CHAPTER 17

Alex lay on her bed in her old room in her parents’ house, shaking uncontrollably. The adrenaline that had flooded her through the battle with the varcolacs had drained away, and now the terror threatened to overwhelm her. She had come so close to death. And she wasn’t safe now. Far from it. The varcolac was so alien, so implacable, and she knew she hadn’t killed it. What if it appeared, right now, in her room? She didn’t think she would have the strength even to rise from her bed.

The way it possessed human bodies like that, killing them and using them like macabre puppets, was the stuff of nightmares. A familiar friend, an ally and a source of safety, turned suddenly evil. Like a child looking up at her father’s face in a crowded room, only to discover that it wasn’t her father at all.

Downstairs, Sandra talked with their mother and Claire, providing encouragement and comfort. Sandra was good at that. Alex never had been. She would find her own way to help.

They couldn’t just stay here and wait for the next attack. They had to find a way to go on the offensive. The varcolac was so powerful, with abilities so far beyond theirs, that it would eventually kill them if it kept trying. And then what? Would it stop with them, or would it go on killing? If they couldn’t stop it, would anyone? What if it wanted to remove all potential for intelligent competition? She didn’t think there was a limit to how many it could kill. They had to find a weakness, a way they could actually defeat it instead of just barely staying alive.

Ryan was brilliant, but unpredictable. She wasn’t sure she could trust him anymore. He claimed not to be able to destroy the wormhole or keep the varcolac contained there, but from the way he talked, she wasn’t even sure he wanted to. He seemed to admire it. They needed help from someone better than that, someone who had defeated it before. They needed her father.

The thought drove a swell of tears that felt like it started in her stomach and forced its way out through her mouth and eyes. She cried helplessly for a while. The lives of her family, maybe even the whole world, were depending on her, and she didn’t have a clue how to do it. Every physicist who had studied the varcolac the first time was dead. Her father, his colleague Brian Vanderhall . . . and one more.

There had been another person involved, Vanderhall’s partner in science and in crime. And she was still alive.

When Sandra came upstairs, she found her sister lying on her old bed, staring at the ceiling. Sandra collapsed on the other bed and let out a breath. It felt surreal to be lying there together, in their old room, as if it was fifteen years earlier and they still lived there, sleeping in the same room and sharing each other’s clothes.

They lay there in silence for a long while, alone with their thoughts. Finally, Sandra said, “Why are we still alive?”

“What do you mean?” Alex asked.

“That thing destroyed the entire baseball stadium. If it can do that, why didn’t it just snap its fingers and kill the lot of us? Or destroy the whole funeral parlor?”

Alex considered this. “It’s not all-powerful,” she said. “We don’t know what it’s capable of, so we tend to treat it like it’s omnipotent. We think it must have been easy for it to destroy the stadium, but it might not have been. It may have required a lot of energy that wasn’t easy to collect, or else it took advantage of a particular opportunity that it can’t always duplicate. We don’t know its limitations, but it must have them. The important thing is that we find out what they are.”

Sandra nodded, but it was all just speculation. How could they ever know the varcolac’s limitations? Finally, she voiced the issue that was troubling her the most. “I died back there,” she said. “A copy of me. When the varcolac attacked, I tried to teleport, and I split into two. Part of me got away. But it killed the other one.”

“I saw that,” Alex said. “But it was the copy that died. Not you.”

“The copy is me,” Sandra said. “She didn’t live very long, but she was me. She and I could just as easily have been swapped, and it would be her lying here with you, and me lying dead on the floor.”

“You can’t think that way,” Alex said. “The copy was someone else, just like I’m someone else. Just be glad you’re not the one who’s dead.”

Sandra frowned. The copy’s body had disappeared shortly after it died, but she couldn’t dismiss it so easily. She wanted to forget it had ever existed, but the memory of it haunted her. That version of her had tried in vain to teleport, fumbling with the interface, and had died where she stood, feeling the varcolac’s energy rush into her and stop her heart. Had she felt pain? Did she know she was dying? Did she realize that another version of herself had survived? If so, it would be scant comfort. Maybe Alex was right, and that other person didn’t matter, but it didn’t seem that way to Sandra.

“Is that how you feel about me?” Sandra asked quietly.

Alex had opened her bedside table and was rummaging through its contents: magazines and gaudy teenage jewelry and half-finished crafts. “What?”

“If I died, would you dismiss me as easily? Just a copy of yourself gone bad?”

Alex looked up. “Of course not. Sandra, you have a life separate from me. You’re a person in your own right. That copy was never its own person, not really. Forget about it.”

A person in her own right. There was an achievement. “Nice,” Sandra said.

“What are you upset about?”

“Nothing.”

“No,” Alex said. “You’re angry, and I want to know why.”

“Why? You think I should be dancing with joy that you deign to consider me a real person?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Does it even occur to you that I may have some claim to be Alessandra Kelley? That just because you’re the one who followed in Dad’s footsteps doesn’t make me the unnatural clone?”

The words rang in the small room as the two sisters stared at each other. “All the time,” Alex said.

The silence stretched.

“Well, then, what now?” Sandra said. “If we’re just supposed to move on with our lives, what do we do? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your little duplication trick didn’t actually kill the varcolac. Which means it’ll be back.”

Alex waited a moment before answering, but then she seemed to shake herself. “The first thing we need to do is copy the Higgs projector interface over to Mom and Claire.”

“Why? You expect them to fight?”

“No. But the varcolac possessed three people in the funeral home, all of whom are now dead. If its goal is to kill you and me, then why didn’t it just possess us?”

“Because the Higgs projector package protects us?” Sandra asked.

“That’s what I think. Regardless, I want them to have it, and I want them to know how to use it.”

“Shouldn’t we tell Ryan what happened?”

Alex’s expression soured. “I don’t know how far we can trust him.”

“I didn’t trust him in the first place,” Sandra said. “What has he done recently?”

“He knew the varcolac was going to attack,” Alex said. “He called and warned me.”

“He warned you?”

“Yeah, like five seconds before it showed up and started killing people. He knew it was there, and he knew what it was doing, but he didn’t come and help. He didn’t fight with us.”

“Maybe he was trying to stop it from where he was, in the lab,” Sandra said.

“Or maybe he was helping it.”

“What? Why would he do that?”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t know. But you should have heard him. He was talking really weird. All about how amazing and smart the varcolac is. Like he admired it.”

“But Ryan’s the one who knows the most about it,” Sandra objected. “He’s the only one who knows how to contain it. We have to work with him.”

“Maybe,” Alex said. She looked pensive.

“What do you mean? Who else is there?”

“What we need is another physicist. Someone with experience building a Higgs projector. Someone who understands splitting and has experience with trying to make changes backward in time. Someone who might be able to understand the varcolac and what it wants.”

Sandra shook her head. “There’s no such person. Dad is gone. He’s not coming back.”

“Not Dad. Someone like him.”

“You mean Ryan’s lab assistant? Nicole something?”

“No way. I’m not sure how much she knows, but regardless, I don’t think she’ll be inclined to help us.”

“Then who? Nobody besides Dad and Ryan has any experience with . . . oh.” It hit her. “You mean Jean Massey.”

Alex nodded slowly.

“But Jean’s in prison. A lifetime sentence for murdering her colleague and trying to murder her own baby girl.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t visit her,” Alex said.

Sandra considered that. Jean Massey was, to a large extent, the reason that she and Alex were different people and her father was now dead. It had been Brian Vanderhall who had first discovered the Higgs projector, and through it, the varcolac, but Jean had been his partner. According to her, it had been mostly his work that had accomplished it. She had killed him, however, sparking a sequence of events that resulted in their father being arrested and tried for the murder, while Sandra and Claire and Sean and their mother were kidnapped and nearly killed by the varcolac.

If not for Jean, their father would still be alive. If not for Jean, however, Alessandra would never have split, and either Sandra or Alex would never have existed. Though she supposed neither of them would have existed, when it came down to it. Alessandra would have, but she would have never heard of a varcolac, and her life would have been very different. Sandra sighed. Did other people have so much trouble defining their own selves? She couldn’t even say with certainty that she was the same person she had been five minutes ago. Who exactly was Sandra Kelley?

“I guess it doesn’t hurt to talk,” she said. “But Alex, you can’t go. Every policeman and federal agent in the state is looking for you.”

“But they’re not looking for you. I’ll take your ID and call myself Sandra.”

Sandra frowned. “It’ll raise red flags. They’ll want to know why I was there.”

“So? Is it a crime to visit someone in prison?”

“They think you and Dad were part of a conspiracy. They’ll think I’m part of it, too.”

Alex raised her hands and then let them drop. “I don’t believe this. You’re still trying to preserve your reputation here? What part of ‘a creature from another universe is trying to kill us’ are you not understanding here?”

Sandra felt a flush rise to her cheeks. She wasn’t being selfish; she was trying to be practical. “Fine,” she said. “Do what you want.”

“Excellent,” Alex said. “I’ll go first thing tomorrow.”

Ryan hated his body. He was tired, his eyes hurt from studying log files and pattern data, and he felt sick from all the Coke and chips he had consumed. The physical body was so weak and needy, a hindrance to the true life of the mind. It had to be fed, and it had to be rested—several hours out of every day, wasted—and it had to be coddled with nutrients and vitamins and exercise to keep it in working order. It was an obstacle. Worse, it would someday betray him completely, snuffing out the bright candle of his true self. It was a failing of the body, not of the consciousness. He envied the varcolac’s unencumbered existence. If the technology had existed to upload his mind into a computer, Ryan would have done it in an instant.

He wondered if the varcolac had ever had a physical body. He still wasn’t clear if there was a race of varcolacs, or just a single intelligence. Had it been born out of the complexity of the particle interactions of the universe? Or had there once been a physical race of creatures, living their sad, short little lives and then dying, their consciousnesses dragged screaming into the void? What if one of these creatures, a scientist and inventor, had discovered a way to imprint his consciousness on the fabric of the universe? That might have been millions, even billions of years ago. And now it was here, at the edge of his world, trying to make contact. What if the varcolac knew the secret to doing this and could teach Ryan? What if he could project his mind onto the universe and live forever?

Ryan brought up the module that controlled the energy pattern keeping the varcolac contained beyond the wormhole. It felt somehow wrong to keep such an amazing creature confined. There was so much he could learn from it, if he could only communicate with it. In fact, as Alex had shown him, there was so much he already had learned from it. So many of the Higgs projector applications—teleportation, invisibility—had been made possible through the equations the varcolac had solved for him.

Ryan loaded a simple pattern on his tablet, one of the earliest he had used to shape the wormhole when he had first created the baby universe. If he replaced one of the incredibly complex patterns he had been forced to devise with this simple one, the varcolac would escape in a moment. Just a push of a button, and it would be done. The varcolac would be out, free to do as it pleased. It apparently wanted the Kelley family destroyed, but that didn’t mean it would destroy him. Ryan was a kindred mind, practically a varcolac himself in spirit.

It was going to escape anyway. It was inevitable. It had sent the singlet back in time from the future to cause the attack on the funeral parlor. It must, therefore, at some time in the near future, be free to act outside the wormhole. And if the varcolac was going to escape anyway, wouldn’t it be better for Ryan to let it loose on his own terms? He could establish himself as an ally, rather than an enemy.

But he wasn’t going to do it. It was foolish, an insane choice that couldn’t be taken back again. The varcolac might communicate with him, but it might just as soon kill him the moment it was out. Ryan sat with the pattern on his tablet, however, unable to set it aside, as the minutes ticked by toward evening. It was like looking over the edge of a cliff and thinking about jumping. Just imagining how easy it would be to simply vault over the railing. He had no intention of setting the varcolac free. But his hand hovered over the controls anyway, flirting with the idea. Of course, he wouldn’t do it. He drew his hand away.

Or at least, he tried. He intended to pull it away. But there was his hand, touching the button, pressing it. Releasing the varcolac into the world.

He stood frozen with his finger still on the button, staring at his hand like it belonged to someone else. He couldn’t believe what he had just done. He wanted to go check the logs, to see if the complex patterns of equations had really been replaced by the simple one, but he was finding it hard to move.

He hadn’t meant to just let it out. It was stupid. Suicidal. His childish dream that he was a superhuman seemed insane now. He was a human being, the same as everyone else, only with an intelligence that had isolated him from others and stunted his social development. Was that so hard to accept? It had been true of many scientists and thinkers before him. Maybe his problem was worse than simple social awkwardness; maybe he was going insane. Or maybe . . .

Could the varcolac have influenced his mind? It had been manipulating him all along, using the solutions to the equations he had designed to get him to do its bidding. What if his immersion in its technology, or just his proximity to the wormhole, had given it access to his brain? Why else would he have done such a cataclysmically stupid thing?

Finally, by inches, Ryan forced himself to move. He brought up the logs and saw what he already knew to be true. The patterns were broken. The equations compromised. There was nothing stopping the free quantum flow of particles from one universe into the next.

It wasn’t too late, though. He could fix this. In the warehouse, during the demo, he’d been able to stuff the genie back in the bottle by introducing a new equation to control the shape of the wormhole. The energies that gave it life and power in their universe came from the baby universe; if he reblocked that path, the varcolac would be recaptured. His fingers flew over the touch screen, fueled by adrenaline.

It didn’t take long. He already had several equations saved off that he had worked out previously. Each was deviously complex, patterns that would require years of effort by high-level mathematicians to solve, if they could solve them at all. He chose one of these, a tricky piece of work based on a generalized form of the Riemann zeta function. He loaded it into the software that regulated the wormhole and initiated the procedure. In his photoionization display, the laser-light arcs shifted and reformed, representing the invisible quantum reality. The pattern held.

Ryan took a deep breath and let it out. Nothing was going to get through that barrier for quite some time. He had done a foolish thing, an insane thing, but no harm had been done. No varcolac had appeared, and no one had been killed. No one would ever know.

His smile faded as the pattern unraveled in front of him.