Supersymmetry (19 page)

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

A
lex 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?”

Alex considered this. “It's not all-powerful,” she said. “We don't know what it's capable of, so we tend to treat it like it's omnipotent. We think it must have been easy for it to destroy the stadium, but it might not have been. It may have required a lot of energy that wasn't easy to collect, or else it took advantage of a particular opportunity that it can't always duplicate. We don't know its limitations, but it must have them. The important thing is that we find out what they are.”

Sandra nodded, but it was all just speculation. How could they ever know the varcolac's limitations? Finally, she voiced the issue that was troubling her the most. “I died back there,” she said. “A copy of me. When the varcolac attacked, I tried to teleport, and I split into two. Part of me got away. But it killed the other one.”

“I saw that,” Alex said. “But it was the copy that died. Not you.”

“The copy
is
me,” Sandra said. “She didn't live very long, but she was me. She and I could just as easily have been swapped, and it would be her lying here with you, and me lying dead on the floor.”

“You can't think that way,” Alex said. “The copy was someone else, just like
I'm
someone else. Just be glad you're not the one who's dead.”

Sandra frowned. The copy's body had disappeared shortly after it died, but she couldn't dismiss it so easily. She wanted to forget it had ever existed, but the memory of it haunted her. That version of her had tried in vain to teleport, fumbling with the interface, and had died where she stood, feeling the varcolac's energy rush into her and stop her heart. Had she felt pain? Did she know she was dying? Did she realize that another version of herself had survived? If so, it would be scant comfort. Maybe Alex was right, and that other person didn't matter, but it didn't seem that way to Sandra.

“Is that how you feel about me?” Sandra asked quietly.

Alex had opened her bedside table and was rummaging through its contents: magazines and gaudy teenage jewelry and half-finished crafts. “What?”

“If I died, would you dismiss me as easily? Just a copy of yourself gone bad?”

Alex looked up. “Of course not. Sandra, you have a life separate from me. You're a person in your own right. That copy was never its own person, not really. Forget about it.”

A person in her own right. There was an achievement. “Nice,” Sandra said.

“What are you upset about?”

“Nothing.”

“No,” Alex said. “You're angry, and I want to know why.”

“Why? You think I should be dancing with joy that you deign to consider me a real person?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Does it even occur to you that
I
may have some claim to be Alessandra Kelley? That just because you're the one who followed in Dad's footsteps doesn't make me the unnatural clone?”

The words rang in the small room as the two sisters stared at each other. “All the time,” Alex said.

The silence stretched.

“Well, then, what now?” Sandra said. “If we're just supposed to move on with our lives, what do we do? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your little duplication trick didn't actually kill the varcolac. Which means it'll be back.”

Alex waited a moment before answering, but then she seemed to shake herself. “The first thing we need to do is copy the Higgs projector interface over to Mom and Claire.”

“Why? You expect them to fight?”

“No. But the varcolac possessed three people in the funeral home, all of whom are now dead. If its goal is to kill you and me, then why didn't it just possess
us
?”

“Because the Higgs projector package protects us?” Sandra asked.

“That's what I think. Regardless, I want them to have it, and I want them to know how to use it.”

“Shouldn't we tell Ryan what happened?”

Alex's expression soured. “I don't know how far we can trust him.”

“I didn't trust him in the first place,” Sandra said. “What has he done recently?”

“He knew the varcolac was going to attack,” Alex said. “He called and warned me.”

“He
warned
you?”

“Yeah, like five seconds before it showed up and started killing people. He knew it was there, and he knew what it was doing, but he didn't come and help. He didn't fight with us.”

“Maybe he was trying to stop it from where he was, in the lab,” Sandra said.

“Or maybe he was helping it.”

“What? Why would he do that?”

Alex shook her head. “I don't know. But you should have heard him. He was talking really weird. All about how amazing and smart the varcolac is. Like he admired it.”

“But Ryan's the one who knows the most about it,” Sandra objected. “He's the only one who knows how to contain it. We have to work with him.”

“Maybe,” Alex said. She looked pensive.

“What do you mean? Who else is there?”

“What we need is another physicist. Someone with experience building a Higgs projector. Someone who understands splitting and has experience with trying to make changes backward in time. Someone who might be able to understand the varcolac and what it wants.”

Sandra shook her head. “There's no such person. Dad is gone. He's not coming back.”

“Not Dad. Someone like him.”

“You mean Ryan's lab assistant? Nicole something?”

“No way. I'm not sure how much she knows, but regardless, I don't think she'll be inclined to help us.”

“Then who? Nobody besides Dad and Ryan has any experience with . . . oh.” It hit her. “You mean Jean Massey.”

Alex nodded slowly.

“But Jean's in prison. A lifetime sentence for murdering her colleague and trying to murder her own baby girl.”

“Doesn't mean I can't visit her,” Alex said.

Sandra considered that. Jean Massey was, to a large extent, the reason that she and Alex were different people and her father was now dead. It had been Brian Vanderhall who had first discovered the Higgs projector, and through it, the varcolac, but Jean had been his partner. According to her, it had been mostly his work that had accomplished it. She had killed him, however, sparking a sequence of events that resulted in their father being arrested and tried for the murder, while Sandra and Claire and Sean and their mother were kidnapped and nearly killed by the varcolac.

If not for Jean, their father would still be alive. If not for Jean, however, Alessandra would never have split, and either Sandra or Alex would never have existed. Though she supposed neither of them would have existed, when it came down to it. Alessandra would have, but she would have never heard of a varcolac, and her life would have been very different. Sandra sighed. Did other people have so much trouble defining their own selves? She couldn't even say with certainty that she was the same person she had been five minutes ago. Who exactly was Sandra Kelley?

“I guess it doesn't hurt to talk,” she said. “But Alex, you can't go. Every policeman and federal agent in the state is looking for you.”

“But they're not looking for you. I'll take your ID and call myself Sandra.”

Sandra frowned. “It'll raise red flags. They'll want to know why I was there.”

“So? Is it a crime to visit someone in prison?”

“They think you and Dad were part of a conspiracy. They'll think I'm part of it, too.”

Alex raised her hands and then let them drop. “I don't believe this. You're still trying to preserve your reputation here? What part of ‘a creature from another universe is trying to kill us' are you not understanding here?”

Sandra felt a flush rise to her cheeks. She wasn't being selfish; she was trying to be practical. “Fine,” she said. “Do what you want.”

“Excellent,” Alex said. “I'll go first thing tomorrow.”