they’ll do the work she has for them. But she can’t. Roger has told her not to, and she can’t do it.
Roger is the first of them to be afraid of what they can do together. Dodger is the first to be afraid of what he can do alone.
“I think so,” she says, and her voice is a whisper, her voice is a sigh; her voice is almost swallowed by the murmuring rumble of the dying quake. The shaking has ended. The rolling has gone with it. All that remains is the faintest tremor in the ground, and in a moment, even that will be gone. “We . . . I think we did something when we were playing, and I think it maybe broke some stuff. We started the quake. But we didn’t mean to hurt anybody. We couldn’t have known.”
“Now we do.” He sounds sad, so sad, and she doesn’t need quantum entanglement to know what he’s thinking: she can see it in his eyes. He steps close again, leans forward, plants a kiss on her forehead, gentle as a farmer planting an apple tree. Then he’s gone, stepping away, turning on his heel, and running, running, running into the ruins of campus, away from the thing they make when they’re together, away from the consequences of what they’ve done. He’s running, and Dodger, for once, is not; she just stays where she is, eyes open and filling slowly with tears, and watches him go.
REPORT
Timeline: 12:01 CST, December 9, 2008 (same day).
The astrolabe spins wildly, astral bodies shuddering and twisting through their orbits.
Pluto—beautiful, jeweled Pluto, crafted from the finest platinum, studded with icy diamond chips—has begun spinning backward, racing in reverse through the mechanical cosmos. A collision seems inevitable, but over and over, it skirts past Neptune, dodges Jupiter, and continues on its implacable, incomprehensible way. The sun is the only piece of the model which does not move. It sits, motionless, in the center of the chaos. (Later review will show the astrolabe began to misbehave when the earthquake began in Berkeley, and that the sun stopped when the quake did. How this is relevant will be less clear.)
Reed stands with his hands behind his back and a frown on his face, watching the model of the universe as it attempts, one misaligned twist at a time, to tear itself apart. He didn’t build the astrolabe, has never been a mechanical engineer, never cared that much about things that aren’t biological, but he loves it all the same, loves it for what it represents: everything. This is what he one day hopes to control. Everything. He coveted it the moment his mother-maker showed him her blueprints for its construction, when he was an apprentice, when Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist in North America, spreading her calm propaganda masked as fantasy, when it seemed like a gangling experiment in base metals turned flesh named James Reed would never be anything but a carnival miracle-peddler, capable of mixing snake oils and minor cures, but nothing more. He’s lied, cheated, killed, and bargained to work his way to this place, this lab, to ownership of this astrolabe. The chaos he now oversees is either a sign that success is finally at hand, or an omen of failure yet to come.
It must be the first. He won’t consider the second.
Something has happened to or with their cuckoos. The astrolabe has run in reverse dozens of times since they were sent out into the world. He remembers no timelines but this one, because he’s not one of them, but the astrolabe . . . that remains his secret weapon. It’s so finely calibrated, so carefully attuned to the functionality of the living universe, that it cannot help but adjust itself when something changes. A shift in the timeline is a shift in the universe. A shift in the universe must be reflected by the astrolabe, or it becomes nothing but a pretty collection of jeweled planets and glittering stars, with no value beyond that intrinsic in its component parts. Even if Reed were willing to allow that, the astrolabe would not be.
There is a knock at the open door behind him. He doesn’t turn.
“Which ones?” he asks.
“Cheswich and Middleton,” says Leigh. “You were right. They’re almost mature.”
“What have they done?”
He can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks again. Leigh has always been an admirer of destruction, when executed well and without petty complications. “An earthquake in California. The