least once: they’ve sacrificed the other for their own protection. Maybe that’s the key. “I brought a chessboard,” he says, holding it up. “I couldn’t find any pieces, but I figured you’d probably have something we could use.”
Now a corner of her mouth quirks, like she’s about to smile again. It seems more genuine this time. He’s already figuring out a few things about Dodger’s smiles, piecing them together from what he remembers of her as a child, what he remembers from the one time they ever met face-to-face: when she’s lying, she smiles with her whole face. When she’s actually happy, she only smiles with the left, like she’s trying to make sure she can control who sees it.
“Did you think I wouldn’t have a chessboard?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound angry, she doesn’t sound frightened, or tired, or any of those other things. She sounds like Dodger. She sounds like his best friend.
He knows the words: relief, alleviation, contentment. None of them encompass the feeling of weightlessness, like all the troubles in the world have been lifted from his shoulders. He guesses this feeling is probably a cliché, but the people who like to put those labels on things don’t always remember that things become clichés because they keep happening, over and over, all around the world.
“Not really,” he says. “So can I exist again, and come inside?”
“Third time’s the charm, I guess,” she says, and holds the door open wider so he can get by. She presses her back against the wall, avoiding even accidental physical contact.
Roger regrets that, a little. He was the one who’d first introduced the idea that their quantum entanglement—or whatever it was—might be enhanced by physical contact, and it appears to have stuck with both of them. He doesn’t want to touch her. He just wishes she didn’t look so scared that he would.
Once the door is closed, he clears his throat and asks, “Berkeley?”
“You have a good math department,” she says, flipping the deadbolt with her thumb. “I wanted to work with Professor Kong. Her research in game theory is revolutionary. And there’s the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, of course. Talk about a kid in a candy store. The kitchen’s this way.” She turns her back on him—a show of trust or a show of dominance, he doesn’t quite know—and heads down the hall, apparently trusting him to follow.
He does, studying his surroundings as they walk, looking for the vocabulary of the woman she’s become. If he can read her, he can start to understand her. The trouble is figuring out which of the things around him belong to her and not to her roommates. That she has roommates is obvious: the place is too big for her to afford on her own, and the Dodger he knew would never have brought a complete set of the Up-and-Under books with her to college. The math texts are probably hers. The books on chess. He’s not sure about the books on social engineering and finding your better self, but something about the way she walks—shoulders back, neck elongated, like she’s practiced this—makes him suspect they might be hers.
The girl on the balcony said Dodger wasn’t interested in making friends, just in having people believe she was, and Roger suspects that she was right. It would fit with who Dodger was when they lost contact.
The kitchen at the end of the hall is small but bright, with windows taking up most of one wall. There’s a concrete patio out back, no more than six feet deep, and every bit of it that can be packed with planter boxes has been. They bristle with dozens of succulents in a dozen varieties, a dozen different shades of gray. There’s a cat sitting on the fence, a scarred orange tom with one green eye. The cat looks at Roger. Roger looks at the cat.
“That’s old Bill,” says Dodger, clearing an armload of newspapers off the folding card table crammed into the breakfast nook. “He comes with the apartment. The landlady asked us to feed him when we remembered, and to call her if he got hit by a car or anything like that. He’s pretty sweet. Only tries to convince us to let him in when it starts raining. So I wasn’t necessarily lying when I said I had to feed the cat, even if he’s not actually mine.”
“What a good kitty,” says Roger dutifully. He likes cats. They have their own agenda, and he