Before we could reach it, a large chunk of concrete landed on the back of Marek’s leg, and he went down. “Go,” he said. “It’s just my ankle. I’m right behind you.”
“I’ll come back for you,” I said.
I ran past him with Sean and ducked into the bunker, where the others were already gathered. I placed Sean in Elena’s open arms, and then stopped, staring at them. All four of my family members had begun to shimmer, flickering back and forth between one image and another. Behind Elena and Claire and Sean, I saw their bodies as I had found them in the house, twisted and lifeless. Behind Alessandra’s face, I could see Alex as she was now, blackened and burned by electricity. What was happening to them? Was this how I had looked when my probability wave had collapsed? Each of them wavered between themselves and their double, only in their case, each of their doubles was dead.
But hadn’t Elena and Claire and Sean had already resolved to these versions of themselves? Their bodies had disappeared. Yet here they were, flickering between the two possible paths their lives had taken. Their quantum state must have been linked to the varcolac’s, a kind of entanglement that forced all states linked to its existence to reach a final resolution, one way or another, now that it was gone. From a quantum perspective, it was simply a matter of probability. A coin toss whether they would live or die.
I stared at them, unable to move. There was nothing I could do to change what was going to happen. But I could help Marek. With a cry, I tore my gaze away and raced back into the corridor. Marek had pulled his leg free, but he couldn’t put any weight on it. I draped one of his arms over my shoulder and supported him like a crutch. Together, we hobbled back toward the bunker.
We had only taken a few steps when the ceiling came down on top of us.
CHAPTER 40
We were lucky. Back near the power conduits, the entire ceiling had collapsed, filling the tunnel with rock and crushing the accelerator equipment and anything else in its way. Where Marek and I were, the damage was less, though we were still half-buried with falling debris. In front of us, the door to the CATHIE bunker was no longer visible. The entrance was blocked with collapsed masonry.
I called to my family, who were either dead or trapped inside, but I heard no answer. I had sent them there for their safety, figuring the bunker was structurally isolated and thus more likely to withstand the tremors, but I hadn’t considered the volume of air. There was ventilation all through the tunnel and experiment bunkers, of course, but if it had been compromised by the collapse, there would be four people inside with not very much oxygen to go around. If they were even still breathing.
There would be a rescue crew, eventually, but we couldn’t afford to wait. I started picking up rocks from near the door and hurling them aside as fast as I could. I was haunted by the sight of their flickering images, wavering between life and death, like a macabre slot machine with more at stake than just a few coins.
In the early part of the twentieth century, when the quantum nature of subatomic particles was just beginning to be perceived, there was a dispute among scientists, some of whom found the notion of collapsing quantum waveforms to be too ridiculous to be true. One of the leading scientists of the day, Erwin Schrödinger, wrote a letter to Albert Einstein and others with a reductio ad absurdum argument, describing a thought experiment involving a cat in a box, meant to demonstrate that the probability wave concept was nonsense. In subsequent years, Schrödinger’s cat became even more well known than the scientist himself.
According to Schrödinger’s experiment, a cat was enclosed in a steel chamber along with a flask of hydrocyanic acid and a Geiger counter. In the Geiger counter was a tiny amount of a radioactive material, small enough that in the course of an hour, one of the atoms of that material might or might not decay, with equal probability. If the atom did decay, the Geiger counter would detect the emission, prompting a hammer to fall and shatter the flask, releasing cyanide gas that would kill the cat. If no atom decayed, no hammer would fall, and the cat would live.
The chance of radioactive decay was not a simple chance in the larger world, like flipping a coin, but a fundamental, subatomic, quantum probability. It meant that if the box were left closed for an hour, the atom would exist simultaneously in both states, decayed and not decayed, in a probability wave that had not yet collapsed. The cat, as a result, would be split: both alive and dead at the same time, entangled in the same probability wave that governed the atom. Until you opened the box.
Schrödinger’s thought experiment, ludicrous or not, was exactly the situation my family was now in. Both alive and dead, their probability waves would be indeterminate until I opened the door. The thought crossed my mind that I should stop digging, that it was better to be caught in a state between life and death than to be completely and irreconcilably dead. But that was no argument. The air inside would only last so long, and then there would be no living possibilities.
Eventually, a rescue crew arrived, and the work went much faster. The door was uncovered, the men shouted for anyone inside to stand back, and they smashed it open with a fire axe. A thin swirl of rock dust drifted out of the open doorway. I waited, holding my breath.
Elena emerged, coughing but smiling. “We’re all here,” she said. “We’re all okay.”
She ran to me, stumbling, and we had our reunion at last, colliding into an embrace despite our injuries and holding on to one another like we would never let go. The children came out next, Claire and Alessandra and Sean, bruised and burned but alive, completely alive. I hugged them each in turn, though as I reached Sean, I could tell that he was about to collapse. His skin was badly burned, and he was just starting to feel the pain, which I knew would get a lot worse before it got better. I held Alessandra close, thinking of Alex lying dead under tons of rock, and knowing that even if Alessandra remembered none of the last few months, she was still the same person I had come to love and admire.
The medics arrived with kits and stretchers. They took Sean and Elena and Marek away, loading their stretchers onto golf carts to take them to the elevators, and from there to waiting ambulances and to the hospital. Claire and Alessandra, unharmed, were left behind with me.
I hugged them both again. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” I said.
Claire gave me a tired smile. Somehow, even filthy with dust, she was beautiful. “Will the others be okay?”
“I think they will. Sean might be in for a long recovery, but he’ll make it.”
“I don’t understand,” Alessandra said. “What happened to Alex? What did she do?”
I explained as best I could about the final sacrifice she had made that had saved us all. I told Alessandra that Alex was dead, but not really dead, because everything Alex had been was part of who Alessandra was. They were the same, both of them, and I praised her for her quick intelligence and willingness to sacrifice herself for her family.
“But that wasn’t me,” Alessandra said.
I knew how it sounded, me heaping more praise and affection on a dead girl than I had ever shown to her. It would take time to turn that around. Time for me to demonstrate that I understood her better now, and loved her, not to the extent that she could be like Claire, but for herself.
“It was you,” I said. “It really was. You just don’t remember it.”
Though it was strange that she wouldn’t remember any of the last few months. I stopped to consider my own memories. I couldn’t bring to mind everything about what it was like to live in jail, but I could remember the horror of my first night there. I could remember all the time I had spent with Alex, but at the same time, I could remember enduring the trial from the perspective of the accused. Some of my memories had blown away into the clouds of what might have been, but some, from both sides, were as clear as daylight. Why couldn’t Alessandra remember some of those same things? Had the Alex I had known been lost entirely? Did this version of her really remember nothing?