There was a fantasy Wildwing had built up in his head that all their problems could be easily fixed, if he could just manage to get back to the team. The logical part of his brain told him that made no reasonable sense. Still, there was some piece of him that insisted that the only thing he needed to do was present the situation to Tanya, and give her the time to work it out. This could barely be called a plan, but it was a plan that had worked very well for him in the past.

The reality was that this was an unfair expectation to put on her. It was impossible for her to be able to fix everything.

Tanya herself would never object. That wasn’t like her, no matter how far outside her area of expertise he asked her to travel. Anything vaguely scientific had fallen to her, in the unfair way that they had all taken on additional responsibilities out of the original scope of the mission. The mission that was supposed to be a couple hours, a day, and then be over, a year and a half ago. There was literally no one else on the planet he could turn to.

Wildwing trusted Tanya’s best guess over anyone else’s sure thing, in any case. She had earned that respect. He did not question her judgment, and that choice had not failed him. The entire Pond was largely down to Tanya’s technical ability, but there were a few things in particular, like the medbay, the fusion generator, and Drake One, that absolutely could not be credited to any of the rest of them. Tanya recovered the medical bay design from schematics in the Aerowing’s small database herself—records kept in case need for remote shelter came upon a crew.

Her first task was verifying Wildwing’s own identity, which he heartily agreed to. It was easy enough, and just required a quick matching of a DNA profile that Tanya had generated months prior, after the event where the Saurians had briefly been in control of the Pond. It was a technological marvel, a few short minutes, and still the very collection of a sample swab felt crude compared to the Mask’s ability.

Then there was the matter of the copy.

Winterwing did not make it to the medical bay under his own power, and had to be carried on a stretcher, with his recently rescued companion wearily following by his side. She appeared to be bordering on the verge of her own collapse, waving away offers of assistance and refusing eye contact or conversation.

There were any number of explanations for the copy’s existence, very few benign, and the majority of them dissolved altogether once they had eased him into the medicom’s scanning bed. There was nothing sinister to be found. He had all the right organs in all the right places, one fractured rib, and a fraying temper as their questions carried on.

Wildwing had not been ready to find nothing. He had convinced himself that he had not been addressing a real person, that there was some trick. It was easy to deal with an android or a Saurian or whatever deception handed to him. He had spent the last year dealing with tricks. He did not know how to handle a person. He did not know how to handle a person that was so clearly supposed to be him, but also clearly was not.

But whatever Dragaunus’s plan had been, it must have centered around Winterwing, and the duck he had pulled from the scrawling on the Raptor’s floor, Emily. With the rib mended, there was nothing for it but to follow Mallory’s insistent instruction to separate the two of them and question them individually. The girl had to stay in the medbay, as she carried the markers of infection, but he was moved and isolated to a barren room where, hopefully, he could not cause trouble.

Devoid of other options, or clear evidence of deception, Tanya simply ran the same DNA comparison again. She tried her best to explain the results to Wildwing, in hushed tones, though it mattered little, with the crowded medbay around them. To his eyes, what she handed him was just two endless strings of letters, randomly generated and meaningless. He frowned and tried in his most diplomatic voice to ask for a clue.

She gave the blue pad a few taps, and sections of both strings began to highlight.

“There’s sequences in here that are entirely different between you two,” she said.

He still could not infer her meaning. “Manipulated?”

“No, no, if it were manipulated, I would expect something, something useful. Targeted. Strategic? This is, well look-” she picked a highlighted spot. “This section is from an ancestor you had that lived in the Arkatrelli plateau. It’s unique to there, it was an isolated community before the Empire. About three percent of people on Puckworld have it. He doesn’t.”

Wildwing pondered this for a moment, but could not recall anything relevant to confirm or deny her claim. And, as she said, he could not find any relevance to the aberration.

“There’s something else too,” she said, taking the pad. “Dragaunus has some proficiency in genetic manipulation, but there are still things he wouldn’t be able to hide, not in a project created in only a couple months. Your skeleton rebuilds itself in a cycle that lasts about seven years. If Winterwing were something newly created, the skeleton would be new too. It isn’t. Beyond the rib there’s evidence of a broken arm in childhood, cranial surgery much more recently, and fillings in his teeth. Fillings. Do you think Draganuus offers dental?”

Wildwing murmured. “A broken arm.”

“What?”

“I broke my arm when I was eight.”

Tanya gave an appropriate pause, but when no further information was forthcoming, prompted the obvious question: “How?”

Embarrassed, he did not tell her about tripping over his own feet and falling as he was walking to school.

She stared at him in increasing awkwardness, until she realized that it was her duty to keep the conversation moving. “I...have two possibilities for you to consider, and your solution may be either or a blend of the two.

“The first is that, while improbable, you’re just looking at a coincidence. Genetics does that, sometimes, where you’ll end up with totally unrelated people that look the same, by chance. I’d call this closer to a cousin than a clone. Definitely the same family, not the same person.”

She must have seen the objection on his face.

“Option two is that Dragaunus’s ability to break the boundaries of the universe means that his potential pool of resources is larger than we assumed, and so are the variations he can encounter. You remember the other Anaheim, where things were different, but still recognizable?” She gestured at her pair of sequences. “It seems possible that we’re looking at you if circumstances were different, but still recognizable.”

The Earth existed in the spot where Puckworld had been in their own universe, and Wildwing had never given it much more thought than that. There were those models of existence that necessitated infinite universes and infinite diversity of all things, intended to never interact but existing within the a grand chaotic design. That was all abstraction, as far as he was concerned. Intellectual exercises with no real world consequences, the sort of bland hypothetical asked after the right amount of intoxication. ‘What if you were left handed’, ‘what if you went to a different school’, ‘what if you had walked a different route this morning’.

He did not like the idea of other versions of him, infinite or otherwise, just on the basis that he was used to the idea, and had been his entire life, that the definition of him was a unique experience. He did not think Tanya was wrong—there was rarely an occasion where he would have dared to suggest she had been wrong about anything. He could not be frustrated with her. It was an explanation, which was what he had asked for.

While all the other things he had asked her to do were outside her field of expertise, this proposal was actually far, far closer to what she should have been studying: The absolute edge of the underlying theories of existence. The sort of high level thinking that he did not have the head or the time for, that he could have happily spent his entire life never considering, if things had just gone-

Had just gone differently.

“I still don’t understand the point,” he said.

“The point?” Tanya asked.

“You can tell he’s not me.”

“Well, sure, he complains too much,” she smiled.

Wildwing straightened his back, sighing in irritation. “Then why the hell was he on the Raptor?”

“Maybe the plan really was to swap someone else into your role, and the best he could do with limited power is what we see.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, though was unconvinced.

“Can I...make a suggestion?”

“What?”

“You could try asking him.”