Page 69 of Under Story

Laurel fills a bowl with oatmeal and a mug with coffee. There’s no time to temper it with Frosty Boy: Nita waves from the center of the galley. Laurel pretends not to see her, then hurries upstairs with her oatmeal. She’s only eaten a spoonful when she hears a knock on the door.

Laurel peers through the peephole. Nita stands on the other side, glaring.

“I can see your shoes,” Nita says. “You might as well let me in.”

Laurel counts to eight before she turns the handle. “Sorry about that.”

She’s tacked on a smile, but it’s already slipping. Nita crosses her arms.

“Yesterday, at breakfast, you barely acknowledged me. And today you ignore me completely?”

“I’m recovering. The mushrooms must have hit me harder than you.”

Nita looks incredulous. “You’re joking.”

“I have a low tolerance,” Laurel says.

“Look in your pocket,” says Nita.

Laurel reaches inside her Big Red. She pulls out a piece of chocolate, still inside its plastic wrapper.

“You didn’t do mushrooms last night,” Nita said. “You put that in your coat, and then you left for Cape Evans. Don’t you think I deserve to know what happened?”

She plays with the zipper on her turtleneck, running her finger over the pull, and Laurel realizes that Nita isn’t angry. She’s hurt.

“You helped us,” says Laurel, slowly.

“Of course I helped,” says Nita.

Across the hall, a pair of stewards are tossing a hacky sack and eavesdropping.

“Will you come in?” Laurel asks.

Nita must sense that something has shifted, for she obeys without a word. She looks from the two separate beds to the blanket, scrunched on one end of the ceiling pipe.

“What’s going on in here?”

Laurel could invent another excuse, but she remembers lying beside Nita after the Midwinter Feast. Tell me if you make it to the antiuniverse, Nita said. And Laurel promised that she would.

Is this Nita? The person before Laurel is an optical illusion, neither friend nor stranger. Still, she might be the next best thing.

“What I’m going to tell you will sound totally insane.” Laurel retrieves the photo from the windowsill. Pointing to Laurel Two, she says, “That’s not me.”

Nita tucks her chin. “Did you hit your head down there?”

“I’m fine,” Laurel says. “As fine as I could be after swimming through a portal.”

They stare at each other. Wordlessly, Nita asks if what Laurel said is true, and Laurel nods in answer.

“So you made it.” Nita’s voice is hushed, her hurt forgotten, and Laurel realizes that this version, too, is a good friend. “You made it to the other side.”

“Nita,” Laurel says, “I’m from the other side.”

A glitch appears in Nita’s smile. She looks from Laurel to the photo, and then she stumbles back.

“It was just as much a shock to us,” Laurel says. “We had no idea what the antiuniverse would be like, but we didn’t expect this, with—with duplicates of everyone.”

Nita’s voice rises. “Duplicates?”