Divination
They reach the bottom of the stairs to find the house awake all around them.
The smell of curry wafts from the kitchen, and the sound of teenage voices arguing loudly about something that sounds like Mario Kart drifts out of the living room.
Erin, the aforementioned creepy blonde, is waiting by the front door.
She’s leaning against it, actually, blocking it from use, her arms folded over her chest and her unsettlingly blue eyes fixed on the ceiling, like she’s performing an oracular reading of the swirls in the plaster.
David slows, until he reaches the floor an easy eight feet behind Judy, who’s walking up to Erin like there’s nothing wrong with approaching the scariest woman in the world.
(Dodger can manipulate the laws of physics like a champ, but Erin?
Erin will just stab you. Over and over again.
And then she’ll wash the blood out from under her fingernails.
Worst of all, she’ll never stop smiling, not even when the police show up to cart your corpse away—and somehow, no matter how much blood winds up on her clothing, she’ll never get caught.)
Erin’s disinterested gaze flicks from the ceiling down to Judy as she approaches. “So you finally came downstairs.”
“I had to finish talking to my colleague before I could exactly walk away,” says Judy, voice calm and level. “Hello, Erin. You’re looking less homicidal than usual today.”
“Thus proving that looks can deceive, because I’m feeling more homicidal than usual,” says Erin. “Isn’t it funny how things sometimes work out that way? I wanted to have a word with you before you left.”
“I thought you might.”
“Roger’s…” Erin’s eyes flick to the kitchen doorway, then back to Judy. “He’s a special boy.”
“I knew that.”
“No, see, after today, I’m not so sure you did. Roger isn’t one of your little Lunars, who’s going to be all honored by you deciding to pay attention to him. He’s a basic function of the universe. We still don’t know what happens if you break half the Doctrine.”
“Good thing I wasn’t planning on breaking him.”
Erin lifts an eyebrow. “Really,” she says, voice becoming a flat drawl. It isn’t a question. It isn’t quite a statement, either. It’s a grammatical oddity, sarcasm made audible and painfully heavy.
“Really,” says Judy, with absolute conviction.
“Maybe you should tell Roger that,” says Erin. “He’s in his office right now, sulking like the enormous twit he’s occasionally determined to be. You two staying for dinner?”
“Depends on who’s cooking,” says Judy. She looks around. “I know where Roger is, and I can hear the kids. That just leaves—”
“Smita is cooking,” says Erin. “None of us want toast and botulism for dinner.”
Judy nods.
David has only experienced Dodger’s cooking once; usually when there’s company she just sets up assembly lines of sandwich fixings and lets people get on with things on their own.
He doesn’t really remember the time she made dinner for them.
He’s either blotted it out intentionally or one of the Doctrine helpfully edited his memories to make eating easier for him.
Either way, he’s happy to join Judy in nodding his agreement with Erin’s statement.
“You two play nice,” says Judy, looking between the pair before she turns and walks down the short hall to Roger’s office. A quick knock later and she’s slipping through the door, out of sight.
David turns his attention back to Erin, smiling uneasily. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she replies, sounding utterly disinterested. “Does this mean you’re staying for dinner?”
“It smells good, so yeah, if I’m invited, I’m down to stick around.”
She rolls her eyes. “I didn’t say you were invited, I just asked if you were staying.”
“In most houses, that would be the same thing.”
“Would it, really? Or do you just take it that way, and count on people being too polite to contradict you?”
David’s still trying to figure out his answer when the shouting from the front room reaches a fever pitch and Erin points to the open doorway, a dour look on her face.
“You, go,” she says. “You were their age fifteen minutes ago, whatever that age actually is. Maybe you can keep them from killing each other.”
David laughs, and Máni laughs with him, stirring in the darkness of David’s hidden heart to remind him that he was once followed across the sky by a pair of children whose mythological significance has been so diluted and forgotten that they no longer manifest. He misses them, Hjúki and Bil, and if he has any regrets about becoming David, it’s only that David has no children or younger siblings of his own, leaving Máni with no one to take care of.
You’ll make a great dad someday, thinks David, and he means it. He does want kids, and it’s hard to think of Máni as being anything other than a fantastic father when he gets the chance.
He’s a little surprised when the only reply he receives is a feeling of overwhelming sorrow, weighted heavily down by regret.
He doesn’t have time to press further, because he’s already stepping into the living room, where the teenagers on the battered brown canvas couch freeze at the sight of him, the boy’s hand still pressed flat against the girl’s cheek where he was shoving her away.
They’re both clutching video game controllers, the wired kind, connecting them to the console under the television.
The living room is another of the house’s many oddities.
It has at least four different, mutually exclusive appearances, which it rotates through depending on the needs of the household.
There’s the one with the leather furniture and all the bookcases, which has been seen less and less frequently since the library was finished; there’s the one with the whiteboards and the bare walls covered with careful equations written in erasable marker; there’s the one with the big central table, and there’s the one that currently exists, with the comfy-looking couch that could have been stolen from the early seventies, the statistically normal number of bookcases containing a slightly statistically abnormal number of books (some things can’t be helped) about things like popular culture, local history, and the flora of California, and the massive entertainment center currently being used by the two resident teens to take out their bloodthirsty impulses without actually needing to clean the rugs.
“In my day, we just skipped straight to Mortal Kombat,” says David, strolling over to squish himself onto the couch with the pair. “Less chaos, but plenty of opportunities to decapitate each other.”
“We’re not supposed to play violent video games,” says the boy, dark brown hair flopping down to half-cover his pale, whiskey-brown eyes. They’re as unnerving as Roger and Dodger’s eyes, in their own special way.
Designer people. Sometimes David wishes he could meet the man who built half this household, just for a brief conversation.
But Roger and Dodger got there a long time before he came into the picture, and from the stories he told, they didn’t leave much of the man for him to have a conversation with.
Pity.
The two teens are definitely twins: coloring aside, they have almost-identical faces, and they’re still the same height, despite the vagrancies of puberty working its will on them.
The girl’s hair is white with a distinct undertone of cornsilk green.
If she were paying to have it dyed that color, her stylist would be a genius.
Since she’s not, and since her hair refuses to take dye of any kind, her genetics are cruel.
She’ll always stand out in a crowd, much like Dodger does; she’ll always be a target.
The people created to embody the Math side of the Doctrine are supposed to draw fire away from their Language counterparts, and they didn’t get a say in the matter.
Their names are Kimberley and Timothy, but everyone calls them Kim and Tim, the rhymes rolling easily off their tongues.
It’s only since the alchemists were basically driven out of Berkeley that the two have relaxed enough to begin fighting like normal siblings, arguing in the halls and slaughtering each other in pixelated dream worlds.
David’s not sure he understands the appeal of video games for the pair.
The world they live in day by day is brighter and more fantastic in a lot of days—although they’re still attending normal high school with normal human students, so they probably have a lot of stress to work through.
“We only have two controllers,” says Tim, taking his hand off Kim’s face and leaning away from her on the couch.
“That’s cool.” David shrugs. “I’ll play loser.”
“Isn’t it normally ‘I’ll play winner’?” asks Kim.
“Yeah, but that just means the winner gets to keep playing, while the loser has to sit around feeling bad about losing. If I play loser, maybe they can win, and things keep changing up. It’s not more fair—someone’s still sitting out every round—but I think it’s more fun.”
The twins exchange a complex look before returning their attention to him. “You’re weird,” says Kim.
David shrugs again. “I’m a Moon. We’re supposed to be a little weird. This world was built for humans, and we’re just shining on it.”
And that, right there, is the real appeal of this weird house and the weird people it contains: nowhere else in the world can he look at a pair of non-Lunar teens and bluntly state what he is without being called delusional, or worse.
There’s a freedom in being able to be truly open about his identity with people who aren’t already poised to shine down over the Impossible City, in being believed.
There’s an almost drunken joy in the absence of cynicism.
“Judy’s a Moon,” says Tim. “She’s dating Roger.”
“Are you here because you’re going to start dating Dodger?” asks Kim. “Or because you think you’re going to start dating Dodger? Because you may want to reconsider that. Dodger doesn’t date.”