would consider what you said to me, try to assess it fairly on its own merits, and worry about the consequences endlessly, because I’m me, and that’s the sort of bullshit thing my brain likes to do,” says Roger. His tone is light. His expression is grim. Erin has always seemed off, but here, tonight, the strangeness of her is magnified: here, tonight, she’s a wound in the fabric of the world, and she’s bleeding, oh, how she’s bleeding.
“Don’t come back from Boston.”
Roger stops walking.
Erin continues, momentum carrying her forward another several feet before she stops, and turns, and looks at him. “Stay home,” she says. “There are schools there that would take you. Plead illness. Get your ass off this improbable road before you go too far, because the Impossible City is just ahead, Jackdaw, and it’s waiting for you. It knows you’re coming. Once it sees you round the bend, it’s going to be too late.”
Roger stares at her. “Uh, Erin? It’s none of my business what you do in your spare time, but are you high? I’m not running away from school because you have some sort of weird Up-and-Under thing going on. And if I’m Jack Daw, what does that make you? The Corn Jenny?”
“I should be so lucky,” she says, and there’s such a terrible, painful reasonableness in her tone that he takes a step backward, away from her, away from the future she represents. “I don’t walk the improbable road, Jackdaw; I don’t go to meet the Queen of Wands. I’ve already been to see the King of Cups, and the Page of Frozen Waters made sure I knew I’d crossed the line. Hurt yourself if you want to, but think about Dodger. She’s breakable right now. Her kind always are. Crow Girls and Jack Daws have a lot in common, but where you burn, she’ll soak up all the water in the world and drown under the weight of her own lungs. You’re the control. She’s just the trigger mechanism. Stop this now before it’s too late for both of you.”
“Now you’re talking crazy,” says Roger patiently. “I was willing to tolerate a lot of weird, because you’re Dodger’s roommate and I don’t know what you’ve had to smoke tonight, but you’ve crossed a few lines, and one of them is the line of reason. Go home, Erin. Sleep whatever this is off. I’ll see you after Thanksgiving.”
“I can see the fixed points in your timeline. I can’t alter them or move between them the way you people can, but I can see them, and you’ve just passed one. Don’t you get it? You’re heading through the temperaments and into the center, and once you get there, I can’t save you. Once you get there, no one can save you. The King of Cups will see you now. The King sees all the cuckoos when they come home to roost.”
“Go home, Erin.” Roger starts walking again, faster this time, quickly passing her. She doesn’t move to follow him. He’s grateful for that, but he doesn’t slow down.
“When the time comes for you to see the King, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she calls after him. “Don’t say I didn’t try!”
“Go home, Erin,” he says, and turns the corner, and is gone.
Erin stays where she is, counting down from one hundred, giving him time to come back. He might. It could happen. Some people, when warned about impending doom, come back to ask for more details. Most don’t. Most would rather pretend the warning never came, that they had no idea of what might be coming for them.
Roger doesn’t come back. Somehow, she’s not surprised. She called him a Jackdaw, a Jack Daw, because that’s what he is, according to Baker’s formulae—that old bitch, with her carefully coded instructions for a generation of alchemists to emulate. But really, everyone who walks the improbable road to enlightenment is an Avery, a Zib, and Roger is no different. He and his sister only have one iron shoe apiece. That doesn’t matter. As long as they walk together, they’ll still walk all the way, and then . . .
“We’ll see what we’ll see,” she says quietly, and turns, and disappears into the night.
HOME AGAIN
Timeline: 19:54 EST, November 22, 2008 (two weeks later).
The house smells like Thanksgiving, that complicated mix of turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and mashed potato and pie that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It smells like holiday. It smells like home. When