awful. She was really great. I hope they do something for her family.”
“What if this is our fault?” Dodger can be like a dog with a bone sometimes. A good attribute for a mathematician, but not the easiest one for a sister, especially not for a sister looking at him with such bemusement and guilt in her eyes. “She was looking at our DNA. What if . . . what if we were split up because there’s something wrong with us, and they thought they could make it better by putting us on opposite sides of the country, like keeping bleach and chlorine apart? We’re not normal. We’ve never been normal. What if Smita died because she got too close to figuring out what’s not normal about us?”
It’s a huge jump from “she looked at our DNA” to “she was killed to keep us secret”; Roger is opening his mouth to tell Dodger to stop being silly. Then he hesitates. For once, words have failed him. Yes, it’s a jump, and yes, it’s ridiculous on the face of things, but can anything really be ridiculous when your starting point is “we’re secret twins who found each other across a continent through quantum entanglement, which is slightly more useful than a telephone, without being as good as telepathy”? Everything about them is ridiculous. It always has been. So what’s one more thing added to the heap?
Haltingly, he says, “I don’t know whether this is about us or not. It could be a freak accident. I hate to say it, but every time we’ve had a fire on campus, it’s been the chemistry kids. Their lab was two floors below hers. They could have knocked something over at the wrong time, and when the wiring sparked . . . I don’t know. I want to say you’re wrong, that there’s no possible way this could be connected to us, but I can’t. I just . . . I don’t know.”
Dodger looks at him for a long moment. Then she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, puts her mug down on the table, and stands.
“We have to find out,” she says, and it’s so simple, and so impossibly difficult, that he can’t argue with her.
“Let me get dressed,” he says.
Campus security has cordoned off the Life Sciences Annex. Caution tape blocks the usual approaches, orange as a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, ends snapping in the breeze. The air smells of char and flame retardants, all the hallmarks of a terrible fire. Even the sky looks ashy, although that could be a trick of the weather; the rain is threatening to fall again.
Students queue up along the tape, whispering to each other as they cup their hands over their eyes and squint at the ruins of the building, trying to pick out every ghoulish detail, every unrevealed sliver of information. A few are sobbing, burying their faces against the shoulders of friends. At least six students died in the blaze—maybe more, depending on what the firefighters found, depending on whether someone had fallen asleep in an empty classroom or gone looking for a private place to sit and study—and each of them had friends, family, a whole world of their own. Those worlds are over now. The world keeps ending, every minute of every day, and nothing is going to make that stop. Nothing can ever, ever make that stop.
Dodger has borrowed one of Roger’s hooded sweatshirts, a baggy gray thing that fits her almost perfectly, her narrower shoulders balanced by her larger chest. With the hood covering her hair and her hands shoved into her pockets, she moves through the crowd like a ghost, and Roger moves in the space behind her, letting her forge the way. This is her part of campus, not his; she knows the shortcuts and the shape of things.
There are people everywhere. There is no clear approach. “We need to get closer or back off,” says Roger, frustrated. “Those are the options. Dodge? Can you get us closer?”
She stops, cocking her head hard, like she’s running some complex set of internal numbers. Then, with a quick nod, she says, “Yes,” and turns, heading away from the building at a fast clip. Roger has to rush to keep up with her. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t slow down: she just keeps moving.
She just keeps moving.
Her steps are light and her eyes shift constantly from side to side, assessing, recalibrating, looking for a better angle. Most people will never