someone who could watch over their nest while they grew, someone they would be able to accept as a member of their peer group, even though technically they had no peers. Only each other. Only ever each other.
Erin has been here before, over and over, as the timelines looped and changed around her. Darren has never been standing by her side. She suspects that, like Dodger’s attempted suicide, his death may be one of the things that can’t be changed: her willingness to betray Reed hinges on it having happened. She hates them for that, Roger and Dodger, who could have each other if they’d stop pushing one another away. She hates them more than she hates anything, and she’ll die, again, if that’s what it takes for them to stay together. She’s done worse.
“I can’t call her,” he says. “She hasn’t . . . We haven’t spoken in seven years. I didn’t answer when she called, and one day she just stopped calling.”
“Try.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re going to get us both killed,” says Erin, with no rancor in her voice. She reaches into her pocket, produces her phone, and throws it onto the bed. “Try the mundane way.”
“I don’t have her number anymore.”
To his surprise, she laughs. It’s a high, bright, impossibly strained sound, like glass breaking. “Oh, trust me, happy boy. That has never mattered. Try.”
Roger picks up the phone.
Dials the number for her old apartment, the one that hasn’t been there for years.
Waits.
It rings three times, four, five, and he’s about to hang up when there’s a click and Dodger’s voice is in his ear, Dodger is talking to him, saying, “This is Dodger. What’s your deal?”
His mouth is so dry he can barely swallow. He forces himself to do just that before saying, “Uh. Hi, Dodge.”
“Roger?” She sounds puzzled. “Why are you calling me from the roof? Did you finally decide to get a cellphone?”
His mouth dries up even further. He can’t speak.
(Because he remembers this; he didn’t remember it a moment ago, can’t even say for sure whether this is a thing that had happened a moment ago, but it’s something that has actually and for certain happened now. Dodger, coming back from a trip to the kitchen for lemonade and brownies to quiz him on why he’d decided to make a prank call from the roof when he knew she was going to be right back up. Him, protesting that he didn’t have a cellphone and couldn’t have called her. It had been a beautiful day. The air had tasted like honeysuckle. The brownies had tasted of chocolate and marijuana. And it had happened almost eight years ago.)
She’s going to hang up. He knows it, and so he swallows hard one more time, and says, “I missed you. That’s all.”
“Asshole,” she says, with complete fondness. There’s a click as she replaces the receiver in its cradle (landlines, they still used landlines back then), and he’s listening to silence.
Slowly, he lowers the phone and turns his eyes back to Erin. “I just called Dodger.”
“Yeah,” says Erin. “Sounds like it was an old number, though.”
“How . . . ?”
“Pack the backpack. Take what you need.” She pulls a lighter from her pocket and flicks it on before beginning to light the fingers of the Hand. “We need to be gone by morning.”
Roger stares for a moment. Then, quickly, he begins to move.
The last thing Erin does is set the house on fire.
She does it with swift precision, touching the Hand of Glory to the aged wood of the front porch and stepping back as the flames begin to leap, growing too fast and voraciously to be ordinary. When the entire front of the house is wreathed in crackling flame, she turns and walks to the sidewalk, where Roger is waiting.
“We need to stand here for a few minutes,” she says. “The Hand of Glory will keep anyone who shouldn’t see us from noticing that we exist, and we want the fire to get a good grasp on the interior before we go.”
“You burned the Life Sciences Annex,” he says.
If Erin is surprised by the non sequitur, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she just nods. “Yes. I did. With the body of your friend inside. I had to. It was an order.”
“From the people you say ‘made’ us.” His voice turns bitter at the end, twisting the single syllable in “made” until it almost breaks. “Did they also tell you to kill Smita?”