But what if it wasn’t so ludicrous? What if Ryan’s mind was in fact not a human mind, but a varcolac’s? He had never belonged with the people surrounding him; he was something different, something greater. Maybe he was destined for something far beyond the simple fame of a smarter-than-average scientist.
The varcolac wasn’t evil, after all. It was just intelligent. Now that he thought about it, it had been the Secret Service agents that had attacked first, not the varcolac. It had only defended itself. When Alex started firing, it fought back, but it wasn’t the aggressor. It had just been trying to communicate. Though there was the baseball stadium. If the varcolac really had destroyed that, as seemed to be the case, it could hardly be considered self-defense.
He returned to the logs surrounding the time of the stadium explosion, scrutinizing the data for anything he had previously missed, looking for some indication that it had been an attempt by the varcolac to communicate. How would a quantum creature know what destruction it had caused from a human perspective? Did it understand the concept of human life and death?
Ryan grew lost in the work, drinking Cokes from his fridge and eating potato chips when he got hungry, barely aware of the taste as they slid down his throat. He studied the times right around the Higgs singlet spikes, filtering by frequency. And then he found it: a barely discernible pattern at the edge of the EHF band.
But it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Two hours before the Higgs singlet spike that had destroyed the baseball stadium, the wormhole had registered a burst of EHF energy. The more he looked at it, the more he was sure that it wasn’t just a random fluctuation. It looked purposeful. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he trusted his intuitions where mathematical patterns were concerned. To be certain, he ran it through a Shannon entropy plot to measure its randomness. No question. It wasn’t just some natural phenomenon; there was information encoded there. It meant something.
He worked all night, and by the morning, he had the answer. Encapsulated in the tiny burst of data was a representation of the location of the blast and its exact time. Direction, distance, and time were encoded in terms of Higgs particle wavelength, amplitude, and frequency, and measured from the wormhole and the time of the varcolac’s escape the next morning. It hadn’t been easy to crack the code, but once he had worked it out, it was irrefutable. It was a signal, or possibly just a measure of the varcolac’s own thought process, but it was there. If he had known all this ahead of time, he could have actually predicted the place and time of the stadium blast two hours before it had happened.
Ryan searched the rest of the data that had been gathered from the wormhole in the days since, looking for similar patterns. He found only one. It had appeared in the logs an hour earlier, just a tiny packet of energy at the same EM frequency as the first signal. He decoded it using the same method, and came up with a location, sixty-two miles away, and a time, 11:26 AM. He checked his watch. It was already past 11:00.
Ryan’s body surged with adrenaline. Did this mean what he thought it did? He identified the location using an online mapping program: Chelsey Funeral Parlor, in Media, Pennsylvania. He didn’t recognize it. He had been expecting another large population gathering, like a skyscraper or a sporting event. A funeral parlor? Why would the varcolac target that?
Whatever its significance, it wasn’t going to be there for much longer.
CHAPTER 16
Alex hated funeral parlors. All the furniture and decorations were unreal, larger than life, like a magazine photo instead of a real place. The flowers were too bright. The tables and divans along the walls were so polished they looked like plastic. The staff, too, seemed fake, sympathy rolling automatically off their tongues in practiced, meaningless phrases. Even the air seemed dreamlike, free of dust and speared with artful beams of sunlight.
Alex wasn’t technically there at all—she was watching through Sandra’s viewfeed—but her brain couldn’t tell the difference. If she weren’t so accustomed to it, it would have been disconcerting to be trapped in someone else’s point of view, unable to change the angle with a flick of her eyes. But Alex had been watching viewfeeds since elementary school, and her eyes tracked with Sandra’s by habit, moving so quickly that it gave her brain the impression that she was the one in control.
She was, in reality, sitting in Sandra’s apartment, staying away from the windows. Teleportation meant she could come and go secretly, and she would be able to escape quickly if anyone showed up at the door, but she still didn’t want to be seen. Besides Sandra’s place, she’d been spending a lot of time in the woods at Ridley Creek State Park, a few miles away from her parents’ house, staying off the main paths and using the invisibility module to stay out of sight. Being invisible was a liability in any more public place, since people would try to walk through her, close doors in her face, or even drive their cars right at her. Which was why Alex wasn’t at the funeral right now—it would be too crowded. The chance of her accidentally being discovered was too great. Besides, she didn’t want to be there.
Alex could disconnect from the funeral feed at any time, but she knew she wouldn’t. It was hard to bear now, but if she didn’t at least watch her own father’s funeral, the loss of it would haunt her forever. It made her feel trapped. Maybe she should have gone after all, stayed invisible and tried to keep to empty corners. If she had been there in person, she could have decided on her own where to look, where to sit, how to respond, instead of being caught in Sandra’s viewpoint.
Sandra stood in a line with their mother and Claire, greeting the guests, accepting their platitudes with good grace. Their mother shook hands and endured kisses with stiff resignation, her polite expression clearly strained. Claire, on the other hand, greeted each guest with the same poise and practiced gravity as the funeral director, her shining blond hair flowing over the shoulders of her expensive black dress.
The two sisters seemed to fit together: Claire and Alessandra, one blond and the other dark. Watching through Sandra’s eyes, Alex felt like an outsider. The truth was, she had always thought of Sandra as the real sister, the original Alessandra. She, Alex, was the interloper, the girl who had suddenly appeared when their father was accused of murder. She was the one who had hidden away with her father, had fought the varcolac, and had been forever changed by the experience. When Sandra—the real Alessandra—returned, Alex had felt like a stranger in her own home. A freak of nature. A quantum mistake.
On second thought, maybe it was better that she wasn’t there at the funeral in person. She might have snatched a too-perfect vase from a too-perfect table and smashed it on the too-perfect floor.
Two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, came through the line, friends of Sandra. Sandra greeted them with hugs and called them Nathan and Danielle. Their sympathy seemed sincere. Alex supposed police officers grew used to funerals and knew how to talk and act. Another woman, also in uniform, hung back and didn’t go through the line. Sandra kept glancing at her nervously.
“Who’s the woman in the back?” Alex asked.
“Detective Messinger,” Sandra said under her breath, after accepting yet another well-meaning hug by a distant relative. Their mother’s family was large and mostly lived in the area, though their father had never gotten on very well with them.
“Is she the one who’s been interrogating you?”
“Yes. I think she half-believes me about the varcolac, but she could just be trying to gain my confidence.”
Alex suspected there were probably other officers and agents there in normal clothes, blending into the crowd. Watching to see if she would make an appearance, perhaps. Alex had no experience on the street with identifying cops, and there were enough of her parents’ friends she didn’t recognize that she couldn’t be certain.