timeline at all. It should be terrifying, losing a moment that shaped so many years. Instead, it’s soothing, comforting, like she’s putting things back the way they should have been all along. The déjà vu that has haunted her all her life is finally starting to make sense.)
“Okay, cool,” says younger Dodger. Then, in a voice filled with wonder, she says, “I really did it, huh? I called the future. That’s amazing. Do we have a flying car in the future?”
“Thankfully, no,” says older Dodger. “Can you imagine some of the drivers we know with flying cars? Can you imagine Roger with a flying car? We’d all be dead inside the week.”
Younger Dodger laughs. “I guess that’s true,” she says. “I want to ask you about . . . oh, everything, but I don’t want to create more of a paradox than I already have.”
“That’s probably smart,” says older Dodger. “If I told you about my life, it might change the things you’d do, and then I might never exist at all.”
“Better not to risk it.”
“Exactly.” She needs to exist. It’s not selfishness or self-preservation that puts that thought in her head: she needs to exist because she’s the version of herself with an unconscious man on her kitchen floor. She’s the version someone wanted to kill. She can’t risk becoming someone more trusting or less isolated. What if she’d been a mother, and he’d taken one of her children hostage? What if she’d had pets? What if she’d been a little fonder of lighting up in the afternoons, and had come home stoned and slow? No. This is the version of her that can survive the situation at hand, so this is the version of her that has to endure.
“I don’t know if I can call you again. I mean, it might not be a good idea, and I don’t have anything else to tell you about. Yet.”
“Call if that changes; otherwise, leave well enough alone, and let this be a one-time gig,” says older Dodger. “It was nice talking to you.”
“You, too. I always wondered how my voice sounded to everybody else.”
That seems like a good place to end it. Older Dodger laughs and hangs up the phone, becoming present-Dodger, only-Dodger once again. The version of Dodger who has Dr. Peters lying, unconscious, at her feet.
With a sigh, she drops her phone back into her purse and goes looking for her emergency earthquake kit. She’s going to need the rope.
Dr. Peters wakes tied to one of Dodger’s dining room chairs. It’s sturdy oak, part of an antique set she bought on Craigslist, and the rope holding him is rated for rock climbing: he strains against the knots and is rewarded with nothing more than a bit of rope burn.
“You can open your eyes,” says Dodger. She sounds annoyed, like this was in no manner the way she intended to spend her afternoon: it’s the voice of a woman who has found the limits of her patience and gone past them, into the blasted hinterlands of irritation. “There’s no point pretending you’re still out, not when you’ve started wiggling around like a hooked fish.”
He opens his eyes. Dodger is seated in a chair identical to the one he’s tied to, legs crossed at the ankles and hands folded on her knees. He’s seen that position before: she assumes it every time they have a session, confessing her confusion and sorrows to him one small, belabored word at a time. Language has never been her forte, and the language of her own inner workings is no exception. Sometimes he’s wondered whether she ever stopped to listen to herself, to the contradictions and unnecessary complications she’s built her life upon.
He’s never asked her. That wasn’t his job. He was her therapist because she needed a therapist, and because it was an easy way to keep tabs on their highest-profile project. Even Reed had been surprised when the girl had gone into publishing; she’d been pigeonholed as a researcher. The math children were always flashier than the language ones, with more striking coloration and faster movements, naturally designed to draw fire. That didn’t mean they enjoyed being the focus of attention. Most of them seemed to want to disappear whenever possible, sinking deeper and deeper into their private projects, coming out only when coaxed.
Dodger has broken so many rules she didn’t even know existed that he’d be impressed, if he weren’t terrified. “There seems to have been a misunderstanding,” he says, trying