“You’re alive!” I said. “I can hardly believe it. I’ve been so worried for you.”
“Where are we?” Elena asked. “Do you know what this place is?” I could see she was rattled, but she kept her voice steady.
“I think we’re in some part of the accelerator’s electrical backbone, where the electrical system connects with the grid,” I said. “It’s way out along the circle, miles away from the Feynman center.”
“How long have we been here?”
“It’s March,” I said. “You’ve been down here for four months.”
Elena got to her feet, angry, astonished. “What are you talking about?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.
“I remember walking toward Brian’s office to find you. We asked a girl from the front desk, and she was leading us to the right spot. Halfway there, this man arrived. He just appeared out of nowhere.”
“He’s not a man, really. It’s hard to explain,” I said.
“And you’re saying it’s been months? We’ve just been asleep down here all that time?”
“Not exactly.” Jean spoke up for the first time. “You were in a kind of slow time bubble. You weren’t asleep; you’ve barely aged at all.”
“I was falsely accused of murdering Brian,” I said. “There was a trial. We’ve been looking for you all this time.”
Silence. It was already too much information, and I’d only begun to scratch the surface. Claire and Alessandra and Sean were still sitting on the floor, looking stunned. Elena’s eyes darted from place to place.
“Are we trapped?” she asked.
“We’re prisoners of that man who kidnapped you,” I said. I looked from one frightened face to another, seeing their panic rise. I wasn’t doing this right. I was scaring them instead of reassuring them. I took a deep breath and stood up.
For the moment, convincing them that several months had passed wasn’t important. In fact, considering the alternative—spending several months awake in a varcolac prison—the fact that they had somehow lost the time seemed like a blessing.
I looked at Sean, noting that this living version of my son had his short arm on the left side, just like I remembered. This was my Sean. I tried to put a confident tone in my voice. “How are you doing, Sean?” I asked. “Are you holding up?”
He gave me a brave smile. “I’m okay, Dad.”
“Claire? How are you? Did those creatures hurt you?”
Claire started to cry. “I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “Just scared.”
“I’m here, too,” Alex said. I turned my attention to her, surprised by the bitterness in her tone.
“Of course, you are,” I said, and then I realized that this was Alessandra, not the Alex I’d spent the last few months with. This was the Alessandra I’d always dismissed as a lost cause, preferring her more stable, smarter, and prettier older sister. I realized now that the alienation in that relationship had been mostly my doing. I looked at Alex, who Jean was just now bringing out of unconsciousness.
Alex pulled herself to her feet and saw the rest of us. “The wires are electrified,” I said quickly, before she could find out the hard way. “Don’t try to step over them.”
Alessandra looked Alex up and down. “Who on Earth is that?” she asked.
It was tough to explain, but Alessandra took it better than I expected. Of course she did—she was Alex, too, only I hadn’t taken the time to really know her. Once introductions were made, the two girls couldn’t stop talking, both with a kind of awe that they were talking to someone who was, in essence, themselves.
They seemed to be able to forget, for the moment, that we were trapped underground as the prisoners of a monster. It wasn’t so easy for Elena. She looked at me, horrified. “Which one is the real her?”
“Both of them are real. Both of them are Alessandra.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s what Alessandra would have been if she’d been kidnapped, and what Alessandra would have been if she hadn’t been kidnapped. Either one could have happened, only in this case, they both did.” I prayed she wouldn’t ask why there was no second Claire or Sean. We would have to cover that eventually, but I didn’t want to have to tell her now.
“But… they can’t both just keep on being Alessandra, can they?”
I shook my head. “No, they can’t. Eventually they’ll converge back into one person again.”
The fear in Elena’s eyes sparked into anger. “Did Brian do this?”
“Indirectly.”
“The man who kidnapped us, then?”
I sighed. “It’s actually not a man. It’s a quantum intelligence, a member of another intelligent race that we’ve been calling varcolacs.”
“An alien?”
“Of sorts.”
“What does it want?”
“I don’t know. It has a vastly different experience of life than we have. I don’t know what it understands or thinks of us, and I have no idea what it wants.”
There was a disturbance in the air. We all felt it. Claire cringed and covered her face. A moment later, the varcolac stood over Alex, regarding her with its sightless face. Alex froze, staring up at it, her body rigid. It smiled. It was the first time it had made a facial expression of any kind, and it was hideous, stretching back its lips and showing far too much of its teeth.
“We don’t have anything you want,” I said. “Please let us go.”
The varcolac didn’t reply. It reached down, lifted Alex by her upper arm, and twisted. The move was casual, but Alex screamed, and we heard bone snapping.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted. I hurled myself toward her, thinking that with enough momentum I might break through the electrical fence and reach them, but it exploded in sparks and threw me back again. I tried to get up again, but my muscles twitched with the pain, and I slipped back down. I cast about for something to throw, anything that could get past the wires, but there was nothing.
“Please let her go,” Elena said. She stood at the edge of the wires, pleading with the varcolac. “What do you want from us?” she asked. “This is my daughter. Please.”
“Jean!” I said. “Do something.”
“I’m sorry,” Jean said. “I was just trying to help you. I didn’t mean for it to end this way.”
“It doesn’t have to end,” I said. “You can fight it, can’t you? Hurry!”
Jean shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you. But I have to think of my own family, too.”
This wasn’t making sense. “What are you talking about?”
“I have to think of my daughter,” she said. She gripped the smartpaper, turned just like the varcolacs had done, and disappeared.
I stared after Jean in open-mouthed astonishment, but I didn’t have time to think about it. The varcolac dropped Alex on the floor and walked across the wires toward Elena.
“No!” I shouted at it. “Come on, fight me! I’m right here!”
Elena cowered away, but the varcolac advanced on her with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the throat. It lifted her as if she weighed nothing and thrust her in range of the bundle of wires separating my square from hers. An arc of lightning shot up from the wires into her body. She screamed and arched her back, her arms and legs jerking uncontrollably while the lightning danced and crackled. She kept screaming and screaming, the sound wrenched out of her body with barely a chance for her to take a breath.
I shouted, too, a bellow of helpless rage, as I tried to reach her, casting about for some weapon, desperate to find a way through, although I knew that even if I could get through, there was nothing I could do against such an enemy. Finally, I dropped to my knees, crying, begging the varcolac to let her go. Why was it doing this? What did it want?