Page 158 of Under Story

“I’m sure.” Laurel tipped her face up to look into his. “I need to know what happened to the other Laurel.”

Kenji sighed. “I thought you might. But I can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“A doctor is forbidden to disclose a patient’s information. Overtakers are no different. Confidentiality is a tenet of our work.”

Laurel felt as though she were back at McMurdo, begging Nita Two for answers.

“But she…she is me,” Laurel said.

This had emerged instinctually, without reason.

“Do you think so?” Kenji asked.

“I’m not sure.” Laurel felt fragile and bewildered. “It’s as though…I can feel her—but it’s like groping in the dark: I touch something, and then it slips away. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Laurel described her visions: the first in the cave, and then her recent experiments. She did not mention that one had included Kenji himself.

A smile played on the overtaker’s face.

“What you’re describing goes by different names,” he said. “Past lives. Déjà vu. Eli would know it as entanglement.”

Laurel remembered Eli’s long-ago Halloween costume. “Spooky action at a distance.”

Kenji nodded. “You are connected, always, to the person you call Laurel Two. Most of the time, that link is subconscious. People think of it as instinct, or intuition.”

“My intuition comes…from her?” asked Laurel. “Do you mean that I don’t make my own choices?”

“You make them together.”

“That still sounds like I don’t have free will.”

“Because you’re thinking as an individual. You are using the word I when you could be using we.”

Her voice, when it came, was small. “But then why are we so different?”

Kenji cocked his head.

“Her career, for example,” said Laurel. “She was so much more successful than I ever was. She never knew Silas. And I did something terrible. She didn’t make that kind of mistake.”

“Perhaps she did.”

“I promise you she didn’t.”

Her emotions, hot, swam just under the skin. Laurel was angry about what she had lost; she was angry to be trapped here, in the antiuniverse, more than a dozen years after she arrived. She was angry to be seeking answers alone, while Eli was probably with Angela. And she was angry to be compared, continually, to the other Laurel—though it occurred to Laurel now that she herself was the only person who had done so.

“Come with me,” said Kenji.

He pulled a lever at his desk. Every screen went dark. Then he walked to the door, which relayed the hallway light as it ebbed open.

—

They continued down the passage to a larger door. When Kenji pressed his thumb to a wall pad, it swung inward.

They entered a broad tunnel with a vaulted ceiling. On both sides were alcoves, lined with cells. The circumference of each cell was no wider than two or three inches, and what lay inside was imperceptible in shadow. A long table ran down the center of the room.

Kenji moved briskly. Again Laurel sensed that he was bending a rule, or making a complicated judgment. He scanned the cells while tapping the fingers of one hand, as if performing some internal math. Then he selected one compartment, which slid out of the wall.