Superposition

^{CHAPTER 27}

I thought if Judge Roswell could be convinced, we would be home free, but it wasn’t so easy. She believed we were who we said, but she still wasn’t pleased. The worst of her glare was focused on Terry Sheppard.

“This is a miscarriage of justice,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “We’re innocent.”

Her eyes swiveled toward me like Gatling guns looking for a target. “I don’t know that. Seems to me you had twice as much opportunity to kill him if there were two of you. What I do know is that this is going to play havoc with the court system. Your little stunt went out on the national feeds. That means that by tomorrow every convict in the pen is going to have his lawyer filing appeals that it wasn’t him who did the crime, it was the other guy who looked just like him. How will any charge stick if there could be a doppelganger out there doing things in your name? It’s a disaster.”

“But we are the same person,” Jacob said. “One passport, one driver’s license, one social security number. If we did something wrong, we’re equally culpable. Eventually the waveform will collapse, and we’ll be in one place again, too.”

The judge’s eyes pinned Jacob for a moment, then turned back toward Sheppard. “A disaster,” she repeated. “Terry, I thought you had better sense.”

“I can’t help the legal precedent,” he tried. “It’s the truth. These two are the same man. And if they can be the same man, then their story that Brian Vanderhall was split in two is equally plausible.”

“Don’t give me your rationalizations. I don’t want to hear it.” Judge Roswell actually pointed a scolding finger at Sheppard like a mother might a naughty child. “You hid the truth from me and the prosecution to get an edge. You put up a gigantic smokescreen that will turn everyone’s attention away from the matter at hand: whether your client actually killed Brian Vanderhall. I’ve never been as disappointed in a former clerk than at this moment. When I hired you, you had principle. Promise. I never thought to see you resorting to cheap theatrics to win a case.”

“It’s not a smokescreen,” Terry said doggedly. “It demonstrates that Vanderhall shooting himself is a plausible story.”

“It was a vaudeville show, and it has drastic implications for the trial system, as you would know if you thought beyond this one case. It violated the spirit of the discovery process, if not the letter of it. It was cheating, Terry.”

“But, Ann…”

“Call me, ‘Your Honor,’” she snapped. “Or better yet, don’t talk at all. You could have brought this to me weeks ago. Both parties could have made arguments in private, and we could have decided how to proceed to ensure fairness. How can we have a fair hearing now? I’m tempted to declare a mistrial, but thanks to you, I don’t see how we can select another jury that will be any less biased than the one we have.” She considered for a moment. “I will instruct the jury that they are to consider the evidence as presented without reference to whom they may or may not have thought they saw coming through the doors. The other Mr. Kelley will not testify. Mr. Haviland, you will complete your cross-examination, and then we will move to closing arguments. Neither of you are to refer to this incident in the courtroom again.”

“Your Honor, Mr. Sheppard has made a mockery of you and this court with this charade. He should be removed from the case,” Haviland said.

Judge Roswell narrowed her eyes at him. I thought he had gone too far by implying Terry had made a fool of her. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “However, Mr. Kelley”—and now she looked at me—“if I see you within a hundred yards of my courtroom again, or appearing on the news before this trial is over, I will have you arrested for murder as well. Don’t think I can’t. Is everyone clear?”

We all nodded glumly, except for David Haviland, who positively smirked.

Disaster. It had seemed like such a good plan, but it was all falling apart. The jury had seen me, briefly, so maybe it would influence their verdict despite Roswell’s instructions, but as she had pointed out, the existence of two of me wasn’t evidence that I hadn’t committed the murder. With the judge instructing them to dismiss what they saw, the jurors would assume it had been a trick of some kind—much easier than actually believing my story. And there were still the fingerprints, and the gun, and the bloody shoes. My double would have to endure the rest of cross-examination, and the judge was likely to give Haviland wide latitude in his questions. This wasn’t going to fall my way.

Roswell called the bailiff in to escort me off the premises, and I was left on the sidewalk while the trial continued on without me. I stood outside the courthouse, not sure what to do next. Alex was inside, but I couldn’t go in and tell her where I was. She would only have seen me go back toward the judge’s chambers and then not come out again.

I looked around and saw someone jogging toward me. “Jean!” I said.

“What happened back there?” she asked.

“The judge was mad at our little stunt. I’m banned from the courtroom. Could you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Go in and tell Alex that I’m out here?”

“Sure thing.”

Jean ran back up the courtroom steps. Two minutes later, she came out again with Alex and Marek, who had been inside watching the court proceedings as well. We found Colin’s car in the parking garage and climbed in, Alex in the passenger seat and Jean and Marek in the back. I sat in the driver’s seat and shut the door. I didn’t turn the engine on, because I didn’t know where to go.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, twisting to look at them. “I don’t know how much longer I have left. I don’t know if the jury is going to exonerate or condemn me, and I don’t know when or how my waveform is going to collapse. I think it’s too late for any of us to affect the outcome of the case. So with the time I have left, I want to figure out what happened to the rest of my family.”

“Count me in,” Jean said. I thought about the phone call from Nick and decided that I wouldn’t mention it. It wasn’t really any of my business, and Jean, whatever her problems, had been a good friend to me. She had to work out her family problems on her own, and if she didn’t see fit to confide in me, I wasn’t going to interfere.

Alex slipped a hand over and squeezed mine. “Count me in, too,” she said. I gave her a warm smile. Neither of us mentioned that she, too, didn’t know how long she had left, or just who she would be when her waveform collapsed.

Marek didn’t say anything, but I knew he was in. Over the preceding months, he had shown himself to be as good a friend as I had ever known. Certainly a better friend than Brian Vanderhall. He didn’t say much, and he didn’t get sentimental, but he wasn’t going to leave me until this was all resolved, one way or another.

I checked my phone and saw that there was a message from Lily Lin. “Hang on,” I said. “This might be important.”

The message was brief, but there was a link to a viewfeed. She had decided to let us see it after all.

Quickly, I explained to the others what we had learned from Lily. “She was the last person to see them,” I said. “This might tell us what happened.”

My heart was pounding as I waited for the others to sync their lenses to my phone. When everyone was ready, I played the feed.

The beginning was familiar—we had seen it before from Sheila’s point of view. Elena asked about me, and Lily offered to take her to Brian’s office. This time, however, we kept watching. They left the Feynman Center and headed along the gravel path toward the Dirac building. It was December, so the sky was already dark. A sliver of moon hung over the horizon. Lily wore a sweater, but no coat, and she hugged herself as she led the way.

Suddenly there was a man on the path in front of them. He didn’t step out of a building or out from behind a tree; he just appeared. Even from this distance, the bones of his face looked wrong, and his elbows and knees bent awkwardly. He had no eyes.

Lily took a step back, and I could see the look of confused fear in Elena’s eyes. The varcolac advanced, its forward motion not hindered by its awkward gait. Lily shrieked and backed out of its way. The varcolac ignored her.

Elena stepped in front of it, blocking it from the children. “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you want?”

It reached out to her, and I cringed, expecting a repeat of the death scene from my house. Instead, a portion of space seemed to rotate on invisible hinges, and a dozen more varcolacs appeared, identical copies of the first, surrounding the party on the grass. The children screamed and huddled close as the varcolacs advanced. When they had formed a tight circle, the space around them rotated again, like a three-dimensional trapdoor, and when it returned to its original position, Elena, the children, and the varcolacs were gone. Only Lily was left, her view blurred by her tears.

The viewfeed ended. This was why Lily hadn’t told anyone what she had seen. It was horrible and impossible, and who would believe her? She had been only too glad to avoid testifying in court.

But now I was one step closer to learning what had happened to my family. It was possible, maybe even probable, that the varcolacs had killed them, but not certain. Despite the fact that they hadn’t been seen for months, it was conceivable that their waveforms might not have collapsed. There was no way to tell where the varcolacs had taken them, or even if it was a where in the traditional sense, but it was possible—just possible—that they might still be alive.

I twisted in my seat to face the others. “They must have had a copy of the Higgs projector letter,” I said. “The varcolac realized they had split, and after it destroyed the copy that Alessandra was holding, it went back to the NJSC to destroy the other version.”

“Wait,” Alex said. “I’m confused. Just how many copies of this letter were there?”

“By my count, there were four,” I said. “Brian had the original letter, and he split, making two. One was destroyed in the pine forest; the other he mailed to me. That version split twice, both times with Alex. One version went to the NJSC, one stayed at home and was destroyed by the varcolac, and the other she dropped by the fence, where we retrieved it. As far as we know, I have the only copy left.”

“What should we do?” Jean asked. “Go find Lily again? Maybe she knows more.”

“No,” Alex said. “We need to find the new girlfriend.”

“That’s right!” I snapped my fingers. “Brian had already dumped Lily when he died, but she mentioned a new girlfriend, someone Brian had left her for. Someone else who was helping him with his experiments.”

“Who was it?” Jean asked.

“She didn’t know.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a lead.”

“If we could find her, though, she might know more about how Brian died. She might even be the murderer. She might have pulled the trigger at Brian’s request, like Lily said, only the experiment went wrong. Or she was angry at him, and there was the gun, loaded and in easy reach, and she grabbed it and shot him,” I said.

“But he was found in a fingerprint-locked room. Only you or Brian could have locked it,” Jean said.

“Or else someone who knew how to reprogram the lock.”

“The police looked for that. They said it hadn’t been reprogrammed in years,” Jean said.

“Okay, then someone who both knew how to reprogram the lock and hack its internal logs so nobody could tell.”

“Doesn’t sound like the type of woman Brian usually slept around with,” Jean said.

“Look, someone killed him. It wasn’t me. The varcolac isn’t likely to use a gun. That leaves other people. So someone must have gotten past that lock,” I said.

Jean made an exasperated noise. “We’ve had this conversation a dozen times. Logically, the only person who could have locked the door and left the room was Brian himself. The other version of himself.”

I sagged against my seat. I still didn’t think Brian had killed himself, but she was right, we weren’t getting anywhere. Besides, my goal wasn’t to solve Brian’s murder anymore. It was too late for that. Now I just wanted to find my family.

“We need to go back to the NJSC,” Jean said.

“We’ve been there three times this week,” Alex said. “What else are we going to find?”

Jean leaned forward. “We have to find whatever it is the varcolac wants. In order to know where it took your family, we have to know where it is. We have to find the varcolac. The only way to do that is to go back down to the CATHIE bunker.”

I started to shake my head. “That’s not a good idea. You haven’t seen it, Jeannie, not in real life. It nearly killed us.”

Jean crossed her arms. “If you want to find them, that’s where we have to go. That’s where the answers are.”

A sudden rap on the car window made me jump. I looked out to see a journalist peering in at me. “Mr. Kelley? Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Time to go,” I said. I turned the car on and pulled it into gear.

The journalist rapped on the window again. “Mr. Kelley?”

I rolled the window down an inch. “I’m innocent,” I said. “I have nothing more to say.” I backed the car out of the parking lot. He followed me and stood in front of the car, blocking my exit. I drove toward him anyway.

“Wait,” he said, but he didn’t have the courage to stand his ground with me bearing down on him. I didn’t stop, and he jumped aside at the last minute. “Hey!”

As soon as we reached the street, another journalist spotted me and ran in our direction, camera drones whizzing ahead of her. “Court must have let out,” I said. “We should have gotten farther away.” More of them appeared, like seagulls after bread, materializing out of nowhere. I blasted the horn and pulled away, leaving them calling after me from the curb.

“Where are we going?” Jean asked.

“Where do you think?” I asked. I didn’t like it, but I had to admit that she was right. There was no way around it. The super collider ring was the varcolac’s lair, if anything was, and if we wanted answers, we had to go back down into it.