Free Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) by Ian Tregillis

might have been enough to lose my followers, but I wanted to be damn certain.
    It was late afternoon by the time I made it to Walworth. I knew exactly what I had to do; I’d had plenty of time to think in the cell. But it was one thing to formulate a plan, and quite another to put it in motion while standing on the doorstep of one’s own home. Liv and I had bought the mock Tudor not long after our wedding in the old man’s garden; we’d been lucky to find it.
    I couldn’t use the key in my pocket until I knew the house was empty. Accounting for my own whereabouts was easy: my doppelgänger was at the Admiralty. That I knew because I’d been at work most of the day when Klaus snuck in to free Gretel. But where was Liv?
    I drew a steadying breath, then knocked. If Liv answered the door, I’d pretend to be lost and hope to hell she didn’t recognize me.
    No answer. I rapped more firmly the second time.
    I fished the house key out of my pocket, just as I’d done countless times. The familiar divot in the brass cradled my thumb as I pushed the key into the lock.
    The key and lock resisted each other. A frisson of panic wormed its way into my gut. What had I forgotten? I could have sworn we’d never changed the locks. But then the key jittered home, and I realized what had happened.
    The house key I’d carried in my pocket from 1963 was the original mate to the lock on this door. But it was also twenty years older, meaning its teeth had worn slightly from decades of regular use whereas the tumblers inside the door were still sharp. So the key gave me a bit more resistance than I’d been accustomed to. It took a fair bit of jiggling before the bolt snapped open with a muffled clack. But it did, eventually, and then I was inside …
    … and reeling from the onslaught of memories.
    The first thing I noticed was the reek of fish stew simmering in the kitchen. The smell slammed into me with the force of an anchor chain snapping taut. If the other things I’d witnessed since my return to wartime had been a gradual sinking back into the seas of my past, this was a nighttime high-altitude drop without a parachute.
    Austerity food. Hadn’t experienced it for a long time, and I’d never missed it. But I’d know it anywhere.
    Liv hated fish stew. We both did. But fish and offal were the only two meats not covered by the rationing system. By now they were already getting hard to find, forcing people to experiment with unfamiliar and unwelcome varieties; I shuddered at memories of nasty surprises from the fishmonger. We’d braved the whale steaks only once. The flavor of oily, fishy-tasting liver bubbled up from the recesses of my reinvigorated memory.
    Simmering food meant Liv didn’t expect to be gone for long. I had to hurry.
    The house differed from the one I knew in myriad fine details. We hadn’t kept a bowl of water near the front door since the war, and I hadn’t laid eyes on that watercolor in years. Sunlight hadn’t yet bleached the wallpaper in the vestibule; the banister glistened under a recent coat of varnish, still unblemished by the scuffs and scratches of coming years. But it was still the same house.
    I thought I’d been ready for this. This was my own home, after all. I’d expected this visit to be easy and quick. But then I glanced into the den.
    Where, alongside the wireless cabinet, sat Agnes’s bassinet. Her baby blanket, the pink one with elephants, was draped over the bottom. The same blanket that had caught Liv’s tears while I dug through the rubble of Williton with my bare hands.
    Before I knew it, I was on my knees with that blanket pressed to my face. It smelled like my daughter.
    Oh, God. It smelled like my living baby daughter.
    It was real. This was all real. I was truly here, not in a dream. My daughter was here, and she was alive. She was with Liv right now.
    In the early years after Agnes had died, we’d kept some little things around to remind us of her presence in our home and