they would have become experimentally uninteresting before graduation.
Dodger blinks. “That makes sense,” she says finally. “Is she really going to burn my house down?”
“She burned ours down.”
That’s new data. Dodger blinks again before she asks, “Girlfriend?”
“Yeah. Since a couple months after the quake.” His laugh is small and bitter. “I guess without you to be her roommate, she needed to find another way to maintain her cover.”
“And they had Dr. Peters ready to start watching me,” says Dodger. “You got a girlfriend, I got a therapist. I’m not sure who got the better deal.”
“You did.” The words are small, and absolutely final: they leave no room for discussion.
“She really burned your house down?”
“She did.”
Dodger pauses, adding these facts to the data she already has before crossing to the closet and opening it. There’s the rest of her things: she has two dressers in there, face to face, so that she can open one by flattening herself against the other. Clothes hang from the rack, and there are several bags shoved into the very back. She digs through them, finding a hiking backpack and tossing it out before she asks her next question: “Did she kill Smita?”
“Yes,” he says. “The people who made us didn’t like Smita digging in our DNA. I guess it could have . . . told her things they didn’t want anyone to know. Not even us. Maybe especially not us. And there wasn’t any other way to make her be quiet.”
Dodger stops, her arms full of clothes pulled down from their hangers, and just looks at him. “She killed Smita and she’s going to burn my house down and you’re okay with this? You don’t see a single thing wrong with the idea?”
“Your therapist tried to shoot you. I think that lends some credence to the idea that someone’s out to get us, and Erin is trying to keep us alive.” And he’s called the past, and she’s received calls from the future; time is malleable where they’re concerned, unstitching itself one impossible idea at a time. “She says it was alchemists who made us, and that they’ve decided we’re not necessary anymore.”
“What?” Dodger stares at him. “Why?”
“Because you weren’t the only pair they made from your template, and they have another one that’s performing better,” says Erin from the doorway, wearily. Both turn to face her. She’s somehow managed to keep the blood from touching her clothing, but whatever strange technique she used wasn’t enough to keep her hands clean. They’re red from fingertips to palm.
She looks at them with calm resignation, and says, “I wish you’d stayed together. I hate explaining this shit. Dodger. You were designed in a lab by an alchemist who thought he could follow Asphodel Baker’s instructions, harness the Doctrine of Ethos, and use it to control the universe if he put it into a pair of malleable human bodies. The earthquake was proof that the two of you could channel the Doctrine, and the separation was proof you wouldn’t. So he’s continued working with his other cuckoos, trying to find the ones who’d get him to the Impossible City and world domination. Now one of those pairs is ready to manifest the Doctrine fully, which means all the others have to die, to make absolutely sure that none of you are holding part of the Doctrine in abeyance and keeping it away from them.”
Dodger frowns. “They’re treating the Doctrine of Ethos as a single divisible whole, with the theory being that if we exist, we have part of it trapped, and it can’t be unified?”
“Yes.”
“And so they’re planning to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“How do we make them stop?”
Erin looks at her gravely, and says, “You manifest first. I think they’re wrong: I can see the universe falling into place around you, and when I see something, it’s usually true. Like calls to like. The first pair to claim the Doctrine will call the rest of it home and have dominion over the entire thing. If you manifest, it belongs to you, and they won’t be able to touch you.”
Roger stands. “How do we do that?”
“See, that’s the problem,” says Erin. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
GLORY
Timeline: 17:06 PDT, June 16, 2016 (the day continues).
They leave by the light of an inferno, shielded by Erin’s Hand of Glory. She washed the blood off her fingers before reaching for the matches, but the faint iron smell of it still surrounds her. She doesn’t look back. Neither does Dodger, whose life has been reduced to