Alex’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and she saw how haggard he looked. “Haven’t you been sleeping?”
“I’ve been fighting this thing for weeks. I barely go to sleep, because I’m afraid it might break through my equations during the night. And now you tell me that it’s just been playing with me all this time, tricking me into doing what it wants.”
“I don’t know that ‘tricking’ is the right word,” Alex said. “It’s so different from us, so alien, that I don’t know if it can understand why we do things. It doesn’t intentionally deceive. I think it’s just solving the probability equations to make what it wants the most likely outcome.”
Oronzi pursed his lips. “I don’t know about that. It’s been pretty deceptive.”
“Has it? Can it really put itself in our place and predict what we would do with certain stimuli as opposed to others? Maybe it can to some extent, but I would guess it’s more in a mathematical way than by sympathy or imagination.”
“What does it want?”
“I don’t know. We never did know. It kills casually, as if death means nothing to it. And yet it knows we’re there. It nearly electrocuted my mother and my brother, but was it trying to kill or torture them? Or does its kind communicate through electrical energy? Or feed off of it? We don’t know if it meant us harm or not, but it harmed us all the same.”
“How did you get rid of it?”
“We shut down the super collider.”
Oronzi blinked. “Seriously?”
Alex pulled her feet up onto the dresser and hugged her knees. “The collider powers hundreds of huge electromagnets at thousands of volts per second. It has a huge electric potential, and the varcolac was tapping into that. We think it was also feeding off of the exotic particles the collider produced. At any rate, once we shut it down, the varcolac was gone.”
“Only this time, it’s got its own universe to draw power from,” Oronzi said. “Thanks to me.”
“Can’t you shut down the universe? You created it, after all.”
Oronzi shook his head. “I’ve tried. It’s self-sufficient now. It may be small by universe standards, but it’s a universe. It’s expanding in its own space-time, generating its own exotic particles by the trillions. Thousands of years from now, when it spreads out enough, it may form its own stars. Maybe even its own form of life. Right now, though, it’s just an incredibly hot ball of energy. There’s no way I can destroy it.”
“Fifteen years ago, the varcolac was tied to the collider. It couldn’t go very far from it. This varcolac may be tied to your lab in the same way.”
“Unless its range is a factor of the amount of energy available,” Oronzi said. “We’re talking 1023 times more energy than the collider. That might give it a little more room to wander.”
“We should talk to my father,” Alex said. “He studied it before. He might have a better idea.”
A soft tap sounded three times against the door. Alex froze. It was probably just Marta coming back to give her a blanket, or to ask why she could hear a man’s voice in the room. The police wouldn’t rap softly; they would shout to announce themselves, or else just break down the door. It didn’t matter. If need be, she could simply teleport away and then find a new place to hide.
Alex opened the door. When she saw who was on the other side, she almost did teleport away.
“Sandra?”
Sandra stood at the door in her police uniform, radio and gun strapped to her belt. “Hi, Alex.”
Alex crossed her arms. “Are you here to turn me in?”
“No. Though I really should. I risked my career by not telling them where you are.”
“Then why didn’t you tell them?”
Sandra paused. “Look, are you going to let me in, or what?”
Alex stood aside to let her into the room, and Sandra stepped inside. Oronzi looked back and forth between the two of them. “Wow, you two really do look exactly alike, don’t you?”
“Sandra, this is Dr. Oronzi, chief physicist at the super collider,” Alex said.
Oronzi stood. “Please call me Ryan,” he said. He extended a hand, but Sandra ignored it.
“Ryan Oronzi,” Sandra said. “I should have known.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Alex shut the door, already struggling with the fury and inadequacy she always felt when her twin was around.
“It means, I should have known you would be hanging out with your partner in idiocy.”
Alex couldn’t believe it. Sandra had met the man for ten seconds, and she was already insulting him. “Ryan is no idiot.”
“Maybe not, but you are. What were you thinking?” Sandra stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the room, glaring at Alex. “The last time somebody played with that technology, it nearly got us all killed.”
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Alex said.
“Then why on earth did you do it? You brought the varcolac back, and for what?”
“I didn’t know that’s what we were doing,” Alex protested. It sounded weak, even to her ears. True, she hadn’t known, exactly. But she had realized how similar the technology was to what Brian Vanderhall and Jean Massey had been playing with years before.
“Didn’t know? For heaven’s sake, Alex. I knew what it was the first time I saw a video of your demo.”
“You saw a video?” Ryan asked.
Sandra waved a hand in dismissal. “The feds played one for me.”
“That’s supposed to be classified,” he said. “You don’t have a clearance for that.”
“Hardly the greatest of our concerns. Have you two figured out what we’re going to do?”
“Do?”
“To kill the varcolac. Or at least to send it back to where it came from.”
“It is back where it came from,” Ryan said. “At least for the moment. Though I don’t think I can keep it there for long.”
Alex took a deep breath. “I was just saying how we should get Dad involved. He might have some ideas.”
Sandra shook her head, and all the bellicosity drained from her face. “You don’t know, do you?”
Alex could see it in her eyes. She could see it, and she knew, but she couldn’t bear to hear it spoken. It was some trick, some malicious prank of Sandra’s to teach her a lesson. It couldn’t be true. “No,” she said. “Don’t say it. No.”
“He’s dead.”
The word hung in the room. Alex kept shaking her head, willing it away. It was not possible. Finally, she whispered, “How?”
“In the stadium.”
“No,” Alex said, and there was force behind it now. “No, that’s not true. He was alive this morning. Mom said he had just been there, sitting in the kitchen. She said you were there with him.”
“He split. I did see him at the house this morning, but I also saw his body at the stadium. So there were two versions. Then the second version—the one sitting in the kitchen—disappeared with no trace. You know what that means.” Sandra seemed to lose all her energy. There were no chairs, so she sank down to sit on the floor. “The varcolac killed him.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said. “You’re saying it was the varcolac that destroyed the stadium?”
“Yes,” Sandra said.
Ryan cleared his throat. “Not possible. The creature broke out for the first time at 11:08 this morning.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Absolutely. I’ve been tracking its progress for weeks. I have alarms set to tell me when it solves another equation and breaks through another layer. This morning was the first time, and it lasted only six minutes before I got it back under control.”
“In that case, I have some data for you to look at,” Sandra said.