on the back of her head, and she wants to apologize, but there isn’t time.
She hits the door again, shunting, and Roger gasps, in too much pain to scream. She doesn’t feel a thing. Maybe she’s damaging herself by refusing to feel the damage firsthand, but there isn’t time for that, either. This door should open. It’s not locked; the combination of fire damage and the earthquake has it wedged into its frame, and she can see the pressure points that will cause it to let go. It has to let go. It has to. Their survival matters more than a torn rotator cuff or a fractured collarbone.
She hits the door for a third time. Roger’s vision goes briefly gray with pain. The door comes open, and she opens her eyes, letting her own vision take over as she hauls him out of the crumbling building, down the familiar steps, back into a world where the geometry makes sense. Things are falling here as well—tree branches, pieces of masonry, power lines—but they’re more widely spaced. She has time to calculate their arc of descent before impact, time to weave between them, still pulling Roger along. He isn’t in pain anymore, but he can feel its echo, filtered through her nerves. As soon as she opened her eyes she broke the connection, as much as it can be broken; their quantum entanglement is strong and getting stronger. Roger’s childhood fears were more justified than either of them realized.
She wonders if he realizes it now. She wonders if he’s going to pull away. And it doesn’t matter now, because they’re still running. Dodger takes the time out of their own escape to move a few feet to the side and knock a freshman out of the path of a snapped electrical wire; she could see the boy’s hair catching flame, see his body jittering and dancing from the current, before she hit him and changed the math. No one comments on their appearance from the Life Sciences building; everyone has their own problems. Everyone is focused on their own survival.
They run until they reach a place Dodger judges safe, far enough from the falling debris that they won’t be hit, far enough from the other students that they won’t be overheard. The shaking is beginning to slow. The aftershocks will last for days, but the main quake, the big quake . . . that’s almost over.
Roger lets go of her hand.
(Later, that’s what she’ll remember: she’ll remember he let go of her first. She’ll remember that they had each other, they were holding on, and then he was gone, pulling away with a finality that left her reeling. The pain still hadn’t come back into her shoulder; her mind was clear. She felt him let her go.)
“Roger?” She turns to him, curious, concerned. He seems as far away as he always does, when she sees him with her own eyes: close enough to reach for, close enough to touch. But the ground between them tells a different story. It tells her he’s taken a step away; if she reached out now, her hands would close on nothing. It tells her she’s alone.
Someone in the distance is sobbing like their heart’s been broken. Dodger feels her own begin to crack.
“Did we do this?” he asks, his voice a thin echo of her own from earlier in the morning. She’d been asking about a fire, about a death; six deaths, really, but only one she was willing to claim as their responsibility. He’s asking about an earthquake, about a campus in ruins around them, about the cost in human lives. Neither of them is stupid. They both know enough about this sort of disaster to know that the death toll will be counted in the hundreds if they’re lucky, and the thousands if they’re not.
“Roger—” she begins, and stops dead as she sees the way he’s looking at her. Like he’s lost. Like she’s the monster on the other side of the glass.
Like he never wants to see her again.
“Did we do this?” he repeats. “Don’t you lie to me, Dodge. I’d know, so don’t you lie.”
She opens her mouth to lie. She stops. She can’t do it. She physically can’t do it. She wants to: can see the lie in the space behind her eyes, shimmering and perfect, a gem of prevarication and deceit. She’s been practicing her lies for years. She just needs to put the words in the right order, and