out on the Pacific, watching the water beat against the rocks. Dodger stops. Roger and Erin stop in turn, watching her.
“Here,” she says, and heads for the wall, ripping at the wallpaper. It comes away easily, in sheets, weakened by the sea air and by its own unreality. This is a thing that burned years ago. Of course it’s malleable now.
Roger takes a step toward her, to join her, and stops a second time when Erin catches his elbow. He looks back to find her watching him gravely.
“If this gets bad, you need to tell her to take you back,” she says. “She won’t be able to refuse. Tell her it’s an order. Tell her it’s a command. Tell her it’s an adjuration. She’ll do it, and if you word it just like that, you may take something back with you that helps us next time.”
“How do you—”
“Because you told me.” Her smile is more of a pained grimace. “Order, remember? I see the frayed and broken spaces. I see the scars. Both of you get to be ignorant of how long we’ve been doing this, but I don’t. I don’t have to remember everything, thank God. I think I’d kill you both, and stop this, if I did. I still get more than you do. And sometimes you tell me, explicitly, to remember things for the next time.”
“Like what?”
Her smile fades. “Don’t ask me that, Roger. You’ve signed off on things you don’t want to know about. Dodger’s the chess player, but you’re the one who’s said ‘this is a sacrifice for the greater good.’ If I tell you what you’ve told me not to change, you’re going to remember, and you’re going to hate yourself. So don’t ask me. For your sake. For her sake. Let it go.”
Roger looks at her in silence for a moment before he glances toward Dodger. “How bad?” he asks.
“Bad enough.”
“Okay. I don’t like it, but . . . okay.”
“Good. Go help your sister take over the universe. I’m going to go keep you alive long enough to do it.”
“How?”
Erin smiles sharply, a blade in a woman’s skin, and pulls the gun from inside her shirt. “I’m going to fight back.” Then she’s gone, turning on her heel and walking out of the room, leaving him alone.
No: not alone. Dodger is there, writing figures on the wall with a Sharpie produced from her overstuffed backpack, lost in her own little world. Watching her write on a wall is its own form of time travel: he blinks and they’re in her off-campus apartment with the whiteboard walls, both of them laughing, content, together. He blinks again and it’s a chalkboard seen through borrowed eyes, a stick of chalk in her hand and the stinging smell of chalk dust in her nostrils. He knows the words—nostalgia, longing, regret. He also knows that the only way forward is through.
He goes to her.
“I love you,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I forgive you.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the wall. “I’m sorry, too.”
“You don’t have to be,” he says.
“Never leave me again?”
“I won’t.”
“Good. The numbers add up. The math is good.”
“What can I do?” he asks.
“Describe the Baths,” she says. He does, and as he speaks she writes faster and faster, turning his words into numbers, reducing the history and splendor of the place to a chain of figures.
“Describe California,” she says next, and he does, and again, she writes, filling the wall and moving on to the next, the universe in figures and functions, an equation that could solve the world, if only they had time to describe and document every piece, every aspect of something so vast that it should be without limit. (And they do have time, they do: for the first time, Roger realizes that their twisting of their own timeline means they can finish anything, if only they can remember beginning it.)
Next is America; after that, the world. The air in the room grows colder and colder, and the mercury glow returns to the walls, glittering and bright. Her Sharpie is still just a Sharpie, black ink and the chemical smell of the marker, but the marks it leaves behind shine like glass, like silver. The rules of reality are turning malleable.
The first gunshot sounds right after Dodger has asked him to describe the house where he grew up. Roger jumps. She looks up, expression sharp.
“We can’t stop now,” she says. “We’re so close. Keep talking.”