WildRose knew right away that this case was going to be one of the weird ones, but she didn't realize how weird until she rounded the corner and literally bumped into herself. She and her doppelganger bounced off each other and rubbed their foreheads with simultaneous stares of irritation, before letting out identical sighs and muttering, in perfect unison, "What the fuck?"
Instinctively, WildRose started to ask if Sharpe was getting any of this...but her words died in her throat as she remembered that she hadn't gotten a signal on her earpiece in over two hours, not since she first stowed away on the cargo ship heading out of Samson City with about six tons of stolen experimental technology. WildRose liked to think of herself as self-reliant, but it made her uncomfortable to realize just how much she had come to depend on Sharpe for things like intel on the ship's registry, GPS coordinates for the island harbor it berthed at...even just having a little voice in her ear to remind her that she wasn't entirely alone as she crept through the vast underground network of steel-walled tunnels meant the world to her now. Losing Sharpe made her feel utterly alone in a way that even a second WildRose couldn't fix.
Assuming she was real, of course. In a world with robot doubles, clones, evil opposites from the Negaverse, shapeshifters, telepathic mirror-fae from the hidden realms, and induced hallucinations, WildRose wasn't exactly about to take Penelope Powell 2.0 on faith. "Who are you and how did you get here?" she asked in low, determined tones, dropping into a fighting stance just in case.
The other WildRose dropped into an identical stance. "I'm me," she said, her voice making Penny wince in that way that hearing yourself talk always does. "Which is I guess you? I think it's something quantum or something, like a side-effect of the device we're tracking down. I don't suppose you paid more attention to Doctor Balkowicz's lecture than I did, did you?"
WildRose shook her head sadly. "No, I figured Sharpe would pick up the details. She's the one with all the PhDs. I got 'you've got to keep it out of the wrong hands', but everything else just sounded like the grown-ups from Peanuts talking." She shrugged. "I think I get the idea, though. It's like that one experiment everyone always talks about with the cat. We're both here because the universe can't decide what's happened to us yet, not until we catch up with whoever stole the device and stop them." She looked down the corridor the way WildRose-the other WildRose-came. "Speaking of, what's down that hallway?"
"Storage space and some barracks," the other Penny said. "Yours?"
"More of the same." WildRose nodded down the unexplored corridor, and her counterpart nodded in return. They began to pad down the corridor with identical, silent steps. (No wonder she bumped into herself-WildRose was probably the only person in the world quiet enough to sneak up on WildRose.) "I didn't see any soldiers, though. Maybe they're all up helping unload the stolen goods? Six tons of experimental machinery isn't exactly the kind of thing you get your buddies to help you move with beer and pizza."
The other WildRose gave her a slight tilt of the head and shoulders that Penny instinctively understood to mean, 'It seems likely but we can't take it for granted.' It was incredibly strange, seeing yourself from the outside like this. She couldn't read her double's thoughts, exactly, but she knew her own body language on a level so intimate that it was like having a near-telepathic degree of understanding. They seemed to be exactly alike...
But they couldn't be, could they? Doctor Balkowicz got lost in the weeds pretty quickly when he tried to explain it to her, but WildRose was pretty clear on that part. The quantum beam reordered space and time, reshaping whatever it hit in accordance with the wishes of its user. The bigger the change, the more powerful the ripples to reality... and because it changed time as well as space, the effects could happen before the cause. The other WildRose was an echo of the shift in the universe; the fact that she was here now, before they even found the thing, probably meant that it was a pretty big shift.
WildRose didn't have time to examine the uncomfortable implications of that thought-her twin held up a hand, and they both stopped dead and listened to the sound of massive machinery at work down a side passage. "They've hollowed the hell out of this place," the other Penny whispered. "I don't know how they could have done this much work on an island this close to Samson City. We were on the cargo ship, what...an hour?"
"A little less," WildRose said, carefully edging around the corner to look down the hallway. She gestured an all-clear to her duplicate, but made sure to hang back just a little to make sure she brought up the rear. It wasn't that she didn't trust herself-if you couldn't trust you, who could you trust? But if she was right, the other WildRose had been... would be... hit by the quantum beam. She was, or would be, or would will have been, or FUCK she hated weird time-travel bullshit! She was changed by the device. And it was a big enough change that it couldn't just rewrite her to have always been that way. It was a big enough change to put a crack in time that went back several hours. WildRose wasn't narcissistic, but she thought she was a good enough person that changing her that much had to be for the worse.
The other WildRose either hadn't thought of it yet, or was feeling pretty confident in her ability to win a fight against herself. She took the lead, loping down the corridor with the grace of a panther. In a quiet voice that nonetheless carried back to Penny, she said, "Less than an hour. There aren't any islands this close to Samson City big enough to conceal an operation like this, at least not on the charts. So either someone's been censoring the navigational charts, or..."
