into a Crow Girl like all the others. She wouldn’t be Zib if he let that happen. She’d be something else, something wilder and stranger and not his at all. He hadn’t known her long enough to care as much as he did. He cared anyway. He couldn’t let the Page have her.
“You have to give her back,” he said. “She’s my friend, and she doesn’t belong to you.”
The Page of Frozen Waters smiled. “Why should I?” she asked.
“Because . . .” Avery took a deep breath. “Because I asked, and because I’ll cut you into ribbons if you don’t.
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book VII
The End of All Things
Now the number is even.
—William Shakespeare, Love’s Labors Lost
It is a callous age.
—L. Frank Baum
OUTCOME
Timeline: 8:03 PDT, June 17, 2016 (and).
There’s so much blood.
Roger didn’t know there could be so much blood. It’s everywhere, hot and red and bitter. Dodger is on her knees, eyes wide and glassy, one hand clasped over the hole in her shoulder. This, then, is where the slightest change changes everything; the length of the words he has given her have dictated her place along the wall. He can see where shortening the equation would have kept her safe, where lengthening it would have put the bullet through her heart. It’s too complex. They cannot win.
His own heart is beating out of rhythm, starting to surrender to the sympathetic pull of Dodger’s pain. He’ll last longer than she does—he has the distant feeling that he always lasts longer than she does when she’s the one who’s hurt; that it has to be like that for them to have any chance—but if she dies, he won’t be far behind. They walk the improbable road together, all the way to the end.
She’s not moving. She’s just kneeling, blood pouring down her arm and soaking into her jeans, and they’re going to die here.
No: not necessarily. He can always tell her to take them back. Erin was clear about that. He knows the words to say, the instructions to give; he can get them out of here.
Dodger lifts her head.
“Wow,” she says, in a voice gone pale with pain. “This hurts a lot. I mean, wow. I did not know how much this would hurt. I need to . . . add this . . . to the equation . . . Roger?”
“Dodge.” He finally moves, hurrying to prop her up. There is so much blood. It’s getting everywhere. They’re both going to be covered, and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, because she’s the one doing the bleeding; she’s the one turning everything as red as her hair (no, redder, so much redder; he can see the color as clear as day, and for the first time, he doesn’t care about that either).
“Tell me to finish.”
He stops. That isn’t the order he was expecting to give. Can he even give two orders at the same time? If he tells her to finish, will he be able to make her stop long enough to reset the timeline? Even for them, there are limits.
“Please.” She closes her eyes, grimacing. “It hurts. Can’t focus. You can make me focus. Please. I’m so close to done. I can see the shape of it. I can see . . . I know how to finish. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this close to finishing.”
Roger pauses. “Do you remember being here before?”
“No. But the math does. It’s in the imaginary numbers. They have echoes, places where the unfinished equations influence the way they hang together . . . please. I think I can finish.”
He’s killing her if he does this. He knows that. He might be killing both of them. Or he might be saving them both. “All right,” he says softly. “Look at me.”
Dodger opens her eyes.
“Finish the problem, Dodger. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Finish the problem.”
She smiles, even as her eyes go glassy with something more than pain. Her Sharpie is ruined, and so she doesn’t reach for it; she dips her fingers in her own blood and begins writing on the wall, finger-painting like a child, slowly at first, but with gathering speed as the command and her own nature take control.
Roger straightens, stands. He needs to buy her some time, and he doesn’t have much currency left. But he has one thing.
Dripping with his sister’s blood, shaken to the core of himself, he turns and walks to the