Page 68 of Under Story

The room has changed. Eli separated the beds and created a privacy screen: a blanket hung over a ceiling pipe.

“Bit of home improvement,” he adds.

“Thank you, Eli. For this, and the food.”

Eli takes notes while Laurel eats. She wonders if her body will rebel, unfit for antiuniverse food, but the cornbread and green pea guacamole taste just like Diego’s.

When she feels slightly restored, Laurel asks, “What happened on the dive, do you think? In the ink cloud, I felt this pressure. It was sort of the like the one in the Arc, except that it seemed to be pushing me upward.”

Eli nods. “I felt that, too, but I didn’t think much of it. Bodies always want to rise to the surface in water.”

He adds a note, though, to his pad.

“What are you writing?” asks Laurel.

He hands it to her. At the top is a heading: Best Guesses. Above the most recent addition—What happened in the basin?—is an earlier entry.

Q: If we’re made of matter, and this universe is made of antimatter, why didn’t we annihilate on contact?

A: Matter turns to antimatter on crossing????

Beside that is a spasm of blue pen.

“I don’t know how you’re thinking about antimatter at a time like this,” she says.

“Just warding off insanity. Speaking of,” says Eli, “what was your friend talking about in the galley?”

“Louis? He thinks we did mushrooms last night.”

“Please tell me you didn’t.”

“Of course not. Louis did give me a piece of mushroom chocolate—my Louis, that is. I didn’t eat it, but maybe they did.”

She looks at the couple in the photo. Their smiles are excruciatingly familiar.

“They look so happy,” she says. “Why would they have wanted to find a portal?”

“Maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they lost Silas, too.”

“But they couldn’t have. If time is going backward here, Silas’s life hasn’t happened yet.”

“Good point,” says Eli. “Add it to our list of questions.”

Laurel creates a new entry—Q. Why did Laurel and Eli Two cross over?—but, with no best guesses, she leaves the A. field empty.

—

A blizzard descends on Saturday morning. It sounds like the sky is being torn. Laurel can’t see more than ten feet out the window.

Eli has already left: his bed is made, a note on the blanket. Laurel slept in her thermal underwear, unable to muster the nerve to pore through the other Laurel’s closet. Now she finds a bath caddy and a towel. At the bathroom sink, she glances in the mirror for the first time in thirty-six hours. Her cheeks are sleep-creased. She can’t remember when she last washed her hair. As she keeps staring, Laurel realizes that she hasn’t looked at herself closely in months. Focus has stripped her down to the essentials. She is chiseled, steely, with blue circles under her eyes and a wolf’s lean determination.

In the shower, she turns the faucet to cold by instinct. Then she remembers that she doesn’t have to train for the dive anymore. She laughs: it is preposterous that they seem to have pulled this off, though she still feels she can’t be sure, still doesn’t understand so much. Laurel uses soap and shampoo from the caddy. Her double’s toothbrush is a more unsettling proposition, but a trip to the General Store feels equally daunting. After her shower, wrapped in a towel, Laurel examines the toothbrush again. Its yellowed head looks back, faceless but somehow confrontational. In the end, she washes it vigorously while a steward stares from the next sink.

Having defeated the toothbrush, Laurel decides to confront the closet. She doesn’t recognize the clothing, though she could imagine buying most of it. Wriggling into a sweater, she tenses, afraid that she’ll detect the smell of someone else’s body. Nothing registers. If the other Laurel has a scent, it must be the same one she does.

When she enters the dining hall, Jules is holding galley rally.

“Absolutely no one,” he says, “is going outside today.”