have a way to show my work, but instinctive mathematics can be as good as practical ones if you’re not being graded.”
“And this number?”
“It’s my number too, just not yet. I dialed the most logical combination I could think of.”
None of this makes sense, and because of that, every bit of this makes perfect sense. Everything the younger Dodger is saying meshes with the older Dodger’s understanding of the world, which is made of math. It’s just that occasionally, the math makes its own rules. Math gets to do that, if it wants to.
“Why are you calling?” she asks.
“Don’t you know?”
“I don’t think I can, until you tell me,” she says. “This hasn’t happened for me yet. I’m the future, but I’m not your future until you finish the call.” It should be terrifying, the thought that she’s changing the equation that comprises her reality. Because this will change things. She knows that, as surely as she knows that every second takes away more of her slim opportunity to escape becoming the future self of a girl she, as yet, never was.
(And it’s a relief, really, to know time can be revised like this. It makes so much about her life start to hang together. A good mathematician is always willing to check their work, to change the pieces that don’t serve the overall equation. That’s what she’s doing now. Just . . . changing pieces, and making something better of herself. She would never have picked up the phone in the past if it wasn’t for the sake of making a better future.)
“Roger called me,” says her past self, and Dodger in the present closes her eyes and listens, silently, to every perfect, painful word.
LONG DISTANCE
Timeline: 11:15 PST, December 10, 2008 (seven years ago; time is unwinding).
The apartment is empty when Dodger arrives. All the windows have shattered. New cracks run through its foundation. She scratches some equations into the dirt that constitutes their narrow strip of a yard—she could do them in her head, but they’re easier to trust when she can see them—and decides it should be safe, if she’s quick. If she smells gas or smoke or anything else that shouldn’t be there, she’ll get out. Until that happens, she can seek comfort in the broken familiar and gather her things.
She doesn’t know yet where she’s going—back to her parents, probably—but she can’t stay here. Not after the way Roger looked at her, with fear and loathing and longing tangled in his eyes. Not after the way Smita died. Running away may not be the grownup thing to do, but Dodger has never put much stock in being a grownup. Sometimes logic says the childish thing is the right one.
The bookshelves in the hall have toppled over, spilling their contents across the floor. Over the Woodward Wall has fallen open to the center illustration, the Impossible City in gold and mercury glory. Dodger stops for a moment, transfixed by the image. Something about it . . .
No. This isn’t the time. She shakes herself free and picks through the mess, occasionally pausing to recover an especially beloved childhood treasure. There was never any real filing system here. At least the ceiling held; at least the broken glass was minimal. At least they didn’t die. Roger may have looked at her like she was a monster, but they didn’t die. They may still find a way through this.
She steps into her room. The damage here is even more minimal, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders. There’s a dusting of plaster over everything, fallen from the ceiling; the pillow has toppled off the bed, and all her markers are on the floor. Somehow, the earthquake has erased half of one wall, reducing the equation to a black smear. She doesn’t know how that’s possible, but she’s not in the mood to ignore the evidence of her own eyes.
Dodger walks to the bed, sits, and puts her hands over her face. The temptation to reach for Roger is enormous. She wants to talk to him. She wants to know that everything is okay. But everything is not okay. They made the quake. She doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why, but she knows they did it, the two of them working together. They’re dangerous. Maybe not individually, but together? Together, they could destroy the world.
It’s not a pleasant thought. It’s the only one she has.
Her phone rings.
Dodger lowers her hands. It could be her parents, checking up