Timeline: five minutes too late, thirty seconds from the end of the world.
There’s so much blood.
Dodger hasn’t moved in almost a minute, her hand outstretched like she’s going to resume using her own blood to sketch numbers on the crumbling brick, an expression of quiet resignation on her face. She’s breathing, but barely, and those breaths are slowing, weakening, becoming less reality and more hopeful thinking.
He should finish the equation she was writing when she fell, should show her work and bring it to a close, but he can’t. She stopped explaining the math to him when they were nine years old, when he was convinced to give her up by hollow threats and lies that could never have become reality. He’s a genius. He knows all the words—prodigy, polyglot, natural—but his genius and hers were never the same, and he can’t understand the symbols that spiraled from her unmoving fingers.
They’ve lost. They didn’t even know they were playing a game, and still, they’ve lost. They lost a childhood together, they lost the balance they could have provided one another, and now they’re going to lose their lives, all because he doesn’t know how to finish the figures surrounding them, red drying into brown as his sister’s chest rises in shallower and shallower arcs, winding down toward eternity. He can’t keep them on the improbable road. Not alone. Neither of them could ever have made this journey alone.
When she stops breathing, his own heart will follow hers into the dark. He knows that as surely as he’s ever known anything, as surely as he knows the difference between myth and miracle, between legend and lie. It’s almost over.
The gunfire continues outside, and it’s not like it is in the movies, it’s not loud and dramatic. It’s a whisper in a thunderstorm, and that whisper is going to be enough to kill them. Erin’s gun speaks periodically through the din, and either her silencer isn’t as good or she’s just not using one, because he hears every shot she fires.
He hears when her gunshots stop.
This is it, then: this is the end. They’ve lost, it’s over. Erin is dead and Dodger is bleeding to death and he’s never going to reach the Impossible City, and he’s never going home. This is where they stop. He fumbles for his sister, gathers her in his arms, not caring how much damage he does in the process of pulling her as close as she always should have been. It’s not like he can kill her. She’s already dead. She just doesn’t know it yet.
“Dodger. Hey, Dodge. I need you to wake up. I need you to help me stop the bleeding.”
Her eyes stay closed. Only the shallow rise and fall of her chest betrays the fact that she’s still with him.
There’s so much blood.
“Come on, Dodge. Leaving isn’t a competition. You don’t have to get me back like this.” His own injuries aren’t as bad as hers. One bullet to the side of the head, taking out a chunk of his ear. It bled like nobody’s business, but there were no arteries involved; if it weren’t for the fact that he can feel her impending death looming over him like a shadow, he’d expect to recover. He won’t. “You can’t. You can’t go. I just got you back again. Are you listening? You can’t go. I need you.”
Her eyes stay closed. There’s so much blood.
When you can’t win the game, knock over the board. He doesn’t remember who said that. Maybe it was his first girlfriend, Alison, with her equal passions for chess and for picking fights over the smallest things. Maybe it was someone else. It doesn’t matter, because they’ve been working toward this since the beginning. This is the only way. Her chest is barely moving, and there’s so much blood, there’s so much blood, and it doesn’t matter that he knows the words. The words are what’s going to take her away.
“I can’t do this alone. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
He leans in until his lips almost touch the curve of her ear, exposed by the short sweep of her blood-soaked hair. He doesn’t lean close enough to get her blood on his face. One of them should die as close to clean as possible.
“Dodger,” he whispers. “Don’t die. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Do whatever you have to do, break whatever you have to break, but