interior walls are completely gone, torn down by fire or rescue personnel—are riddled with holes. The building seems cancerous, diseased, a thousand years old.
There’s a hole in the floor, leading to the basement. The bolt that held the pterodactyl to the ceiling remains, but the fossil beast is gone, fallen below or consumed by flames. Dodger stops and looks at the place where it hung, a look of childish gravity on her face. Something that endured for millions of years is gone; something that should have outlasted them both is over. Somehow, that’s the worst thing yet about this tiring, terrible day.
Then she turns away, looking at Roger, and says, “We need to look for answers.”
They’re standing in a burnt-out building; they’ll be arrested, or worse, expelled, if someone catches them here. They’re not arson investigators, or investigators at all. Neither of them is equipped to be here. Neither of them has a clue what they’re doing.
But Dodger needs this if she’s going to accept that it isn’t their fault that Smita’s gone. She needs to walk the floor and try to figure out why this is happening, and if that’s what she needs, then Roger’s going to give it to her. It’s a small thing. It’s all he can do.
“Wood burns at—”
“Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit,” says Dodger, without missing a beat.
Roger nods. “So we have a starting point.”
“Absolute zero,” she says.
“Exactly.”
They walk the floor like tightrope performers, placing each foot gingerly in front of the other, testing for weaknesses, waiting for the moment when the whole thing gives way. Occasionally, one of them will say something: a word, a number. The other will answer, a number, a word, completing the equation that they make between them, defining the world one step at a time. After a while, they stop looking at each other; they don’t need to.
“Ceiling tiles.”
“Ninety-five destroyed, one hundred and sixteen partially destroyed, eighteen intact. Eighty-four.”
“Chairs damaged in this classroom.”
“Fifty-three destroyed, seventeen damaged but potentially repairable.”
It’s never been like this before. They’ve always been holding each other a little bit apart, divided by some reluctance to give in. When they were children, Roger didn’t quite believe in her. When they were teens, she hadn’t quite forgiven him. As adults, they came back together by chance (but there is no chance where they’re concerned; there never has been, only intricate design), and still they’ve been holding back, afraid of giving in, afraid of needing too much.
They aren’t holding back now.
“Pounds of fallen masonry.”
“Seven hundred and three, in this room.”
“Dust.”
“Twelve thousand parts per million.”
On and on they go, the shorthand becoming more extreme, the air going hot and heavy around them, like an electric storm rolling in, like another fire getting ready to ignite, a fire that needs no flame but only the constant friction between the two halves of something which has never, in all the long years of their lives, been fully realized.
(In an apartment off-campus, a woman who remembers the lab they have been allowed to forget, a woman with so much blood on her hands that she’ll never, never be able to wash it clean, feels the air turn syrupy and slow, thick as molasses and just as capable of suffocating anyone foolish enough to wind up mired in it. She puts down the plate she was washing, drops the dish towel, and walks calmly to the back door. The old orange cat who hangs around out there comes running when she opens it. He feels the strangeness too, with the precognition native to the animal kingdom, and he wants nothing to do with it. He darts under the table, fur fluffed out, hiss rising in his throat. Erin sighs, drops to her knees, gathers him, squirming, into her arms. She carries him to the front door and out into the street, until they reach the small, grass-covered island at the center of their intersection, a place where nothing will fall in the chaos to come. They won’t be safe here. They’ll be close enough. The woman holds the beast tight and waits for the sky to fall.)
Back in the Life Sciences Annex, Roger and Dodger continue their search. Their initial goal has faded into the background, replaced by this entertaining, all-consuming new game, word for number, number for word. Roger has never understood the math that calls to her, but he feels it now, thrumming in his veins like a promise of miracles to come. Dodger has never grasped the need to