"I could know she was all right. She could know I was all right, too." Schrb'dinger's mom, he thought. Schrodinger's kid. Just like the cat in the thought experiment, Justin and his mom weren't all right to each other till each one knew the other was all right... or wasn't. Uncertainty gnawed at him.
One thing he didn't say, or even think, was, / could go back to the home timeline. He couldn't. He knew too well he couldn't. There were too many genetically engineered viruses in the home timeline already. No transposition chamber would come to the room deep under Mr. Brooks' shop till somebody found a cure for this one. The quarantine methods the home timeline used were a lot more effective than roadblocks, with or without soldiers. Stuck. The word resounded in his mind. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.
"She'll be the way she is. And you are all right—as long as you don't come down sick." Beckie knocked wood. Justin wondered how old that superstition was. Plenty old enough to be in both this alternate and the home timeline. Older than the breakpoint, then. Thinking about things like that hurt a lot less than thinking about the disease or the war or what a mess this assignment turned out to be.
"I'm not the only one to worry about. You're in as much danger as I am," Justin said.
"Everybody in Elizabeth's in danger," Beckie said, which was bound to be true. She laughed. "If I didn't come with Gran, I could be lying on the beach right now, you know?"
"Sorry about that," Justin said.
"You want a fizz?" she asked.
"Sure," Justin said. They walked into the kitchen together. Before she opened the refrigerator, he put his arm around her. She gave him a surprised look—but not too surprised. "Thanks for listening to me," he told her. "Thank for putting up with me, you know?"
"No problem," she said. "It works both ways, believe me." She squeezed him for a second. Then she slipped away. "Fizzes."
He drank his in a hurry. It wasn't just like anything in the home timeline, but it was sweet and cold. It even had caffeine in it. What more could you want? He wondered if he should try something more with Beckie. Something about the set of her mouth told him it wouldn't be a good idea right this minute.
Then her grandmother walked into the kitchen. "Oh," she said. "The boy." By the way she eyed him, he might have been something she'd just cleaned off the floor with a wet paper towel.
"Gran!" Beckie said.
"What?" her grandmother said. "It is him, isn't it?"
Oh, yeah, Justin thought. You stick in the knife and then you try to pretend you didn't mean anything by it. And if he got mad—if he told her where to go and how to get there or even if he showed he was annoyed any way at all—she won. She was a sweet old lady, and he was just a punk kid. The very best he could do in the game was break even, and the only way he could do that was to make believe he didn't notice a thing. Kids had had to do stuff like that since Urk the australopithecine broke an antelope bone over Urk, Junior's, head for making a monkey out of himself when he shouldn't have. Nope, you couldn't win.
Beckie's grandmother took a pear out of the fridge, looked at it, breathed all over it, and then put it back and got out another one. She went away, munching. You chew with your mouth open, too, Justin thought.
Once her grandmother was gone, Beckie sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "She's like that."
"What can you do?" Justin said. "My aunt's a world-class dingbat. People choose their friends. Your family? You're stuck with your family."
"Stuck with." Beckie looked in the direction her grandmother had gone. "Boy, you can say that again. I feel like she's my ball and chain."
"Yeah, well. . ." Justin kind of shrugged. "It's not like you're going anywhere much, not the way things are."
"Tell me about it." Beckie cocked her head to one side, listening. "What's that? That rumble, I mean?"
"Sounds like more trackforts and stuff," Justin answered. "But that's crazy. They pulled out to fight the uprising, and now they're coming back? Why would they do that?" Suddenly he flashed on Mr. Brooks, and he knew just what the older man would say, right down to his tone of voice. "I bet the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing." He sounded cynical enough to alarm himself.
He made Beckie blink, too. But she said, "I bet you're right. Either that or"—she looked scared—"they're soldiers from Ohio instead."
She probably didn't care about Virginia or Ohio. She didn't want to get stuck in the middle of fighting, that was all. Since Justin felt the same way, he couldn't very well argue with her. Even so, he said, "I don't think they're Ohioans. The noise is coming from that way, not that way." He pointed first east, then west.
Beckie listened, then nodded. "It is, isn't it? That's a little better." No, she didn't care about either side. After a couple of seconds, she remembered he was supposed to. "I didn't mean—"
"Don't worry about it," he said. "To somebody from a rich state on the other side of the continent, this whole thing probably looks pretty silly."
"Nothing where you can die from a horrible disease or get blown to pieces looks silly when you're stuck in the middle of it." Beckie spoke with great conviction.
"You hit that nail right on the thumb," Justin said gravely.
Beckie started to nod, then gave him a peculiar look. "You come out with the weirdest stuff sometimes, you know?"
"Thanks," he said. This time, he knew exactly what kind of face she made at him. Before he could say anything more, he heard rising screeches in the air.
"What's that?" Beckie said again.
He didn't answer. He knocked her flat, and threw himself flat, too, even while she was squawking. He was dragging both of them toward the kitchen table—get under something, he told himself—when the first shells went off. Something slammed into the kitchen wall, and all at once the house started leaking air-conditioned air through a hole the size of his head.
"What was that?" Beckie's grandmother called. "Did anything break?"
Justin lost it. There with artillery raining down on Elizabeth, he started laughing like a loon. Half a second later, Beckie was doing the same thing. They clung to each other. Either they were both crazy or they were an island of sanity in a world gone mad. Part of it, probably, was simple fear of death. The rest was proof of just how far out of it Beckie's grandmother really was.
The shelling lasted only a few minutes. It sure seemed like forever while it was going on, though. When it finally stopped, Justin sat up—and banged his head on the underside of the kitchen table. The bombardment hadn't touched him. Banging his head hurt a lot—but only for a little while.
"Wow," he said in place of something stronger, "that was fun."
"Now that you mention it," Beckie said, "no." She wiggled out from under the table without trying to fracture her skull on it. Then she looked at the hole in the kitchen wall and slowly shook her head. When she muttered, "Wow," too, she seemed amazed. "If that hit one of us, or maybe both of us . . ."
"Yeah," Justin said. "I know."
That hole was about a meter—they would say three feet here—off the ground. Beckie looked at it some more. "Thanks for knocking me down," she said. "I didn't know what you were doing for a second, but—thanks. How did you know to do that?"
For that second, she likely thought he was attacking her. Well, he wasn't, not like that. "My uncle's a veteran," he answered. "He says you've got to get fiat if they start shelling. He says a hole in the ground is better, but we didn't have one handy."
"I was trying to dig a hole in the linoleum for a while there." Beckie looked at her hands. So did Justin. She'd broken a couple of fingernails. She wasn't kidding. Justin had wanted to dig a hole and pull it in after himself, too. "Thanks," Beckie said again. She kissed him half on the cheek, half on the mouth.