a woman he’d believed himself to be in love with as she fell to her death in the deep, lightless waters of the Pacific. That’s all in the future. The future is Dodger’s department.
Dodger. His eyes widen for an instant before he closes them.
“Dodge?”
There’s no reply.
He remembers to open his eyes before he breaks into a run.
* * *
The room where he left his sister and her math has been transformed into a chamber of horrors. There is blood everywhere. On the walls, the ceiling, the floor; there is blood in places blood should never be. It is brilliantly, violently red, so red that it attacks the eye, shaming and scarring it. And at the center of it all is Dodger.
She has never looked so small, or so pale. With all the blood, it seems impossible for her to be this pale. She should be a rose garden, drying in a hundred different, subtle shades of red. Instead, she is bone and wax and soapstone, she is snow and teeth and goose feathers. There is no color in her skin at all. Her hair is almost offensively bright next to the wrung-out rest of her.
Roger runs across the room. He knows the words—exsanguination, hypovolemia, hemorrhage—but he’s never known them like this, as real things, tricky and tangled as venomous snakes. The words can comfort him. The words may be the only things that comfort him. They can’t make things better.
Or maybe they can. The Sutro Baths are still all around him, solid and real. He’s still here. Erin said he’d die if Dodger did, and he believes her, because he remembers that terrible day when Dodger tried to take herself out of the world. The edges of his vision are becoming riddled with those little black dots that came before the seizures, all those years ago, but they’re small, they’re almost something he can overlook. She’s going. She isn’t gone. Not yet.
He drops to his knees beside her. The blood is so thick that it squishes like jam on toast, gelatinous and warm and somehow obscene. He swallows his nausea, gathers her in his arms. She is so still. She is so cold.
But the walls . . .
The walls are covered with equations. No: not equations. With equation, one single string of formulae and functions, all leading toward an inevitable sum. It’s beautiful. He doesn’t understand it, and still, he knows it’s beautiful. Dodger has reduced the world, the situation, them, to one room, filled with the quick, arcane figures that, for her, have always equaled reality.
“Wow,” he whispers, and looks down at her. “You finished. Dodge, you finished. You did the whole thing. You finished it. Wake up now, okay? You finished, and that means you get to wake up, and we get to win.”
She does not wake up.
He shakes her a little. He can’t help himself. “Come on. I need you to tell me what this means. I need you to read it to me. Wake up.”
She does not move, does not react, does nothing, in fact, but lie in his arms and bleed, growing colder and paler with every second. There can’t be that many seconds left for her, and when she goes, he goes too. He has to reset. He has to tell her to take them back. They can go again, they can try again, and maybe next time—
Maybe next time they’ll wind up right back here again, with all their ghosts still dogging their heels, and all their mistakes made for the second, or hundredth, or two hundredth time. No. He can’t. It might be the right thing to do, and yet still, he can’t.
Dodger got the math. He got the words. That was how this was supposed to work, right? He looks at the writing on the wall again, the figures and forms that mean just shy of nothing to him, and takes a breath. They did this once before. He knows what to do. He knows what the consequences might be. That doesn’t mean he has a choice.
“Light,” he reads, letting the symbols on the wall tell him what they want to be, what they want to mean. “This is the light of dark places, the light defined by its own absence, and through definition, becoming darkness; weight, mass, the cessation of emptiness—”
The building shakes as he reads, becoming the epicenter of its own unending, private earthquake. The walls glow gold and the sky is filled with blazing mercury light, sending a