Page 67 of Seasonal Fears

“This is really nice of you,” he says, to Dodger.

“It’s the least we could do,” she replies. “I mean, this is all sort of our fault.”

“That was the last question I wanted to ask,” he says. “You people talk like academics on meth—one topic into the next topic into the next, and if we’re lucky, you remember you never finished the first topic before we all forget what you were saying. I think you do it on purpose, at least some of the time.”

Roger is listening now too, shoulders tense, head canted ever so slightly to the side.

Dodger shrugs. “Maybe we do. I mean, Roger and I are both academics. He teaches at the university, I mostly do research and short projects for think tanks. Erin’s a social worker.”

She rattles off their professions like a small child might explain what her Barbies do all day while she’s at school. Harry can’t believe any of the three of them has actually done a day of work in a long time, if they ever have. And that’s okay. He’s not here to judge these strange, impossible people. He just wants to understand them, a little, maybe, if he can.

“I just don’t quite get some of the things you say.”

“I mean, we are forces of the universe, and you’re more of a force of the world in training,” says Dodger. “No summers on Mars. You’d be powerless there. But there is math on Mars, so I do just fine.”

“Please don’t tell me you people hang out on Mars for fun, I don’t think I could handle it right now.”

“Okay,” says Dodger, and goes quiet for a few seconds. Harry lets them stretch like taffy, broken by the sounds of the sandwich makers asking each other for toppings, or the rustle of Roger’s foil, or the clank of knives against jars. He gets the feeling silence is something Dodger doesn’t handle well, and if he just lets it linger, she’ll tell him what he wants to know.

He’s not wrong. “What do you want to know?” she asks.

“What did Erin mean, when she said sometimes you have to settle for the high score you have?”

Dodger sighs, heavily, and walks over to take the foil from Roger, who turns smoothly to face Harry. Neither of them says a word as this exchange takes place, although Roger reaches out to squeeze Dodger’s shoulder, leaving his hand there as he starts to talk.

“We’re like Melanie. We’re artificial. Everyone who lives here is artificial, except Smita, and she’s not a manifestation of anything, unless she’s the natural force of leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor.”

“She’s not,” says Erin. “That would be Chaos or Entropy, and Darren’s still dead.”

Roger makes a brief, uncomfortable face. “Yes, he is,” he says. Then he sighs. “You and Melanie—and Jack—you’re supposed to exist. You’re pearls the world created when grit got caught inside the way things worked. Pull out a pearl and the oyster makes another one, because it’s in the habit. The universe doesn’t know how to operate without you anymore. It doesn’t matter if some of you are artificial, you’re still familiar things. You’re supposed to be.”

“Okay,” says Harry, dubiously.

“Me and Dodge, Kim and Tim, we’re not supposed to be. We were made by a man who was following a blueprint by a woman who thought forcing things that were never supposed to exist as people into human skins was the way to control them. But what neither of them ever seems to have considered is that once something becomes a person, it can do whatever it wants. If you go outside in December and freeze to death, that’s impersonal. If your girlfriend creates a blizzard in your lungs, it’s a choice.”

“Mel wouldn’t do that.”

“No, I don’t think she would. But if Winter takes her over, becomes her instead of her becoming it, it could choose to do that. It would still be a person, even if it wasn’t the one you wanted it to be. Some mornings I wake up and I don’t know who Roger Middleton is. He’s a stranger, a man I’ve never met, and I’m just Language, all the way from one side to the other. All I want to be is Language. The thought of going back to being Roger is disgusting.”

“So how do you come back?”

Roger reaches up and tugs the white streak in his hair. “I have a sister,” he says. “She gets lost too, sometimes, but as long as we never get lost together, one of us is always ready to lead the other home. But that’s beside the point. The universe isn’t used to us yet. The Doctrine of Ethos has always existed—it’s foundational—but it never had the ability to want things before. To make decisions for itself. That’s all new. It’s all down to Reed and Baker and them messing with things they shouldn’t have been messing with.”

“Huh,” says Harry.

“Neither of us can live without the other, because we’re not balancing each other, we’re not opposites, we’re literally two halves of the same idea split into separate skins. If you put the whole thing in one place, it never figures out how to be human, and that’s not as useful for the people who made us. And Reed forgot kids aren’t tools, and they don’t automatically want what their parents want. They don’t do what you expect them to do because you gave them life and they owe you. We started rebelling almost immediately.”

“First time around, we didn’t even make it to twelve,” chirps Dodger, with almost maniacal cheer. “‘Lab accident,’ my ass. Leigh Barrow was a monster and she deserved what we did to her.”

“Yes, she did,” agrees Roger. “We figured out, sort of by accident, that when we’re together, we can actually reset time.”

Melanie drops her butter knife. Harry blinks.

“Whoa,” he says.

“It’s not as useful as you’d think,” says Roger, a little wryly. “For one thing, we can only go back along our personal timeline. If Dodger had come home and said you’d threatened her or something, and she couldn’t live with it, she could have demanded we reset the world to yesterday, and decided not to go to the farmers’ market when she got up this morning.”

“So it’s more of a rewind than a reset?” asks Harry.