by Kate Norris
Winnie raised her eyebrows. He said all this so casually! “A leash? Like for a dog?”
“A bit of advice, my dear. If you choose the most unpleasant interpretation of everything, life will be—well, unpleasant.”
Winnie narrowed her eyes. “Unpleasant? Was that how things were for your mother? You used her body to make your serum—and it didn’t even work!”
She had been prepared for this to make Hawthorn angry—she wanted him angry, to at least get some little dig in, if she could do nothing else—but all expression left his face. Those chilly eyes, blank . . . they were terrifying. She almost regretted her words.
“Is that really how you want to do this, Ms. Schulde?” Hawthorn asked, voice flat. He looked away and shook his head. “I can’t believe he told you that,” he muttered, as if James had been the one who wronged him!
“All right,” Hawthorn continued, “you want to have control? You’ve got it. Cooperate with me, or Scott goes to prison for James’s death. It’s up to you.”
Scott shook his head and grabbed her hand tight in his own. “No, Winnie. You’re not going to be some sort of sacrificial lamb. I don’t want that. Not for me. I couldn’t live with myself.”
He was well-intentioned, but this was no better than when he lied to her to convince her to go along with his plans.
Winnie was tired of being manipulated.
She would do this her own way.
“I’ll go with you,” Winnie told Hawthorn. “I’m not going to fight.”
She was going to flee.
There was only one reason for Hawthorn to be intent on keeping her in a Faraday cage instead of just locking her in a room. He must know that she could escape their world at any time, as long as she had access to some electricity.
And she did—if she could get to it.
She grabbed Scott’s arm. “It’s okay,” she said, and traced a spiral on the inside of his wrist with her thumb.
The cyclotron.
A spiral was how the mechanism was represented in diagrams. She had to hope he understood what she meant, because if she was going to get away from Hawthorn, she would need his help.
The cyclotron was in the basement, right below them. Winnie just needed to get down the hall, down the stairs, and it would be there, waiting for her. But if she was going to make a sudden break for it, she would need to convince Hawthorn he had already won, so he would let his guard down.
He didn’t seem to think girls were capable of much. That gave her an advantage.
Winnie met Scott’s eyes. His were bright with fear. She was sure hers must be too.
But she could do this. She knew she could.
“I can’t do it, Scott,” she murmured. “I can’t keep getting people hurt.” She glanced over at Hawthorn. “He’s a powerful man. He’ll make you suffer. And if I can save James too . . .”
Winnie squared her shoulders. She wanted to seem brave but resigned.
“Show me to the Faraday cage. I’ll do anything you ask if you promise not to hurt Scott or get him in trouble.”
“Gladly.”
“Say it.”
Hawthorn rolled his eyes, but in a jolly, amused sort of way. “I promise.”
Winnie was satisfied. She wanted him to see her that way—like a silly girl who accepted pinkie promises from murderers.
Hawthorn began guiding her down the hall, arm in arm, like a kindly chaperone.
“Keep back,” he warned Scott, who trailed helplessly behind them, seemingly at a loss for what he could possibly do now, but obviously unable to just leave.
“Could you tell me more about your mother?” Winnie asked, half to keep him distracted and half out of sheer curiosity.
“My mother? She was a mystic,” he said, voice dripping with contempt. “Completely uninterested in quantum matters, electromagnetic forces—the true source of her ability. Instead, she collected crystals and other poppycock. Called her gift the ‘divine feminine.’ She laughed at me for wanting to quantify and classify such things. Well, she wasn’t laughing in the end.”
Ah. Hawthorn’s Faraday cage—built with every “comfort” in mind—had housed a previous occupant.
“Some people,” Winnie said, shaking her head. “They refuse to see what’s right in front of them.”
Hawthorn released her arm to fumble in his pocket for the keys, then unlocked the door to his private lab.
“Scott, get the door,” Winnie said, trying to sound ever-so-slightly put out by his “thoughtlessness” at not holding the door for them already.
Hawthorn was a man accustomed to being attended to. This didn’t strike him as odd.
Scott grabbed the heavy wooden door to hold it open for the two of them.
Winnie quickly slid backward and shoved Hawthorn as hard as she could, pushing him through the doorway into his lab. Then Scott slammed the door shut behind him.
Hawthorn roared like an animal. The door had one small window of wire-reinforced glass, up above the handle. She could see him there, pushing at the door and fuming. His angry breath fogged the glass.
Hawthorn fixed his ice-blue eyes on her own. “You’ll wish you were dead.”
If he caught her? She didn’t doubt it.
Winnie looked up and down the dimly lit hall frantically, searching for something to block the door.
Scott was braced against the door as Hawthorn slammed his body against it from the inside. He managed to shove it forward a few inches and snaked his fingers through the gap, only to have them get smashed with a sick crunch when Winnie helped Scott push it shut. He howled and jerked his hand back.
There were no heavy objects in the hallway just waiting to be part of a blockade.
“Should I—” Winnie began, then said, “Wait—Scott, give me your belt!”
His hands grasped the door handle, and his shoulder was braced against the wood.
“Better take it yourself.”
Winnie felt her cheeks flame hot, but there was no time to waste. She grabbed for the buckle, unfastened it, and pulled the belt free of the loops on his trousers with one sharp yank.
There was a fire extinguisher set in the wall near the door, locked in a glass case. She looped the belt through the door handle and the little metal handle on the case, then buckled it.
“Winnie, no way will that hold—” Scott began, still braced against the door.
And she could see that he was right. When Hawthorn pushed against the door, the handle of the fire extinguisher case looked ready to break.
“You have to go by yourself,” Scott said. “I’ll stay here and hold the door.”
Winnie couldn’t speak. Her eyes welled with tears. She wasn’t just saying goodbye to this Scott. She was saying goodbye to the idea of saving her own. Goodbye to the idea of ever seeing him again.
And goodbye to Mama.
Scott just looked at her. Tears were in his eyes too, and like her, he seemed to have no idea what to say. He was braced against the door, so he couldn’t even hug her.
Scott wouldn’t be able to hold the door forever. Winnie had stalled long enough.
She still didn’t know if Scott would remember anything. That was out of her control. All she could do now was give them another chance. What they did with it was up to them.
“I love you,” Winnie whispered.
Words she would never get to say to her Scott.
Then she ran.
* * *
• • •
The staircase to the basement was just twenty feet or so away. Winnie flew down the hall, closing the space between Hawthorn’s lab and the staircase in seconds.
The cyclotron was just one flight down.
Winnie clattered down the steps, and then she was in the basement work area. She skidded to a stop next to the cyclotron’s control panel.
Winnie heard glass shattering from the floor above. The window on the door? Had Scott been hurt? Was Hawthorn still trapped?
She would have to be quick. Winnie examined the control panel. She was no stranger to lab equipment, and this seemed straightforward enough. She pulled a large lever, and the massive machine began to click. She hit another button, held it, then flipped a switch, and the cyclotron began to whine.
Inside the machine, a high-frequency oscillator was hurtling charged particles between the poles of an incredibly powerful electromagnet, generating massive amounts of magnetic Lorentz force.
There was some quirk in the makeup of her body’s own particles that answered the call of these forces too. Her stomach fluttered. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to find out if she really could fly.
You’ve done it before, Winnie reminded herself. You did it without even trying.
Winnie remembered that day. How Scott’s body looked crumpled there on the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She loved him so much, and he would never know.
That Scott was gone.
It was awful and it was unfair, but sometimes people died.
The accident that killed him had been just that—an accident.
So had the fall that killed her double . . . but that accident had been the result of the wrongness of her entering this world in the first place. That wrongness was her responsibility to fix.
The conditions were right, thanks to the cyclotron—she could practically taste it, like ions in the air before a thunderstorm—but she still had to harness her own ability to make the leap.
The border between worlds had always been blurred for her, but she couldn’t force her transportation. Brute willpower didn’t work.
That was Father’s way.
Hawthorn’s way.
She had to discover her own.
Winnie searched inside herself for the feeling that accompanied the splinters.
It took only a few seconds for her to find it: a sort of sickness in her stomach paired with an expansiveness in her chest, the nauseous feeling that she was bigger inside than out. She squeezed her eyes tight and focused. She followed that feeling down to its root.
All living things—plants, animals, people—were home to an electric charge. Galvani had dubbed this “animal electricity,” which Mama had mentioned in her lecture that very afternoon. More recently, scientists had termed this living charge “bioelectricity.” It wasn’t unique to Winnie. But what she could do with it was.
Winnie visualized this living current of electricity as a river. It flowed through her. But it was outside her too, much bigger than her, reaching out to connect with the charged atmosphere the cyclotron had created. Those twin rivers—electricity outside herself, and within—they encompassed everything. All matter. All times. Hawthorn’s mother had been right—this was beyond calculation and control.
It was miraculous.
Father had kept her in the Faraday cage during their experiments in an attempt to protect her, but now she realized it had also kept her from accessing this. Winnie was a sort of sailor by birth, and electromagnetic waves were the sea she traveled on. Father must have suspected the importance of these fields—that’s why his experiments used electricity—but he had been too cautious about Winnie getting hurt. His care for her had undermined his own work all these years, Winnie now realized with a pang.
She returned her attention to the river of electricity. It had many, many pathways. It forked, and forked, and forked, an incomprehensibly complex Lichtenberg figure. It gave Winnie vertigo just thinking about trying to count all those paths. She focused on the one nearest to her. It forked into another path, one that pulsed faintly in time to the beat of her own heart. That river in her mind—it represented home, and it called to her.
But she was still tethered to the world she was in. Tied there by fear. Fear that her double’s life was the best one she could ever have, and she was giving it up. Fear that she wouldn’t be able to build a life for herself that she wouldn’t long to leave.
It was her responsibility to try.
There was a wrenching crash from above, then the staccato of footsteps running down the hall. Hawthorn was coming for her.
It had to be now.
In her mind’s eye, Winnie visualized traveling along that home current. She could go forward, along with the flow, or she could go back. She felt for a future spot. “Animal instinct,” Hawthorn would call it. She found a place that felt right.
Then she jumped in.
Winnie didn’t faint this time. She felt the moment of transportation like a stab of cold all over her body, almost unbearable, but over before she could really register the pain. There was resistance—to pull herself forward, she had to push that other world back.
Winnie shoved, and then—all at once—she was free of the current.
She opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor next to the cyclotron in the basement of Pupin Hall.
It was dark. The cyclotron was off, a sleeping behemoth. Hawthorn’s footsteps and shouts were no more.
Winnie was back in her own world. She’d done it.
And now she was alone.
CHAPTER FORTY
Had it worked?
Winnie was home. It had worked for her.
But had it really worked for them?
There was no way to know. She just had to hope it had.
Winnie sat up, then stood. Her body felt heavy and slow. She had been scared for so long, striving for so long, propelled by fear—what now?
Winnie let out a long sigh. She could go to Dora’s. She was sure her friend would be over the moon to see her. Winnie could hide out there. Come up with some plan. Run away. If she was very clever and very lucky, maybe she would never have to face Father.
But running away—that was what she’d been doing when she left their world before. And look how that had turned out.
No. Winnie would go home. She would face Father’s wrath. Father’s questions. After everything she’d been through, surely she could do that. And then, she’d tell him “no more.”
She climbed the stairs up to the first floor of Pupin Hall—but before she could take even a dozen steps down the hallway, she heard the creak of a door opening.
Winnie looked frantically toward the sound, fearing Hawthorn—but the sound had come from farther down the corridor.
A figure stood there, perhaps ten feet away, hidden in shadow. A security guard? The custodian, come to open up the building?
“Winifred?”
It was Father.
“Oh my god. It is you. I heard a crash—it woke me up—mein Gott!”—he shook his head in disbelief—“you came home.”
He ran up to her. Winnie flinched reflexively, but all he did was pull her into a tight embrace. Tears were streaming down his face, but what really surprised her was that his breath didn’t smell of schnapps. What was he doing sleeping in his office if he hadn’t passed out there?
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I thought I might never see you again,” he whispered, tickling the top of her head with his breath. “I’ve been working nonstop,” he said, gesturing vaguely down the hall toward his office, “trying to figure out how to get you back.”
“How long have I been gone?” she asked urgently.
Father frowned in confusion, but he answered without questioning why she asked.
“Sixteen days.”
Oh, thank god! By her count, she’d been gone ten. If what Hawthorn said was true and their timelines were attached, her jump of six days into her own future would have taken them six days into the past, back to a time when Winnie and James were both alive.
Father held her out at arm’s length so he could look down at her, then smiled. “All my work, and I made no
progress. But here you are. You came home yourself,” he said, then frowned. “I’m surprised you would want to, after I—”
“I can’t forgive you,” Winnie said abruptly.
This Father, speaking to her so warmly, just like she’d always wanted—this was a trap the universe had set for her. It tempted her to take the easy route, but she wouldn’t pretend like everything was okay any longer—not even if that meant provoking his anger.
If her sticking up for herself sent him into a rage, well, so be it.
“I know I have a lot to make up to you,” Father said softly. “I’ve had nothing but time to think about all that I’ve done wrong . . . that empty house . . . but I will make it up to you, somehow.” He swallowed nervously. “To you, and to Scott. I’ll do everything I can to earn both of your forgiveness.”
Father begging for forgiveness would have been enough to send her for a loop, but what he was implying about Scott—it was impossible.
Winnie had seen him die. Hadn’t she?
“Wait. Are you saying Scott’s okay?”
Father let out a heavy sigh. For the first time in her life, Winnie noticed there were lines around his eyes. “Oh, Winifred . . . the accident . . . he was seriously injured.” Father’s shoulders sagged. It was the guilt, Winnie realized, that made him look older. “The doctors are hopeful, though,” he said, straining to sound more upbeat. “He’s improving. Every day, he asks for you. He can’t seem to remember you’re gone.” Father frowned grimly. “It will do him good, I think, to see you.”
She couldn’t focus. All this time when she’d been off in another world, messing things up for another set of them, Scott had been here. Waiting. Asking for her.
His body on the floor though—she had been so sure.
And she had been so wrong.
But that didn’t matter now. Scott was here, alive!
“Can I see him?” Winnie asked. “Can we go see Scott right now?”
Heaven help any interloper who tried to take him from her.
“Yes,” Father said, “yes, of course.” He took her in his arms again and pulled her close. “I’ve been so foolish—so tied up in your mother’s loss for all these years that I let myself lose you too. Things will be different now, Winifred, I swear it.”