Page 84 of Under Story

In the other Laurel’s office, she dismantles everything she thought she knew about the natural world. Sometimes she stares in awe at the tree slices threaded with hyphae. Here, fungi are not agents of decay; instead, like dark matter, they hold material together.

She emails Kwame about Samir’s findings. In July, Kwame sends her an initial hypothesis. That month is unseasonably cool. Laurel bikes to her favorite Vietnamese restaurant and returns with takeout containers of pho.

“I heard from Kwame this morning,” she tells Eli. “He thinks that the fossil forest will compose in about three hundred million years—and I can check his work.”

Eli transfers the broth into bowls. “Because our past is their future?”

“Exactly. And the Kwame in our world, the one who discovered the fossil forest? He dated them back to the same period, before the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.”

Eli looks thoughtful. Several hours later, she hears his footsteps outside her office. Laurel leaves the door cracked, but he always knocks.

When she waves him inside, he asks, “Do you know when Helen died in our universe?”

Laurel shakes her head. “I had left for McMurdo by then. But before that, Beth said…” She pauses, trying to remember. “I think she said that it would be likely within a year.”

Eli is holding his laptop. He sets it down on her desk.

“These are the birth announcements for last month,” he says. Beneath a heading—September 2017—Laurel sees Helen’s name. “You came to Antarctica in October of 2016. This would have been one year later.”

Laurel cocks her head. “What are you thinking?”

“Do you remember how the birth dates on our drivers’ licenses didn’t make sense?”

Laurel thinks back to the moment on the plane when they puzzled over the strange years. She had not intentionally committed hers to memory, but she recalls it right away.

“Mine was 2068,” she says.

“And mine was 2070,” says Eli.

They look at each other.

“The years our doubles were born,” says Laurel.

The second implication follows on the tail of this one.

“And…in our world, the years we die,” says Eli. “You’d go two years before me.”

The thought is chilling. It feels as though she knows something she shouldn’t, stolen from the other side. She can tell by Eli’s face that he has more to tell her.

“If people here are born on the day—and in the same way—that they died in our world, then that should be the case for Silas,” he says. “August 18, 2014: we’d only have to wait three years.”

“But that would be the other Silas,” says Laurel. “Silas Two.”

“Think of Helen, though. She started life as an old woman, but developmentally, she’s a baby.” Eli puts a hand on her shoulder. “We’d raise him as ours.”

Until now, Eli has played the role of skeptic. Laurel hasn’t seen him with the zeal of a believer.

“What about our plan?” she asks. “We were supposed to cross back to our world in July.”

“I know.” He exhales, removing his hand. “And we can try. We will try. But when we made that plan, we had no data. Now we do. If Silas’s double is born here, he’ll need us.”

Laurel listens with quiet devastation. It would be easy to lash out, but Eli looks as pained as she feels.

“Everything we worked for,” she says. “It was all for him—for Silas One.”

“Maybe we only thought it was,” says Eli.

The room feels dense with the presence of both boys, each half real and half theoretical.