“All those things mean ‘zero’ to me. He’s going to use them to siphon off the Doctrine.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t mention the bucket he saw them carry in, the bucket full of what they call “alkahest,” the universal solvent. It can dissolve anything. Even a universal constant.
Dodger didn’t see the bucket. He can’t hear her thoughts, but he knows what she’s thinking: it wouldn’t be so bad to lose the Doctrine, would it? They’d go back to being the people they were before they followed Erin into a building that didn’t exist and solved the universal equations. She’ll still love math. He’ll still love words. They just won’t be tied to those things on a cosmic level. They’ll be able to get out of each other’s heads, to do whatever they want with their lives, to be people, instead of ideas.
Even as she thinks it, she knows it isn’t possible. The math doesn’t work. They aren’t people who somehow inherited a cosmic force of logic and definition: they are that force, made incarnate by someone who should have known better, should have done better, should have been better. They’re ideas who dreamt of being people, and now that they’re waking up, it’s too late for them to be anything else. The children Reed intends to put in their places might still be able to turn human. She and Roger . . . no. Not anymore.
She knows without asking that Roger reached the same conclusion before she woke; he was just waiting for her to catch up. She closes her eyes. “We need to get out of here.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Aren’t we supposed to represent the base forces of the universe?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t come with a Penn and Teller starter course.”
He sounds so frustrated that she laughs a little. Eyes still closed, she says, “Reed wants to strip us to our base components and instill them in our replacements. Which ends with us dead and them pretty screwed-up. I wouldn’t want a mad scientist shoving something into me just because he thought it should be there. There has to be something we can do.”
“Can you math your way out of being tied up?”
Dodger’s eyes open, widen. She stares at the ceiling for a second before she smiles and says, “That’s not a bad idea. Hang on.” She squirms, getting a feel for the rope around her, before looking back to Roger. “Okay. The tables are thirty-six inches in width and four inches thick. That means each loop around the table itself, not including us, involves eighty inches of rope. Adding our geometry—”
She talks faster and faster, until Roger is no longer following what she’s saying. She gets like this when there’s math involved, and he’s not going to interrupt, because he can see the shape of what she means, and what she means is “I can get us out of this.” He watches as she twists just so, shifting her shoulder up, shifting her arms a fraction of an inch to the side. She’s working at the knots without ever touching them, using the physics of the rope and the math of the situation as a whole to get herself free. He isn’t sure she can do it. It shouldn’t be possible. But then, when has anything about them been possible?
This, too, is a manifestation. He’s starting to see how they can walk in the world when all this is over. Magic doesn’t have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes, it’s the subtle things that are the most effective of all.
“—and pull and ha!” Dodger sits up, the rope falling loose around her. She’s still naked and covered in silvery runes, but some things are less important than freedom.
Roger averts his eyes as she runs to his side, and keeps them averted while she’s untying him. Then he sits up, and they look around the room. It’s bigger than it seemed at first, with a floor painted in constellations, like a strange mirror of the starry sky above them. The walls are stained glass, each panel showing a scene from one of Baker’s books, but subtly changed. The King of Cups holds a staff in one hand and a chalice in the other. The Stormcrow Princess is still charred gray, but she wears the robes of a rival wizard, and the color of her skin is clearly the result of chemical poisoning, flesh blistered by things she was never meant to steal.