the world around her. She’s fully integrated her new depth perception into her vision, and has stopped running into things quite so often, although she still runs at them like she expects everything, even walls, even mountains, to stand aside.
Roger, on the other hand, ambles through the world. Let Dodger race ahead; he’ll always catch up. He moves smoothly, easily, and everything around him rearranges to let him pass. He is comfortable in both his own skin and his place in the world. It’s a terrifying combination, for those few who can look at it and understand what it means. Erin supposes that, after they have faced down Reed, for better or for worse, the people who can tell what Roger and Dodger are by looking at them will never trouble them again. Some risks are too dangerous to take when there’s any way for them to be avoided.
The corn rustles around them, husks rubbing one against the other like the legs of a thousand insects. Dodger wrinkles her nose.
“This is very outdoors,” she says. “I don’t like outdoors. That’s where you get sent when you’ve been bad.”
Roger, who has started hearing the echoes of the things she doesn’t say, hears the words “where your parents send you,” even though they go unspoken. He reaches for her hand, takes it, squeezes it, and keeps walking.
(He can raise the dead, but he needs something to raise, and there was nothing left when Leigh was done. Her parents are as lost to her as his are to him, and he wishes at least one of them had been spared.)
“Reed wants to be well concealed,” says Erin. “He likes to think of himself as a spider, sitting in his web, pulling his strings and keeping things hidden. The new King of Cups.”
There’s so much Roger wants to say. He says none of it. That Reed must die is certain. That Erin, not Dodger, not him, will be the one to pull the trigger is equally certain. All of them have people they want to avenge, deaths they want repaid. But Dodger’s never killed anyone, and the only people he’s killed—Leigh and the man of earth—were killed in self-defense. However necessary this is, it’s still murder.
They wade through the corn until it seems like the world is nothing but corn, gold like the Impossible City, like the Sutro Baths. Maybe this is the true essence of the Up-and-Under, of transmutation, of everything: the purification of the base materials of soil and sky and water into golden kernels, growing sweet and patient on their stalks. Erin darts ahead, and suddenly there’s a shack in the middle of the corn, small and listing to one side, made of corrugated tin. Someone has painted it with silver paint, until it shines like mercury in the sun.
Roger and Dodger both stop and blink at the shack, nonplussed.
“Is that it?” asks Dodger.
Erin opens the door and smiles, quick and tight. “It’s a long way down.” Then she’s gone, vanishing into the gloom inside the shack, and they have no choice but to follow. She is their only guide, now that they’ve committed themselves to walking the improbable road all the way to the King. They can’t afford to lose her.
The shed door swings shut behind them, and all is silence. Silence, and the corn.
Erin wasn’t joking when she said it was a long way down: a hatch in the shed floor opens on a spiraling staircase descending down, down, into the darkness below the corn. They descend until it begins to feel ridiculous, until Dodger—who grew up in earthquake country, not twister country—is sticking so close to Roger’s side that he’s afraid he’ll trip over her and send them both tumbling down into the dark.
The stairs are dark. There are lights every ten feet or so, but they’re barely enough to split the gloom. They’ve descended almost fifty feet before he realizes the lights are getting brighter, matching the adjustment of their eyes. This system will keep people disoriented for as long as humanly possible, rather than letting them fully adjust to either dark or day. He’d be impressed, if he weren’t so angry.
The light brightens. The stairwell opens up as it drops away. The last fifteen feet of the spiral stair winds through the open air, descending into a room that looks more like an airplane hangar. The walls are tin, like the shed upstairs; the floor is industrial linoleum. Dodger looks around, eyes narrowed, assessing everything. Roger