The generator was an old model Scott had taken from the campus laboratory. He’d given the old thing a tune-up, and then modified it to output 900 milliamperes, same as Father had done.
Scott switched on the diesel-powered generator, and Winnie could hear the engine start to strain almost immediately. It was being asked to output more amperage than it had been built for, so this was to be expected.
Father had always said how much he admired machines for their predictability. They always did just as they were asked. The laws of mechanics were so clean. A machine could break down, but it would never act out, and once you opened it up, there was no mystery to what had happened. Quantum mechanics were practically mystical by comparison—odd and contradictory. Why had Father decided to study unruly electrons? He would have been happier with bolts and gears. Happier, Winnie thought darkly, with a clockwork daughter who never disappointed him.
The generator continued its work, feeding current onto the surface of the Faraday cage. Winnie began to feel the vibration in her teeth. Dora and Scott and Beta were far away from her, all the way on the other side of the gym—thank goodness for Scott’s binoculars!—and while the distance was reassuring with regard to their safety, she felt terribly alone in the cage.
Winnie was completely trapped there. If she tried to exit the cage before the current discharged, she would be electrocuted, and Scott wouldn’t even be able to turn off the generator, or he would be electrocuted too.
All she could do was wait. Wait for the overburdened generator to self-destruct. Then wait for the charge to dissipate enough for her to be safe, while still leaving enough charge in the atmosphere to approximate the conditions of her first trip.
“What’s the reading so far?” Winnie called to Scott, who had his binoculars trained on the atmospheric electrometer.
“Nothing yet,” he said with a frown.
“Should I start jogging?”
She was supposed to run in place in the cage while intentionally hyperventilating to simulate the physical effects of the fight or flight response. Given her anxiety about the situation, it should be no challenge to whip herself into a frenzy.
Scott’s brow furrowed in thought. He looked terribly nervous.
“Yes,” Scott said finally, “go ahead and start. But save a bit of energy for later. It might be a while before the generator blows.”
“Maybe you did too good a job on that tune-up,” Winnie said, smiling faintly.
Scott grimaced. “Maybe I did.”
Winnie began to run in place. She kept her breath shallow and quick. She didn’t follow Scott’s advice to conserve energy. If she failed, it wouldn’t be because she didn’t try. As long as she didn’t push herself so hard that she fainted, it would be fine.
Her ears began ringing almost immediately, and she began to feel dizzy. It was working.
“The generator,” she called, panting, “is it louder?” The engine’s whine seemed to have increased in pitch, but Winnie wanted to make sure that wasn’t just because of her proximity.
“Yes—we’re getting close, I think.”
It was almost time.
Winnie surrendered to panic.
It was oddly freeing to give rein to her fears, rather than trying to tamp them down. In her mind, she took herself back to Father’s basement laboratory, back to the night of Father’s cruel cat-in-a-box experiment. Scott was right in front of her—he’d been electrocuted. She saw the scorched lab coat. Imagined the smell of the singe. Remembered the smoke—burning her lungs, burning her nose. She breathed even quicker—in out in out in out—through her nose until she felt the burn.
“I’m getting a reading from the electrometer,” Scott called. “A high one. Be ready after the generator goes, but don’t leave the cage until I say it’s safe.”
The muscles of her thighs were trembling. She wasn’t much of a runner. Her right calf began to cramp, but she ignored it.
Focus on Scott. He’s dying! He’s dead!
She timed her quick breaths to the bleat of that word in her head—dead dead dead. Tears flowed down her cheeks unchecked.
“Are you okay?” Dora cried, but Winnie ignored her. She knew she was scaring the girls, probably scaring Scott too, but she couldn’t simultaneously reassure them and command her body to panic.
The poor generator was trying so hard. Such a diligent worker. The kind Father liked best. The engine screamed, the keen of a dying animal, then—abruptly—stopped.
“Wait!” Scott reminded her. “Wait until I give the all clear.”
Their Faraday cage was intentionally ungrounded, like Father’s had been that day by mistake. The charge on the cage would dissipate rather than arc, because there was no conductor close enough to arc to.
Or so they thought.
There was a loud crack, and electricity arced up to kiss the metal cage enclosing one of the overhead lights. They were plunged into darkness.
“What’s happening?” called Beta.
For the first moment, Winnie’s complete panic felt like a delicious success. But this wasn’t part of their plan. She was no longer playacting fear to prep her body for its work. Their experiment had gone off the rails. It was in danger of failing completely.
“Damn!” Scott hissed. Winnie couldn’t see him—she couldn’t see anything—but she heard him take a few deep breaths.
“I can’t read the electrometer now,” Scott said, “so we’ll just wait it out. Let’s give it thirty minutes or so. The charge should dissipate long before then. We’ll rebuild the generator, try again another time—”
“No,” Winnie said. She was still panting. She couldn’t seem to stop. The panic was still in her. Her heart felt shivery, her whole chest tight. The current on the Faraday cage had gotten its chance to discharge, but she hadn’t.
The day before had brought James’s death. Her being there was messing with gravity, changing the tides, and then that morning she had caused a complete disruption of time. What more would go wrong if they waited? She couldn’t risk it.
“It’s safe enough. I’m coming out. I’m trying now.”
“No,” Scott yelled. “Absolutely not. You could still get shocked!”
Yes, she could, but the chance was small. It was unlikely there was enough electricity remaining in the atmosphere to seriously hurt her, and in any case, the thought of being electrocuted wasn’t as frightening as the thought of their experiment being a total failure without her even trying to get home at all.
She pushed open the door.
“Winnie, stop! Get back in the cage!”
She ignored Scott and took a few careful steps forward.
“It could still work! I’m just going to check the electrometer, then try to transport.”
The darkness was still inky and oppressive around her, feeling like a physical barrier, rather than just the absence of light. But her eyes were slowly adjusting.
She took a few ginger steps toward the electrometer. She needed to know how much current there was in the atmosphere. If this didn’t work, that data would be essential to plan their next experiment.
“Dammit, Winnie! What are you doing?”
“Just stay where you are,” she said, her voice sounding loud in the dark. She was confident enough that it was safe to risk herself, but not confident enough to risk Scott. Again.
She moved slowly, sweeping her arm ahead of her, hoping to make contact with the electrometer—but gently. If she knocked it over, it would shatter, and that would be the end of that.
A few more steps, and her fingers brushed the glass of the Leyden jar. She leaned close. Her eyes would adjust, and she would be able to read—
Her knuckle bumped one of the metal plates she had so carefully sanded during the tedious construction of the thing. Static electricity sparked blue, bright enough for her to see the Leyden jar shatter. Winnie jerked back, the pain of the static shock sharp in her hand, like what she imagined a snakebite must feel like.
These weren’t the conditions they had planned for. Winnie no longer felt the panic their experiment called for, just the irrational anger of sudden pain. And with the electrometer broken, she had no idea if there was still an atmospheric charge left after the discharge of her shock. Still, she had to try.
Winnie closed her eyes, and wished for home, for Scott. She tried to feel around inside herself for whatever it was that had allowed her to travel the first time, but—nothing.
It was like trying to wiggle her ears—she knew it was possible, because some people could. But she simply couldn’t do it. She tried and there was nothing there.
Was the premise of their experiment wrong? Or did her attempt fail because they had messed up the conditions? It was impossible to know for sure.
Whatever the cause, one thing was clear: They had failed.
All their equipment was destroyed, and her hope along with it.
Compared to the disappointment, the pain in her hand was nothing.
“What’s happened?” Beta called. “Winnie, are you okay?”
Scott rushed for the gym doors.
“Don’t touch the metal,” Winnie said, her voice sounding hollow in her own ears.
He kicked the door open, letting in a bit of moonlight from the hall windows. Now that they could see, Dora picked up the flashlight from the ground a few feet away from her and turned it on.
“Winnie?” Dora called. “Are you all right?”
The cone of light from her flashlight hit Winnie’s face, and she flinched at the glare.
Dora gasped. “Your head!”
Winnie touched a hand to her forehead. It came away sticky with blood that looked black in the pale yellow beam of light. She must have been cut by some flying glass when the electrometer shattered. A little shard of their hard work. One of the shattered pieces of Scott’s chance for survival.
Dora aimed the beam of her flashlight at the center of the gymnasium, giving Winnie a chance to survey the damage.
The mascot painted at the center of the basketball court was completely obscured by a scar of charred wood. The circular burn was about ten feet across, surrounding the Faraday cage. If she hadn’t been inside, Winnie was sure she would be dead.
The generator was still smoking. All of its plastic dials had melted. She turned around to look at the electrometer. Shattered glass and twisted shards of metal were all that remained.
“I suppose I can tell Martha not to worry about having my athletic clothes washed for tomorrow’s gym class,” Dora said faintly. She was trying to sound plucky, but her shaky voice betrayed reverberations from the shock of it all.
The way ears ring after a deafening noise, and everything sounds muted and far off—that was how Winnie felt. Not with her hearing, but with all of her. Her mind was deadened with the disappointment of their spectacular failure.
It felt like losing Scott all over again.
They would try again. She wouldn’t stop trying. But what if they just kept failing? And what if the effects of her being in their world kept getting worse? How much time did she really have?
The cut on her head bled freely now. It hurt, and she was as nauseated as if she hadn’t just lost a fair amount of blood, but swallowed it.
She stumbled over to Scott. His expression was completely shut down. Scott was still living in that moment between seeing the deep cut and feeling the searing pain that would follow—Winnie knew the signs.
When she met Scott’s eyes, it was like he was just noticing that she was there. He didn’t look pleased.
“Winnie, how could you? James—that was yesterday. You think I could stand to watch you die today?”
It was her life to risk, Winnie thought ferociously—but underneath, she knew that wasn’t fully true. If he had done something similarly half-cocked and dangerous, she would have wanted to throttle him.
Winnie squeezed her eyes closed and kept them shut for a long moment. When she opened them, she saw her double standing there behind Scott, frowning at her.
“I’m sorr—” Winnie began to say, then fell silent in shock. A wound began to open itself on Beta’s forehead, like her skin was being cut into by an invisible knife. Winnie didn’t have to look in a mirror to know that this laceration was identical to her own.
“Scott,” Winnie said shakily, “Scott, look.”
He did, and his face went paper-white at the sight of Beta.
“Oh my god,” Dora whispered.
Beta looked scared, but she had yet to realize what had happened. “What? What are you two staring at?”
Beta put her fingers to her temple then, and held them in front of her face in fascination, as if the blood on them were someone else’s. “Oh,” she said, and her knees began to buckle. Scott had an arm around her in a moment to keep her from falling.
Dora hurried over to the locker room with her flashlight and was back in a flash with a clean washcloth. She pressed it to Beta’s wound.
“Hold it here,” Dora said. “Tight.”
“What are we going to do?” Beta said, almost wailing.
“Shh,” Scott murmured. “It’s going to be okay.”
Her double folded in on herself and gave a hopeless sob. It was obvious that all that had allowed Beta to cope with the situation was that it would soon be over—but without that hope? Well, Winnie felt the awful weight in her own chest—a twin despair.
Winnie’s own wooziness finally took hold, but no one was there to catch her. She stumbled down on one knee, pressing her bloody palm to the floor to catch herself before she fell completely. Dora and Scott were too busy examining Beta’s forehead to even notice that Winnie had collapsed. She pushed herself back up and stumbled over to the bleachers, where she sank down to sit on the hard wood.
Scott pulled a clean handkerchief out of his breast pocket and knotted it tight around Beta’s head. “I’ll take care of Winnie,” Scott said to Dora. “Get her home,” he added, jutting his chin in Winnie’s direction, tone clipped. “Tell your housekeeper she fell. She can help you get her scrapes cleaned up. Maybe she’ll want to call for a doctor, but I don’t think it needs stitches.”
It shouldn’t hurt so bad, having him angry with her. He wasn’t the real Scott, she reminded herself. She had, what, a week of shared history with this person? He was a stranger. They were all strangers. Even Beta. Especially Beta! Beta, who made Winnie a stranger to herself.
“Let’s go,” Dora said softly.
Scott didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t say anything to her, just bent over and began picking up the pieces of their ruined electrometer.
Winnie didn’t know why he bothered. It wasn’t like there was anything salvageable.
Dora took Winnie’s arm and gently pulled her into the hall.
But Winnie was still able to hear her double moan, “We have to get rid of her, Scott. We have to get rid of her.”