CHAPTER 16

Alex hated funeral parlors. All the furniture and decorations were unreal, larger than life, like a magazine photo instead of a real place. The flowers were too bright. The tables and divans along the walls were so polished they looked like plastic. The staff, too, seemed fake, sympathy rolling automatically off their tongues in practiced, meaningless phrases. Even the air seemed dreamlike, free of dust and speared with artful beams of sunlight.

Alex wasn’t technically there at all—she was watching through Sandra’s viewfeed—but her brain couldn’t tell the difference. If she weren’t so accustomed to it, it would have been disconcerting to be trapped in someone else’s point of view, unable to change the angle with a flick of her eyes. But Alex had been watching viewfeeds since elementary school, and her eyes tracked with Sandra’s by habit, moving so quickly that it gave her brain the impression that she was the one in control.

She was, in reality, sitting in Sandra’s apartment, staying away from the windows. Teleportation meant she could come and go secretly, and she would be able to escape quickly if anyone showed up at the door, but she still didn’t want to be seen. Besides Sandra’s place, she’d been spending a lot of time in the woods at Ridley Creek State Park, a few miles away from her parents’ house, staying off the main paths and using the invisibility module to stay out of sight. Being invisible was a liability in any more public place, since people would try to walk through her, close doors in her face, or even drive their cars right at her. Which was why Alex wasn’t at the funeral right now—it would be too crowded. The chance of her accidentally being discovered was too great. Besides, she didn’t want to be there.

Alex could disconnect from the funeral feed at any time, but she knew she wouldn’t. It was hard to bear now, but if she didn’t at least watch her own father’s funeral, the loss of it would haunt her forever. It made her feel trapped. Maybe she should have gone after all, stayed invisible and tried to keep to empty corners. If she had been there in person, she could have decided on her own where to look, where to sit, how to respond, instead of being caught in Sandra’s viewpoint.

Sandra stood in a line with their mother and Claire, greeting the guests, accepting their platitudes with good grace. Their mother shook hands and endured kisses with stiff resignation, her polite expression clearly strained. Claire, on the other hand, greeted each guest with the same poise and practiced gravity as the funeral director, her shining blond hair flowing over the shoulders of her expensive black dress.

The two sisters seemed to fit together: Claire and Alessandra, one blond and the other dark. Watching through Sandra’s eyes, Alex felt like an outsider. The truth was, she had always thought of Sandra as the real sister, the original Alessandra. She, Alex, was the interloper, the girl who had suddenly appeared when their father was accused of murder. She was the one who had hidden away with her father, had fought the varcolac, and had been forever changed by the experience. When Sandra—the real Alessandra—returned, Alex had felt like a stranger in her own home. A freak of nature. A quantum mistake.

On second thought, maybe it was better that she wasn’t there at the funeral in person. She might have snatched a too-perfect vase from a too-perfect table and smashed it on the too-perfect floor.

Two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, came through the line, friends of Sandra. Sandra greeted them with hugs and called them Nathan and Danielle. Their sympathy seemed sincere. Alex supposed police officers grew used to funerals and knew how to talk and act. Another woman, also in uniform, hung back and didn’t go through the line. Sandra kept glancing at her nervously.

“Who’s the woman in the back?” Alex asked.

“Detective Messinger,” Sandra said under her breath, after accepting yet another well-meaning hug by a distant relative. Their mother’s family was large and mostly lived in the area, though their father had never gotten on very well with them.

“Is she the one who’s been interrogating you?”

“Yes. I think she half-believes me about the varcolac, but she could just be trying to gain my confidence.”

Alex suspected there were probably other officers and agents there in normal clothes, blending into the crowd. Watching to see if she would make an appearance, perhaps. Alex had no experience on the street with identifying cops, and there were enough of her parents’ friends she didn’t recognize that she couldn’t be certain.

The greeting line seemed endless. Alex didn’t know how her mother and Sandra could stand it. Finally, everyone filed into the small chapel.

While the organ was playing something somber, a ping notified Alex of an incoming call. She ignored it at first, but it kept pinging over and over, evidence that whoever it was was calling over and over. She checked and saw that it was Ryan Oronzi. She rolled her eyes and answered it.

“Ever hear of just leaving a message?” she said.

“Alex? This is Ryan.”

“I know who it is. There’s this new invention—you might have heard of it. Instead of calling over and over, you can just send me a message, and I don’t have to interrupt my father’s funeral to answer you.”

“Listen to me. The varcolac . . . wait. Did you say funeral?”

“Yes. My dad’s funeral is going on as we speak.”

“At the Chelsey Funeral Home?”

“Yes.”

“In Media?”

“Yes! Did you just call to check the address? If you were planning to go, you’re a bit late.”

The organ music stopped, and the minister walked toward the front. His hair was long and gray, drawn back into a leather tie. He wore ecclesiastical black with a traditional white collar.

“They have to leave,” Ryan said. He sounded agitated.

“What are you talking about?”

“I found some data. It points to that funeral home. The varcolac is going to destroy it.”

“What? I thought you said the varcolac was contained!”

“It is contained. It sends particles back in time, remember? Sometime in the future, it’s going to break out and send a Higgs singlet back in time to this moment. Can you imagine the precision and understanding it takes to create the effect you want through the chain reaction of a single particle? It’s incredible.”

“I’m not interested in how incredible it is! Is there anything we can do?”

“We can . . . well. Never mind.”

“What?”

“There’s less than a minute left. Not much we can do, at this point.”

At the funeral, the minister turned to face the assembled guests. He had no eyes. Where his eyes should have been was just blank, featureless skin.

Alex leaped to her feet. “Sandra!” she shouted, just before her viewfeed went black.

She flicked the viewfeed aside, revealing her true surroundings: the front room of Sandra’s two-room apartment. She frantically tried to reconnect to Sandra’s vision, but she couldn’t. The varcolac’s presence must be interfering with the signal. The alternative—that the varcolac had already destroyed Sandra and her system with it—didn’t bear thinking. Alex had to get to that funeral home, and she needed to do it now.

She brought up the last image she had received from Sandra, the horrible, eyeless face of the minister staring out at the guests. She knew Sandra’s precise location as of seconds before, but she might have moved by now. If she teleported there, she might appear right in the middle of someone else’s body. Or she might arrive just as the building exploded.

It didn’t matter. Her sister was in danger. She had to do it, and she had to do it now.

Sandra stared into the eyeless face of the varcolac, at first too startled to react. It was happening again. She would be captured or killed, and all these people with her. She thought of her mother losing another loved one, or else dying herself. She was not going to let that happen.

The varcolac swiveled its head toward her, seeming to stare at her despite its lack of eyes. It opened the minister’s mouth and groaned.

It was an awful sound. It was as if someone had taken the mouth and throat of a corpse and played air through it with a bellows. It was the most terrifying sound Sandra had ever heard. The funeral director approached the minister, solicitous as always, but clearly disturbed by the varcolac’s face. “Sir, is everything all right? Do you need help? Should we call 911?”

The varcolac didn’t even look at him. It raised a hand, and the director cried out and clutched at his chest. He collapsed to the floor, shuddered once, and then lay still, his eyes staring out at nothing. The room erupted then, guests scrambling over one another and trying to push out the doors. Sandra stood, but she didn’t run. She was a police officer, sworn to protect the people of Pennsylvania. Besides, it couldn’t be a coincidence that it had shown up here, of all places. It had come for her.

She didn’t have her firearm—she was suspended, and besides, it hadn’t seemed appropriate for a funeral. She didn’t think it would do much good against the varcolac anyway. She had seen how Alex had fought in her demo, and knew she had some of those same capabilities available through the software Alex had copied for her, but by the time she figured any of them out, she could be dead.

Her mother still sat in her seat, staring frozen up at the varcolac. Claire was tugging at her arm, looking panicked. “Mom, you need to leave,” Sandra said. “Leave now.”

Suddenly Alex was there next to her. “Keep moving!” Alex said. “Don’t stay in one place.” She disappeared and reappeared across the room.

The varcolac advanced and raised its hand toward Sandra. No time. Sandra chose a spot on the other side of it and teleported. To her, it seemed as though the room had suddenly spun around. Across the room, where she had just been standing, a young woman that looked just like her clutched at her chest and fell to the floor.

“Alex!” Sandra screamed. But no, it wasn’t Alex. The woman was wearing the dark dress that she herself was wearing, and her hair was put up in the same style. The woman on the floor was her.

Disoriented, Sandra looked around and saw Alex, still very much alive. Then who had just died?

Suddenly, Sandra understood. The varcolac was a quantum creature, a probabilistic being. Like a quantum particle, it acted at more than one time and place at once, as part of a probability waveform. It had attacked her both before and after she teleported, and so just like her father, she had split. One version of her had teleported and appeared here. The other version had died.

Sandra flushed with horror and rage. She wanted to tear the varcolac to pieces, but she didn’t know what to do. How could such a creature even be harmed? It could kill every person here with a gesture.

For that matter, why was it even here? If it had the power to destroy a baseball stadium, why didn’t it just destroy the whole building, or the whole block? Why weren’t they already dead?

Nathan and Danielle, both in uniform, advanced on the varcolac, spreading out and drawing their sidearms. “Police!” Danielle shouted. “Hands on your head!”

“No!” Sandra yelled. “Get out of here! It’ll kill you!”

They either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. Danielle raised her weapon and fired three shots at the varcolac, center mass. It blurred, and the bullets passed through it, punching holes in the paneling at the back of the room. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space.

The varcolac raised its hand toward Danielle, but suddenly Alex was there, standing between them. There was a brilliant flash of light. Alex fell back a step, but stayed on her feet. She pointed at the wall, and the varcolac flew toward it as if gravity had suddenly been turned on its side. The minister’s body hit the wall with an audible crunch. It fell to the floor, and for a moment, Sandra thought the fight was over, but the minister stood again. One of its arms was twisted at an angle, and it dragged one leg behind it, but it came at them, eyeless and terrifying.

Then Sandra saw something that took her breath away. She called her sister’s name and pointed. Behind Alex, Nathan and Danielle’s faces were also covered with blank skin where their eyes had been just a moment ago. All three varcolacs advanced, surrounding them.

Ryan could see what was happening in the funeral parlor through Alex’s viewfeed, but there was nothing he could do about it, not directly. If he teleported there, he might be killed. Then who would devise the next equation to trap the varcolac? He was like a general, too valuable to be risked on the front line. He wanted them to survive, but when it came down to it, his life was worth more than theirs.

The crazy thing was, as far as he could tell, the varcolac was still trapped in the wormhole. The creatures attacking Sandra and Alex at that moment had somehow been manufactured by the varcolac in the future, through the Higgs sequence it had sent back in time. Or that it would send back in time. Ryan had underestimated the complexity of the sequence of particle interactions the varcolac could initiate with a Higgs singlet. He had imagined it doing the equivalent of sending a billiard ball back in time with exactly the direction and spin to impact each of the other balls and win the game—a difficult enough concept. Instead, the particle it had sent back in time had initiated a sequence that had created an instance of the varcolac itself, an extension of its own intelligence and physical presence.

Ryan was in awe. This creature had such mastery over time and space that it could recreate the pattern of its own existence with the chain reaction of a single, precisely aimed particle. Which meant that it understood its own configuration down to every quark and gluon. It could replicate some portion of itself, and these replications were mere extensions of its mind. Could it be that it was a species of one, communicating itself across the universes and the ages? Its awareness and experience must be vast.

But it wasn’t invincible. It was no god, free to rewrite the laws of nature as it saw fit. It was confined by the wormhole, at least to some extent. It had been banished from the world when its source of power was removed. There was still some chance that they would be able to defeat it.

On the other hand, they couldn’t hold it back forever. They had to come to terms with the fact that varcolac would, eventually, win. If it was sending particles back in time from some later date, that meant it was going to escape from the wormhole—something that had been seeming increasingly inevitable anyway. It occurred to Ryan that perhaps, instead of fighting it, he should be helping it. If there was no way to win, wouldn’t it be better to join the winning side?

But no, that was ridiculous. He didn’t even know what the varcolac wanted. He couldn’t trust it to reward him for helping it, if it even noticed that he had. He had to keep it contained as long as possible. In the time that remained, he would study it, collecting as much data as possible about how it worked and what it could and couldn’t do. That way, if there was some way to defeat it, he would find it. And if not, he would at least know better what he was dealing with.

Sandra shouted her friends’ names, but it was no use. They were varcolacs now, or at least its puppets. Danielle pointed her gun at Alex and fired. Alex blurred, just like the varcolac had, but Nathan disappeared and reappeared behind Alex, trapping her between them. Alex blurred again just as he fired.

Was it three varcolacs? Or was the same creature inhabiting all three bodies? It hardly mattered. The varcolacs advanced on Alex from all sides. Two of Sandra’s friends were going to kill her sister, or else her sister was going to kill them. Though she supposed her friends were probably already dead.

The varcolacs raised their hands, firing shot after shot of whatever invisible energy they used to stop people’s hearts. Alex blocked with some kind of energy field of her own, producing more of those blinding bursts of light. “Sandra!” she shouted. “Get Mom out of here!”

Their mother still crouched next to Sandra’s body, watching the fight with an expression of terror and rage. Claire was there, holding her back. Whether their mother was foolhardy enough to try to attack the varcolacs, Sandra didn’t know, but she might risk anything if her children were in danger. Sandra teleported to her and wrapped her arms around her. She didn’t know for sure that this would work, but so far the software governing the teleportation seemed to be able to account for her clothing and anything she was carrying. Sure enough, the room around them disappeared and was replaced by Sandra’s old bedroom, in her parents’ house.

“I’ll be back soon,” Sandra said. Her mother started to protest, but Sandra teleported away without listening. She reappeared in the funeral parlor and grabbed Claire, teleporting her away, too. It was the best she could do for them. When she returned again, Alex was still fighting hard, a sheen of sweat glinting from her forehead. Sandra spotted a familiar person hiding behind a table, cowering with her head in her hands.

“Detective Messinger?” Sandra said.

Messinger looked up. Her eyes were wild. “Did you see it?” she said. “Did you see what it did to those people?”

“Stay down,” Sandra said.

“I’m a cop,” Messinger said. “But I couldn’t . . . how can anyone fight such a thing?”

Sandra didn’t answer. She was watching Alex, who was now sending folding chairs flying at the varcolacs. The varcolacs flickered and teleported around the room, avoiding the attack. Alex was amazing, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. And how could they win against a creature that could simply find more bodies to inhabit and press into service?

Sandra felt something cold and hard being pressed into her hand. She looked down. Messinger was holding out a Glock 19, her service weapon. Sandra snatched it up. She teleported and reappeared next to Alex, immediately firing at the nearest varcolac. The varcolac blurred to avoid it.

“How do you block their attacks?” Sandra shouted.

“Turn your automated system on!” Alex shouted back, just before teleporting again to a spot behind one of the varcolacs.

Sandra quickly paged through the menu options on her eyejack system. There it was—Automated Defense. It made sense. A human couldn’t react fast enough to choose the “diffract” function after a bullet was fired; they needed software to detect the attack and react to it. She toggled the option on, just in time. A varcolac appeared in front of her and a flash of light sparked through the air as the system blocked its attack.

“We have to get out of here,” Sandra shouted. “They’ll just keep coming.”

“It’ll find us, wherever we go,” Alex said.

“Then what do we do?”

Alex didn’t answer. She clutched at her chest, and fell to her knees, her face pulled back in a rictus of pain.

“No!” Sandra shouted. But then she saw that there was another Alex standing next to her, and another, and another, until there were at least a dozen.

“Surround them,” one of the Alexes said. “Grab hold of them.”

The Alexes teleported into positions surrounding each of the varcolacs—Nathan, Danielle, and the minister—and wrapped their arms around them. Bright light flashed and sparked, like lightning arcing through the spaces between their bodies. Sandra understood what she was doing—using the shield as a weapon, disrupting whatever energy pattern allowed the varcolacs to inhabit and control these material forms. It worked, after a fashion. The two officers and the minister writhed in the flashes and fell to the ground. All three of them now had eyes again. They looked like their original selves. They were also dead.

Sandra rushed to Danielle’s body, touching her, listening for her breath or some indication that she might still be alive. She was warm, flushed even, but had no pulse.

“We need to leave,” one of the Alexes said.

Sandra looked up at her, furious. “These were my friends!”

“I didn’t kill them,” Alex said.

“They’re still dead! Don’t you even care?”

“I care about keeping you alive. I care about letting Mom know we’re okay.”

“You call this okay?” Sandra waved her hand, indicating the multiple Alexes. But there were fewer of them now, only five or six. As she watched, another Alex disappeared.

“I’m converging again,” Alex said. “It doesn’t last long.”

“You’ve done this before?” But even as she said it, Sandra knew Alex had done it before. She could remember the lab at Lockheed Martin when they had first gotten that particular module to work, the thrill of discovery, the promise of a bright future for their department. It was still under development, and so hadn’t been included in the demo. But Sandra hadn’t been there. Those were Alex’s memories she was seeing.

Sandra felt the blood rush to her face. Alex had been a fool to experiment with such things, knowing what she knew. Didn’t she know what was at stake? Just because something could be done didn’t mean it should be.

But no. She wasn’t a fool. That’s what Sandra didn’t understand about science. It wasn’t an option to leave a discovery hidden, like a treasure buried in sand. The truth was out there. You couldn’t know that things like teleportation were possible and do nothing about it. If you did nothing, you had no power—not over other people who didn’t have the same moral standards, and not over varcolacs who could appear without warning out of nowhere. It was much better to have the power and knowledge and decide what to do with it than to wring your hands and hope nobody else would discover what was possible.

For a brief moment, Sandra could see the room—and in fact, the world—through Alex’s eyes.

“No!” Sandra yelled the word out loud and jumped to her feet. She was Sandra, Sandra, not Alex. Those were not her memories, and they were not her thoughts.

Alex’s probability wave had collapsed, and all the other versions of herself had converged back into the whole. Sandra took a step back, away from her sister. She had almost converged with Alex as well. In truth, she was like those others, wasn’t she? Simply a probability split that had stayed unresolved a lot longer than it should. But she didn’t feel disposable. She didn’t want to cease to exist as a separate individual.

Sandra clenched her teeth. “Never do that again,” she said.

Alex looked bewildered. “Do what? Save both of our lives?”

“That splitting thing. It’s unnatural. You’ll only make it worse.”

“If you had a better idea for fighting off three varcolacs, you should have mentioned it a little earlier.” Alex gave a small laugh. “In fact, if splitting wasn’t possible, you wouldn’t even be here.”

There it was. Sandra felt tears rising and fought them back down. Alex was staking her claim as the real Alessandra, the true daughter. She had been the heroine, the sister everyone loved, certainly the one her father had loved best. Sandra was nothing more than an inconvenient copy, not quite as good as the original.

“You might as well just assimilate me now and get it over with,” Sandra said. “You could do it if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“I didn’t mean that. We wouldn’t either of us be here, if splitting weren’t possible. I wasn’t trying to say . . . and no, I couldn’t do it. And I wouldn’t want to.” Alex stepped forward and took Sandra’s hands. Sandra flinched, but her sister didn’t let go. “We’re different people,” Alex said. “We always will be.”

“And if getting rid of this varcolac for good means that we converge to a single person again?”

“It won’t come to that,” Alex said.

Sandra traced her eyes over Alex’s familiar features: the same height, the same hair, the same build, the same face. People without a twin didn’t know what it was like, to look across the room and see yourself looking back. To have a constant, living example of what you might have been if your choices had been different. Just by being alive, Alex was a subtle judgment of who Sandra was. Even real twins didn’t know that experience like she did, when the person across the room really was her. No matter where she went, no matter how far from Alex she ran, her entire life would always be defined in some way by the inescapable presence of her sister. Her other self.