Scott took another step back from her, looking stuck somewhere between horrified and awestruck.
Winnie was confused—but also oddly relieved. This was bizarre. Bizarre, she could handle. She could handle anything, so long as it wasn’t Scott saying something like Oh, we can’t do this—your father as code for I don’t want you after all.
“I—of course I’m me,” Winnie said. Who else could she be? She looked down at her hands, turning them back and forth like a magician—see, no tricks here.
She took a step toward Scott. He backed up until he was pressed against the kitchen wall. His brows tightened in a quick flinch of fear before he could compose his face.
“The smoke—I think you’re confused,” Winnie said gently, in a tone she recognized as one learned from her mother. It was the voice Mama had used to soothe one of their injured hens—or one on the chopping block.
“I’m not,” Scott said firmly. His gaze traveled up and down over her face like he was trying to analyze every detail. “It’s uncanny!” he whispered.
“What’s uncanny?” she whispered back. Was this just a terrible dream? Maybe it had all just been a nightmare—Father’s anger, Scott’s accident—and she was still asleep.
Then she realized. Why hadn’t she understood sooner? The locked door. Father’s smile. The shock, the smoke—it had made her stupid.
This wasn’t her house.
That wasn’t her Father.
This was a different reality.
And Winnie had no idea how she’d gotten here.
Winnie looked around wildly. There was no shocking difference between this world and her own—not in the kitchen, at least. But as she looked around, she noticed a few small things. Cheerful yellow gingham curtained the windows, not just plain white blinds like at home. There was a little tray housing a napkin holder and salt and pepper shakers in the center of the table, while her own table was always cleared between meals. Dishes were left drying in the rack, not immediately dried and put away. It was all nice enough, and overall, pleasantly familiar.
But this wasn’t her home. Was she safe here?
Not that her own home had been safe.
Scott—oh, Scott—if the accident had been real—
Winnie shut that door inside herself so sharply she could almost hear the slam. If she thought about that now—
No. She could not think about that now.
Scott’s double stood in front of her, examining Winnie quizzically.
“You see it now?” he asked.
Winnie nodded. She saw.
Winnie closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath.
She needed to examine this new environment analytically, like a scientist would, to discover and avoid any potential dangers.
The first step of the scientific method was simple: ask a question.
Where the hell am I?
Winnie tried to work backward in her head. Although Father recognized her, he said she shouldn’t be in the laboratory, and the door to the lab had a lock here. She existed in this reality, but she must not work with Father and Scott. What else was different here?
For one thing, this Scott was an unknown variable. Potentially dangerous, like all unknowns. Winnie looked at him, and she tried to believe this.
But she couldn’t. Not now that all the fear had fallen from Scott’s face as the shock wore off. He looked at her with the open wonder of a little boy.
She looked at him, and she saw Scott.
“I can see those wheels turning,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
Even though Winnie knew she should be extremely careful until she got her bearings, she couldn’t make herself distrust him. So she would gather as much information as she could and give as little in return as possible.
“I—I don’t know. What are you thinking?”
Scott smiled and gave a little shrug. “Just the obvious. Project Nightingale must have had one hell of a breakthrough.” He frowned. “Although they couldn’t have intended to send you?”
Nightingale? Why would Scott’s mind jump to Hawthorn’s work? In her world, they’d only just learned of it—and it certainly wasn’t something Scott had any excitement about.
“Nightingale has nothing to do with this,” Winnie said sharply.
And she would have nothing to do with them.
Winnie didn’t know where, exactly, she was, or how she’d gotten there, so it felt good to feel certain about something. To hell with Hawthorn. To hell with Father. To hell with any scientist whose work put other people’s lives at risk.
Winnie had endured a lifetime of Father’s poking and prodding. If she’d stood up for herself and put an end to the experiments earlier, Scott wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
She would never let herself be experimented on again. Not by Father, and certainly not by Hawthorn.
From here on out, she would be designing the experiments herself.
“If not Nightingale, who?” he asked. “And what are you doing here?”
Winnie frowned. How had she gotten there?
“It was just—I don’t know, exactly. An accident.”
The color began to drain from his face.
“What is it?” Winnie asked.
“If it wasn’t planned—how can I explain it?” Scott said the last part to himself, then bit his lip and sighed, eyes searching the space above her head as if there might be some answer printed there on the wall. “You see, matter can’t just poof! into existence. That’s been one of the challenges for us—trying to figure out how to balance the ‘scales.’ If we’re going to transport matter, we need to absorb energy in return. There has to be exchange, not just transmission. It goes back to the first law of thermodynamics . . .” He trailed off, and gave Winnie an uncertain look, as if he was worried this was all over her head. “I’m sorry, is this making sense?”
“Scott, I know what the first law of thermodynamics is! ‘Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.’” It was unsettling to have him talking to her like this, as if she were a silly schoolgirl instead of a peer. “You and Father—I take it you work for Hawthorn here? With Project Nightingale?” She was . . . not thrilled by this development. “Well, in my world, we don’t. But I do work with you, and with my father. You can talk to me normally!”
“I’m sorry! But none of this is normal,” he said, then shook his head. “Anyway, the first law of thermodynamics applies to matter too, of course. The amount of ‘stuff’—of any kind—in our universe always remains constant. So, if you want to transport something to another reality—into another closed system—you have to receive something back too, or else . . . well, or else we have no idea what could happen.”
He paused, and Winnie felt the full weight of his words. She understood his panic now. Her being there—it upset the order of things. The cosmos would strive to regain equilibrium. But how? And what would it do to their world?
. . . or to her?
“I understand,” Winnie said. She understood all too well. “Go on.”
Scott continued. “Hawthorn has been experimenting with—basically, they’re a new type of battery. The idea is that they can be used to absorb energy from another reality to balance out the amount of matter we’re transporting, so the total ‘stuff’ in each system remains constant. But you’re saying there was no precaution like that during this—this accident?”
Winnie shook her head.
“We have to get you back home, Winnie. We have to get you back home as quickly as possible. I’m going to go get Professor Schulde. We have to take you to Hawthorn. However you got here, he’ll be able to help you get back.”
“No!” Winnie said sharply.
“Winnie—”
“You’re saying Hawthorn has it all worked out? Really? He’s able to transport people?”
Scott stared at his feet. He shifted his weight nervously, then looked back up at her. “No. Not yet. There have been some promising tests with inanimate objects. But the tests with living subjects . . . Hawthorn is still working out the kinks. They haven’t gone great.”
Winnie immediately thought of James, and her blood ran cold.
“Humans?”
“No! No, just animal subjects.”
Winnie gave a shiver of revulsion. Better than testing on people, but gruesome all the same.
“I only met Hawthorn once,” she said. “He—frankly, he frightens me. But you obviously know him better. Tell me, if he knows I’m here, and that some awful scales have become unbalanced—what’s he going to do? Would he transport me the same way he’s been transporting inanimate objects, even if he thinks it’ll kill me? You know, to dispose of the extra ‘matter’?”
Scott frowned. He bit his lip and looked away, considering.
“Well?”
He sighed. “I don’t think he’d try to transport you if it would kill you. Not right away—not unless he felt he had to for some reason. But—probably he would want to keep you for testing. Figure out why it worked for you. How you survived. See if there’s something different about you. And if there’s a way he could use it.”
Oh, there was certainly something different about her. And Winnie doubted Hawthorn would ever let her go once he found out what it was.
She had to convince Scott that going to Hawthorn was the wrong move.
“Winnie is your girlfriend here, right?” Winnie asked. It made her blush to say it, but that was the least of her concerns now. “Is that something you’d want for her? Being experimented on by Hawthorn?” She looked at him and pressed. “Scott. Would you really hand me over to someone like that?”
She paused a moment, letting the question sink in. The uncertainty on his face gave her hope.
“We don’t need Hawthorn,” Winnie continued. “You know about his work; I know about the accident that brought me here. If we work together, we can figure this out ourselves. It will go much more smoothly with me as a collaborator than as a prisoner.”
Scott’s expression softened. Had she convinced him?
Before he could answer, they heard the front door open, then slam.
“I’m home!”
It was a voice Winnie recognized, but she couldn’t immediately place it. Not Brunhilde, certainly.
Before she could think to hide, the girl entered the kitchen and saw her. Her jaw dropped, and her shocked expression was a perfect mirror of Winnie’s own.
For a moment, Winnie couldn’t process what she was seeing. The girl was dressed in a smart gray wool skirt with kick pleats, an inch or so shy of Winnie’s school regulations, and a pearl-pink cardigan that made Winnie acutely aware of how grubby she must look from lying on the dirty laboratory floor. She wore her hair in a stylish, chin-grazing, gently curled bob.
But there was no mistaking it: This girl was her doppelgänger, although they were hardly identical. Her double had rosy lips, artfully arched brows, sooty lashes—and in a sweater that snug, she actually had curves. Winnie had no idea this was waiting to be carved from the rough stone of her physique.
I’m beautiful, she thought, for the first time in her life.
Winnie would have savored the pleasure of this realization had it come at any other time, but as it was, she quickly moved past it to more pressing concerns.
This girl was her. If Winnie had an ally in this frightening world, she was it.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” Winnie said, laughing a bit with relief.
“Who is this?” her double asked Scott, sounding a bit possessive. Then she seemed to notice how alike they were and began to tremble. “Scott, what’s going on?”
Her double took a few steps closer. She reached a shaky hand toward Winnie’s face, but stopped before she made contact.
Winnie inhaled sharply. Looking into this face that both was and was not her own—reality had cracked open to show its strange bones. All she could compare it to was the surreal feeling of déjà vu, but that didn’t even begin to cover it.
“Is this some kind of joke? It’s like—it’s like looking in a mirror,” this Split-Winnie said. She gave Winnie a doubtful once-over. “Well, almost. Who are you?” she demanded, voice shrill. Winnie recognized the ghost of her own German accent in the panicked tone.
“Shh! Your father will hear,” Winnie said. “I’m your double. I came here from a different reality and—”
“Project Nightingale sent you?”
“No,” Winnie said firmly. “They have nothing to do with this.”
Winnie watched her double close her eyes, retreat into herself, and take a deep breath. When she opened them, she seemed a bit calmer. “We need to go tell Father. This is—this is crazy. You shouldn’t be here.”
This wasn’t the response she’d hoped for from her double, but the girl was right. Not about Father—the girl’s impulse to go to him was completely foreign to Winnie!—but that her being there was wrong.
Winnie had already realized that, but standing face-to-face with her double really drove it home. There was already a Winnie here. And from the look of things, Winnie thought with a pang, a better one. There was no place for her there. Not just in a cosmic, first law of thermodynamics way, like Scott insisted—but right there, in that house. Winnie was an interloper, and she was not welcome.
This girl had Scott. She had a life that didn’t seem to be as unpleasantly tangled up in her father’s work. She even had nicer sweaters! The two of them must also have some things in common, but Winnie couldn’t guess what. At least when she was jealous of a girl at school, she could tell herself, Oh, but she can’t do X. Or, Everyone has different strengths.
But this girl—what if she was Winnie, but just better?
She tried to push the thought out of her head.
“Yes, I need to go home,” Winnie said. “As quickly as possible. But I’m keeping your father—and Hawthorn—out of it.”
Winnie’s double glanced back and forth between her and Scott in disbelief. “What? Why? Please tell me I’m dreaming, because this is all absurd. I’m getting Father. It isn’t up to you!”
“No, Winnie,” Scott said, putting a quelling hand on her double’s forearm. “She’s right. We have to help her. She’s you.”
For a moment, Winnie could hardly believe it. Her own double didn’t want to help her, but Scott did. She felt a rush of gratitude toward him. He’d taken her side over his own Winnie! She’d never forget his kindness.
Winnie glanced at the dark expression on her double’s face.
She wouldn’t forget either.