“I’m sure Mom called them.”
“There’s going to have to be a funeral, you know. They’ll arrest you, if they see you there.”
Alex shrugged. “That’s all right. I don’t need to go.”
“We could switch. We’ll wear the same dress. I’ll go into the bathroom with a GPS, then I can teleport out, and you—”
“No.” Alex took Sandra’s shoulders. “You go. I don’t want to see him like that.”
Sandra nodded. “All right.”
“I need to get back to the lab,” Ryan said. “If we’re right about the varcolac changing the past, we need to understand how it works.”
“I’ll come, too,” Alex said.
“Okay,” Sandra said. “I’ll see you later then.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to walk down the mountain. I just need some time to think. Then I’ll go find Mom.”
“Later, then.”
“Later. And Alex?”
Alex turned. “Yes?”
“It’s not your fault.”
Alex made a tiny shrug, noncommittal, and frowned. “Thanks.”
Ryan and Alex made eye contact and then teleported away, leaving Sandra alone on the mountain. Sandra took the trail leading from the peak back down to the road. She was still wearing her police uniform, which attracted looks from the other hikers, but the slope was an easy one, and the walk pleasant. She soon settled into a comfortable pace. The pretty, wooded surroundings and the sound of birdsong increased her melancholy.
In truth, it was more than just her father’s death that was bothering her. She was certain, quite certain, that she had never heard of the Novikov self-consistency principle, and yet she had come up with the name in an instant. She wanted to tell herself that she must have heard of it a long time ago, when she was a child, and it just came bubbling to the surface of her memory at that moment. But she knew that wasn’t true.
It was Alex’s memory. Her sister knew very well what the Novikov self-consistency principle was, and Sandra had accessed that knowledge as if it were her own. It was what had happened fifteen years ago to her father, shortly before he resolved into a single person, after having been split in two for months. It made her afraid that their probability wave, after all this time, was in danger of collapsing. Maybe the reason they had remained two individuals for so many years was because the varcolac was gone. Now that it was back, maybe they would resolve into one person again.
And what if they did? Who would Alessandra Kelley be? She and Alex were such different people now, with different skill sets, different desires, different relationships, different lives. Would either of them survive in any meaningful sense? Or would one personality dominate, and the other, for all practical purposes, die? Sandra was afraid that if it came down to strength of personality, there wouldn’t be very much of her personality left.
She thought of her father, and his brief split before death. How awful for her mother, to have him home, to think him safe, and then to have him so suddenly gone. She ought to visit her. Sandra checked her phone and found the GPS log. She had made calls when in her old bedroom, and the data was still there. No one would be in her room.
On her eyejack system, she brought up the menu of quantum functions that Alex had copied for her. There was a professional-looking menu with a military feel and a tiny Lockheed Martin logo. The options were tagged with unfamiliar icons and words like State Spin, Diffract, Tunnel, Attraction, and Probable Split. The only one she was familiar with was Teleport, and it didn’t seem very safe to experiment with the others. She accessed the teleport function, and her bedroom materialized around her.
She grinned. It was such a rush, doing that. She barely understood how it was possible. She didn’t even have as much as a battery on her to provide the power. There was so much energy bound up in the basic structure of the universe. Technology like this would make primitive techniques like burning fuel a thing of the past. If they could learn how to tap it without calling murderous alien creatures out of the space between the atoms, that is.
Sandra heard talking from her parents’ bedroom; it sounded like a comedy show on the stream. She didn’t want to startle her mother by walking in on her, so she sneaked downstairs and out the front door, and then rang the doorbell. A few minutes passed before her mother opened the door. Her normally pale face was leached of color, except for the skin around her eyes, which was red and raw. She wrapped her arms around Sandra without a word and buried her face in Sandra’s hair. Sandra remembered her mother as such a strong presence in her life, but her thin body felt fragile in Sandra’s arms.
They went inside. Her mother went through the mechanical actions of pouring Sandra a cup of coffee. The forensics crew must have been through, looking for evidence to support the claim that her father had been here after the explosion, but the kitchen had since been cleaned to an antiseptic shine. Sandra had last seen her father right there, sitting at that table, poring over the data she had given him.
“Is Claire here yet?” Sandra asked. She knew without asking that Claire would take care of the arrangements for the funeral. Claire was the planner in the family, the organizer of all details, and always had been. Even from California, Sandra had no doubt she was already making calls and writing lists of what needed to be done.
“Her flight doesn’t come in until nine-thirty.”
“And Sean?”
“He called.” Her mother’s voice sounded dead, devoid of emotion. “You know the military.”
“Will they let him come home?”
“You mean, was it his choice or theirs for him to stay in Poland? I don’t know. He said something about a special mission.”
Considering the current friction with Turkey, talk of a special mission was a frightening thing. Turkey’s influence had been spreading across the Balkans for years, and now Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia had all been quietly assimilated, either through military threat or economic pressure. Allied with an increasingly powerful Iran, Turkey maintained a strong source of oil and a secure southern border. The growing Turkish navy now dominated the Mediterranean. Worse, they had apparently recovered a stockpile of Soviet nuclear warheads left over in Romania from the Cold War. The Romanian government had previously declared the weapons disassembled, but Turkey now claimed they were operational.
American politicians were anxious to restore balance in the region before Turkey grew into a world power, so they were pouring troops and money into Poland and Germany. War seemed inevitable. As a Force Recon marine, Sean wasn’t trained for a back-row seat. Sandra didn’t know how her mother would survive if the next funeral was his.
“I’m sure he’ll be okay,” Sandra said.
Her mother forced a smile and squeezed her hand. They sat there for a while, their hands clasped across the table, not talking about war, or her father, or varcolacs, or what the future might hold. Memories flashed through Sandra’s mind, cued by this so-familiar kitchen. The memories that came from both before her split with Alex and those that came after merged seamlessly together in her mind. It was as if at fourteen years old, she had suddenly gained a twin sister. It felt to her like Alex was the new one, and she the daughter who had always been there. Of course, it would have felt just the same to Alex.
Sandra wanted to share some of these memories with her mother. They were good memories, on the whole. Her father had loved them all, though imperfectly, and they had loved him. He had been a father who was present in their home, for whom family, rather than work or friends or other ambitions, was the highest priority. She said none of these things to her mother. There would be time for such remembrances. For now, she just held her hand.