Supersymmetry (12 page)

Despite that, she had always known he loved her. She would miss him desperately. She would have to call Claire and tell her, and somehow they would have to get the word to Sean in Poland. She imagined him in that distant country, hearing such dreadful news without any family members nearby. Would they give him leave to fly home for the funeral?

They pulled into the parking lot of the police station. Messinger pointed to a black sedan and made an exasperated noise. “Mr. Black Suit got here ahead of us,” she said.

“You mean Liddle?” Sandra said.

“That's the one.”

As they drove past the sedan, Sandra could see Liddle himself standing there, and another cop helping a woman out of the back seat. It was her mother.

Sandra opened the door, heedless of the fact that it was still moving, and jumped out. Messinger called after her, but she didn't stop. “Mom!” she called.

Her mother turned. Her beautiful long hair was loose, curling around her shoulders and arms, and her face was red and streaked with tears.

Sandra went to embrace her.

“Keep them apart,” Liddle barked, and the other cop, a man Sandra knew and had talked Philadelphia sports with over coffee, stepped forward with a cold expression to block her way.

“She's my mother,” Sandra protested.

Messinger jogged up to join them, and Liddle glared at her. “Detective, get this woman away from here.”

Messinger took Sandra's elbow, but Sandra shook her off. “I just want to see my mom. There's no law against that.”

“The easy way, or the hard way,” Messinger said in low tones.

Sandra growled in frustration. “I'll be back soon, Mom,” she called. “It's going to be all right.”

She allowed Messinger to lead her away. “Sorry about that,” Messinger said. “But you know we can't have you talking to her.”

“I don't know any such thing. She's not under arrest, and as far as I know, neither am I. We should both be free to walk out of here if we want.”

Messinger shrugged. “Maybe. But practically, we can hold you for twenty-four hours if we feel you're interfering with the investigation or withholding crucial evidence. And we need to talk to your mother before you do.”

“What do you think I'm going to do, threaten her to keep her mouth shut? Feed her a story?”

“I don't know you, Miss Kelley. I don't know what you're going to do. But we need to talk to her before she talks to anyone else.”

The clouds were low, and a strong wind was picking up. “My father is dead,” she said. “You saw his body for yourself. Isn't that enough?”

“That doesn't stop the investigation. The blast originated from his seat. We have to question everyone who knew him or saw him recently. Besides—his car was found at his house, not at the stadium. Somebody must have driven it home.”

“I told you—”

“I know what you said,” Messinger said. “It doesn't matter. We have to investigate.”

Sandra thought about Alex and the Salt and Light mission. Was she afraid? Did she have a plan? Sandra didn't know why she hadn't told Messinger to look there for Alex, but she realized now that she didn't trust the Philadelphia police department to investigate this mystery. There was too much going on, too much that was beyond their ability to understand. Even if the police did find Alex, they might not believe her story, and they certainly wouldn't let Sandra talk to her. The only way Sandra was going to understand what was going on was if she found Alex herself.

She stopped walking. Messinger kept going for a few steps before turning to look at her.

“Am I free to go?” Sandra asked.

Messinger hesitated. “You are. But don't go far.”

“I won't,” Sandra said. But she didn't mean it. She planned to go as far as it took to get some answers. She was on her own now. They didn't trust her to be a cop, and she didn't trust them with her family. Sandra didn't know what next steps the police would take, but she knew one thing. She would find Alex before they did.

CHAPTER 12

“D
r. Oronzi!” Alex said. He was just sitting there on the bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Please, call me Ryan.”

“Fine. But how did you find me here?”

“The module you stole uses an unclassified map server that we host outside of the lab. Whenever you teleport, it logs your location. We didn't want anyone to teleport and not know where they ended up.” He chuckled. “You chose a pretty wet itinerary.”

Alex narrowed her eyes. “I didn't want to die. How did you teleport in here so precisely?”

“I had your actual location to key off of. Normally, we have to do the same thing—either aim for water, or, more commonly, have someone waiting at the destination already to make more accurate measurements. I wasn't mocking you; it was smart not to trust the data.”

Alex still stood with her back to the door. Though she supposed it would do no good to run from a man who could track her location and teleport to wherever she went. It was a disturbing thought. Though if she simply powered down her eyejack lenses, he would lose his track. And she was pretty sure she could outrun him.

She stepped into the room. There was no chair, but the dresser was low and bare, so she hopped up to sit on top of it. “You've been keeping secrets,” she said. “This technology can do more than you've been letting on.”

He shrugged. “It's unproven research. Not ready for prime time.”

“Yeah? Or did you just want to keep it to yourself?”

“The government pays the bills. They know what I'm doing.”

Alex shook her head, still amazed. “I get the teleportation thing, at least partially,” she said. “We were already using tunneling concepts to shift the location of objects. But invisibility? How is that remotely possible?”

“Not that hard, really,” Oronzi said. “The Higgs projector makes it possible, but it's just a matter of recalculating Maxwell's equations for each photon that comes into the field, so that a new photon is released on the other side with the same direction and energy, as if the first had never been captured. There's actually a small time delay, but not so much that anyone would ever notice.”

Alex crossed her arms and examined him. “So what do you want from me?”

“You promised you would tell me what you know about the varcolac. I did my part: if not for me, you would have been caught by now for certain.”

Alex felt a sense of indignation rising up in her, although he was probably right. “Maybe you underestimate me.”

He shrugged, acknowledging the point. “It doesn't matter. What matters is that I need to know everything I can about this thing. I need to know how to beat it.”

Alex's eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and she saw how haggard he looked. “Haven't you been sleeping?”

“I've been fighting this thing for weeks. I barely go to sleep, because I'm afraid it might break through my equations during the night. And now you tell me that it's just been playing with me all this time, tricking me into doing what it wants.”

“I don't know that ‘tricking' is the right word,” Alex said. “It's so different from us, so alien, that I don't know if it can understand why we do things. It doesn't intentionally deceive. I think it's just solving the probability equations to make what it wants the most likely outcome.”

Oronzi pursed his lips. “I don't know about that. It's been pretty deceptive.”

“Has it? Can it really put itself in our place and predict what we would do with certain stimuli as opposed to others? Maybe it can to some extent, but I would guess it's more in a mathematical way than by sympathy or imagination.”

“What does it want?”

“I don't know. We never did know. It kills casually, as if death means nothing to it. And yet it knows we're there. It nearly electrocuted my mother and my brother, but was it trying to kill or torture them? Or does its kind communicate through electrical energy? Or feed off of it? We don't know if it meant us harm or not, but it harmed us all the same.”

“How did you get rid of it?”

“We shut down the super collider.”

Oronzi blinked. “Seriously?”

Alex pulled her feet up onto the dresser and hugged her knees. “The collider powers hundreds of huge electromagnets at thousands of volts per second. It has a huge electric potential, and the varcolac was tapping into that. We think it was also feeding off of the exotic particles the collider produced. At any rate, once we shut it down, the varcolac was gone.”

“Only this time, it's got its own universe to draw power from,” Oronzi said. “Thanks to me.”

“Can't you shut down the universe? You created it, after all.”

Oronzi shook his head. “I've tried. It's self-sufficient now. It may be small by universe standards, but it's a
universe
. It's expanding in its own space-time, generating its own exotic particles by the trillions. Thousands of years from now, when it spreads out enough, it may form its own stars. Maybe even its own form of life. Right now, though, it's just an incredibly hot ball of energy. There's no way I can destroy it.”

“Fifteen years ago, the varcolac was tied to the collider. It couldn't go very far from it. This varcolac may be tied to your lab in the same way.”

“Unless its range is a factor of the amount of energy available,” Oronzi said. “We're talking 10
²³
times more energy than the collider. That might give it a little more room to wander.”

“We should talk to my father,” Alex said. “He studied it before. He might have a better idea.”

A soft tap sounded three times against the door. Alex froze. It was probably just Marta coming back to give her a blanket, or to ask why she could hear a man's voice in the room. The police wouldn't rap softly; they would shout to announce themselves, or else just break down the door. It didn't matter. If need be, she could simply teleport away and then find a new place to hide.

Alex opened the door. When she saw who was on the other side, she almost did teleport away.

“Sandra?”

Sandra stood at the door in her police uniform, radio and gun strapped to her belt. “Hi, Alex.”

Alex crossed her arms. “Are you here to turn me in?”

“No. Though I really should. I risked my career by not telling them where you are.”

“Then why didn't you tell them?”

Sandra paused. “Look, are you going to let me in, or what?”

Alex stood aside to let her into the room, and Sandra stepped inside. Oronzi looked back and forth between the two of them. “Wow, you two really do look exactly alike, don't you?”

“Sandra, this is Dr. Oronzi, chief physicist at the super collider,” Alex said.

Oronzi stood. “Please call me Ryan,” he said. He extended a hand, but Sandra ignored it.

“Ryan Oronzi,” Sandra said. “I should have known.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Alex shut the door, already struggling with the fury and inadequacy she always felt when her twin was around.

“It means, I should have known you would be hanging out with your partner in idiocy.”

Alex couldn't believe it. Sandra had met the man for ten seconds, and she was already insulting him. “Ryan is no idiot.”

“Maybe not, but you are. What were you thinking?” Sandra stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the room, glaring at Alex. “The last time somebody played with that technology, it nearly got us all killed.”

“I know that. Don't you think I know that?” Alex said.

“Then why on earth did you do it? You brought the
varcolac
back, and for what?”

“I didn't know that's what we were doing,” Alex protested. It sounded weak, even to her ears. True, she hadn't known, exactly. But she had realized how similar the technology was to what Brian Vanderhall and Jean Massey had been playing with years before.

“Didn't know? For heaven's sake, Alex. I knew what it was the first time I saw a video of your demo.”

“You saw a video?” Ryan asked.

Sandra waved a hand in dismissal. “The feds played one for me.”

“That's supposed to be classified,” he said. “You don't have a clearance for that.”

“Hardly the greatest of our concerns. Have you two figured out what we're going to do?”

“Do?”

“To kill the varcolac. Or at least to send it back to where it came from.”

“It is back where it came from,” Ryan said. “At least for the moment. Though I don't think I can keep it there for long.”

Alex took a deep breath. “I was just saying how we should get Dad involved. He might have some ideas.”

Sandra shook her head, and all the bellicosity drained from her face. “You don't know, do you?”

Alex could see it in her eyes. She could see it, and she knew, but she couldn't bear to hear it spoken. It was some trick, some malicious prank of Sandra's to teach her a lesson. It couldn't be true. “No,” she said. “Don't say it. No.”

“He's dead.”

The word hung in the room. Alex kept shaking her head, willing it away. It was not possible. Finally, she whispered, “How?”

“In the stadium.”

“No,” Alex said, and there was force behind it now. “No, that's not true. He was alive this morning. Mom said he had just been there, sitting in the kitchen. She said
you
were there with him.”

“He split. I did see him at the house this morning, but I also saw his body at the stadium. So there were two versions. Then the second version—the one sitting in the kitchen—disappeared with no trace. You know what that means.” Sandra seemed to lose all her energy. There were no chairs, so she sank down to sit on the floor. “The varcolac killed him.”

“I don't understand,” Alex said. “You're saying it was the varcolac that destroyed the stadium?”