Page 79 of Inkpot Gods

“I’ve never met anyone who was actually immortal.”

“Of course you haven’t.” The girl looks down at her hands, still clutching the controller. “Once they get tired of the world the way it is, they pack up and head for the Impossible City. I wonder what they thought when it became the Impossible City. Whatever it was before probably looked a lot less like nineteenth-century Boston.”

“Wait. You know what the Impossible City looks like?”

“Well, yeah.” The girl shrugs. “I hang out with Lunars. Pretty sure Judy’s trying to track down David so she can make him babysit us tonight. They visit the Impossible City monthly, and they come back here and tell us what it was like. So I’ve never seen it, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’d see if I could go there.”

“About that … you seem a little old to need a babysitter. I didn’t have a sitter when I was your age. Why do they need someone to watch you?”

“Roger can tell anybody to do anything. Did you know that? That when he gives an order, you have to do whatever he says. You don’t get a choice, not like you normally would when someone says you should do something you don’t necessarily want to do.”

“I figured that out, yes. It’s how the Doctrine is supposed to work, isn’t it? The Language side of things keeps them moving in the right direction, and the Math side puts them in the right order.”

“And when he gives an order, Dodger can rewind time enough to make sure that you follow it, even if you already did something else.”

Lilianne is starting to get a painful sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. She’s heard people use that tone before, heard them talk flatly about how terrible things are, how there’s no clear route from where they are to where they want to be. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” says the girl. “But when Roger’s not here, sometimes Tim and I can push past the orders he’s given us. It’s not easy—our thoughts don’t want to go against him, even when he’s not around to see—but we could have been the Doctrine, and so it’s possible for us, if we work at it for long enough. Only when he’s far away, though. And he can’t always be here watching us so he can tell us not to kill ourselves as soon as he looks away, so they make sure there’s always someone home to watch us. To make sure we don’t do anything they’ll have to take back. Dodger hates rewinding time without good enough reasons.”

“I … Did you hurt yourself?”

“I don’t know. Did I?” The girl looks up, shrugging as she meets Lilianne’s eyes. “I don’t have any scars. There aren’t any bloodstains on the carpet, and I didn’t have to have my stomach pumped. If you ask this timeline, no, I never did. Roger took even that away from me.”

Lilianne flinches. She can’t help it, and she sees the girl’s eyes shutter at that reaction, some of the easy openness slipping away into silence.

“You know they’re only watching you because they care,” she says, and it’s so awkward and useless and insufficient, she feels bad for the words as soon as they’re out in the open.

“They don’t care, they feel guilty, because they spent their whole lives running away from the Doctrine, and we spent our lives reaching for it, only it chose them when the time came, and left us perfectly prepared and positioned for an apotheosis that’s never going to come,” says the girl. “But sure, let’s call that caring. There are worse ways to talk about guilt.”

“Kim, are you chewing our new alchemist’s ear off?” asks Erin from behind Lilianne. “You know you shouldn’t trauma-dump on our guests before they’ve had a chance to get used to the way things work around here. Wait until she knows whether or not she’s ever coming back.”

“Sorry,” says Kim, and there’s no apology in her voice. She turns back to the screen, pressing the button to resume play, as Erin reaches out and puts her hand on Lilianne’s elbow, guiding her away.

“Sorry,” she says, and her tone is so much lighter than Kim’s that it aches; it’s a bruise, not an open wound. Lilianne wants to ask her if she can hear the difference, if she can understand how much the girl is hurting, how much she needs help. But the words die on her lips as Erin fixes her gaze with eerily blue eyes and says, “We’ve been waiting for you to wander into the kitchen. Didn’t realize you fell into a tarpit. I probably should have.”

“It’s all right,” says Lilianne, but it’s not all right: it’s a million miles and more from all right. That girl—that child—needs professional assistance, not video games and loving neglect. “I was just—”

“Kim’s always like that,” says Erin, and the dismissiveness in her voice makes Lilianne’s teeth ache. “She took losing the potential to claim the Doctrine really, really badly. Like, I thought some of the other candidates had taken it badly, but she took the cake. It’s not her fault. Reed raised her to believe that apotheosis was inevitable, and when it wasn’t, well.”

“I don’t think this is her fault.”

“No one here is saying that it is. But wow did we not need a suicidal teenager on top of everything else we’re trying to deal with here. You ready to go?”

“Go?”

“Back to the lab. Smita told you we were going back, didn’t she?”

“She did.”

“We have shoes for you, and Roger’s going to drive us over to the lab entry as soon as we’re all ready to get moving. David’s coming back to handle twin duty—Tim’s up in his room, but I’m sure he’ll come down as soon as he realizes that pizza is happening.”

Lilianne frowns, looking at her more critically. “You’re a lot nicer now than you were before.”

“I still hate everything you represent, and I don’t want you anywhere near Smita when this is all over, but she talked to me, she explained exactly what happened, and I no longer think you put her in danger on purpose. I’m a big girl. I can admit it when I’m wrong.”

Lilianne’s frown deepens. “That doesn’t sound like admitting it when you’re wrong.”

“All right, let’s try it this way: this is my family. It’s big and it’s weird and it’s mine. When Darren died, I thought that was it for me and having a family I could call my own. Now that I have one again, I’m holding on to it if it kills me. Which it has, a few times. They didn’t let those timelines stand, which I appreciate, since I like being alive better than I like the idea of being dead.”