other end of the line, and she doesn’t have time for pleasantries. She never has. “You need to say the following: ‘take us back to the last fixed point.’ Tell her it is an order. Tell her it is an adjuration. Tell her it is a command. And do it fast, Jack Daw, because the whole damn Impossible City is about to fall on your head.”
“Erin? What are you doing with Dodger’s phone? Does she know you’re calling me?”
“No, and I don’t have time to explain it to you, and I’m not going to have time, because you’re about to wipe the last week off the board. This is a bad equation, dumbass; this is a sonnet that doesn’t rhyme. Take whatever metaphor you need, but call her and end this, fast.”
“Roger!” His father sounds angry, cancelling out his mother’s sweetness. “Get down here this instant!”
Roger crouches forward, cups his hand around the phone, like that would make any difference in the world. “Look, Erin, I want you to give Dodger her phone back and cut this shit out right now, or so help me—”
“You found something.”
He stops dead.
“I don’t know what it was, because I’m not that attuned to you, but it was something you know shouldn’t exist. A story you wrote about having a sister, maybe, or a photo, or a drawing. You found something that didn’t happen in this timeline, hidden with the things that did happen. That’s because we’ve been here before. Not exactly here, not this precise point, but close enough for government work. We’ve done this often enough for me to start remembering, and you need to call Dodger, and you need to repeat what I told you to say right now.”
“Or what?”
“Or this might turn out to be the last timeline. You’re too old for chemical resets and therapy. You’re old enough to be a failure. You listened to me last time.”
“How do you know that?”
Erin’s chuckle is grim. “We’re still here, aren’t we? Get the fuck off the improbable road, or you’re a dead man, and you’re taking Dodger down with you.”
The line goes dead. Roger lowers his phone, staring at it. This makes no sense. This can’t be true. But the picture in his hand is real, and there are footsteps on the stairs, and those things don’t make sense either; those things are somehow terrible in their senselessness.
He closes his eyes. “Dodger?”
The backyard, a world in flowering color. Dodger’s perspective shifts as she sits up again. “Roger? You okay?”
“You need to take us back to the last fixed point.” There are footsteps on the landing now. They’re trying to be quiet, but they don’t know the creaks and groans of the floor the way he does. They didn’t grow up here.
“I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”
“Take us back,” he repeats. There’s supposed to be more to it than that. Haltingly, he says, “This is an order.”
“Roger—”
The doorknob is turning.
“This is an adjuration.”
His father is pushing the door open, tread heavy enough to identify him. “What are you doing, boy? Open your eyes.”
“This is a command.”
Roger’s eyes stay closed as his father grabs his arm and yanks him away from the hole in the closet floor. He doesn’t have time to open them before Dodger’s vision goes white, the flash traveling from her optic nerves to his, white taking black, upsetting the whole chessboard.
We got it wrong, he thinks, and everything is gone.
The girl had landed in a crouch, more like a wild thing than a child. Slowly she straightened, until she was standing a little taller than Avery, a little shorter than Zib, slotting into the space they made between them like it had been measured out to her specifications.
She had black hair and yellow eyes, and a dress made of black feathers that ended just above her knees. Her feet were bare and her nails were long and raggedy, like no one had ever trimmed them, but let them grow until they could be used to climb the walls of the world.
“Who are you?” asked Zib, all awe.
Avery had to swallow the urge to pull her away. She would stay there forever if he let her, of that much he was sure: she would never realize when she was in danger, and without her, he would never be able to go home.
“I’m a Crow Girl,” said the stranger. She cocked her head. “Who are you?”
“I’m Avery, and this is Zib,” said Avery. “Please, do you