occasional flashes of childish ignorance, like the word “prodigy” was supposed to have been somehow accompanied by a direct download of the encyclopedia into his brain. His cheeks flare with the ghosts of old embarrassments.
“The Impossible City is Reed’s territory, even if he’s never been inside; he controls the walls,” she says, words slow and careful. “We’re not ready to take it yet. Maybe we never will be. They say you’re going to manifest if you’re not stopped, and I’m banking on that, but that doesn’t mean I know what it means. No one does. Maybe you’ll just become too troublesome to kill, without actually having the power it would take to stop the greatest alchemist of his age. You could be the new Stormcrows, living in exile while you wait for the King of Cups to weaken enough for you to take him down. There’s only one way to find out, so if we could stop fucking around and get moving, I’d be awfully grateful.”
“What do we have to do?” asks Roger. He can see that Dodger will be a while in coping with this information. It’s all words, all piled on top of each other: there’s no clear equation for her to complete. This is on him.
Erin shakes her head. “We need to hide. We need to figure out where we’re going. We need to get there. You need to manifest, and you need to do it fast.”
“You keep saying that but not saying what it means. What do you want us to do?”
“I think the closest you’ve come to manifestation was the earthquake. God, the earthquake.” Erin looks wistful as she focuses on Roger, like she’s thinking about good cake or better sex. “I knew it was coming because it’s happened before. There was so much scar tissue around that moment that the air was like molasses. If you’d kept going, if you’d continued to tell her what to do and she’d continued to feed back the numbers . . . you could have manifested right then and there. I still don’t know why you never do.”
“You can feel the timeline changes?” Dodger shoves her way back into the conversation—literally. She plants one hand on Roger’s chest, pushing him aside to get closer to Erin. “How? Why? I can’t feel them.”
Roger says nothing. He’s too busy staring at the world around him, at the colors that intensified by a factor of ten as soon as she touched him. So many words make sense when things look like this. Color is a kind of magic. He hopes people who have it understand that, and don’t take it for granted.
“Of course not. You cause them.” Erin looks levelly at Dodger. “Every time the timeline has changed, it’s been because your brother told you to make the old world go away. You’re a thermonuclear device on two legs. You’re the flash flood that sweeps people into the Up-and-Under. But him? He’s your trigger. You can’t do most of the things you’re capable of without someone to set you off.”
Dodger blinks, taken aback. “That’s a little misogynistic.”
“Reed didn’t pick which of you got which half of the Doctrine: you did that yourselves, while you were incubating. Don’t ask me how fetuses pick anything. You were little science projects with the same genes, only one chromosome apart, and you decided how those genes would manifest. Firstborn gets language, second gets math. Second also gets all the recessives turned on, because the math kids are the expendable ones: they get to be targets all their lives. As long as there’s breath in a math kid’s body, the language kids can order them to reset the timeline to a point before shit got bad. Of the pairs I know of, it was split about fifty-fifty which kid got language and which got math.” Erin never met any of the other incarnate Doctrines: they were given into the care of other handlers, when they were allowed outside the confines of the lab in the first place. She’s grateful for that, in an abstract sort of way. Just this once, in her entire life, she’s pulled the good card. She got the pair who might make it out alive.
“I think I’ve seen this movie,” says Roger. “I make a lousy Aladdin.”
“Oh, you’ve got your share of party tricks. When you’re fully manifest, no one will be able to go against you. If you ask for something, you’ll get it. You could rule the world if you