Baker thought of you, Reed created you, and now that you’re here, the whole world gets to keep you. Both of you. This isn’t something you walk away from. Smita wasn’t the first person I killed on Leigh’s orders, and the Cheswiches won’t be the last people she kills on her own. Are you with me yet? All you can do by running away is play straight into her plans.”
“Aren’t we even going to call the police?” Dodger’s question is small, meek, the question of a child. There’s no anger in it. All the anger is reserved for her expression. Her glare in this moment could melt steel.
“And send them to their deaths? Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” Erin meets Dodger’s glare unflinchingly. “That’s assuming they’d find the house. She’ll have Hands of Glory burning by now, making the whole place obscure. She’s not an amateur. She taught me everything I know—but as the cliché goes, she didn’t teach me everything she knows. She’s a monster trying to bait you into meeting her in her den, and we can’t let you go. I’m sorry. We can’t lose you, or we lose everything.”
“She’s not a monster. She’s a woman. Women can die.”
Erin shakes her head. “She was crafted from a dozen corpses. Half her bones are carved with protective runes, safe below the skin, where no one can see to counter them. The alchemist who made her died at Reed’s hand; there’s no one living who knows every trick that woman has squirreled away. She’s dangerous. She’s deadly. If you want to stop her, if you want to avenge your parents and make things as close to right as they can be, you must manifest. I don’t know how many ways I can say this. You have to find the heart of this country we’re in, whether it’s Munchkin or Hyacinth, and you have to get us there, before it’s too late.”
Dodger holds Erin’s gaze locked on her own. “When this is over,” she says, in a perfectly reasonable tone, “I’m walking away, and I’m never speaking to either of you again.”
“We’ll see,” says Erin. “Now figure out what you want to eat. You’re going to need to keep your strength up.”
HAM AND EGGS
Timeline: 4:13 PDT, June 17, 2016 (this damned day).
They linger over their midnight meal (which reaches the table sometime after one A.M.; misnomers and inaccuracies abound in this liminal space between the night and day) until Erin glances at the clock on the wall and says, “The trains have started running. We should go.”
“Go where?” asks Roger. “We don’t know where we’re going. We just know there’s a killer out there looking for us, and we’ve spent the whole damn night sitting in this Denny’s, eating eggs and not running for our lives.”
“Eggs can be a lifesaver,” says Erin. She turns her eyes to Dodger. “If you want to know where we’re going, ask your Crow Girl. She’s the only one who can get us there, if she’d start playing along.”
Dodger hasn’t said anything in hours. She glares at Erin and holds fast to her silence.
Erin sighs. “Sulking doesn’t bring them back, but it might get us killed. Roger, talk some sense into your damn sister.”
“It’s like spiders,” says Dodger.
They both go still.
“When he gives an order I don’t want to follow, it’s like spiders in my brain, and I can’t say no.” She virtually spits her words. “No matter how much I want to not do it, I have to, because he told me to, and it’s like spiders running their spider legs all over the inside of my brain. You told him to do that. You made him use me like a puppet.”
“Dodge—” Roger begins.
“Don’t think you’re getting out of this,” she says. “She told you to do it, but she’s not you. You don’t have to listen to her the way I have to listen to you. So you’re not clean either.”
“It’s nice to know you can still sulk like a teenager, but this isn’t getting us anywhere,” says Erin. “If you want to be mad at me, it’s not like I can stop you. I want you to remember one thing, though: I didn’t make you. The man who did, the man who sent a killer here to take you down, he’s out there. All of this is at his feet. He’s been chasing this dream for a long time. The only way we stop him is by taking it