we’ve checked every variable. Until we know we can do it perfectly. I’m only doing this one more time, and it has to be flawless.”
“What?” That’s enough to make him hurry to her side, wonder forgotten. “What is it?”
“The astrolabe began showing errors the day we were born. Running in reverse, stopping, backing up. Leaping from one time to another. It’s the resets. Some of these columns are describing the ones who didn’t manifest, but I . . . I know these dates.” She taps a column. “This is where we made contact. See? The last time on that day, that’s when I gave up. Or when you told me not to. It’s all through our lives, all these little corrections, all the times we went back and started again. But I can’t reset without you, and you didn’t know to tell me to reset when I was five.”
(five years old, and she runs into the street where a truck hits her, putting her into a coma that will last for twenty-five years, until a man she never got to meet is brought to her bedside by a scowling woman with strawberry blonde hair, until the man gives her an order at the woman’s cold command; five years old, and she lived to be thirty, and she never lived at all)
He doesn’t fully understand. She can see that, and be frustrated by it, even as she forgives him. Sometimes she won’t understand him either. That’s why they have to stay together. They have to explain the universe for one another.
“Every time we’ve reached the Baths, or whatever else we could use to call the Impossible City into being, we’ve tried again,” she says. “Maybe sometimes we’ve tried again from someplace that looked a lot like this, but it almost never happens until now. Until we’re almost thirty years old. But Roger, the stars haven’t moved. Erin said the Doctrine was a universal force. She meant it. We’ve been resetting the entire universe, because otherwise . . .”
“ . . . the stars would have jumped thirty years out of place every time we reset time,” he says, with dawning horror. “Does he say how many times? How many errors he recorded?”
“This last time was lucky number thirteen—”
“That’s not so bad.”
“—thousand.”
Almost half a million years of looping the universe through their lifetimes, of using their own needs as a lever on which to turn everything that is or ever has been. Roger stares at her. For the first time he can remember, words have no meaning. The numbers they describe are too big; the offense they contain is too much.
Finally, in a choked voice, he says, “Yeah, let’s not fuck with time any more until we’re sure we’re doing it for the last time.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s do something else.”
“Yeah.”
“Farmer’s market?”
Dodger blinks before smiling slowly, wearily, but with a depth of joy he hasn’t seen from her in a very, very long time.
“Sounds good,” she says. “I think we’ve earned some potatoes.”
He laughs, because there’s nothing else to say.
See them now:
They walk through the corn, a cluster of four moving two by two, brothers holding fast to sisters, sisters keeping their brothers close. They are not a family, not yet, but they will be; the inevitability of it is written in the too-similar lines of their faces, in the way they share certain small mannerisms, certain subtle ways of holding themselves. They come from the same place. They share experiences that no one else will ever understand, nor should be asked to.
And they are beautiful. There is nothing arrogant or cruel to their beauty; it’s a fact of existence, as plain as the noses on their faces or the smears of mercury and gold paint still showing on the skins of two of them. They’ve traveled through the Up-and-Under, perhaps the last to make such a pilgrimage, and the things they’ve learnt from this journey will be with them always. For better or for worse, there is no going back to where they started. Not for any of them.
“California,” says Dodger, and “California,” Roger agrees, and “Anywhere but here,” says Kim, in a voice like a sigh. Tim says nothing. Tim simply looks around with eyes like saucers, drinking in the world.
But this is not the entire ending. Look:
In a room beneath the earth, in a place where nothing good endures, a woman left for dead, a woman whose pulse had fallen so far below the threshold needed for saving, stirs. She opens her