Page 68 of Seasonal Fears

“It was, until we fully claimed the Doctrine,” says Roger. “We traveled back to whatever fixed points we had in our timeline—usually places where we made big decisions that would have lasting impacts—and then we lived things out again from there, making different choices, not always making the right ones. Not even usually making the right ones. We were flying without any sort of safety measures in place.”

“Then I went AWOL,” says Erin.

“Yeah,” says Roger. “About our five hundredth time through, we made it far enough that Reed arranged for Darren’s death. And that changed everything. With Darren gone, Erin was no longer fully under their control. She began to rebel, and allied with us, intending to help us reach the Impossible City and become manifest. Since Erin represents Order, and wasn’t part of the closed circuit Dodge and I form together, we realized we could use her to retain things between resets. She could be asked to remember things, to understand things, to help us make the right choices at crucial junctures.”

“I am exactly as useful as a hacked Furby,” says Erin blandly. “Goodie for me.”

Roger ignores her. Harry presumes he has a lot of practice at that. “So now there were three of us trying to get away. And after a bunch more resets and attempts, we managed to reach the Impossible City and become manifest. That’s when we found Kim and Tim—Reed had been priming them as vessels for the Doctrine—and learned what we’d been doing to the universe.”

“How so?” asks Harry.

It’s weird, standing here with this man so much older than he is explaining himself like Harry is somehow capable of judging him. But Roger looks ashamed, ducking his head, as he explains, “Every time we reset, we reset everything. The whole world. Maybe the whole universe, although I’d rather not think about us being that powerful.”

“It was the whole universe, because the stars never moved,” says Dodger. “Every single time.”

“Right now is later than it has ever been before,” says Roger, ignoring her. “Time didn’t start moving forward without interference until we stopped treating it like our personal lifeline, and even once we understood and became manifest, we had to go back and do it all again a few more times.”

“They finally got to understand what they’d been doing to me this whole time,” says Erin, carrying another sandwich to the table. “They had to go back into their own pasts with full understanding of what was happening, and who had already betrayed them, and who they had to lose.”

“My parents were Reed’s people,” says Roger, and shrugs, one-shouldered and uncomfortable. “They loved me in their way. There was nothing I could do to sway them to our side of things, and telling them I was manifest just forced us to trigger a reset on the spot. They loved their master and they loved the thought of power way more than they loved the weird kid they had adopted at his command.”

Dodger puts her hand on his shoulder, and he leans into it. “We sat down and mapped out every important moment of our lives, and then Dodger ran the variables until she found a path through them that did as little damage as possible while still turning us into the people we needed to become. It does us no good to play a perfect game if we come out the other end as Reed’s puppets. Our broken places matter as much as our intact ones.”

“You let yourselves get hurt on purpose?”

“Yes, but we did it knowing it was worth it. We played the closest thing we could find to a perfect version of our timeline. The first time we managed to manifest, Reed killed Erin, Erin killed Smita, Kimberley nearly killed Erin—it was a mess.”

“So we fixed it,” says Dodger. “Some bad things had to happen, no matter what, because they were the bad things that taught us how to keep being human.”

Harry supposes when you’re talking about people who can literally rewind and rewrite time, you want them to be human. Humans are petty and awful and mean and small, but they’re also generous and wonderful and kind and the biggest things that could ever exist. Humans matter, and he feels a little better knowing that the kind of people who go to farmers’ markets and treat sandwiches like serious business are in charge of reality. It makes more sense than any other theology he’s ever considered.

“And once we got it as close to right as we could, we stopped,” says Roger. “We’re still working on the problem, but I don’t think we’re going to try again. I think we’re already in the best-case scenario.”

“There’s no way to save Darren and still get Erin to join us,” says Dodger. “Roger can’t leave her with instructions that go back before she’d joined us, or she relays them immediately to Leigh, and Leigh comes to punish us for insubordination. So until Darren dies, Erin effectively isn’t in play. And there’s no way to save my parents. If I move them, Leigh finds them. If I move them without their consent, they react badly. And trying again would mean resetting the entire universe to the day we were born.”

The thought is horrific. Harry and Melanie are so much younger than the pair of them … they’d have to live their whole lives over again, without the benefit of a road map telling them which mistakes to avoid.

They’d have to live through the motel again, and however much of the coronation they get through. He doesn’t even want to consider the possibility.

“Doctor Who made time travel seem a lot cooler than this, huh?” asks Dodger, amused and sympathetic. “Don’t worry too much about it. You have better things to focus on, like the coronation, and getting out of here. We’re done being the story. It’s your turn. All three of you.”

“Just one request,” says Roger. “It would be convenient for us to know the local seasonal monarchs. It would make things easier going forward. So if you win, come back and let us know, okay?”

“Okay,” says Harry, and doesn’t mention that Dodger already asked them to do that. It’s sort of reassuring that the twins don’t automatically share everything. It means they’re still individuals. It means one less thing to worry about.

Dodger hands Melanie a paper bag filled with sandwiches and puffed cereal treats, and Jack steps away from the salad station, and that’s it, then: their interlude is ending, and it’s time for them to get back on the road.

“Where do we go next?” asks Harry.

Dodger’s eyes go glassy and a little unfocused as she stares at a point he can’t see. “South,” she says, after a long quiet. “You want to head south, and then cut east, and keep going until you hit Alabama. You’ll know you’re in the right place when they come out to meet you. They’ll be able to show you the rest of the way.”

“What, she sees the future, too?” asks Jack.

“Who are ‘they’?” asks Melanie.

“I don’t know,” says Dodger, looking annoyed.

“She doesn’t see the future, she’s just looking for the logical outcomes of the numbers as she knows them,” says Roger. “Right now, that means your optimal path is south, then east to Alabama. That could change, depending on what you do along the way, but we have to live in the moment, right?”