Superposition (14 page)

She couldn't help herself. “And what?”

“Turn him over to the police, probably. Or maybe kill him; I don't know. It depends. But I wouldn't leave it alone. I wouldn't say, hey, it doesn't matter, these things just happen. I'd do something about it.”

“I'm fourteen years old!”

Colin crossed his fingers on his lap. “I killed a person for the first time when I was fourteen.”

She gaped at him. I gaped, too. I had never heard that before. Was it true? Or was he saying it just to get a reaction?

“You did not,” Alessandra said.

“I did.” Colin smiled sadly. “It was a terrible thing. But you listen to me.” His smile disappeared and he bored into her with his clear, blue eyes. “You're only a victim if you believe you are. You can do anything at fourteen.”

“What do you know?” she screamed at him. She lashed out with her feet, kicking him in the side. “Shut up, just shut up!”

“I know that you can tell your father what you saw. I know you can remember every detail of how this creature moved and reacted. You know what it said, or what it seemed to be after, or what it could do and couldn't do, and you can tell your father, and he can figure out what this thing is and how to stop it before it kills again. I know you can do that.”

She stood, shaking with rage, her lower lip trembling. “How do you know? You don't know me.”

“Because you're a fighter. Unlike your sister Claire, who had everything she ever wanted, you had to make your own place. You fight, just like your father, just like me. I know. I can see it in your eyes. So tell us what happened.”

“I ran,” she said, her voice on the edge of tears. “I ran away and left them all, okay? They needed me, and all I thought about was myself.” She bit her bottom lip.

“Keep going,” Colin said. “Why did you run? What did you see? You can tell us.”

“I can do better than that,” she said. She yanked her phone from her pocket and hurled it at me. I caught it, by reflex, before it hit me in the face. “It's all there,” she said, and began to cry. “Everything.”

To my surprise, Colin had a pair of eyejack lenses, which he popped out and washed and let me borrow. I wasn't used to them, and they made my eyes water, but with some copious blinking I could stand to look around. After a few more minutes of fiddling, I even managed to get them synched to Alessandra's phone, and a menu appeared in thin air, like a scroll unrolling two feet in front of me and hovering there. I turned, and the menu moved as well, a bit disconcertingly, since there was no other indication that it wasn't a real, physical object. I reached out, almost expecting to feel real paper, but my hand passed through it.

“It's a bit easier if you sit down,” Colin advised.

I did so, and only then realized how dizzy I was. Besides keeping teenagers connected to their friends, this technology was frequently used in business circles for virtual meetings that appeared to be face-to-face. The lenses might project the image of a coworker or customer into an empty chair at my table, as if he had come to visit, when in fact he was in San Francisco or Seoul or Jakarta. I actually had a pair of lenses at home that had come with my phone, but I had only tried them once before. I found the experience of seeing something that wasn't there a bit unnerving.

With a little practice, I could navigate the menu by centering my focus on a selection and blinking, though I had a tendency to blink unintentionally and choose the wrong option. I accessed the history of what Alessandra had seen—there were quite a large number of files available, but she kept them well organized, and I cycled through the video until I found the time in question. At first, it started playing in a two-dimensional rectangle about two feet in front of me, as if I were watching the stream. I selected full-screen mode instead, and I was suddenly immersed.

I was back in my house, in the living room, looking at a fashion magazine. It wasn't like watching a movie on the stream. The picture flicked around as Alessandra moved her eyes. My instinct was to turn my head and look around, but of course, that did nothing but make me feel lightheaded. What was recorded was only what Alessandra herself had seen. I couldn't change the viewing angle. Colin fitted earbuds into my ears, and I could hear as well.

“Alessandra! Put that down, and go tell your sister and brother to come get their shoes and coats on.” It was Elena's voice.

The view changed as Alessandra looked up, and there was Elena, vibrant and beautiful and alive. She was just pulling the brown suede coat on over her green sweater. Her forehead was tight with worry and stress. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand, to whisk her away from there and protect her this time. A hard ball formed in my throat and my eyes stung. I coughed violently and shook my head to clear it.

“Where are we going?” Alessandra asked.

“You know that man who was here last night? The police just called and said they found him dead at the NJSC.”

“Wow, like he was murdered?”

“That's what they say,” Elena said tightly.

“Is that why the police called? To find Dad?”

“Yes, now please! Go get Claire and Sean.”

“Why do I have to come?” Alessandra asked.

“Because I'm not leaving you here when I don't know what will happen, or how long I'll be. We should stay together.”

“Why don't you just call him?”

“I have been calling, but he hasn't picked up. I called the NJSC, and they don't know where he is either. I don't want to sit here wondering. We're going.”

“Are they going to arrest Dad?” Alessandra asked. “Did Dad kill the man?”

“Alessandra!”

“Well, did he?”

“Of course not,” Elena said. She grabbed her purse from the easy chair and rummaged through it. Now go get Claire and Sean and tell them to meet me in the car.” Elena took out her keys, swung the purse over her shoulder, and turned the handle to the front door. I wanted to shout, to warn her, but of course, she couldn't hear me. I wasn't really there. I watched mutely as she swung the door open. The varcolac was standing there.

Elena had never been one to scream. She stepped back and tried to shut the door again, but the varcolac walked through it as if it were air. It was followed by lighter, more shadowy versions of itself, like the interference pattern we had seen before, but these quickly merged into the one figure.

“Alessandra, call 911,” Elena said in a sharp voice, which she kept admirably under control. “Right now.”

The perspective changed as Alessandra jumped to her feet. An option scroll sprang into view in her vision. Much more rapidly than I could have done, she manipulated the options to control her phone and dialed the emergency number.

Elena took another step back. “Leave this house, or I'll call my husband.”

The varcolac cocked its head, reached out, and put its hand through Elena's chest. It didn't break the skin; it just passed right through, like it had with the door. For a split second, she gasped, and her eyes flew wide, then her face crumpled and she collapsed. Alessandra screamed. I shouted and stood up, nearly stumbling over the chair. I felt Colin steadying me.

The varcolac leaned over Elena and peered at her, sniffing. Alessandra screamed again, and the varcolac looked at her, swiveling its head as quick as a bird. She ran, stumbling, into the kitchen, around the table, and out the back door. With one backward glance to make sure he wasn't following her, she crossed the back yard and climbed over the neighbor's fence. I kept expecting her to turn around, to go back to the house. I figured the varcolac must have gone upstairs to kill Claire and Sean, and then Alessandra went back and saw my car and went inside, and that's when the varcolac got hold of her. But it didn't happen. She kept running through the streets and crying until she saw Marek run along beside her, and then I pulled up in my car and they both climbed inside.

The dizziness was getting to me. I blinked the display off, pushed past Colin, and ran to the bathroom, just in time to throw up in the toilet. I'd barely eaten all day, so it wasn't much, but it made my throat burn. I realized I was shaking.

Colin came up behind me and helped me to my feet. He found paper towels under the sink and let me wipe and wash out my mouth before leading me back into the basement room. Alessandra was lying on her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

“Now you know,” she said bitterly. “I ran away and left them all to die.”

“You couldn't have saved them,” I said. “You were right to run. But I need to know something: did you go back to the house at all?”

She glanced at me, suspicious. “You know I didn't. I saw Mom fall, and I ran. I didn't know if she was dead or what; I just ran away.”

“I saw you, in the house. After Marek and I found Claire and Sean, we went back downstairs and saw you.” I looked to Marek for confirmation, and he nodded.

“That's true,” he said. “You were there.”

She sat up. “Alive?”

I nodded. “Alive. The thing that killed Mom had a hold of you, and I distracted it, and you ran away.”

Colin looked more worried now than he had since we arrived. “And did you see that just now? When you watched the recording?”

I shook my head. “No. And that wasn't the only strange thing. Alessandra, tell me—are you right-handed or left-handed?”

She looked at me like I'd gone mad, and I didn't blame her. “I'm right-handed, as you well know.”

“Raise your right hand.”

“What's wrong with you?”

“Please, Alessandra. Just do it. Raise your right hand.”

Slowly, skeptically, she raised her left hand.

“You're not messing with me now, right? That's your right hand?”

Colin intervened. “What are you doing, Jacob?”

“Everyone, raise your right hand,” I said. The four of us were in a circle now, the three men standing, and Alessandra sitting on the bed.

Marek and Colin and I raised our right hands. Alessandra raised her
left.

We all looked at each other.

“What's going on here?” Colin asked.

“The rest of the family,” I said, hardly able to keep my voice under control. “Elena and Claire and Sean. They might still be alive.”

We talked around the events of the day for hours, but came to no real resolution. Alessandra fell asleep on the bed with the old, blue-green blanket wrapped around her.

“One of you must be mistaken,” Colin said. “She couldn't have both come back to the house and
not
come back to the house. Either the two of you didn't see what you thought you saw, or she's blocking the experience from her memory.”

“The recording backs up her story,” Marek pointed out.

“True,” I said. “But maybe you're wrong. Maybe she could do both.”

Colin's raised eyebrow showed what he thought about that suggestion. “Let's keep our considerations to the physically possible, okay?”

I couldn't resist the shot. “Funny to hear you say that, of all people.”

“Just because I believe in the miraculous doesn't mean—”

I waved away his explanation. “This
is
physically possible. We've already seen that the man with no eyes exhibits quantum probability waves. What if Alessandra was caught up in that probability wave? What if she briefly experienced superposition, like a subatomic particle, and existed as a set of possibilities, rather than a single reality? She was terrified, but at the same time she wanted to protect her siblings. She both ran away and she stayed, both at once. Both of those possibilities were in evidence.”

Colin looked at me skeptically over his glasses. “In evidence. You're telling me there were two Alessandras running around your house and neighborhood.”

“Not two girls, exactly,” I said. “Two possibilities, momentarily unresolved. We say an electron orbits an atomic nucleus, like the Earth around the sun, but it doesn't really. It's part of a waveform, a probabilistic cloud that exists at every point around the nucleus at the same time, with some probability. Similarly, a particle can have an up spin or a down spin, but until it resolves, it has both—it's in quantum space, spinning both ways at once. For Alessandra, I think the wave resolved once I picked her up in the car, or maybe slightly before that. The two versions didn't deviate all that much.”