Supersymmetry (31 page)

The Jozef Stefan Institute was in Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital and largest city. It would almost certainly be guarded. Instead of teleporting to the roof of the Institute, Alex chose an old castle, a tourist attraction that looked down on Ljubljana from a rounded hill in the city center. It was night, so the castle was closed to the public, its ramparts deserted.

Catching her breath, Alex looked around, astonished. For some reason—perhaps because she had never heard of the place before today—she had pictured Ljubljana as a dirty slum of a place, poor and overcrowded. Instead, she found a picturesque old European city, clean and colorful, with red shingled roofs and cobblestone streets and the blue ridges of the Alps in the distance. Lights danced through the night, not garish with neon or strobing color, but subtle and tasteful.

The Institute itself was a university and center of scientific endeavor, one of Slovenia's proud achievements. Its five buildings formed a sort of square in a residential area of the city, with a courtyard in the center where flowers bloomed. It was a place of peace and human accomplishment. And it was surrounded by Turkish soldiers.

It could mean only one thing: that Jean had reached and convinced the leadership of Turkey, and that they recognized the importance of this place. Alex's mind raced. Now that she was here, it was increasingly clear to her how unprepared she was. How would she find Sean? She didn't know his plan of attack or where he was coming from. Maybe he was waiting until the dead of night. Maybe he had already rigged the place with explosives and was putting as much distance between himself and the Institute before it blew. Or maybe the varcolac had already killed him.

It made her suddenly sad. Why did there have to be war? Hadn't Europe suffered enough in the last century and a half? When humanity was capable of such beauty and discovery, why did countries have to pit their aspirations against each other in widespread destruction? She hated to see this beautiful city scarred. And she didn't want her brother to die.

Alex unlocked the large black hard case she had brought with her: Angel's quadcopters. If it came to a showdown with the varcolac, it was the best weapon she had, the only weapon she knew that could even slow it down. Though ultimately, it had not even been the varcolac itself she had fought at the prison. It was a shadow of itself, created by a Higgs singlet sent precisely back in time, like an automated computer program given certain goals and functions by its creator. And she had very nearly lost.

An alarm sounded. A soldier on the roof was pointing in their direction and talking into a radio. They'd been spotted.

“What do we do?” Tequila asked.

The soldiers stood at alert with weapons raised. Alex saw an officer speaking rapidly to a squad and pointing at the castle. Then they started to die.

Gunfire tore into them, sounding like distant pops from Alex's vantage point. The soldiers' bodies danced and fell. A few started shooting, but their weapons were wrenched out of their hands by invisible forces. Alex watched, aghast. It had to be her brother and his team out there, using their projectors and killing these men. Somehow, it seemed more awful in this idyllic city with its old-world charm. The old world had bloody conflicts too, of course. But everything about this place spoke of peaceful cooperation and advancement. The blood on the cobblestones was lurid, garish, wrong.

She understood the reasons. She didn't even blame Sean, not really. This place had to be destroyed. It was a military installation now, whether it had been built for that purpose or not. It was possibly the enemy's single most powerful asset. If it had been bombed from the air, it would have somehow seemed more justifiable, though of course the soldiers would have died just the same. A team of insurgents was the more humane option; it would allow them to kill the soldiers without killing the scientists inside.

When the soldiers lay dead on the floor, the marines appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and advanced on the entrance. They ran quickly, in a crouch, anonymous in their masks and urban fatigues.

Alex could immediately tell which one was her brother. Sean had been born with a short arm, half the normal length, with a tiny hand at the end of it that couldn't grasp anything very well. For most of his growing up, it had been that way, a source of frustration and occasional ridicule, though he could do just about anything he put his mind to learning. He was athletic and coordinated, and worked twice as hard as anyone to prove he could not only do the same things others could, but do them better.

Then a prosthetic was invented that could enclose his short arm and operate off of the signals of his nerves and muscles. It was a wonder of engineering and made his left arm more precise and powerful even than his right. Sean had joined the military—an impossibility before the prosthetic—and, true to form, had dedicated himself to being not just a capable soldier, but one of the very best.

It was the prosthetic that gave him away. It was bulky where it enclosed his left arm, and even under specially fitted fatigues, it stood out.

They disappeared inside. Maybe they would set their explosives and leave safely, and the facility would be destroyed. Sean knew what he was doing. He and his team were in superb shape, crack shots, experts in infiltration and sabotage. They were trained with the Higgs projectors and knew when and how to use them. Alex began to hope that their presence wouldn't be needed, that Sean and the other marines had everything under control.

Then the bodies on the ground started to rise.

CHAPTER 24

“S
andra!” Her mother had her by the shoulders, but she was looking up at someone else. “We need to get her back to the hospital.”

“No.” Sandra blinked her eyes, looked around. She was on the floor in the High Energy Lab. Her mother and Angel were there, looking concerned. “I'm back. I'm okay.”

“This isn't right,” her mother said. “You have a concussion, maybe worse. You need medical care.”

Sandra stood up, a bit shaky. Her head throbbed. “No, I don't. It's not medical at all. I wasn't unconscious.” She turned to Angel. “I was there with Alex. In her mind. It was like I
was
her, seeing what she saw, thinking her thoughts.” She sank into a chair. “I don't even think she knew I was there.”

Was that what it would be like, when their probability wave finally collapsed? Would she be absorbed into Alex without a glitch? Not only did Alex not know she was there;
she
, Sandra, hadn't known she was there. She hadn't been aware of herself, like a ghost trapped in Alex's body. She had
been
Alex.

And now she was back. How long would it last? How much time did she have left before she ceased to exist as an individual?

“I have to lie down,” she said.

Her mother pulled the thin mattress off the broken bed. Sandra stretched out on it, trying not to cry from the pain. Her mother sat next to her and massaged her scalp.

“She's in Slovenia somewhere, at a scientific institute,” Sandra said. “Sean is there, too. And I'm pretty sure the varcolac is somewhere nearby.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

She shook her head. “I don't think so. Hopefully she has a plan.”

She lay quietly for a time, thinking. Wondering what her life would have been like if she and Alex had never split. Would she even have existed? It was so hard to think about, the concept of being Sandra, and yet being different. She and Alex were just two examples of millions of possible Alessandras that might have been, each of them her, and yet each of them not. If she and Alex did some day combine, she probably wouldn't mourn the day. She would be a new person, and that person would be glad to be alive. But that person wouldn't be Sandra Kelley.

“Angel?” she said.

He came to her side.

“Can you tell from the data how long I have left?”

“What do you mean?”

“From my father's data. If the trend continues, can you plot how long it will be until Alex and I converge into a single person?”

For once, he was solemn. “I can't. It's a complex pattern, not linear. Maybe someone else could tell, but not me. I'm sorry.”

She met his eyes. She hadn't had much time to think about it, but she really liked Angel. He was funny, relaxed, unintimidated by petty authority figures. He was intelligent and self-sacrificing and cared about doing the right thing. He wasn't much to look at, but that was growing on her, too. She could trust him.

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I don't think I have very long,” she said.

The Turkish soldiers had no eyes. They rose to their feet, ignoring the bullet wounds in their chests and heads, and set off toward the main entrance of the institute, the doors that the American soldiers had just entered. Alex felt the panic start to flutter in her chest like a trapped moth. The varcolac was here.

There was no time for fear. She teleported to the low roof of one of the Institute buildings, and her team followed close behind. Alex cued the quadcopters from her eyejacks, and they rose out of their case four at a time. As soon as each group reached eye level, she sent them teleporting down to surround a single eyeless Turkish soldier. A flash of electricity, the puppet fell, and Alex moved on to the next.

“What can we do?” shouted Vijay.

“Find another way into this building!” she said. He ran off across the roof, the others following him.

There were too many soldiers. She took out as many as she could, but they reached the doors anyway. An American who'd been left at the entrance fired his M4 into them, but the bullets passed through them like water. He slammed the doors in their faces, but they walked right through without a pause. She heard the soldier scream.

Alex surrounded another puppet soldier with quadcopters. This time, however, the puppet reached out and grabbed one with each hand. The flash of their energy shields still took him down, but he took the two copters down with him. They smashed into the ground, writhing and sparking as the blades dug into the dirt. The next soldier did the same thing. Unlike the puppets at the prison, these were learning. The varcolac was here, altering their behavior to react to her attack.

She teleported the remaining copters back to the roof. “Vijay?”

“Over here,” he called back. “There's a way in.”

She ran over to see a metal door, which they had unlocked by the simple expedient of teleporting a pebble into the lock mechanism, blowing it apart. The door hung open.

“Let's go.”

She led them inside and down a flight of concrete stairs, which opened at the bottom into a long, poorly-lit hallway. It was evening, and most of the eight hundred scientists that worked here during the day were gone. She had to find Sean and warn him what he was up against. Then, once his explosives were set, she could teleport him and his team back to Poland. Assuming they lived that long.

She rounded a corner and felt a gun at her head. A man grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face against a wall, but not before she got a glimpse of his blackened face and gray fatigues.

“I'm an American,” she said. The soldier turned her around and held her at arm's length, taking in her appearance, processing the sound of her voice. “I'm Sean Kelley's sister,” she added. The expression on the soldier's face would have been comical in any other situation.

“Team Alpha,” the soldier murmured. “We have a situation at entry point one.”

“Copy that,” a familiar voice replied. “Do you need help?”

Alex grabbed the radio. “Sean,” she said. “It's me.”