Scott was pacing in front of a shabby, floral-patterned couch. It was hard to untangle the knotted mess of feelings Winnie felt when she saw him: relief that he hadn’t somehow vanished overnight, grief over the him she had lost, guilt over the trouble she’d brought into his life. And pulsing under all of that, excitement (mixed with nausea). She was happy to see him, just like she always was. There were new feelings layered over it, but underneath, that same bedrock. Even if she could admit, at least to herself, that it was probably wrong for her to feel that way about him now . . .
Her eyes began exploring his apartment—that was safer than continuing to look at him. The place was small but uncluttered. A kitchenette occupied one corner of the living space, and there were double doors on the far wall, but judging by the empty space left in front of them, they concealed a pull-down Murphy bed, not another room. Although the apartment was modest, it was tidy and warm, exactly what Winnie would have imagined Scott’s home to be: a clean, simple space for a busy student to sleep and eat.
“Have a seat,” Scott said, and gestured toward a beat-up armchair.
Winnie’s double went to take a seat on the couch, but Scott held up a hand to stop her.
“Not you,” he said. “Dora, I want you to take Winnie home. Having her double nearby is making her sick. The other one can stay here with me, and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
Winnie winced at being referred to as “the other one,” but supposed there wasn’t really anything better for him to call her. It would be easier for them to talk once her double was gone.
But Split-Winnie made no move toward the door. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and sank down onto the sofa. “The nausea is going away already.”
“You want to get another bloody nose?” Scott asked. “I wish you’d actually mentioned that bit yesterday—I would have told you to stay home.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” her double grumbled, and Winnie grinned at her sass. After a moment, the girl returned her smile.
“Fine. Stay. But if you start to feel sick again—”
“I know, I know.”
“I’m feeling better too,” Winnie said, although she felt embarrassed a beat later, because no one had actually asked. “I wonder what makes it stop and start?” she added quickly, and took a tentative seat in the battered leather wing chair in the corner, the spot farthest from her double.
Scott frowned, thinking. “Maybe it’s something like carsickness,” he said. “Motion sickness is caused when part of the body—the inner ear, for instance—understands you’re in motion, but another part—like your eyes—doesn’t. Maybe when you’re near your double, the parts of your body that orient you in space get confused—you’re here, but you’re there—and it makes you feel sick until your eyes catch up with your body.”
Winnie did feel disoriented, but it had more to do with Scott than with her double. She saw Scott in her memory, on the floor, limbs at odd angles like a dropped doll. She saw Scott right there in front of her, tantalizingly close.
If she couldn’t go back and save him . . . what would she do? What would she do without him? And how could she live with herself?
Scott caught Winnie staring.
They both quickly looked away, and Winnie noticed her double glancing back and forth between them uneasily.
What did she look like to Scott? Did the differences between her and her doppelgänger jump out at him? Or did he have to force himself to see them?
“Well,” her double said, “we already know her being here is wrong. Scott, what did you call it? ‘Violating the rules of space-time’? So, is it really such a surprise that it’s messing things up?”
What her double said was true, but her words still made Winnie feel like an unwelcome immigrant all over again.
“Why are we the only ones it’s hurting, though? Dora hugged me last night—she was fine. And when I got here—before we realized what was going on—Scott kissed me. Nothing weird happened to him either.”
“He what?”
Scott shot Winnie an irritated look.
“Honey, I thought she was you.”
“Really? Did you think I’d just come back from a shopping trip at the Salvation Army or something?”
“All right!” Dora interjected brightly. “You each got a dig in. Are you ready to stop being shitty?”
Winnie and her double each let out a sharp bark of identical surprised laughter.
It gave Winnie an idea.
“Quantum entanglement! Or something like it,” Winnie said. She looked at Scott. “Could that be causing it?”
“What’s that?” her double asked.
“Basically, some particles are—they’re linked,” Scott said. “So, if something happens to one, it affects the other, no matter how far apart they are.”
Winnie’s double frowned. She didn’t seem to like the idea. Suddenly, she gave her own arm a sharp pinch. “You don’t feel that, right?”
Winnie shook her head.
“See? We aren’t linked,” her double said. “We aren’t the same person.”
Winnie found her double’s unease extremely relatable. She was unsettled by the idea herself—but she still felt like she was on to something.
“Oh, I know we aren’t,” Winnie said. “I don’t mean it like that. I was thinking on a quantum level—maybe all doppelgängers have linked particles, since we start out as the same person.”
“So, it’s not how we move our arms, but the orbit of our electrons or something?”
“Exactly! And maybe those energy fields throw each other off when they get too close to each other, like identical poles of a magnet.”
Scott looked spooked.
“If that’s true—Winnie, I don’t think you understand how serious that is. If getting too close to each other puts pressure on your atomic bonds . . . well, you don’t want to know what happens when an atom splits. Let me tell you, the whole city would feel it.”
Winnie swallowed nervously. This talk sure made her and her double’s petty jealousy feel—well, petty. She knew she had to mention what had happened at the park earlier, even though just thinking about it filled her with a queasy guilt.
“This afternoon, at the park—I think something went wrong with gravity.”
“What!”
Winnie bit her lip—thinking back on it, it was as surreal as a dream. But no, it had happened. There was no denying that now, no matter how much she wished she had dreamt it.
“I got heavy—really heavy. It was hard to walk, and I sank into the ground. And it wasn’t just me. It happened to a little boy playing nearby too. It happened out of nowhere, and then—it couldn’t have even lasted a minute—then it stopped.”
They all sat in silence for a moment, trying to absorb the shock of what she’d said, Winnie assumed.
“Well, that’s . . . alarming,” Scott said. “But whatever’s going on, we need to focus on getting you back home as quickly as possible.”
“Alarming? It was terrifying! Everything went back to normal after and nobody was hurt, but what if next time—” Winnie took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She looked at her double. “She wasn’t even there, so it isn’t only us being near each other that’s upsetting things. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to get you home,” Scott said. He sounded calm, but Winnie noticed he had started bouncing his leg—one of his nervous habits. “That’s all we can do. And, Winnie,”—he gave her double a stern look—“I don’t want you involved after tonight. Whether this is quantum entanglement or who knows what, I don’t want us to find out how serious these physical symptoms can get.”
“I want to be involved, though! What am I supposed to do, just sit home alone and worry?”
Scott shook his head. “I’m sorry—I know it’s frustrating, but I won’t allow you to put yourself in danger.”
His voice went a bit husky with emotion at the end, and Winnie felt a knot form in her throat. She’d seen that kind of protectiveness from Scott before. It was what had made him stay with her in the lab. It was what had gotten him killed.
He wanted to protect his Winnie—but who was going to protect him?
She had already gotten one Scott killed. And now, just by being there, she was putting the whole city—maybe even their whole world—at risk.
You will not let Scott get hurt, she told herself sternly. You won’t let any harm come to any of them, she vowed.
But she already feared that wasn’t a promise she had the power to keep.
Scott swallowed and shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was once more matter-of-fact.
“Winnie,” he said briskly, now addressing her, “you can come here in the evenings, after I’ve finished my daily work with Professor Schulde. I told him I wasn’t feeling well so that we could all meet early today, but I’ll have to return to work tomorrow.”
This was the moment. And Scott had given her the perfect opportunity to share what she’d been considering. “I was thinking,” Winnie began nervously, “that it might be easier if I stayed here with you. I could keep working while you’re away during the day, and there’s less opportunity for me to raise suspicions if I’m not out and about. And less opportunity for any more . . . mishaps.”
The safer she was from Nightingale, the safer they all were. And the fewer people she was around, the fewer people she could put in danger. Plain and simple. The thrill in her stomach was just the result of figuring out how she could stay safely hidden and find some answers at the same time, she told herself. Not because Winnie was eager to spend her nights with her double’s boyfriend.
But before Scott could answer, her double said, “Absolutely not!” She looked a little embarrassed by her vehemence, and quickly added, “I mean, she’ll be much more comfortable at Dora’s,” gesturing around the small space.
“I think it’s better for her to stay here too,” Dora said. “She has to leave the house with me in the morning, and—well, Winnie, tell them what happened at the library today.”
Winnie hadn’t intended to say anything about that. She’d been frightened in the moment, but now she wondered if she’d overreacted.
“Oh, it was just a silly thing,” she said, waving her hand. Hadn’t she given them enough to worry about? “I went to the library to do some research—”
Scott cringed and made a worried hiss.
“What?”
“Nightingale and the Manhattan Project have certain subjects at area libraries flagged. It’s part of our security agreement to protect against espionage as government contractors. Any time someone makes an inquiry or checks out materials about nuclear fission, uranium enrichment, multiverse theory, interdimensional travel, et cetera, we get a report we’re supposed to investigate.”
Winnie sighed. “Oh. I guess I wasn’t being paranoid, then.”
“I should have told you.”
“You couldn’t have known I would go to a library first thing.” Although, she was a bit surprised he hadn’t guessed as much—wouldn’t her double have done the same? “I didn’t give them my name,” she added. “Or anything like that. So at least there won’t be much to go on. Just my description.”
“Still, you should definitely stay here. The less you’re seen, the better. This place is nothing much, but we’ll make do.”
Rather than being relieved at this, Winnie began to worry. She hadn’t really thought about what it would be like, sharing such a small space with Scott for days on end. Where would she sleep? On the couch? No, of course Scott would be a gentleman and insist she take the bed . . . which, if her guess about the Murphy bed was correct, would be about five feet away from Scott on the couch. So, there she would be, wrapped in his blankets, head on a pillow that smelled of him, listening to his breath while he slept. It sent a tangle of feelings shivering through her stomach.
She was excited at the prospect of being so close to him, and ashamed of that excitement.
Winnie gave her head a brief shake. She was there to figure out how to save her Scott, not to think like that about his double.
“Well, that’s settled—” Scott began, but Split-Winnie cut him off.
“No, it’s not! I don’t want her staying here. She can upset gravity just as easily here as she can at Dora’s, and the only reason she’s afraid of Hawthorn is because James is missing in her world, and their Scott thought Hawthorn was to blame.”
“What?” Scott asked. “James went missing? Why didn’t you tell me!”
“I was going to,” Winnie said weakly. Her double just hadn’t given her the chance.
Scott had never looked at her with such reproach before. Winnie felt a hot flash of righteous hatred toward her double for betraying her confidence. This feeling vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving behind confusion and shame. Was that the sort of person her double was when her back was against the wall—disloyal?
She and her doppelgänger were bringing out the worst in each other. The two of them weren’t supposed to be in one world together, and with both of them occupying the same identity, just trying to exist made her feel like a dog begging for scraps. She couldn’t just be Winnie anymore, even in her own head. “Winnie” was her, but also her double, who she had to dress like, even though she knew she could never really be her. She just wanted to be herself, but how could she, under the constant pressure of her own mirror image?
No. She had to stop thinking of her double as another self outside her body—as another “Winnie.” She was Winnie. Let her doppelgänger be . . . Beta, at least in Winnie’s head; she should get to be Alpha in her own mind, if nowhere else.
Winnie took a deep breath. Distancing herself from her doppelgänger made her feel calmer than she had all day. She was stuck in a foreign world, but she was Winnie, she was herself, and she was human. An individual, not just a poor copy.
“Well,” Scott said slowly, “would you tell me about it now?”
“But that’s the thing,” Beta interjected. “It doesn’t matter—it has nothing to do with our Hawthorn. Our James is fine. So, she doesn’t have to stay with Dora, and she doesn’t have to stay with you. We don’t have to hide her at all. We can introduce her to Hawthorn and let Nightingale help her. Especially if they’re just going to find her anyway.”
Winnie being there might be upsetting the order of things and endangering people, but at least she cared. Her double didn’t seem to care about anything aside from herself and her Scott.
“Hawthorn was using James as a test subject,” Winnie said, pausing to let the horror of that sink in. “The kind of man who does that—he isn’t a good man, not in any world.” Winnie felt a lump forming in her throat, because what she said could apply to Father too. “But if that’s the sort of person you’re willing to turn me over to, then I guess there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”
“Of course we won’t!” Scott said quickly. He shot her double a look of reproach. “We aren’t going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
This felt like victory—but only for a moment. Beta immediately paled and clutched her stomach, which made Winnie realize that she was feeling queasy too. She lurched to her feet, eyes searching for the bathroom, but her double shoved past her and hurried that way herself, slamming the door shut behind her. Winnie could immediately hear the sickening sound of her double vomiting.
Dora took her arm and quickly guided her to the kitchenette, handing her a little wastebasket. Winnie’s stomach heaved, but thankfully, it was empty.
She watched Scott as he waited for her double outside the bathroom. There was something so tender about the way his hand was pressed against the door that separated them, like he was eager to share even in her suffering.
Scott finally glanced back over his shoulder, sparing a thought for Winnie. But instead of inquiring how she was, he just said, “You should probably go. And maybe it’s best if you just stay with Dora—at least for the time being. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll start planning then.”
Even though Beta lost the argument, she still got her way in the end. Winnie wasn’t surprised. She couldn’t have really expected Scott to side with her over his own girlfriend. Still, it felt astonishingly unfair that her double’s preference was given more weight than Winnie’s safety.
She longed to see her own Scott then with an intensity she remembered from the early grieving months after her mother’s death. That experience had taught her there was no escape from grief. Time would lessen it, but the only way out was through.
It wasn’t an especially helpful lesson.
Winnie’s legs felt increasingly weak as they descended the several flights of stairs to exit Scott’s apartment building, but her nausea gradually eased. Once they were outside, a chilly wind lashed Winnie’s cheeks, making her realize they were wet.
“Your stomach hurts terribly?” Dora asked, grimacing in sympathy.
Winnie nodded. It was easier to let Dora think that was why she was crying.