the shadow of the corn. He has no grave. She’s his living mausoleum.
She sits, cross-legged on the couch, and waits. Three minutes after midnight, her phone rings. She picks it up. Brings it to her ear.
“Hello, Erin.”
She nearly drops the phone.
Normally, the evening report is requested by Leigh: a serpent, to be sure, but a serpent she knows intimately, and who knows her just as well. Leigh made her, molded her, chose the color of her skin and the texture of her hair. Leigh is not her mother—more her architect—and one of them will kill the other one day, but Leigh is familiar. This voice . . .
This voice is softer and harder at the same time, an iron bar wrapped in a sheet of velvet, rubbing against her skin in a sickly-sweet parody of seduction. She hasn’t spoken to Reed in years, not since she left the lab, but still, she knows that voice. She knows it very well.
“Sir,” she manages to say through a constricted throat, with a mouth gone dry as ashes.
“You’ve done well keeping the language aspect of your pairing under observation. The math can’t hurt anything on its own. A trigger’s required if a gun’s to be of use.” He chuckles at his own joke, a dry, humorless sound, like bones clicking together in a tomb. When he speaks again, that small levity is gone. “Your assignment has changed. Kill him.”
“Sir?”
“We have a better candidate, a pair that’s managed to mature without separation, and we can’t have the Doctrine’s loyalties confused when it tries to take physical form. The Middleton boy has become a liability. Your service is appreciated, and you need to terminate the experiment. Clean up whatever mess it creates. We’ll expect you back here within the week—oh, and Erin? Try to be more subtle this time. They can’t all be electrical fires.”
The line goes dead. The call has been terminated.
Erin lowers the phone and stares blankly at the hallway. At the end of it, Roger is sleeping, defenseless, unwary. He has no idea what she is, what he’s welcomed into his home, his bed. He’s never suspected her, not once. She could let him go like that: let him die innocent of what he was made for, of what he can do. It’s the only choice she can be sure she’s never made before. The odds of Dodger managing to reset the timeline on her own before she dies from disconnection shock are slim. So no, this is a thing she’s never done. Every time, every timeline, every revision, she’s chosen to refuse her duty. She’s chosen to fight.
She’s so tired. The cuckoos have the luxury of forgetting their trips to the Impossible City. Not her. She’s been tangled up with them for lifetimes, and the temptation to end the story here is stronger than she expected. One knife, one throat, and she gets to be something more than their pretty little killer. She gets to go back to the lab, to the comforts of the world she was made for, and see what kind of world this would be with the Doctrine truly embodied, truly activated.
A world controlled by Reed, with Leigh at his red right hand. For the (tenth? hundredth? thousandth?) time she looks at the choice, and stands, still knowing what she’s going to do, to walk into the shadows of her home.
FLIGHT RISK
Timeline: 00:15 PDT, June 16, 2016 (same night).
“Oof!” Roger sits upright, dreams dissolving into a confused haze of fragmentary images. The color red—true red, the red he’s never seen with his own eyes—lingers, and he knows he was dreaming of Dodger. (Or dreaming with Dodger: assuming she’s still on this coast, it’s not unreasonable to think their sleep cycles might occasionally align, and their subconscious minds might keep reaching out even after their conscious minds have decided to cut contact. He misses her. He imagines she feels the same.)
Still groggy, he looks down to see what hit him. It’s a backpack, already half-full. He picks it up and looks inside, finding clothes, and notebooks, and his tablet.
“You have five minutes,” says Erin. Her voice is cold. There’s no teasing or laughter there now, only the sort of steely resolve he hasn’t heard from her since before the earthquake. He looks up. She’s standing in the doorway, dressed in dark gray leggings and a matching tank top. It looks like she’s getting ready for a yoga class, or a run.