Reg met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I keep visualizing them opening that case in some Johnson County field.” He shook his head. “That’s not what civilized people do.”
“And yet they’re so much like us,” Rosa said softly.
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “Like, exactly like us.”
“They’ll know their trainees are gone,” Reg said, “and they’ll guess we went to them for help. It’s a logical move.”
“I don’t think anybody looks at their own face and turns away,” Rosa said.
Eddie snorted softly beside her. He had a point—he’d punched his own face. As far as Rosa knew, the only other person who had ever pulled that off was Eddie2.
“Hey,” Trevor said. “What did you guys think about the eyeliner on that guy? I mean, was it weird?”
Rosa shrugged. “I don’t usually like makeup on guys, but I think it worked. His haircut helped.”
“I wonder if I could pull that look off,” Trevor said.
She stared at him in the rearview mirror. “Trev—that was you. I mean, if he can …” She gave up.
“Sorry to turn the conversation from your eyeliner,” Reg said, “to our survival.”
Trevor shrugged. “They’re probably sending someone to all our homes. They thought Oolitic was a good bet, and I’m guessing they sent the other team to Los Alamos,” he said, looking at Rosa. “Your dad has connections. He could have helped us.”
“He would have,” she said. She was sure of it.
Reg squeezed her headrest like it was one of those balls to calm your nerves. “They’ll come up empty. Then they’ll start trying to guess our plan.”
“Good luck with that,” Eddie said. He still wasn’t looking at anybody.
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “Maybe we should ask them to let us know once they’ve figured it out. I’m a little fuzzy on the whole going-back thing,” Trevor said. “Do we have, say, a plan?”
“I think there’s only one thing we can do,” Reg said. “We have to destroy their ability to access our world.”
“In case they find the bacteria?” Trevor said.
“Yeah. And because I don’t trust Sensenbrenner. If he’d do this, what else would he do?”
“That means wrecking their XD craft, right?” Rosa said. She caught his eye in the mirror. “I hear you have some experience with that.”
“Damn it, Reginald! You should not have told them that.”
“Could they just make more bacteria?” Trevor said.
“Wouldn’t matter if they can’t get it to our world,” Reg said. “We’re buying time here. And anyway, they can’t just build another ship. The other Reg wouldn’t tell me much about that coating, but he did say they have to grow it in a lab. All in one piece. Takes years.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. He stared down the road between the cornfields. A railroad track ran beside them, twin paths stretching before them, mile after mile, across this alien and familiar landscape.
“If we wreck the egg, we’ll be stuck here,” Trevor said.
Rosa’s stomach twisted. How far was she from home? Could it even be calculated?
They drove in silence. When Rosa thought enough miles had rolled under the tires she said, “I liked your grandma.”
Eddie glanced at her, then nodded and looked away. She thought he wasn’t going to respond, but finally he said, “Almost everything is empty space—from the atom to the universe. Everything is empty.” She didn’t know what to say to that. “The laws of physics demand separation. Everything is pulled apart.”
“Oh, baloney,” Rosa said, before she thought about it. “The laws of physics say that we can’t observe an electron because all our probes affect the observation. Observing an experiment changes the outcome. They’ve proven that, Eddie.”
“I know,” he said. “So what?”
“So our interactions matter. They change things. They actually change the universe.”
“That’s what life is,” Reg said softly. “Empty space and how we fill it.”
Rosa twisted and looked at him, because that was kind of sensitive for Reg. He looked up from under his lids and swirled his finger, and she turned back to the road.
“There’s no empty space around Rosa,” Trevor said, “as much luggage as she carries. You’re kind of a hoarder,” he said to her.
“That’s true,” she said. “I fill my empty spaces with stuff.”
“What do you fill your empty spaces with?” she asked.
He grinned at her in the mirror. “Antibiotics.”
“Virtue and erudition for me,” Reg said. She took a swipe at him over her shoulder, but he ducked.
“He’s actually full of crap,” Eddie said. He was a little perkier. Getting to insult people seemed to do that for him.
“You ever think about the fact that you’re from Oolitic?” Reg said.
“Um?”
“Oolitic limestone is full of fossils—tiny shell fragments coated in carbonate. They look like little eggs.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “So?”
“You can see Oolitic as the past, or the future—as a fossil, or as an egg. You gotta decide which it is—if you’re going to hatch or not.”
“I’m not sure I want to hatch. And ooliths aren’t actually …”
“Don’t screw with my analogy. Hatch, damn you.”
Rosa braked at a four-way stop, empty except for them, and looked both ways. Then she accelerated down the highway, heading straight for Iowa. In the distance, a train blew its whistle, long and lonely.