Divination #3
“She can’t,” says Kim. “Dodger hurt herself once, really badly. It was before we were even born—her hurting herself is part of what made Mr. Reed decide that Tim and I were needed. They’ve gone back and tried their own pasts a whole bunch of times since they manifested, trying to get it right and make things as close to perfect as they possibly can.
But not everything can be perfect. If you’re going to need calluses because you have to walk on sharp rocks in order to save yourself, you’re going to need to build them up. ”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning they have to leave some of the bad things in their history alone. They can’t make it so that they never get split up, or so Roger doesn’t have a bad breakup with his first girlfriend—or so Dodger never hurts herself.
” Kim finally turns and looks at David, eyes bright with anger and defiance.
“She has to hurt herself, or they never grow up to be the people they have to be in order to take the Doctrine away from the alchemists, even if that means taking it away from us, too. And because she has to hurt herself, Roger gets to always be afraid one of us is going to hurt ourselves, even if we don’t want to.
Even if we never would. Her past informs my future. Forever.”
“I’m sorry,” says David. It’s not enough. It’s what he has.
“Whatever,” says Kim. She drops her controller onto the couch and rises, leaving the room just as Erin comes in, watching the girl go with a flat, disinterested expression.
She turns to David. “Dinner’s ready,” she says.
“Thank you,” he replies, not sure what else he’s supposed to say. He puts his own controller down and rises.
Time to eat.
The kitchen table isn’t large enough for eight people. David knows that. It seats them all, all the same, with room for their plates and drinks—milk for most of them, iced tea for Judy and Smita, coffee for Roger.
The curry is beautiful, a deep red shot through with veins of golden ghee, chunks of chicken and onion breaking the surface like gemstones breaking through lava.
There’s naan, hot and soft and rich with garlic and cilantro, and heaping bowls of rice, one for each half of the table.
Smita sets each of the dishes on its own individual hot pad, protecting the wood and cushioning the food at the same time, and no one moves to serve themselves until she’s settled and spooning rice onto her own plate.
Only then do they begin passing the basket of naan around the table, taking their pieces with approving noises.
Judy beams at Smita. “This is all lovely. And it smells amazing.”
“You only say that because you can’t cook,” says Smita, amused.
“Not true. I can make Pop-Tarts. And I made an omelet last week that didn’t come with a side order of setting the kitchen on fire.”
Everyone fills their plates. David sits back and watches as the people around him eat and bicker and interact.
Roger keeps “accidentally” bumping Judy with his elbow, which causes her to stop chewing and shoot him frankly besotted looks which Dodger ostentatiously ignores.
Kim and Tim steal bits off one another’s plates, while Erin manages to get the exact right ratio of curry and rice in every single spoonful.
Not a single drop of sauce falls on her clothing, each one landing obediently back in the middle of her plate.
It’s companionable and homely and surreally normal, which shouldn’t be possible, since everyone at this table has been touched by the preternatural in one way or another.
(Even Smita, who is perfectly normal on the surface, has had her encounters with the alchemical world.
It killed her. Dozens and dozens and hundreds of times.
In every timeline David has heard of, she discovered that Roger and Dodger were genetically identical, twins in every way but gender, something that shouldn’t have been possible, and in every timeline except for this one, she died for that knowledge.
Erin would receive orders from her masters, go to Smita’s lab, and kill her.
But Erin is the only one who could remember the loops without outside intervention.
She’s the natural force of Order, forced into a human skin and made to walk the world.
Her very soul resisted the disorderly way they were rewriting the universe.
And when Roger and Dodger became strong enough to resist their own masters, Erin was able to twist her orders hard enough to let her spare Smita. Her best friend. Her penance.)
When dinner’s over, he lingers to help Erin clean up the kitchen while the others scatter through the house and out into the garden.
He doesn’t want to think about what Judy and Roger might be doing out there in the dark.
It’s not that he’s jealous—he’s not—it’s just that he doesn’t like to consider his superior’s sex life, especially not when it might involve the porch swing he sometimes sits on.
So he gathers the dishes and carries them to the sink, watching Erin portion the leftovers into sealed plastic containers and tuck them away in the fridge.
He waits until she turns back in his direction before he asks, “Hey, Erin, do you know anything about Roger, um…”
“Manipulating the twins to prevent them from doing anything that can’t be undone without resetting reality again?
” she asks, cool as an evening in October.
She walks over to the sink, bumping him out of the way with her hip before turning on the water.
“You know he wouldn’t give an actual order without good reason to think that he needs to. ”
“I know, but forcing someone to do—or not do—something is sort of shitty, and feels like the kind of thing the other side does, not us. We’re supposed to be better than this.”
“Are we?” asks Erin, looking at him with one eyebrow raised. “Who says?”
David doesn’t really have an answer for that. He sighs and fetches another stack of plates, setting them on the sink next to her. Then he pauses, her words finally fully sinking in.
“Wait,” he says. “Again?”
Erin nods, adding soap to her half-filled sink and beginning to add the dishes.
“Again. You don’t think Roger went straight for the nuclear option, do you?
No, don’t answer that, of course you do.
To you, he’s just this terrifying figure who isn’t technically supposed to exist—artificial incarnations are scary when you’ve been around as long as Máni has.
I mean, hell. I am an artificial incarnation, and sometimes those two manage to scare me.
I think I know more about what they’re capable of than they do, and not all of it is awesome.
But let me tell you a little bit about Roger Middleton.
I’ve known him since we were both grad students, I’m pretty sure I’m qualified. ”
David doesn’t say anything. This is a rare opportunity to learn more about the man his senior is involved with, without needing to ask her directly. He’s not going to do anything that might make her change her mind.
“He’s a nerd. They’re both nerds, but for Dodger, ‘nerd’ was defined by being almost totally alone, all the time, forever.
She didn’t do friends when she was younger.
She didn’t do socialization. She did … math.
It was different for Roger. He joined pub quizzes and went to baseball games and attended literary conventions and library conferences.
He met other nerds, and he built relationships with them.
He’s still maintaining some of those friendships, even when Dodger would rather he didn’t.
She was alone for so long that she’s selfish with the people she cares about.
He wasn’t. He’s protective of them, because he’s scared for them.
He needs to know that they’re all right. ”
“That makes sense,” says David, thinking of the things Kim told him, of the pale scars he’s seen on Dodger’s arms when she relaxed enough to forget to be self-conscious about them. “I can’t imagine Dodger would take losing them any better than he would.”
Erin actually laughs, the sound thin and flat, like it’s been pressed until it lost all joy. “She didn’t. She wouldn’t. So they have to keep surviving, even if they don’t want to, because no one wants to see what happens when she melts all the way down.”
David hesitates before asking the only question he has left: “How many times?”
“Can’t be sure, I don’t remember everything unless it actually concerns me, but at least five,” says Erin, dunking another plate in the sink.
“It varies which one of them it is, and we’re going to have to find a solution sooner or later, because the silence is eating them alive.
But as long as they are alive, the silence can have a full belly, and the world will keep on turning. ”
Sometimes David forgets how fragile reality really is.
And sometimes he remembers.
In a laboratory that’s almost more like a bunker, made of concrete infused with godsblood and the ashes of the dead, only silence stirs.
This place has been sealed away for a year, left to be forgotten after the alchemists who had been working in Berkeley fled the city, chased away by their own creations and by an entire pantheon of angry Lunar deities.
Leaving may have been the smartest thing they ever did, as it meant some of them were able to get out while they were still breathing.
(The ones who didn’t were collected and repurposed by the ones who did. There is no retirement in the alchemical world. Only recycling, into smaller and smaller versions of the self, carved up and portioned out by the survivors.)
The long corridors stand empty, the rooms echo with silence, shadows gathering on every flat surface.
And yet there are no cobwebs in the corners, no dust on the abandoned equipment, no small scuttling things with dozens upon dozens of legs scurrying through the shadows.
Water drips from a cracked pipe in one of the main lab areas, collecting drop by drop.
It has already filled the room to a level of almost two feet, but there is no mold, no fungus, and nothing seeks to claim the artificial pool as its new kingdom.
There are very few true dead zones in the world, few places where no forms of life can find a foothold. This has become one of them.
Once, people lived here. Worked here. Even thrived here. Once, this was a center for learning and terrible innovations. Everything ended in an hour, and is still over, still settling into the grave of its own ambitions.
The sound of metal scraping against stone is almost offensive as it cuts through the stillness, too loud and unforgivable to be permitted. In the deepest dark at the back of the largest lab, something stirs.
It does not live. It does not dream. But it awakens.
Bit by bit, it uncurls its spindly limbs. Bit by bit, it unmakes its own mausoleum. It is neither ghost nor ghast, is something undefinable and impossible, and the fruition of a plan put in place so very long ago that there is no accounting for the changes between here and now.
It turns, slowly, to consider its dead and frozen kingdom. It will find no restoration here.
Silent, it slides into the water without a ripple. Now is the time to rest and recover. Whatever will come will come. The future can still be changed, and the past … the past will remain a foundation on which to build every thing that follows.