Grey

The others don't like me. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's that they don't understand me. Winter, Monk, Nico, the Royal Family--they all stumbled into this life. Winter has his cute little Halloween story, Monk has his bitter drunken rants about whatever godforsaken peat bog he grew up in. King discovered the truth when one of her alternates, distraught upon learning of Courtney Love's suicide, killed herself, and now she's worshipped as the pop god Jenny Rex on half-a-dozen parallels. I know Black and White like me--they sort of have to--but they don't understand. I was born for this. They weren't.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble remembering my name. Maybe that's why I haven't talked to any of them for six months.

Let's get a few things clear, here at the beginning, so maybe this can be a beneficial relationship for both of us. I've forgotten my real name; all I know is that my friends, if that is what they are, call me Grey. Or called me Grey, more accurately. I go by another name, as well, but I don't wish to speak of it now. You are you, whoever you are, reading this years from now, I imagine, after whatever happens to me happens. Maybe Black and White find me and bring me back in, and then we'll all have a good laugh. Maybe I'm captured and killed for what I've done. I'm sure there'll be some laughter then too.

Actually, I'm sure both of these things, and more, will happen. The question is which one I'll remember.

So now you have my name, of a sort, but not what I am. If you, as I suspect, are some average person in some average future who has just stumbled across this book, then I also suspect you would be surprised to learn that there are worlds beyond your own--parallel worlds. I'm sure Winter could explain the physics, if he were here. But there are parallel worlds, and there are a very few people who can move between these worlds. Most of these people, myself included, are employed by an agency whose remit is to patrol the borders between the worlds and to investigate incursions from one parallel into another. Lately our jobs have been getting harder; the borders are not as strong as they once were. Six months ago this agency sent me on a mission, the details of which I was strongly encouraged to forget. I'm afraid that soon I will forget that I was even sent on this mission. And I am afraid to even imagine what I will have become by then.

As my memories of the recent past have deteriorated, I have thought more and more about my childhood, and specifically my father. What I remember about my father is that he looked a lot like the person I now see in the mirror, on the rare occasion I see a mirror. I remember people called him "Grey" too; it must be our family name. He was tall and rich, always dressed in an immaculate suit; I never knew the proper phrase for what he looked like until I came to Winter's world. He looked like a movie star. Errol Flynn, perhaps.

My father taught me a great many things, that I remember. He taught me etiquette, how to function in polite society, and languages--our house was always home to emissaries from far-off lands, all of them close personal friends of my father's. Many of them spoke languages I never heard again until I learned to jump between worlds and became familiar with the tongues of Winter's world. He taught me literature and science, how to fence and how to ride.

Most importantly, he taught me to kill.

He gave me my first gun on my tenth birthday. It was called a Luger, he said, a thing from another time and place. He spent three years teaching me to shoot. The mechanics of aiming and firing came easily, and I was a better shot than even him; but the psychological distancing of myself from the act of killing, which my father called "focus" and which I still, though just barely, am able to call "insanity," came more slowly. But it came nonetheless.

When I turned thirteen my father revealed what I had suspected for some time: that he was able to travel between parallel worlds. He conjured up a spinner, the first I had ever seen, and took me through it. It felt like dying. It felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to feel that way.

We came out of the spinner in a room that looked just like the one we had left. A boy who looked just like me--who, I realized on some intuitive level, was me--ran into the room to investigate the noise. He saw me and froze. My father told me to shoot the boy, and before I could think of a reason not to, I had done it. I could feel two bullets tear through my chest just as they tore through his, but I lived while he lay on the floor dying.

My father gave me a syringe and a small vial and told me to collect some of the blood that was pouring out of the boy's chest. He said this would let me create spinners and jump between worlds on my own. As I bent down next to the boy to collect the blood, the last of the his life passed from his body. As he died, I felt for the second time in less than a minute the sensation of dying. I knew then it was something I wanted to feel again.

I still keep the vial with me, but hidden, so no one will know who I really am. I keep it hidden well. I’m not even sure I know where it is, now.