Sandra rushed to Danielle’s body, touching her, listening for her breath or some indication that she might still be alive. She was warm, flushed even, but had no pulse.
“We need to leave,” one of the Alexes said.
Sandra looked up at her, furious. “These were my friends!”
“I didn’t kill them,” Alex said.
“They’re still dead! Don’t you even care?”
“I care about keeping you alive. I care about letting Mom know we’re okay.”
“You call this okay?” Sandra waved her hand, indicating the multiple Alexes. But there were fewer of them now, only five or six. As she watched, another Alex disappeared.
“I’m converging again,” Alex said. “It doesn’t last long.”
“You’ve done this before?” But even as she said it, Sandra knew Alex had done it before. She could remember the lab at Lockheed Martin when they had first gotten that particular module to work, the thrill of discovery, the promise of a bright future for their department. It was still under development, and so hadn’t been included in the demo. But Sandra hadn’t been there. Those were Alex’s memories she was seeing.
Sandra felt the blood rush to her face. Alex had been a fool to experiment with such things, knowing what she knew. Didn’t she know what was at stake? Just because something could be done didn’t mean it should be.
But no. She wasn’t a fool. That’s what Sandra didn’t understand about science. It wasn’t an option to leave a discovery hidden, like a treasure buried in sand. The truth was out there. You couldn’t know that things like teleportation were possible and do nothing about it. If you did nothing, you had no power—not over other people who didn’t have the same moral standards, and not over varcolacs who could appear without warning out of nowhere. It was much better to have the power and knowledge and decide what to do with it than to wring your hands and hope nobody else would discover what was possible.
For a brief moment, Sandra could see the room—and in fact, the world—through Alex’s eyes.
“No!” Sandra yelled the word out loud and jumped to her feet. She was Sandra, Sandra, not Alex. Those were not her memories, and they were not her thoughts.
Alex’s probability wave had collapsed, and all the other versions of herself had converged back into the whole. Sandra took a step back, away from her sister. She had almost converged with Alex as well. In truth, she was like those others, wasn’t she? Simply a probability split that had stayed unresolved a lot longer than it should. But she didn’t feel disposable. She didn’t want to cease to exist as a separate individual.
Sandra clenched her teeth. “Never do that again,” she said.
Alex looked bewildered. “Do what? Save both of our lives?”
“That splitting thing. It’s unnatural. You’ll only make it worse.”
“If you had a better idea for fighting off three varcolacs, you should have mentioned it a little earlier.” Alex gave a small laugh. “In fact, if splitting wasn’t possible, you wouldn’t even be here.”
There it was. Sandra felt tears rising and fought them back down. Alex was staking her claim as the real Alessandra, the true daughter. She had been the heroine, the sister everyone loved, certainly the one her father had loved best. Sandra was nothing more than an inconvenient copy, not quite as good as the original.
“You might as well just assimilate me now and get it over with,” Sandra said. “You could do it if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”
“I didn’t mean that. We wouldn’t either of us be here, if splitting weren’t possible. I wasn’t trying to say… and no, I couldn’t do it. And I wouldn’t want to.” Alex stepped forward and took Sandra’s hands. Sandra flinched, but her sister didn’t let go. “We’re different people,” Alex said. “We always will be.”
“And if getting rid of this varcolac for good means that we converge to a single person again?”
“It won’t come to that,” Alex said.
Sandra traced her eyes over Alex’s familiar features: the same height, the same hair, the same build, the same face. People without a twin didn’t know what it was like, to look across the room and see yourself looking back. To have a constant, living example of what you might have been if your choices had been different. Just by being alive, Alex was a subtle judgment of who Sandra was. Even real twins didn’t know that experience like she did, when the person across the room really was her. No matter where she went, no matter how far from Alex she ran, her entire life would always be defined in some way by the inescapable presence of her sister. Her other self.
CHAPTER 17
Alex lay on her bed in her old room in her parents’ house, shaking uncontrollably. The adrenaline that had flooded her through the battle with the varcolacs had drained away, and now the terror threatened to overwhelm her. She had come so close to death. And she wasn’t safe now. Far from it. The varcolac was so alien, so implacable, and she knew she hadn’t killed it. What if it appeared, right now, in her room? She didn’t think she would have the strength even to rise from her bed.
The way it possessed human bodies like that, killing them and using them like macabre puppets, was the stuff of nightmares. A familiar friend, an ally and a source of safety, turned suddenly evil. Like a child looking up at her father’s face in a crowded room, only to discover that it wasn’t her father at all.
Downstairs, Sandra talked with their mother and Claire, providing encouragement and comfort. Sandra was good at that. Alex never had been. She would find her own way to help.
They couldn’t just stay here and wait for the next attack. They had to find a way to go on the offensive. The varcolac was so powerful, with abilities so far beyond theirs, that it would eventually kill them if it kept trying. And then what? Would it stop with them, or would it go on killing? If they couldn’t stop it, would anyone? What if it wanted to remove all potential for intelligent competition? She didn’t think there was a limit to how many it could kill. They had to find a weakness, a way they could actually defeat it instead of just barely staying alive.
Ryan was brilliant, but unpredictable. She wasn’t sure she could trust him anymore. He claimed not to be able to destroy the wormhole or keep the varcolac contained there, but from the way he talked, she wasn’t even sure he wanted to. He seemed to admire it. They needed help from someone better than that, someone who had defeated it before. They needed her father.
The thought drove a swell of tears that felt like it started in her stomach and forced its way out through her mouth and eyes. She cried helplessly for a while. The lives of her family, maybe even the whole world, were depending on her, and she didn’t have a clue how to do it. Every physicist who had studied the varcolac the first time was dead. Her father, his colleague Brian Vanderhall… and one more.
There had been another person involved, Vanderhall’s partner in science and in crime. And she was still alive.
When Sandra came upstairs, she found her sister lying on her old bed, staring at the ceiling. Sandra collapsed on the other bed and let out a breath. It felt surreal to be lying there together, in their old room, as if it was fifteen years earlier and they still lived there, sleeping in the same room and sharing each other’s clothes.
They lay there in silence for a long while, alone with their thoughts. Finally, Sandra said, “Why are we still alive?”
“What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“That thing destroyed the entire baseball stadium. If it can do that, why didn’t it just snap its fingers and kill the lot of us? Or destroy the whole funeral parlor?”