She steps through. Roger follows, and Erin follows him, and all of them stand there, breathless and unbelieving, as the fractals rush ever outward, drawing walls, windows, deep bathing pools. Recreating the past.
“Whoa,” says Dodger.
“Ditto,” says Roger.
“Fucking finally,” says Erin. She moves past them and the floor beneath her feet is solid; they have called this place far enough back into being that it can support her. She looks around as she walks, taking the measure of her surroundings. “We’re going to need to find a place where you can work. I don’t know what manifestation entails, but if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it here—and you need to do it fast.”
“Why?” asks Dodger. She doesn’t take her eyes off the ceiling, a domed lattice of glass and steel and electric lights that are beginning to flicker on, one after another, pulling on a grid that isn’t real to activate circuits that no longer exist. They are standing inside a ghost. The weight of it hits her like a blow. They are standing inside a ghost, something she called back into being and Roger turned solid around them. This can’t be happening. This is happening.
“Because something this big is going to be like a goddamn signal fire to the people looking for us. You bought the time to get us here. Now you need to make it count for something.” Erin’s face is grim. “You need to make it matter, or all this was for nothing.”
FIRE
Timeline: 6:14 PDT, June 17, 2016 (this day).
Leigh Barrow is on the phone with James Reed when Dodger steps into the air above what used to be the foundations of the Sutro Baths. Leigh stops mid-word, mouth going slack, eyes fixing on the horizon, where a beam of golden light illuminates the sky. It looks like a castle spire, like a tower, like a beanstalk stretching up toward some distant country in the sky. She hates it. She hates it like fire. She would tear it down with her bare hands if she could.
Reed is shouting. She snaps out of her fugue, bringing the phone back to her ear.
“The sky just turned gold,” she says, ignoring whatever he’s trying to tell her. Either it’s about the manifestation, in which case she knows better than he does what’s going on, or it’s not, in which case it doesn’t matter anymore. The cuckoos have found their way to the castle. It’s not the Impossible City, but it might as well be, because like calls to like, and where they are, where they’re standing, they have access to everything the Queen of Wands—everything Baker—ever knew. “They’ve found the capital. They’ve started. Reed, I know you hate to share, but you need to tell me where to go, and you need to tell me right now.”
Silence, punctuated by heavy breathing. Then: “You forget your place, Leigh.”
“My place is by your side in the new world, doing the things you don’t want to do, killing the people you don’t want to kill. Your hands have always been too clean. If you want that new world to happen, instead of just being a cute idea you used to talk about before you let two fucking cuckoos seize the Doctrine, this is where you tell me where to go.”
“I could have unmade you the moment you fell into my hands.”
“Sure. But you didn’t. You knew what I could do for you, and kept me as I am instead of breaking me down for parts. Right here, right now, I am what you have on the ground; I am what you have that’s capable of stopping these wayward children. Tell me where to go.”
Reed’s sigh is deep and tired. He’s never allowed himself to sound that weary in her presence before. Leigh hears her death in that exhalation. She has proven too difficult. When she returns to Ohio, he’s going to have her killed.
You’ll have to see me before I see you, old man, she thinks. The Doctrine is still there for the taking, embodied in those skinny teenagers he has captive at the lab. She can control the forces of an unthinking universe just as well as he can, and her reign will be a lot more fun. Blood will fall from the sky; seas will burn; bodies will litter the streets.
So much more fun.
“Baker anchored California around the Sutro Baths,” he says. “She thought the damned things were an architectural miracle, a temple to the idea of