subordinates. There is mercy in their betrayals.)
They descend by inches, by feet, by years. The air goes flat around them, losing the resonance of the wind, even as it continues to grow colder. At the same time, the cold loses its power. Roger and Dodger walk straighter, stand taller. Only Erin shivers, and when she looks back at them, she can barely focus on their faces. They don’t have individual features. They are one and they are neither, and they are so close to one of the focal points of the world that there is no difference between those two ideals.
The door is gone. The stairs are gone. There is only the foundation, gray and cold and blackened in places where the fire had its way. Erin steps aside when she reaches the first of the great implacable stones. Dodger steps forward, head cocked, looking at the structure like she can see it as it was meant to be. And she is Time and she is Math and maybe she can; maybe she sees what was, instead of what truly, terribly is.
“The blueprints would have put one of the stairways here,” she says, and takes a step into empty air. She does not fall: logic has been suspended. Instead, she shifts her weight onto a step that isn’t there, a step that glimmers mercury silver and purified gold in the shivering sea air. She takes another step, and another, and the steps remain sketched spectral and true behind her.
Roger and Erin exchange a look. Roger speaks first.
“Dodger seems to be walking into a building that doesn’t exist.”
“Sure looks like it.”
“The building isn’t there.”
“Nope.”
“But she’s going up the stairs anyway. The stairs that aren’t there either.”
“Yup.”
“Can we walk into the building that doesn’t exist?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Roger turns to look at the glimmering ghost of the stairs, and says, with a firm certainty, “The stairs are there. The stairs are real. The stairs will support our weight without dropping us into the ocean to drown or die of hypothermia.”
The glimmering stairs lose some of their shine, silver and gold replaced by half-visible concrete, like they’re becoming solid again; like he’s called them back into the world. Roger takes his first cautious step. As with Dodger, the steps hold him; there is no give to whatever he stands upon, whatever he’s called more truly into being.
His sister is almost to the top. He hurries after her, and Erin brings up the rear, and all is silence, save for the beating of the sea against the shore.
The stairs end abruptly. Dodger puts out a foot, testing the air, and there’s nothing there: only emptiness, and the fall that waits beyond it, looking for another body to claim. She pulls her foot back, balanced on the thin ribbon of almost that has carried her this far, and looks over her shoulder to where Roger is hurrying up behind her.
“There aren’t any more stairs,” she reports.
“What comes after stairs?” He stops on the step below hers, putting his hands on her shoulders. Color blossoms back into his world, deep and bright and limitless. “Look for it.”
Dodger turns back to the empty air in front of her, looking at it with new eyes—eyes that see how far it is to the horizon, that can trace and factor every line. She blinks once, hard, and says, “This is where the landing was, where they moved into the body of the Baths. There would have been a short entryway, to keep the saltwater from getting inside, and then the door. The door would have been right here.”
She steps forward, into the empty air, already reaching for the doorknob. Roger starts to tighten his grip on her shoulders, certain that she’s going to fall . . . then he stops, and lets her go. They’ve already come so far, done so many things that shouldn’t have been possible. What’s one more? So he lets her go, and trusts the air to hold her.
Dodger doesn’t fall.
Her hand finds the doorknob where there is no doorknob, and the door blossoms into being around it, spiraling out in a fractal bloom that grows almost too fast to follow, meeting up with the blooming patches of solidity spreading outward from her feet, drawing a floor to hold her and walls to justify its existence. They start glimmering and thin, mercury and gold, before the gray and brown race in, sketching them into real things, solid things. She opens the door.