When You and I Collide

by Kate Norris

  Or so they thought.

  There was a loud crack, and electricity arced up to kiss the metal cage enclosing one of the overhead lights. They were plunged into darkness.

  “What’s happening?” called Beta.

  For the first moment, Winnie’s complete panic felt like a delicious success. But this wasn’t part of their plan. She was no longer playacting fear to prep her body for its work. Their experiment had gone off the rails. It was in danger of failing completely.

  “Damn!” Scott hissed. Winnie couldn’t see him—she couldn’t see anything—but she heard him take a few deep breaths.

  “I can’t read the electrometer now,” Scott said, “so we’ll just wait it out. Let’s give it thirty minutes or so. The charge should dissipate long before then. We’ll rebuild the generator, try again another time—”

  “No,” Winnie said. She was still panting. She couldn’t seem to stop. The panic was still in her. Her heart felt shivery, her whole chest tight. The current on the Faraday cage had gotten its chance to discharge, but she hadn’t.

  The day before had brought James’s death. Her being there was messing with gravity, changing the tides, and then that morning she had caused a complete disruption of time. What more would go wrong if they waited? She couldn’t risk it.

  “It’s safe enough. I’m coming out. I’m trying now.”

  “No,” Scott yelled. “Absolutely not. You could still get shocked!”

  Yes, she could, but the chance was small. It was unlikely there was enough electricity remaining in the atmosphere to seriously hurt her, and in any case, the thought of being electrocuted wasn’t as frightening as the thought of their experiment being a total failure without her even trying to get home at all.

  She pushed open the door.

  “Winnie, stop! Get back in the cage!”

  She ignored Scott and took a few careful steps forward.

  “It could still work! I’m just going to check the electrometer, then try to transport.”

  The darkness was still inky and oppressive around her, feeling like a physical barrier, rather than just the absence of light. But her eyes were slowly adjusting.

  She took a few ginger steps toward the electrometer. She needed to know how much current there was in the atmosphere. If this didn’t work, that data would be essential to plan their next experiment.

  “Dammit, Winnie! What are you doing?”

  “Just stay where you are,” she said, her voice sounding loud in the dark. She was confident enough that it was safe to risk herself, but not confident enough to risk Scott. Again.

  She moved slowly, sweeping her arm ahead of her, hoping to make contact with the electrometer—but gently. If she knocked it over, it would shatter, and that would be the end of that.

  A few more steps, and her fingers brushed the glass of the Leyden jar. She leaned close. Her eyes would adjust, and she would be able to read—

  Her knuckle bumped one of the metal plates she had so carefully sanded during the tedious construction of the thing. Static electricity sparked blue, bright enough for her to see the Leyden jar shatter. Winnie jerked back, the pain of the static shock sharp in her hand, like what she imagined a snakebite must feel like.

  These weren’t the conditions they had planned for. Winnie no longer felt the panic their experiment called for, just the irrational anger of sudden pain. And with the electrometer broken, she had no idea if there was still an atmospheric charge left after the discharge of her shock. Still, she had to try.

  Winnie closed her eyes, and wished for home, for Scott. She tried to feel around inside herself for whatever it was that had allowed her to travel the first time, but—nothing.

  It was like trying to wiggle her ears—she knew it was possible, because some people could. But she simply couldn’t do it. She tried and there was nothing there.

  Was the premise of their experiment wrong? Or did her attempt fail because they had messed up the conditions? It was impossible to know for sure.

  Whatever the cause, one thing was clear: They had failed.

  All their equipment was destroyed, and her hope along with it.

  Compared to the disappointment, the pain in her hand was nothing.

  “What’s happened?” Beta called. “Winnie, are you okay?”

  Scott rushed for the gym doors.

  “Don’t touch the metal,” Winnie said, her voice sounding hollow in her own ears.

  He kicked the door open, letting in a bit of moonlight from the hall windows. Now that they could see, Dora picked up the flashlight from the ground a few feet away from her and turned it on.

  “Winnie?” Dora called. “Are you all right?”

  The cone of light from her flashlight hit Winnie’s face, and she flinched at the glare.

  Dora gasped. “Your head!”

  Winnie touched a hand to her forehead. It came away sticky with blood that looked black in the pale yellow beam of light. She must have been cut by some flying glass when the electrometer shattered. A little shard of their hard work. One of the shattered pieces of Scott’s chance for survival.

  Dora aimed the beam of her flashlight at the center of the gymnasium, giving Winnie a chance to survey the damage.

  The mascot painted at the center of the basketball court was completely obscured by a scar of charred wood. The circular burn was about ten feet across, surrounding the Faraday cage. If she hadn’t been inside, Winnie was sure she would be dead.

  The generator was still smoking. All of its plastic dials had melted. She turned around to look at the electrometer. Shattered glass and twisted shards of metal were all that remained.

  “I suppose I can tell Martha not to worry about having my athletic clothes washed for tomorrow’s gym class,” Dora said faintly. She was trying to sound plucky, but her shaky voice betrayed reverberations from the shock of it all.

  The way ears ring after a deafening noise, and everything sounds muted and far off—that was how Winnie felt. Not with her hearing, but with all of her. Her mind was deadened with the disappointment of their spectacular failure.

  It felt like losing Scott all over again.

  They would try again. She wouldn’t stop trying. But what if they just kept failing? And what if the effects of her being in their world kept getting worse? How much time did she really have?

  The cut on her head bled freely now. It hurt, and she was as nauseated as if she hadn’t just lost a fair amount of blood, but swallowed it.

  She stumbled over to Scott. His expression was completely shut down. Scott was still living in that moment between seeing the deep cut and feeling the searing pain that would follow—Winnie knew the signs.

  When she met Scott’s eyes, it was like he was just noticing that she was there. He didn’t look pleased.

  “Winnie, how could you? James—that was yesterday. You think I could stand to watch you die today?”

  It was her life to risk, Winnie thought ferociously—but underneath, she knew that wasn’t fully true. If he had done something similarly half-cocked and dangerous, she would have wanted to throttle him.

  Winnie squeezed her eyes closed and kept them shut for a long moment. When she opened them, she saw her double standing there behind Scott, frowning at her.

  “I’m sorr—” Winnie began to say, then fell silent in shock. A wound began to open itself on Beta’s forehead, like her skin was being cut into by an invisible knife. Winnie didn’t have to look in a mirror to know that this laceration was identical to her own.

  “Scott,” Winnie said shakily, “Scott, look.”

  He did, and his face went paper-white at the sight of Beta.

  “Oh my god,” Dora whispered.

  Beta looked scared, but she had yet to realize what had happened. “What? What are you two staring at?”

  Beta put her fingers to her tem
ple then, and held them in front of her face in fascination, as if the blood on them were someone else’s. “Oh,” she said, and her knees began to buckle. Scott had an arm around her in a moment to keep her from falling.

  Dora hurried over to the locker room with her flashlight and was back in a flash with a clean washcloth. She pressed it to Beta’s wound.

  “Hold it here,” Dora said. “Tight.”

  “What are we going to do?” Beta said, almost wailing.

  “Shh,” Scott murmured. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Her double folded in on herself and gave a hopeless sob. It was obvious that all that had allowed Beta to cope with the situation was that it would soon be over—but without that hope? Well, Winnie felt the awful weight in her own chest—a twin despair.

  Winnie’s own wooziness finally took hold, but no one was there to catch her. She stumbled down on one knee, pressing her bloody palm to the floor to catch herself before she fell completely. Dora and Scott were too busy examining Beta’s forehead to even notice that Winnie had collapsed. She pushed herself back up and stumbled over to the bleachers, where she sank down to sit on the hard wood.

  Scott pulled a clean handkerchief out of his breast pocket and knotted it tight around Beta’s head. “I’ll take care of Winnie,” Scott said to Dora. “Get her home,” he added, jutting his chin in Winnie’s direction, tone clipped. “Tell your housekeeper she fell. She can help you get her scrapes cleaned up. Maybe she’ll want to call for a doctor, but I don’t think it needs stitches.”

  It shouldn’t hurt so bad, having him angry with her. He wasn’t the real Scott, she reminded herself. She had, what, a week of shared history with this person? He was a stranger. They were all strangers. Even Beta. Especially Beta! Beta, who made Winnie a stranger to herself.

  “Let’s go,” Dora said softly.

  Scott didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t say anything to her, just bent over and began picking up the pieces of their ruined electrometer.

  Winnie didn’t know why he bothered. It wasn’t like there was anything salvageable.

  Dora took Winnie’s arm and gently pulled her into the hall.

  But Winnie was still able to hear her double moan, “We have to get rid of her, Scott. We have to get rid of her.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning, Dora nudged Winnie long before she was ready to wake. It took a moment for her consciousness to claw itself out of an unpleasant dream that immediately faded to nothing more than a vague impression of fear, needles, and James.

  “What?” she asked groggily, glancing at Dora’s alarm clock—6:45. They hadn’t gotten in until after 3 a.m., and then they’d had to wake Louisa to look at Winnie’s head, claiming she’d tripped carrying a glass of water back to Dora’s room. Winnie would be surprised if she’d gotten two hours of uninterrupted sleep. “What is it?”

  “School is canceled,” Dora said. “We just got the call. I thought you would want to know.”

  Winnie’s stomach sank. She’d hoped the mess they left in the gymnasium would pass as a failed prank, but they wouldn’t close the school if they thought it was just schoolgirl shenanigans.

  Winnie rubbed her temples. What was done was done. They couldn’t change things now.

  “All right,” Winnie said. “I’m going to try to get some more sleep.”

  She rolled over, putting pressure on the cut on the side of her forehead. Tired as she was, it was a long time before she was able to fall back asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Winnie awoke again hours later to a brisk knock on the door. Louisa entered the room carrying a pale pink Bakelite phone on a shiny tray. Its long cord trailed off out the bedroom door.

  “There’s a call for you,” she told Dora, setting the tray down on the bedside table.

  Dora nodded mutely, and Louisa left the two of them alone again.

  “Who do you think it is?” Winnie hissed.

  “Maybe Mother, or Father?” Dora suggested uncertainly. “Maybe it has nothing to do with what happened.” She lifted the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

  Winnie’s eyes were trained intently on Dora’s face, and she was surprised to see a flicker of irritation come and go.

  “Winnie,” Dora said, “you can’t call here! You are here! Louisa knows your voice.”

  Winnie scooted closer to Dora on the bed, and Dora held the telephone out between them so she could hear too.

  “I pretended to be Lucille. I had to call—some policemen came by the house, the same ones we saw taking Winnie and Scott to the morgue. They had Daddy come home from work and they interviewed us together. They asked about James—no surprise there—but they also asked if we knew about what happened at school.”

  “What!” Winnie gasped. “How did they link that to you so quickly?”

  That damn Muldoon had been suspicious of her from the start. But even so, it seemed unlikely that the police would connect the dots to her. Only Hawthorn would recognize the damage they’d left behind as a failed experiment.

  “I don’t know, but they seemed fairly certain a girl was there at the school when the explosion happened. They wanted to take my fingerprints, for some reason. Daddy wouldn’t let them.”

  Winnie remembered falling on the gym floor, leaving a bloody palm print—a handprint that would be easily identified as belonging to a young woman just by the size, but the fingerprints would identify it as hers. Well, hers or Beta’s.

  “Scheiße!” Winnie cursed in German.

  The police could have no idea what was really going on, of course—which, if anything, made them more dangerous. She thought about the facts of the case, as they would see it. A scientist—Beta’s father—working on a military project. A dead student, best friend of his daughter’s boyfriend, also part of the project. An explosion at this daughter’s school, with a young woman present. A random jumble of evidence until you throw in this: the Schuldes—they’re German. Now all this pandemonium coalesces, and a single cause emerges.

  Espionage.

  Suddenly, it’s clear that the Schuldes must be German spies. They integrated themselves into a government project to steal American technology for the enemy. That student? He died because he knew too much—collateral damage.

  Winnie let out a breath.

  Even though there wasn’t any truth to it, she knew far less evidence was required to make such charges those days.

  That August, less than three months earlier, there had been a mass execution of German enemy agents. The six men had not carried out any sabotage, but they had intended to—or so the military tribunal claimed.

  The details of the case had stuck with Winnie, for obvious reasons. The youngest of them had been only twenty-two, and a US citizen since the age of ten. He’d been abroad when Hitler declared war on the United States and wound up stranded in Europe. He claimed he’d only cooperated with the Germans as a way of getting home. When Winnie saw his mugshot in the newspaper, she couldn’t believe how normal he looked—handsome even—and scared.

  “That’s not all,” Beta said. “There was some other kind of accident last night, apparently. They asked if I knew about it, but wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “What do you mean? They thought you might be involved with something other than what happened at school?”

  “I guess so.”

  What could it have been?

  And was it possible that they were to blame for something else, something they didn’t even know about?

  Well, no, not “they.”

  Her.

  “So, what are we going to do?” Dora asked. She spoke the question into the receiver, but she was looking at Winnie.

  Winnie had no answer. What were they going to do? What could they do? Their plan had failed; their equipment was destroyed; police detectives were on their trail,
closing in, and Hawthorn couldn’t be far behind.

  “I don’t know,” Winnie said, but her own uncertain words were lost beneath her double’s confident reply.

  “Winnie and I are going to restage last night’s experiment tomorrow. Here, in Father’s lab. He has the equipment,” Beta said. “We can do it. Just she and I.”

  Winnie was surprised her double was willing to try again. The way Beta’s forehead had just split open like that . . . thinking about it made Winnie sick to her stomach. Would something worse happen to the two of them the next time they were together? But the physical effects of Winnie’s presence in their world were intensifying too. It was dangerous not to try.

  “Scott won’t like it,” Winnie said finally. “What if we get too close to each other, and something goes wrong?”

  “That’s why we aren’t going to tell him. He would just tell us not to. But nothing is riskier than you staying here. And what about your own Scott—you haven’t given up on him, have you?”

  “Of course not!” Winnie said.

  “We don’t have a choice. We have to try.”

  And for once, Winnie had to agree.

  * * *

  • • •

  Winnie should have realized McPherson and Muldoon would come for Dora next.

  That afternoon there was a loud knock on the door, audible even in Dora’s bedroom. How was it that just a knock could convey so much authority?

  “Mr. and Mrs. Vandorf aren’t home at the moment,” Winnie heard Louisa say firmly. “You’ll have to come—hey, you can’t just barge in here!”

  There was the bass rumble of one of the detective’s voices, but she couldn’t make out the words. Winnie grabbed Dora’s hand tight in her own. The two girls looked at each other, but neither said a word. Fear had pushed Winnie beyond the ability to speak.

  Whatever the detective said, it must have mollified Louisa, because she said, “Here, I’ll take your coats. Have a seat in the drawing room, and I’ll go get her.”

  Louisa opened the door without pausing to knock.

  “There are detectives here,” she said quietly. “They want to speak to you, Dora. I told them your parents aren’t here, but they insisted. Should I ring for Mr. Rockford? You should have someone here, but Dora, please tell me you don’t actually need an attorney.”