you to fuck with me right now, Roger, and I don’t have the patience to sit and hold your hand while you work through this. I’m risking my own life to save yours. Show a scrap of gratitude, and call your damn sister.”
She walks past the bed while he’s gaping at her again, kneeling and opening the bottom drawer of her dresser. Pushing away a veil of lingerie and sanitary products—even though Roger has always been understanding about her periods, willing to go to the drugstore when she asks without complaining about it, something she attributes in part to the amount of time he spent with Dodger in his head, putting a box of tampons on top of something she wants left alone has always been a functional deterrent—she produces a lead-lined box. It has no latch; instead, it is sealed with a sheet of candle wax. She breaks it with one hard strike of her palm and looks over her shoulder to Roger. His eyes are still open. He hasn’t moved.
“They’ll know,” she says quietly. “When the sun comes up and their little science projects haven’t suddenly become a lot more powerful, they’ll know you’re still breathing. They’ll assume I failed, that you were too much for me, and they’ll send someone to finish what they think I started. We have until they get here and find an absence of bodies before they know I’ve gone rogue, and once that happens? All bets are off. So call her, before we’re running.”
“Erin, you need to cut this out. Whatever this is, you need to stop. It’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to save your scrawny, ungrateful ass.” She turns back to the box. Opens it. Withdraws its contents. Stands, and turns to face him.
Roger makes a thick urk noise, like he’s trying to speak through a mouthful of concrete. Erin’s smile is as thin as the blade of a knife, and would cut twice as sharply.
“This is a Hand of Glory,” she says. “I made it from the severed hand of a murdered woman, because I knew I was going to need it eventually. I’ve been trying to protect you for a long time. Longer than a lifetime, even, thanks to your asshole sister. I’m sorry to drop this on you so abruptly, but it’s not like there was ever a convenient moment for saying ‘hey, Roger, so you know, you were engineered by alchemists who want to control the world, and they’re hoping they can use you and Dodger for that purpose.’”
Roger knows that hand. It’s been a long time, but there are things he doesn’t have it in him to forget. The shape of Smita’s fingers, long and elegant and nimble; the way she painted her nails in shockingly bright colors, as if to draw attention to her hands, which she considered her best feature. The hand Erin holds belongs to a woman who died in a fire. There’s no way it should be here, no way it should still look so fresh and pliant, but it is, and it does, and the world is no longer making sense.
“Call her,” says Erin. There’s no love in her voice. Maybe there was never any love there at all.
Or maybe there was. Some things are difficult to fake, especially over the length and breadth of the years they’ve had together. There have been a lot of years. Their relationship, informal as it is, has outlasted marriages among his peers; there have been days when he thought they were going to be together forever. Days when it seemed like Erin was his happy-ever-after girl, like they were going to be able to build a future, one brick at a time, just by keeping one another close and never letting go. He’s trusted her since the earthquake, since she stopped being Dodger’s prickly roommate and became his friend, confidant, and eventually lover.
He can’t throw all that away in an instant. So he takes a deep breath, trying to swallow his misgivings, and says, in his most serious tone, “Erin, I want you to explain what’s going on.”
Erin’s eyes widen. “Oh,” she says, in a small, surprised voice. “Every manifestation really does feed into every other. No wonder. No wonder. I . . .” She shakes herself like a wet dog, like she’s trying to shrug off some unwanted control. “I was born in the lab that created you and Dodger. You were the pet projects of a man