“Well, then, we should find someplace like there, and live in that place instead.”
“Someplace that isn’t real?”
“Someplace that used to be real but stopped for a while.”
Roger nods. “Whatever you want, Dodge. We can live in a castle that got burnt down a thousand years ago, if it’ll make you happy.”
She nods, eyes half-closed. “It will.”
“Good.” He’s been steering them toward the beach, walking around the driftwood and rocks littering the shore. Someone will spot them soon and call the Coast Guard or something. He’s almost looking forward to that. They can take a nice ride in a boat and get Dodger someplace where she can be looked after. He’s pretty sure her body would be thrilled to get a little more blood into it, and he knows he’s a compatible donor. It’s just a matter of finding someone with a needle to spare.
They walk down the shore, water lapping at their shoes, and somehow it’s no surprise when a bundle of spindrift and kelp resolves into the body of a woman, lying, Ophelia-esque, in the foam.
“Dodger, can you stand on your own?”
“I can try,” she says, and steps away from him, opening her eyes and wrapping her arms around herself. She’s looking better. There’s some color back in her cheeks, and when he moves out of her reach, she doesn’t wobble. She’s rebuilding herself, one simple cell division at a time, and biology is in many ways a mathematical function. She’s going to be fine.
The same cannot necessarily be said of Erin. She’s pale, but lacks the waxen bloodlessness Dodger so recently displayed: her skin has a faint greenish tinge, like she’s lingered too long in the chambers of the sea. Human voices did not wake her. Her clothing is torn, but her limbs seem straight and strong, and she has no visible wounds.
“Erin.” Roger kneels beside her, lifting her head tenderly from the sand. Dodger, watching, can finally see how they were lovers; can see the delicate hyperspace they sketched between them, before Erin’s betrayal shattered it forever.
He cups her skull with his fingers, looking at her closed eyes, and smiles, because he can see the story of her. She finally makes sense.
“You’re okay,” he says. “Open your eyes.”
There’s nothing to contradict him, no reason she shouldn’t be able to survive the trauma she’s endured. His words are put before the universe, and after a moment, the universe agrees with him. Her eyes open. She blinks, twice, before she gasps, taking a huge, sucking breath of air. Roger takes his hands away as she begins to cough, rolls onto her side, and vomits a lungful of water onto the sand.
Dodger tilts her head. “What, you can raise the dead now?” she asks. “Fancy.”
“Hey, you were almost dead what, fifteen minutes ago? Shut your face.”
“I’ll shut your face,” she says, smirking, amused. She quiets, and watches Erin continue to vomit what seems like half the sea out of her body. There is more water there than woman, or at least it looks that way. Maybe Roger can raise the dead.
Dodger hugs herself and shivers, and wonders whether that’s a good thing.
Finally, Erin is finished vomiting. She pushes herself unsteadily upright in the sand and coughs, once, before she smiles. “You did it,” she says, looking from the blood-smeared Roger to the blood-drenched Dodger. “You manifested.”
“That and a cup of coffee will buy us a night in a holding cell if we don’t get off this beach,” says Dodger. “Someone’s going to call the Coast Guard soon, if they haven’t already, and since we’re probably being looked at for arson right now, maybe that’s not such a good thing? As a thought?”
“You don’t understand how much things have changed for you,” says Erin. She shifts her weight to her feet, tottering into a standing position. She looks weak as a kitten. “No one’s going to arrest you, or try to put you in jail. No one’s going to touch you, ever again, if you don’t want them to.”
For a girl who just maybe-drowned, she’s remarkably spry. Roger watches her, an uneasy sense of responsibility spreading through his bones. This is his. He made it, made her, when he called her back from her watery grave. “So we’re done,” he says.
Erin looks at him. “Not quite. There’s still one person out there who knows what you are, knows what you can do, and knows enough to want to hurt you.”