named James Reed, who’s been trying for over a hundred years to follow Asphodel Baker’s directions for incarnating a universal concept called the Doctrine of Ethos in a human body. Yours was the first generation where he began splitting the Doctrine into equal halves, both to force the hosts to be more like ordinary people, and to make them easier to control. You got language. Dodger got math.”
“And you got a blow to the head if you think I’m going to believe this bullshit.” Roger’s getting angry. He can’t help it. This is ludicrous; this is insane; this would have been impossible to swallow even if Erin hadn’t gone a step too far and invoked Dodger’s name. He doesn’t like to talk about his sister when he can help it. He made his choice. He has to live with it.
(Under the anger is horror, slow and rich and thick as honey. Because what she’s saying is impossible, yes, but so is quantum entanglement with an absent twin; so is causing an earthquake with a game. Erin is putting his life into a new context, one where things that have never been believable make sudden and absolute sense. And he does not want them to.)
“Don’t you want to know what they built me for?”
He doesn’t. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll play. What did your mad science masters design you to do?”
“Not mad science: alchemy. Mad scientists are kinder to their creations.” She takes the bowl of spare change from the dresser with her free hand, tilting it forward to show its contents before she flings them into the air. Roger doesn’t have time to react before they hit the ground in a grid around her. Each coin is positioned like the floor had a magnetic coil beneath it, landing at the points of imaginary squares. Every one of them is heads-up. Erin puts the dish back.
“Chaos and Order were early targets,” she says. “It seems like they should be bigger than something like the Doctrine, but it turns out that because they’re primal, they’re also simple. They’ve been employing poppets of my lineage for almost as long as they’ve been working to incarnate yours. I am the living embodiment of Order, and I am ordering you to get the fuck out of that bed and follow me.”
“That was a terrible pun,” says Roger automatically. He can’t deny the evidence of his eyes. He’s always been good at justifying things unseen, but this? This is physical reality. He knows there are no magnets. This is too much for a prank.
Erin scowls. “Are you still not taking this seriously? They’ll send people here when I don’t check in. They’ll find you. And they will kill you.”
“Right.” Roger crosses his arms. “Why are you helping me if these are the people who made you?”
“Because they made me like they made you: they made me to be a part of a pair. Chaos and Order. But we weren’t as entangled as you and Dodger are—remember when she slit her wrists and nearly bled out behind her house? I remember you arguing with her, in a timeline that never existed, about whether that needed to happen. Whether that was something the two of you could revise. She said it had to be allowed to remain part of the timeline, because that event was one of the things that allowed me to convince you to come with me.”
Roger’s eyes have been getting wider and wider, until it seems like they’re set to swallow the top half of his face. He folds his arms tighter, holding himself in a half-comforting embrace.
“You can’t live if she dies, and she can’t live if you die; that’s how it works for the cuckoos, every last carefully designed one of you. Me, I can live without my other half just fine. Doesn’t mean I wanted to.” Darren had been sullen and quick to anger, rigid in ways that were almost comic, coming from an avatar of chaos. He’d wanted everything just so, following patterns he had set and only he could understand. And he’d loved her. Oh, how he’d loved her. They’d been two halves of the same coin, not brother and sister like the incarnations of the Doctrine, but Adam and Eve of the unformed universe, so suited to each other that the thought of being apart had been a painful impossibility. Until the day Reed needed a hammer to pound a stubborn nail. Until Erin needed training. Until the cuckoos needed