distortion. I’d rather not be here when that happens.”
The wax of the dead woman’s hand has run down, taking her fingers with it; three of them are merely stumps, and one has guttered out completely. Her thumb still burns steadily, but it’s only a matter of time before that runs down as well. As they watch, the flame on her pointer finger goes out.
“Here,” says Roger, tossing Erin the keys.
She snatches them out of the air with a sarcastic “Thank you” and climbs into the driver’s seat, setting her Hand of Glory in the passenger’s place. Roger and Dodger exchange a look before getting into the back. She’s right about one thing: they need to get tangled up in each other again, the way they used to be, the way they’ve been running away from since they were children.
Dodger waits until Erin starts the engine before asking, voice low, “Do you really think she’s telling the truth?”
“I called you,” says Roger. “I mean, I picked up the phone and called you before the earthquake happened. I called you in the past. I talked to you. I hadn’t heard your voice in seven years, and I called you, and I talked to you.”
“I think you also called me from an alternate timeline,” says Dodger.
He looks at her blankly.
“It was the day of the earthquake. I was back at the apartment, trying to figure out how much could be saved and how much I was going to leave behind—I didn’t know about Candace yet—when my phone rang, and it was you, from the future. But not this future, because this version of you wouldn’t need to say the things that version of you said. When we touch the past, we change it. We revise ourselves. And it’s not something we can take back. I can’t refuse the changes you made when you called me from the future, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I was on the verge of giving up on you until you told me not to.”
She smiles beatifically, and Roger fights the urge to squirm. She got numbers: she got time. The one commonality in all the instances of phone calls across time is Dodger, and he knows without being told that he’d get nothing but dead air or a stranger’s voice if he tried to call his childhood home and speak to his adolescent self. Time doesn’t bend for him the way it does for her. Reality bends for him. When he asks for something, he usually gets it, because the world listens when given commands.
Time rewrites itself, but words are what trigger the transformations in people. It’s a bigger responsibility than he could ever have asked for. “Erin, you keep saying you want us to manifest,” he says, turning toward the front seat. “Is there any way to do the opposite? Is there a way for us to refuse the Doctrine, to just give it up and let them have it back?”
“You can die,” she says. “Remember what I said earlier: if you make this choice, you’re making it for both of you. You can’t survive without each other. You’re too tangled up inside.”
Roger, remembering the seizures he experienced when Dodger attempted suicide, says nothing. Dodger, on the other hand, shakes her head.
“We can’t give this up,” she says. “Even if that were somehow an option—and I’m glad it’s not—we can’t. Who would you even be without the words, Roger? Who would I be, if you took my numbers away? I’ve needed sleeping pills for years, because my head’s too empty. We’re not supposed to be apart. She’s right. And remember the earthquake.”
Roger will never forget the earthquake. Part of him will be going through the earthquake forever.
“Do you want the sort of people who would send someone like Dr. Peters to kill me to have the sort of power that it took to make the earthquake?” Dodger’s voice is earnest, accompanied by her hand, offered to him across the backseat. “They don’t deserve what we have, and we don’t deserve to die. We have to make this right.”
“We have to try,” Roger agrees, and puts his hand in hers, skin touching skin for the first time in so damn long. Their eyes widen in tandem before they collapse in their seats, bodies going limp, heads lolling to the sides.
Erin watches all this in the rearview mirror, waiting until she’s sure they’ve lost consciousness before she rolls her eyes and guns the engine.