Chapter Fifty-Two
‘She was so psyched up, running on no sleep and too much caffeine. She was terrified; we’ve been friends for long enough for me to see it as clear as day, but she kept saying she wasn’t.’
‘She thought it wouldn’t work?’ I ask, even though that’s the most logical explanation.
But Amina’s expression twists. ‘No. She knew it would work. That was why she was terrified.’
‘Oh.’ I pause. ‘But it didn’t work.’ I feel bad for stating the obvious.
A ghost of a smile flashes across Amina’s face. ‘Didn’t it?’
‘Touché,’ I concede. ‘But she did end up in a coma.’
‘Well, yes. I knew something had gone wrong in the split second after she flicked the switch. I don’t know if she drew too much power, or if it was something else, but all of a sudden she was slumped in the seat, her head just hanging there, like a baby who can’t support their own weight.
’ She glances around as if she is reliving that time, desperately searching for an answer to the comatose woman in front of her.
‘She had a heart condition,’ I tell her.
‘A heart condition?’
‘We all have it, some genetic quirk. I was in a world where that Bethany had a panic attack and ended up in hospital. It’s one of those things no one would ever think to look for until BAM!’ I clap my hands together and Amina jumps.
‘What happened? To that Bethany?’
‘She’s fine. I left her with a long list of instructions about diet and managing stress and all that jazz.’ I wave my hand as if it isn’t a big deal.
‘I didn’t know if she was going to make it,’ Amina whispers. ‘I called an ambulance and then I carried her outside so …’ She trails off.
‘You didn’t want them to know the truth about what happened?’
‘I didn’t want Nick to know.’
I nod. I understand that.
‘And I didn’t know where she was,’ Amina adds.
‘She was in the hospital.’
‘Not like that. I knew where her body was, but I didn’t know where she had gone. I tried … I tried to bring her back.’
I pause for a moment. ‘You thought that was why she was in a coma?’
‘Because there was no one inside her? Yes. Of course.’
I pause again, allowing my racing brain to coalesce my thoughts into some semblance of a structure so I could articulate the question into words. ‘Could the body live without …’ I stumble over the idea of the soul. ‘Without a consciousness?’ I ask instead.
Amina stares at me.
I continue. ‘Because I think the coma was purely physiological. The result of that heart attack from the power surge.’
‘But then …’
‘Yeah.’ I breathe out loudly. ‘I think she swapped with another Bethany. And so there was someone else inside. Trapped.’
Amina shivers. ‘That’s hideous.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Bethany wouldn’t have done that. If she thought that would have happened, she wouldn’t even have tried.
I know her. She’s not like that.’ But I can tell she’s trying to convince herself this, a voice in the back of her skull raising a quiet question that perhaps Bethany would. Perhaps she was desperate enough.
I shift the subject slightly, aware this isn’t something we should dwell on. ‘So you tried to bring her back?’
‘I thought perhaps I could pull her back and then she’d wake up and this would all be okay.
But nothing worked. I began to think it was because her body wasn’t here, but I couldn’t exactly take the machine to the hospital, imagine how messed up that would look.
I kept trying though. I had to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to make sure no one knew what I was up to.
And then I’d come here and work for a few hours and try again. And again. And again.’
‘Always at night?’
She nods.
‘And how often did you come here?’
‘For the first few days I came every night. But then it got more difficult for me to sneak out, so it slowed to maybe twice a week, although generally on different nights.’
Every few nights. Never more than four nights between. ‘Do you know which dates?’ I ask.
‘I kept records,’ Amina tells me with the exact same tone Alesha uses when she tells me she’s done the same thing.
A dash of pride, a hint of a challenge for someone to criticize, and a dollop of smug.
Amina is like a prism, refracting the light in a million different ways, each one reminding me of someone else I’ve met along this journey, as though all of us Bethanys seek certain people in our lives and Amina has had to take on many of those roles.
She hands over a small notebook covered in neat writing, each word carefully penned in block capitals. It’s a list of dates and observations of the conditions and the outcomes.
‘This is every time I tried to run a correction.’
I trace the dates backwards, calculating the gaps between Amina’s attempts. There’s a familiarity there and I try to remember the sequence I repeated as I ran it through the algorithm a stupidly precocious Tyler had written.
I almost want to laugh. But I know there’s a chance that hysteria will take over me and I’ll never stop.
Because Amina wasn’t pulling her Bethany back to this world.
She was pulling me.
‘We need Tyler,’ I tell her.
‘Tyler?’ Amina’s face is blank.
‘Tyler Adams. You must have heard of Tyler Adams?’
‘Is he famous?’
‘Only the most famous man in theoretical physics. You must have heard of him.’
But Amina is adamant. In this world Tyler Adams is an entirely unknown entity in her and Bethany’s life.
Where is he?
I start to hunt for Tyler while Amina heads out of the storage unit to find us some coffee and sandwiches.
I smile slightly to myself. It seems Amina also fills the void of Cesca in this Bethany’s world, the one who always makes sure there are snacks and drinks and suitable provisions for any adventure.
‘Any allergies?’ Amina asks me from the half-opened door before she ducks beneath it.
I stare back at her and wait for her to realize what she’s asked.
‘Right,’ she says and a blush blooms across her cheeks. ‘This is still the same Bethany’s body. Got it.’
The bizarreness of the situation doesn’t even seem to faze her.
Tyler Adams doesn’t work at the university. I can’t find any published works attributed to him since the paper on quantum computing he published two years after he completed his PhD in 2016. It’s like he just dropped off the face of the physics planet.
A cold hand snakes up the back of my neck. What if … I push down the thought. I’m sure that isn’t it. But my fingers shake as I type “Tyler Adams obituary” into Google.