CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was a relief to get back to the dull routine of school on Monday. Winnie was able to brush off Dora’s questions with a minimum of fuss or hurt feelings, and when she got home, she immersed herself in homework. The reverberations of her unsettling Friday evening still made themselves felt at her center, but she told herself that if she could just keep it all tamped down, eventually it would dissipate—it must.

She tried her best to focus, but thoughts of Mama and Schrödinger continually intruded on her work. Did she continue to pop up in his mind as he did in hers, or had she been gone from Schrödinger’s thoughts as soon as she was gone from his sight?

Winnie was so distracted that when she heard a crash downstairs, it took her a terrified moment to parse the sound.

“Winifred!” she heard Father roar, “Get down here now!”

Winnie couldn’t normally hear when Father got home from all the way up in her attic bedroom; the crash must have been him slamming the front door.

Blankness overtook her, just like it always did during Father’s rages. The fingers of her right hand unconsciously sought the pulse in her left wrist. It felt quick. She took deep breaths.

Father was angry. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It must be about Friday—

“Winifred!”

She trudged toward the staircase. He must know she’d lied about going to the party. Someone must have mentioned meeting her there. But did he know the rest? That she’d spoken to Schrödinger, found out about him and Mama? That she’d discovered the truth, and said nothing to him? If so, how could she appease him now?

Her relationship with Father was, at its best . . . less than ideal. But how she longed to have the relative peace of even a week ago. How she longed to un-meet Schrödinger, un-know what he’d told her! Now that everything was out in the open, what if Father rejected her? She was practically an adult. He could ask her to leave. Maybe it would even be a relief to him, not having to pretend to be her father anymore.

“I want you in the lab, now!” Father shouted, and Winnie heard him stomping toward the basement. Vibration in his throat, in the air, in her ear.

Winnie’s heart thudded hard and quick in her chest. That was not the sound of a “relieved” man. She tried again to turn her brain off, focusing on what was outside herself, not in. She was good at switching off when she really had to, and knew, in a detached sort of way, that this wasn’t a skill to be proud of. Sure, it helped her get through the hard times, and the experiments with Father, but it was sad to want to not feel. It was sad to have a life that made you want that.

Brunhilde was in the kitchen, mixing waxy white oleomargarine with yellow dye as a substitute for rationed butter. She seemed to be straining for normalcy, but the bowl trembled in her hands.

“There are worse fathers,” Brunhilde said suddenly.

“I know,” Winnie answered, but she was pretty sure Brunhilde said it to comfort herself.

“Ah, Liebling—” she began, then stopped herself with a sharp shake of her head, exhaled heavily, and said, “Go on.”

Once Winnie was on the basement stairs, she could feel the deep bass thrum of the generator in her stomach, a counterpoint to the hummingbird flutter of her heart.

When she entered the laboratory, Father had his back to her while he adjusted the generator. He appeared to be modifying it so that it would output a higher voltage than usual. Even from a few feet away, Winnie could smell the alcohol radiating from him. Had he really been drinking on campus? That wasn’t like him.

Father was wearing heavy rubber gloves that protected him from fingertip to elbow, but it made Winnie nervous to watch him work anyway. He could be sloppy when he was drunk, and electricity was unforgiving.

Scott stood next to Father, and when he glanced back over his shoulder at the sound of Winnie’s approach, his expression was bleak.

Winnie couldn’t mask what she felt either. Facing Father alone was bad, but having Scott there would only make this worse. She didn’t want him to see this version of Father—to see this darkness at the heart of their life together.

Winnie took a breath, hoping to calm herself, but she could feel electricity in the air, like the atmosphere before a lightning storm. It throbbed around her, setting her teeth on edge and raising the fine hairs on her arms.

Scott approached her. He paused like he was about to say something, but just exhaled. Winnie understood. What could he possibly say?

She didn’t think he would ever look at her the same way again.

“You should go,” she whispered hoarsely. This was her mess.

“There’s no way I’m leaving,” Scott said, indignant, and much too loud.

Father turned around. “Such loyalty! Loyalty like that I can’t even get from my own daughter.”

Angry as he was, Winnie was still so relieved to hear him call her that.

“I’m sorry I lied about going—”

Father cut her off with a glare. “This isn’t about Hawthorn’s vulgar parties. This is about your father.”

That word was meant to cut her, and it did.

He peeled off his long rubber gloves and tossed them on the lab bench. Father’s normally immaculate golden hair was pushed this way and that, like he’d been running his fingers through it, and his eyes were wild. When sober, Father prided himself on control, but drunk, he was forever on the cusp of losing it. Winnie had to be the one who restrained herself, who took what he dished out in silence. She had found out Mama was a liar—Father was a liar—and what was his response? He was angry with her.

“Was it everything you hoped? Meeting Herr Schrödinger?”

“Oh, certainly,” Winnie said, voice hard with sarcasm. “I always hoped to have a stranger announce he was my father at a cocktail party.”

“You want pity? Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. That’s what you get, going to that party, speaking to that man. The nerve of him! He comes to my office, this Herr Schrödinger,” Father said, practically spitting the honorific, “with an opportunity. ‘I’ll help you secure a position working with Project Nightingale,’ he tells me. ‘The extra income will help you better care for my daughter.’ His daughter! His daughter he calls you! I kept you out of that world. I stayed out of it myself, as much as I could. And you blithely wander in!” Father grabbed Winnie by both arms and jerked her back and forth. “What were you thinking? If Hawthorn finds out about your abilities—they’ll take you from me, you stupid little—!”

“Sir!” Scott said sharply.

“This Nightingale Project,” Father continued. “If they find out what you can do—”

“Sir, that’s enough!” Scott pulled Father off her.

For a moment, the three of them just stood there. Winnie was afraid Father would turn his wrath against Scott, but he stayed rooted to the spot, heaving angrily.

Winnie rubbed at her arms. She was certain they would purple with handprints overnight.

“There’s no way for Hawthorn to find out,” she said, but her voice wavered.

Based on what Hawthorn had witnessed last night, he might already suspect. And Schrödinger had implied that Mama saw splinters. If Schrödinger suspected this meant she might see them too—he could tell Hawthorn about it.

Would he?

Winnie had no idea.

“Well, I’ll be damned if Hawthorn’s project progresses beyond our own. I will be the first to unlock the secrets of the multiverse.” He glared at Winnie. “Which means that you need to start working much harder.”

Scott gave Winnie a confused look. How strange this all must sound to him! As far as Scott knew, Father’s only work was their own experiments on wave mechanics.

“Professor Schulde, listen to yourself,” Scott said, speaking slow and level. “She’s just a girl. What exactly do you expect of her?”

Father whipped his head toward Scott. “I could have you dismissed from the university for canoodling with my daughter.” His voice sharpened. “Stay out of it.”

“Winnie?” Scott said softly. “Let’s go. We’ll come back when—when things have settled down.”

He grabbed for Winnie’s hand, but she pulled it out of reach.

“I can’t.”

Father—he wasn’t perfect. But he was her only family. Without him, there was no one. They might not share blood, but their shared pain was just as tight a bond. Tighter.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

Scott took a few steps back, shaking his head, but he didn’t leave. Winnie was glad for that.

“I’ve been thinking that what’s holding you back is a lack of motivation,” Father said, “but I’ve come up with a solution for that. We’re going to try a version of an experiment I believe you’re familiar with.” He gestured toward the corner. “Winifred, get inside the Faraday cage.”

Winnie eyed the cage anxiously. It was for her own protection, but it still made her nervous—being trapped. She swallowed her fear and stepped into the eight-by-eight cage of heavy metal mesh. The walls of the Faraday cage were grounded, preventing any charge from accumulating on its outside surface. Father could surround Winnie with an electric field, which he theorized might act as a medium for her ability, and inside the cage, she would be perfectly safe.

Father was always careful to protect her from harm during their special experiments, just like he safeguarded all his difficult-to-replace equipment.

“Scott, there’s a cardboard box upstairs in the hall. Bring it down, please.”

Scott retreated upstairs. After a few moments, he still hadn’t come back, and Winnie wondered if they’d finally reached his edge. She was relieved when she heard him coming down the stairs, but when he returned, his eyes were dark, and his mouth was set in a straight line. It was an expression she’d never seen him wear before.

Scott met Winnie’s eyes through the mesh of the cage, and it was plain as day—he’d stayed for her. But he didn’t want to be there.

“Well, bring it out,” Father said.

Scott opened the box and lifted out a small black kitten. He cradled it to his chest and stroked its fur absentmindedly. The kitten let out a tiny mew.

This was too much.

She could easily guess the experiment Father had planned. It was awful. And how could she pretend it had never happened, with Scott there as witness?

Schrödinger’s cat-in-a-box thought experiment was quite well known. Imagine a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If a single atom of the radioactive source decayed, a monitor would register the radioactivity and the flask would be shattered, killing the cat. There was equal probability that an atom would or would not decay over the course of an hour. Within that time frame, the cat must be considered both alive and dead. It was all theoretical, of course, or at least that was what Schrödinger’s paper supposed, and what other scientists assumed.

Winnie knew better.

This was a representation of how splits happened. The cat really was both alive and dead, just in separate realities.

“You’re both familiar with Schrödinger’s famous paradox, I assume?” Father asked.

“It’s meant to be a thought experiment,” Scott said, speaking through his teeth, “not an elaborate method of exterminating house pets.”

Winnie braced for Father to explode, but he just laughed.

“Father, please—”

His smile froze, and he spoke flatly. “Perhaps this wouldn’t be necessary if we’d had any measure of success—if you’d tried a little harder.” Father turned to Scott. “Put it on the workbench,” he said, pointing. “There is fine.” He looked back at Winnie. “We don’t need any elaborate setup, do we? Geiger counters, uranium, and the like? Schrödinger always was more of a showman than a scientist, and there is, as they say, more than one way to kill a cat. As for our element of chance, a coin toss should work just fine.”

Father had made her play this game before, but without such grim stakes. He flipped a coin, then checked the results without letting her see. After years of training her focus, Winnie could usually force herself to see the splinter of the toss, and then she would know that if it was tails in that other world, it was heads in her own, or vice versa. The next step—the one she’d never succeeded at—was changing the results of the coin toss that had already happened. After she tried to will it different, Father would look again, hoping to see a new result, and be disappointed.

Winnie didn’t really think she could affect the outcome of something that had already happened like that. Then again, Father always told her that she was small-minded to cling to a linear idea of time. Space and time were a continuum, and relative to the observer. She was a different sort of observer, wasn’t she? So, Father said, why wouldn’t she be able to use her observations to influence time as well as matter?

Winnie glanced at the kitten, looking so forlorn sitting there on the workbench. It didn’t know it should run away. It was such a baby, she didn’t even think it would be able to.

Would Father really kill it if Winnie failed to change the results of the coin toss? She looked at him—the wildness in his eyes.

Yes.

He would.

Winnie would try her hardest. That was the most she could do.

“All right,” Father said. “Put your hands on the receivers.” Winnie took hold of the metal rods that measured the electrical activity in her own body. “Scott, the circuit, please.”

Scott stood there a moment, looking at her, his expression one of confusion and pity—exactly what she’d wanted to avoid. She didn’t want him to feel sorry for her.

Then he flipped the circuit, flooding the Faraday cage with current. Electricity would saturate the metal mesh surface, then harmlessly bleed back into the earth below through the grounding wire.

Father tossed the coin in the air, caught it, and placed it, covered, on the back of his hand. He glanced at the face of the coin himself without letting Scott or Winnie see, but Winnie didn’t need to look to know. She’d caught the splinter as soon as the coin was tossed—it was heads there. So, tails in her own world.

“All right, Winifred. I want you to change the result. Now concentrate, and tell me when you’re ready.”

Even though Winnie thought she had no control over the coin, she still had to try. She closed her eyes so tight they hurt and focused as hard as she could. She could hear the kitten meowing on the bench a few feet away. Why did Father do these things?

But she knew. She knew.

Winnie squeezed the receivers in her hands and wished for a different outcome. Heads, heads, heads, she repeated fervently in her mind.

“Enough—five seconds and I’m looking, whether you’re ready or not.”

One of the machines began to whine, but she pushed the noise aside. Do it, she told herself fiercely. Just force it to happen.

Winnie could hear the cage humming. She felt a sort of pop below her breastbone. Her eyes flew open. Something was wrong. If something was wrong with the cage, all that current could touch her, stick out a forked tongue and take a taste . . .

“Scott?” Winnie cried shrilly, her head full of images of being electrocuted, burnt to a crisp. “Scott! I think something’s wrong!”

Scott hurried close. “It’s buzzing.” He bent over to take a closer look at something, then immediately jumped up. “The grounding wire—it’s frayed! Professor Schulde, cut the power!”

But it was too late. There was too much current to be contained, and with the grounding compromised, nowhere for all that energy to go. Electricity jumped off the Faraday cage in a blinding arc—how could something so dangerous be so pretty?—and Scott was right there, the quickest path to the ground.

Winnie saw Scott seize as electricity surged through his body. Then he crumpled.

Winnie’s legs gave out beneath her almost in tandem with Scott’s, and she collapsed onto the floor of the cage. Its surface was still buzzing with charge, but she was safe inside. If the wire mesh had been damaged, she would have been at risk, but she should have realized immediately that wasn’t the case. She’d been worried for herself, when she had been the only one who was safe.

Her nose was thick with the acrid smell of singed hair. Scott’s hair. She shook her head ferociously, as if she could undo what she’d done through the sheer vehemence of her denial.

First Mama, then Scott. Was anyone who got too close to Father doomed, or was it just anyone she loved? Or was it the two of them, together, who destroyed all pure, good things they touched? She couldn’t bear it. Everything was too awful. She couldn’t bear it.

Father shut off the generator and stumbled over, looking like a ghost of himself. Pale, edges blurred—that was the smoke. “Are you all right?” he asked her, voice trembling.

Winnie didn’t bother to answer. “Scott? Scott, can you hear me?” She pushed the door of the Faraday cage open and tried to run to him, but Father blocked her way.

“Stay here. I’ll check on him.”

Scott was crumpled on the floor like a discarded rag doll. She could see the scorched hole on the arm of his lab coat from where the electricity had struck. He was so still.

Father knelt by his side and shook him, shouting Scott’s name right in his face.

But he didn’t move.

Father looked back at her. He looked shell-shocked, and suddenly sober.

She hated him. She hated him like she had never hated anything.

Scott couldn’t be dead. Her mind skipped away from the thought. She refused to live in a world without him in it.

Winnie’s head buzzed.

Her vision tunneled, then went dark.

---

• • •

When Winnie came to, she pulled herself back up onto trembling legs, angry with herself for having fainted. The laboratory was full of smoke. Something must have caught fire. Her eyes searched the floor frantically. Where was Scott? Had Father even called for a doctor yet?

Winnie stumbled forward, waving smoke away from her eyes. “Father?” she called out. She couldn’t see him for all the smoke.

A high-pitched whine—Father must have switched on the exhaust hood—and the smoke began to clear.

“Winnie, what on earth are you doing? Did you hear the explosion? I think it was just a circuit breaker, thank god,” Father said. “Don’t you know when you hear something like that, you’re supposed to run away from the sound, not toward it?”

Winnie hardly registered what he said. She was looking past him, at Scott, who was throwing extinguishing chemicals on the small fire that flickered around the circuit box.

“Scott? What’s going on? You’re all right?”

He grinned at her and gave a small wave before returning to the task at hand.

“Oh, I see how it is,” Father said. “You weren’t worried about me. You just wanted to check on your darling.”

Winnie felt herself blush, even though embarrassment was low on her list of concerns at the moment.

“No, I just . . .” Winnie trailed off.

What was going on? Had she imagined the whole thing? Had what she’d experienced been a powerful splinter that she’d somehow confused with her own reality?

“Everything is fine, so run back upstairs—and I’ll forget you came down here if you forget I ever left the door unlocked.”

Unlocked? The basement door didn’t have a lock. It was the smoke, and the chemicals—it had to be. She was confused, or Father was, or they both were. She turned around, moving as if she were underwater, and climbed back up the stairs.

When she reached the top, she saw that the basement door did have a lock, and it had been bolted from the inside. Winnie was even more confused. Had she locked the door behind her and forgotten? And when had Father put a lock in, anyway?

She opened the door and fled into the bright light and fresh air of the kitchen. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Her head hurt from the smoke—or had she hit it when she fainted? What was going on?

She heard footsteps on the basement stairs, either Father or Scott. She opened her eyes. Scott approached her, his face a mask of concern.

“Winnie, what’s wrong? You seem, I don’t know—confused.”

Winnie didn’t even try to stanch her tears. “Oh Scott, I thought you were dead.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her close. She pressed her face to his chest and let the thirsty cotton of his pristine lab coat absorb her tears.

“Shh,” he soothed. “Here, let me look at you.”

Winnie pulled back a little and tilted her face up toward his.

“I’m fine,” Scott said. “It was just a little accident.”

He leaned down and gently pressed his lips to hers. She was surprised by how soft they were.

How many times had she thought about exactly this moment, under the covers at night—her favorite bedtime story—or in a sudden unwelcome flash when he glanced over at her in the lab? It was her first kiss. It had happened a thousand times before, but finally—finally—it was happening for real.

In the movies, women kicked up a leg when they were kissed, or swooned, melting into their beloved’s arms. Winnie stayed very still. The moment felt so perfect she feared that if she so much as twitched, it would burst like a soap bubble.

Still, the kiss was over too soon.

Scott pulled back, and adjusted his glasses, which had gone slightly askew. Winnie was electric with fondness for him—fully charged and dying to spark. She already wanted to kiss him again, and felt almost bold enough to do it.

But the expression on Scott’s face wasn’t fond. He looked deeply concerned—frightened, even. His eyes scanned her hair, her clothes, her lips. He backed away from her.

No! It hadn’t been a mistake. Scott couldn’t think it was a mistake!

Hadn’t he felt what she felt?

He frowned, and Winnie braced herself for some argument—some excuse—for why he didn’t want her after all. Her father. Her age.

But Scott said none of that. And still, his words knocked her flat.

“You’re not Winnie,” he said shakily. “Who the hell are you?”