Erin nods. “He knows you’ve manifested. When you found yourselves, it was like a signal flare for the people who knew what to watch for. He’s going to be marshalling his forces. If you want to stay alive—if you want to stay free—you need to take this to him. You need to stop him.”
“And then what?” Dodger is pale and weak-looking, but her voice cracks like a whip. “Is there another dungeon we have to crawl through, another dragon we have to defeat? Don’t look at me like that. I was a nerd kid, I played D&D. Just answer the question. If we do this, do you throw another boss fight in our path, or do you walk away and leave us the fuck alone?”
“This is the last one,” says Erin. “We stop him, and the Up-and-Under is safe, at least until some other asshole comes along and decides to destroy the house that Baker built.”
“Well, when that happens, it’s going to be someone else’s problem,” says Roger firmly. “We’ll do this, because we deserve to be left alone. And after that, you’re going to leave us alone. You’re never going to see us again.”
“Deal,” says Erin. She smiles a skeleton’s smile, all teeth and pallor. “He’s never going to see us coming.”
Roger looks at her, and hopes she’s right.
Avery and Zib stood hand-in-hand, looking at the great towers of the Impossible City. The buildings here weren’t like any other buildings they had ever seen. They moved, changing shape and form and function according to the needs of the people who walked on their high walkways, moving between them like dreams.
Beside them, Niamh sighed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.
“I lived here once,” said Niamh. “I never will again.”
“Why not?”
“Because drowned girls are very possible, and the Impossible City only welcomes impossible things. Girls like me happen too often to ever make it home . . .
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book VII
After the End
It’s mathematics, the ultimate code,
And the universe was singing in my favorite mode . . .
—Dr. Mary Crowell, “The Doctrine of Ethos”
Everything is measured in the span of a second.
—A. Deborah Baker
COST AND CONSEQUENCE
Timeline: 13:01 EDT, June 20, 2016 (four days later).
Leigh is dead and the cuckoos are in the wind and the only thing Reed can’t understand is how it’s all gone so wrong so fast. They were weak, separated, in denial: their only use was in keeping the Doctrine contained until their replacements could mature enough to take it as their own. None of this is in keeping with the plan, and he doesn’t have time for it.
He would regret the loss of Leigh, if there was time. She was a liability, yes, and he had been planning to kill her, absolutely, but she had been loyal in her way, and she had deserved to die a victor, not . . . whatever this was. What was the point of traveling to the Impossible City, only to fall before the doors were even opened? It was unfair. It held no resonance. Asphodel would have called it narratively unsatisfying for one of the heroes to die this close to achieving their goals.
(The thought that Asphodel would not have called Leigh a hero, would not have called him a hero, never crosses his mind. This is his story, has been since he wrested it away from his creator, and of course he’s the hero. How could he be anything else?)
They’ll be coming for him next. They must. They’re manifest, and they’ll be seeking the City now, seeking it with all the zeal of their conflicted cuckoo hearts. More, they’ll know that he alone, in all the world, holds the keys to their unmaking. So they’ll come for him and, through him, for the Impossible City.
There is little time left. Subtlety, such as it is, must fall by the wayside. There is too much left to do.
The box, which left Reed’s hands not three hours prior, is placed before the High Priest of the American Alchemical Congress with the reverence of a sacrament, who looks at the paper—dull lead scribed with platinum sigils—and frowns.
“What is this nonsense?” he demands.
“An apprentice of Master Daniels found this in the walls of the old master’s house,” says the alchemist who carried the box into the room. He is slight, slender, and shivering.
The others dismiss his shaking as awe. Who wouldn’t feel awe, in the presence of the greatest of the American alchemists? They have peers around the country, but none