Page 81 of Inkpot Gods

“Hey, now,” says Roger. “I’m very smart, you know.”

“Mmm-hmm,” says Judy. “Sure you are. I’ve seen you before coffee.”

Roger halfheartedly swipes at her, and she leans away, smiling at him like this is an ordinary afternoon, like nothing bad is going to happen to anyone here. Lilianne wishes she could believe that.

The kitchen door swings open again, and Dodger steps through, scanning the room and taking note of each of them in turn. “All right, fuckos,” she says. “David’s in the living room with Kim and Tim, and he’s good to stay until midnight. I gave him money for pizza, and then I gave him more money to take the kids to Ben and Jerry’s after dinner. They’ll be fine.”

“I’m not sure I want them leaving the house while we’re not here,” says Roger.

“No one will be able to find the house while we’re out, especially if none of us are home,” says Dodger. “As soon as Kim and Tim go out, everything will fold down into sleep mode, and the whole place will seal itself off. It’s fine. We don’t have anything else to fret about. We have plenty of things to worry about, but not the kids, not the house, and not the cat.”

“There’s a cat?” asks Lilianne, seizing on the simplest part of Dodger’s statement like a lifeline.

“Yeah,” says Dodger. “Old Bill. He’s been around since I was in grad school. Pretty sure he has the world record for oldest living domestic feline, or would, if we knew exactly when he’d been born. He’s sort of immortal now.”

“My bad,” says Roger.

“Your wonderful,” counters Dodger. “Who doesn’t want an immortal cat? He’s pretty happy. He was old enough when he got frozen in time that he mostly just sleeps and purrs and sometimes goes wandering around the neighborhood to drive all the outdoor toms into a screaming rage.”

“That seems…” Lilianne stops. She can’t even decide how it seems. It’s too weird to be easily categorized.

“Outdoor cats are never really a good thing, between the casual murder of local wildlife and the risk of being hit by a car or eaten by a coyote or just fucked up by another cat. They aim for the face and throat, and when those injuries get infected, you can be down a cat before you’ve even had time to think about what just happened,” says Dodger. She picks up and fills her own coffee mug. “But Roger ordered old Bill not to kill anything he finds outside the house—he can kill mice and spiders and house centipedes when he’s in the house, we’re fine with that, we just want him to leave the songbirds and lizards alone—and, well, the ‘immortal’ thing means the usual dangers just aren’t as dangerous where he’s concerned. So we let him do what he wants.”

“It’s a very odd approach to pet ownership,” says Judy.

“Because everything else about us is so damn normal,” says Dodger. “Everybody ready to go?”

“We were just waiting on you,” says Roger.

“Then away we go.” Dodger slams her coffee in one frankly impressive swallow. Smita moves to stand next to Lilianne, putting a reassuring hand against her wrist. Lilianne glances at her, barely managing to scrape up an uncomfortable smile.

“It’ll be fine,” says Smita. “This is the best group of people you could possibly go with into a potentially dangerous underground lab. Much better than going with just me.”

“Dodger mentioned better shoes,” says Lilianne.

“They’ll be in the car,” Smita reassures her.

Lilianne nods, and follows the rest of the group out of the kitchen.

They troop through the house to the front door. The sun is bright outside, bathing the whole block in deceptive summer brilliance. It’s early fall, Lilianne knows; back home in Alabama, her mother is coming fully into her own, embracing her season and all its blessings, while her father is melting under the weight of inexplicable exhaustion and seasonal allergies. Because they’re the incarnations of “shoulder seasons,” rather than standing for the summer or winter, they can function mostly normally no matter what time of year it is, but growing up with them has left Lilianne deeply sensitive to the changing seasons. Seasons matter.

The porch is larger than makes any sense for a house this size, and even piling eight people onto it, they’re not so cramped together that they’re knocking against each other when they don’t want to be. That, if nothing else, confirms that the house doesn’t really exist. A house with a porch like that, this close to the university, would have long since been purchased and turned into faculty housing, something impressive for a dean or a department head.

Although Roger is a department head, so maybe he’s just hedging his bets with the location of his ridiculous residence. And “ridiculous” is really the only applicable word. Lilianne’s eyes widen as she takes in the walls and supports around her. Every board has been painted a different color, and not in a harmonious “pride-flag symbolism” sort of way. No. It looks like the painters were just given a list of colors the residents would like to see, and then told to do whatever they wanted.

Dodger is smirking at her. Lilianne forces her attention back to the mathematician, trying not to look totally appalled by what she’s seeing.

“Something wrong, alchemist?” asks Dodger.

“I’ve just never seen a house that managed to clash with itself before,” says Lilianne, too bewildered to be anything other than honest.

“That was the goal,” says Roger. “I used to be colorblind. Like, on a genuinely distressing level. So once I could see colors, I wanted to see them all, all the time, no matter what. I don’t care if they go together or not.”

“Yes, she can tell that,” says Dodger. “Everyone can tell that. The birds can tell that. People who are still colorblind can tell that.”

“It’s not that bad,” protests Lilianne. “It’s … definitely unique. It has character. I think it’s fascinating.”

“Lilianne,” says Roger gently. “I am literally the living personification of language, spoken, written, or non-verbal. I hear what you’re saying when you speak: not what you actually say, but what you mean. So trying to fool me by talking around whatever it is you really think is not going to work.”