“It can’t,” says Peter, and kisses his wife goodnight.
Down the hall, Dodger lies awake, staring at the slowly dimming constellations on her ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark paint still holds a charge, even after all these years; she can tell the time by the half-life of her artificial sky. She wants to talk to Roger. She wants to ask him what he thought of the meal, of her parents, of the overall situation. She can’t. Smita is asleep, but Erin is right there, close enough that she’d notice if Dodger started talking to herself.
We should have worked harder at that whole “silent communication” thing, she thinks, and counts the stars, and tries to sleep.
Erin listens as Dodger’s breathing levels out, turning deep and slow as the other girl sinks into unconsciousness. When she’s sure Dodger is well and truly gone she opens her eyes, brushing the hair out of her face with one hand, and counts silently to ten in ancient Sumerian. There’s no movement from the mathematician. She’s not fully manifest yet; there will come a time when someone so much as thinking of numbers in her presence will catch the corner of her attention, risking her full regard. Erin won’t take risks like this then, assuming they’re still together, assuming they’re still alive.
Carefully, she sits up, watching for any signs of motion. When they don’t come, she stands, and pads toward the door.
The air in the house is still. Roger is asleep in his room, she’s sure; put them this close together and the cuckoos will either be continually on guard, sleeping in shifts, watching one another’s backs, or they’ll be utterly relaxed, synchronizing in ways even they haven’t started to figure out yet. Erin can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they discover how deep their entanglement goes.
This is not a house built for war. Everything in it speaks of peace, of indolence; no one who thinks in terms of a battle coming would choose cream carpets, or pastel accents in their wallpaper. Erin pauses at a picture of the Cheswich family in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disney World. Dodger, who looks all of twelve years old, is wearing mouse ears and grinning the broad, bright grin of a child whose greatest trials have involved an imaginary friend who stopped talking to her and a series of math teachers who don’t understand. Her parents glow with love and satisfaction. It’s things like this that make these cuckoos so dangerous; there are bricks in their road to the Impossible City that are neither wind nor stardust but simple red stone, forged in the real world, where alchemy is a fantasy and immortality an impossibility.
“You made them too normal, and that’s where you fucked up,” she murmurs, touching the frame. Then she resumes walking, heading for the back door, and out into the green California evening.
Erin left the lab for New York City after Darren died, sent to a foster family as dedicated to the cause as the Middletons, to learn the things she’d need to know for her coming mission. Her “mother” taught her to wield civility like a weapon, to put on eyeliner and lipstick and a smile she didn’t mean, one sharp enough to slice through skin, bone, and social barriers alike. Her “father” taught her to break down a rifle, wipe it clean, and reassemble it in under a minute, putting her through the kind of hard, unrelenting drills that would have made a military academy proud. They’d been working for the glory of the cause, working for citizenship in the Impossible City, and they had made her the kind of weapon that could be used to change the world.
The trouble with weapons is that they can be aimed in any direction. She sits on a lawn chair near the fence (the same chair Dodger, in another timeline, reclined in while Roger’s life fell apart; the chair where she ordered a reset of the universe to save him from the consequences of his parents’ choices) and pulls out her phone. The number she dials is found in no directory, listed in no database; even the phone company would have difficulty determining who owns it.
Dodger, I’m sorry, she thinks, and raises the phone to her ear, and waits.
There is a click. “Report,” says a voice.
“Cheswich’s parents recognized Middleton as a biological relative as soon as he entered the home,” she says. “They asked whether the subjects were aware of