, and suddenly the carpet was littered with little bits of broken glass.
“And another thing.” Matasuntha was standing in the doorway. Whatever the other thing was, it never got mentioned. She was staring at the emerald shrapnel on the floor. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out for quite some time.
“It’s no good,” Theo said for the fifteenth time. “You can’t mend it.”
Uncle Bill looked up at him hopelessly. He had splinters of glass stuck to his fingers with superglue. “It says on the label, sticks anything,” he said.
Theo nodded. “In this reality, yes. But there’s an infinite number of realities where it doesn’t, and they were all in the bottle. By the