CHAPTER 1
“Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching” echoes off the walls. Not only has the next Red Line train to Alewife arrived but its passengers have already flooded the station, a torrent rushing up the escalators, through the turnstiles, then down the concourse to spill out the doors to Cambridge. The deluge arriving as the PA system squawks catches Ellie off guard. It’s rush hour. When a train arrives on one side of the platform, the one on the other side leaves seconds later. She sprints, a beleaguered salmon racing against the current of bodies. Her pack sloshes between her shoulder blades, a sloppy fin batting the waves of people surrounding her.
No one has tried to kill her today—yet. Her sister, Chris, arranges something at random intervals. It’s to keep Ellie sharp, Chris claims, because, occasionally, skunkworks isolationists try. Not that Ellie believes Chris has her best interests at heart. Well, not anymore, but she doesn’t know how to stop the attempts on her life, and they do keep her sharp.
Maybe the mistimed announcement is part of today’s attempt. She’ll be caught in the rip current of bodies, a wave will overwhelm her, and a shark hiding in the swell will tear her to pieces. Compared to the attempt with the Mylar balloons, the jar of Marmite, and the US men’s Greco-Roman wrestling team, an ill-timed flood of people at Alewife Station is downright practical and likely.
None of that happens, though. The crowd flows around her as she plunges down the stairs toward the platform.
The car doors shut just as she reaches them. While the PA system blasts “Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving,” the train clatters away. The train supposedly now arriving sits already emptied on the opposite side of the platform. It beeps as its doors slide shut.
As the crowd streams up the stairs and escalators, the platform quickly clears, leaving a couple of people who must have, like Ellie, just missed the train. Some guy wearing shorts that stretch across his thighs, no shirt, and more self-possession than Ellie thought possible hovers in front of one of the train doors. Someone else sits on a bench, staring at her e-reader. A thin woman reaches for Ellie like a drowning person reaching for a buoy. Her luggage crashes to the floor. She asks in rapid Mandarin whether Ellie knows how to get to the Best Western. Her oboe-like voice skips through her words.
Ellie blinks. Strangers start conversations in Mandarin with her all the time at school. Not so much outside of school. The Best Western is only a short walk away. With luggage, though, the woman will want a taxi, but there’s almost always one dropping someone off outside the station. All the woman needs to do is go up the escalator and cross the concourse. She tells the woman all of this in Mandarin. Ellie’s response doesn’t draw laughs, her irrational fear whenever she talks to a stranger in any language that’s not English. In fact, the woman thanks her. Ellie decides she is not today’s assassin.
The woman doesn’t turn to the escalator. Instead, she freezes for a moment, then glares at Ellie.
People randomly start sounding like her sister way more often than Ellie would like. Some people text. Her sister commandeers convenient strangers. It’s never less than creepy, and it always catches Ellie off guard until the glare.
“If you’d quit school after Mom’s diagnosis like I’d told you to, you’d have moved back to DC,” the woman says in fluent English, her voice now husky and incongruously casual. “You wouldn’t need to worry about missing the Amtrak now.”
It’s not Chris’s voice, but it absolutely is. A childhood in Taipei clashed with an adolescence in Buffalo to give Chris an accent that’s all non-rhotic and flat nasal vowels. She’s always sounded like a panhandler in 1930s New York, albeit one who made unreasonable demands on your life rather than begged for a nickel. After Mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma, Chris became a 1930s New York panhandler who’s always promising to send Ellie to sleep with the fishes.
Chris has always treated Ellie like this. Ellie was mostly through her undergrad when she had even an inkling that anything was different. None of her university friends have older siblings who talk to them like this. Granted, their older siblings are only a couple of years older, not practically a decade. Still, the idea that Ellie became a full-grown adult before realizing this is too embarrassing to think about, so she usually doesn’t.
“Even if I miss this Amtrak, it’s not like there won’t be another one tonight. What do you have to tell me that’s so urgent that it can’t wait until, at worst, tomorrow afternoon?” Ellie folds her arms across her chest. “You did not waylay some random stranger so that you can taunt me about missing the train.”
As Ellie says this, it strikes her that maybe Chris did. The obvious opening to needle Ellie is right there. Whenever Chris does it, she is, of course, always “just joking.”
The woman only comes up to Ellie’s neck. She glares down at Ellie anyway.
“Of course not. Who do you think I am?” The woman folds her arms across her chest. “If I have to stay at home to watch Mom, you have to go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe. Mom brought you with her so many times thatyou have to be dense if you can’t make a straightforward repair by yourself.”
Ellie ignores the jab. When Chris doesn’t have to play the good, dutiful sister around witnesses, Ellie has to ignore a lot of jabs to get through a conversation.
“What’s the problem?”
“Everyone’s wrong about why the International Prototype of the Kilogram is losing mass relative to its official copies. We’d see divergences between them even if the kilogram were defined by something more fundamental than a cylinder of platinum alloy. The notion of the kilogram, itself—”
“Has become unstable.” Ellie frowns. “Fundamental physical constants are changing—”
“Yes. Now the good news—”
“There’s good news?”
“—is we’ve found some hold-time violations in the skunkworks. Probably caused by some leaking valves. They must be why the kilogram’s unstable. Fix them and I promise I won’t judge you when you don’t get here until tomorrow afternoon. First time for everything.”
By “first time,” Ellie isn’t sure whether Chris is talking about repairing the skunkworks by herself or not judging her for being late. Probably the former. The skunkworks that generates a universe lives within the surrounding universe. She’s only ever assisted Mom, albeit more times than she can count by now. There are an infinite number of skunkworks and universes. Nothing in the matryoshka doll that is the set of nested universes can prevent Chris from judging Ellie. She would ask, but Chris has already gone.
The woman turns around as though she hasn’t said a thing. She goes to the escalator, trundling her luggage behind her.
At least someone gets to go where she wants to. Ellie doesn’t. Chris won’t let anyone else stay by Mom’s side. Mom liescomatose, the end stage of glioblastoma, on a bed in Chris’s den. She needs constant attention from Chris the way dolphins need tax advice. However, taking care of your parents is a filial obligation and no one is more Taiwanese than someone who no longer lives in the motherland. All of the relatives see Chris as the good daughter, the dutiful daughter. Even though Chris wants Ellie in the same house as Mom, she never lets Ellie do anything.
Ellie visits every weekend anyway. She does because she’s more like Chris than she likes to admit, just as stubborn and also someone who no longer lives in the motherland. Also, once in a while, Mom shifts in bed. She yawns. Her eyes open a crack and, for a moment, she stares right at Ellie, as though she’s about to wake from her long nap. Then her eyes close again, and she slumps back into oblivion. This seems like much more than random firing of neurons in a brain about to die. Ellie, even though she knows better, can’t help thinking that the next time might be the time she wakes for real.
The train beeps. Its doors slide open. Passengers stream onto the train. Ellie shakes her head clear, then joins them. Everyone else is headed toward Davis Square. Ellie, on the other hand, is headed to the universe that surrounds this one. She blends into the crowd, so no one notices when she disappears.
CHAPTER 2
