This is the life that they, for better or for worse, have been forced to leave behind.
“We need more time,” says Dodger abruptly. She turns to Roger. “Order me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what to do, and we don’t have time to stand around waiting for me to figure it out. It’s only spiders in my brain when I don’t want you to do it. I want you to do it. Tell me to buy us more time.”
Erin steps back, folding her arms, and watches. They need to do this, to find the empty spaces between them and determine the best ways to fill them. She remembers this, or something very much like it, from other timelines, attempts to manifest which ended in failure, and in everything being set back to the start. She doesn’t know when Roger told her to remember it, but remember it she does: she knows this is important. She will not interfere.
It still aches. She remembers the hurt she felt the first time she realized she’d never be part of their closed circle, their nation of two. Reed might have split the Doctrine into two bodies, each with their own thoughts, personality, and desires, but he was never strong enough to make them independent of each other. They’d always come back together, and when they did, they’d always form a single whole, without a crack between them to let anyone else slither in.
Roger grimaces. “Are you sure?” he asks, voice unsettled.
“I am,” says Dodger. “Tell me.”
He takes a deep breath. “Dodger,” he says. “Find us more time. That’s an order.”
The air around them seems to plummet four degrees as Dodger’s eyes widen and go glassy. Behind them, her mind is working double-time, making connections and throwing them aside at a speed she wouldn’t be capable of on her own. Then, without a word, she starts to walk away. After only a few steps, she breaks into a run.
Erin and Roger run after her, following her into the bright open-air lobby of the BART station. She digs in her pocket, pulling out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and feeds it to the machine, punching a series of keys that shouldn’t do anything but confuse the poor computer. Instead, it spits out a hail of golden dollar coins and three tickets, each set to the value of a one-way trip to Fremont. She fills her pockets with dollar coins, keeps one ticket, and holds the other two out toward her companions.
“Take them,” she says, when they fail to move.
They do.
She licks her ticket on the side without the magnetic strip, and gestures for the others to do the same. They do, and she snatches the tickets from their hands, running away across the station. Roger and Erin stare after her.
“Do you know what she’s doing?” Roger asks.
“Not a damn clue,” says Erin.
Dodger returns at a trot, hands empty. “Gave them to some homeless kids looking for a place to take a nap,” she says. “The tickets are ours. Everything about them says ‘ours.’ Breath and spit and purpose. As long as they’re in the BART system, anyone running the numbers to try and find us is going to get a false positive off those tickets.” She hesitates, face falling. “Leigh wouldn’t . . . she wouldn’t derail an entire train to take us out, would she?”
“No,” says Erin, before Dodger can run to try to reclaim the tickets. She says it so firmly, with so much certainty, that it’s almost possible to believe she’s not lying. “That’s too public. She’ll avoid that sort of thing if there’s any way.”
“Great,” says Dodger. “The bus leaves in five minutes. We should be on it.”
They are.
The sun won’t be up for another hour. The bus slides through the darkness, all cool, processed air and drowsy commuters. They can’t sit together and so Erin sits apart, easing herself back into the reality where this is her natural condition: where loneliness is not only a consequence but the water in which she swims, melancholy mermaid never more to come to land. Dodger takes the window in the seat she shares with Roger, and he closes his eyes, letting her watch the trip for both of them. His color vision is coming, but it’s not as nuanced as hers. Seeing San Francisco by night with her depth and complexity of color is . . . it’s amazing.
It’s amazing.
They glide through the fog clinging to the Bay Bridge, long, snaking thing that it is, incongruous palm trees