He knows when she says “excess material,” she means more than just the afterbirth, which will possess strong alchemical properties of its own, thanks to the method of the manikins’ creation. She means the woman who gestated them, unwitting surrogate to a pair of cuckoos. He doesn’t know where Leigh found the surrogate, and he has enough humanity—if only barely so—not to ask. The cost of having his composite alchemist’s brilliant mind at his beck and call is that she’ll occasionally do things like this—and because of the woman’s long proximity to the subjects, her body may be of alchemical interest. It’s never possible to know in advance.
“The boy?”
“Dead. Waiting for you in your private lab. I know you wanted the honor of the dissection.” Her lips draw back from her teeth in displeasure. When something needs to be taken apart, she prefers to do it herself.
Reed pays her unhappiness no mind. “And the subjects?”
“The male was removed from the womb first, which means he’s likely the control; he’s fine, healthy, and ready to ship to his adoptive family. The female was extracted less than two minutes later. She screamed for half an hour before she settled down.”
“What calmed her?”
“The male. When we put them together, she doesn’t cry.” Leigh’s mouth quirks. “Isn’t the flight to her new home going to be fun?”
Reed nods. “And the others?”
“The adoptions have been arranged. We’re cutting along the Humors. Two each to Fire and Water, one each to Earth and Air.” For the first time, Leigh’s veneer of confidence cracks. “Are you sure about sending them out? I mean, really sure? I’d be more comfortable keeping them here, under controlled conditions.”
“The girl—”
“All of them.” Leigh shakes her head. “These children are irreplaceable. There’s never been anything like them in the world. They belong here, where they can be studied. Monitored. Managed. Putting them into the wild is asking for something to go wrong.”
“The plan has been carefully designed to maximize the chances of success.”
“You call this ‘careful design’? Placing half of each pair with a civilian family, that’s being careful? At least the other half will be with our people, but that’s not good enough. This isn’t how we control our investment.”
Reed knows what they’re doing: was the one who designed the protocol. Somehow, he manages not to scowl. “I was unaware that this was ‘our’ investment,” he says.
Leigh waves a hand dismissively. “You know what I mean.”
“Do I? Do I really? We’ve been over this. A certain amount of randomness must be introduced if we want the children to learn to access their abilities. We know strict lab conditions don’t work.” More, by raising them away from the lab, they avoid the risk of their subjects learning too much, too soon. Knowledge is power, for these cuckoos more than most. If he keeps them ignorant, he keeps them tractable—and oh, how he needs them to be tractable. Tractable things are so much easier to control.
“At least let us keep one of the pairs here. The newest. They’re young, they won’t know anything beyond what we show them. We can raise them in boxes, keep them apart, control everything they see and hear. We’ve tried absolute isolation together. We haven’t tried it apart.”
“Because it would break them.”
She shrugs. “Some things need to be broken.”
Things like you, he thinks, as aloud he says, “My will is law here, Leigh.”
“But—”
“My will is law.” His hand lashes out, grabbing her throat, slamming her back into the wall. Her eyes gleam with malicious delight. This is what she wanted: the reminder that he is the superior predator, that he has earned his place at the top of their tiny pecking order. How he wearies of the violence. How he understands its necessity. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good girl.” He releases his hold on her throat, pulling his hand away and straightening his collar. “Believe in me, Leigh. That’s all I ask. Believe in me, and I will lead you to the light.”
“And the light will guide us,” Leigh says, ducking her head until her chin almost brushes her sternum.
“We’re following the correct path,” says Reed, touching her shoulder.
As soon as his hand finds her flesh, the alarm begins to ring.
Both of them stiffen, heads snapping up, eyes scanning the lab for some sign of what’s gone wrong. All around them, the technicians who have studiously ignored their disagreement are doing the same, checking their equipment, calling up chemical readouts. Reed is the first to move. He pulls his hand away from Leigh and runs for his private lab. The door is closed, but opens at the swipe of the card he wears on a lanyard around his neck.
Inside, an astrolabe, spinning endlessly, occupies half the space in the vast room. Reed freezes in the doorway. Leigh, sliding to a stop behind him, does the same, as both of them stare.
The dance of planets was calibrated by a master’s hand, designed to mirror the heavens exactly. Asphodel poured years of her life into the spectacular machine, thinking it would be a key component of her legacy—and as her final, crowning touch, she knocked it outside of time, so that it could someday be used to chart the movement of the Doctrine. Reed has taken great pleasure in locking it away, using its mechanical horoscopes solely for his own gain. It is a wonder of technical alchemy. Only a great and terrible misuse of the forces of nature could damage this edifice of gold and copper and spinning jewels …
And it’s running in reverse.
Slowly, Reed smiles.
“You see?” he says. “We don’t need to wait to know if this is going to work. We’ve done it. All those old fools who thought they could control the world—Baker, Hamilton, Poe, Twain, even poor, damned Lovecraft—they failed, and we’ve succeeded. Two of those children, two of those six clever, clever children, have just reset their personal timeline. It works.” He turns to her, beaming.
“We’re going to control the world.”
Leigh cocks her head, following his words to their logical conclusion. “Does that mean we don’t need the bankers anymore?”
When keeping predators on a leash, it’s important to give them room to run. Reed nods. “Yes,” he says. “But make sure they understand why we’re terminating our agreement. It’s always better, when they understand.”
Leigh’s face splits in a smile as bright and wide as the gateway to the improbable road. In that moment, she is more terrible than she is beautiful, and Reed wonders how the alchemist who made her could ever have missed the warning signs.
“It will be done tonight,” she says.
“Good. I have business with the Congress. Everything is proceeding exactly as it should.” He tilts his face toward the window, his own smile smaller, and tamer, than Leigh’s. “The Impossible City will be ours.”
Behind him, Asphodel Baker’s astrolabe continues to smoothly rewind, and all of this has happened before.
The Improbable Road
TIMELINE: 02:13 CST, JULY 3, 1986.
The man whose name is not Mr. Smith wakes in a dark, silent room, with the feeling that something is terribly wrong. The shape of his wife is a familiar distortion in the blankets beside him. A strange, animal smell hangs in the air, coppery and thick.
He is not alone.
The thought has barely formed when a different shape looms over him, grinning widely enough to show every tooth in its head. They are even, white, and perfect, and yet he somehow can’t stop himself from thinking there’s something wrong with them, that they’re mismatched, that this assortment of teeth was never meant to share a single jaw, a single terrible smile.
“Good evening, sir,” says the shape. He recognizes it now. Reed’s woman, the scowling piece of subservient arm candy who moves in and out of their meetings like she has a right to be there. Leigh. That’s her name. He’s never been this c
lose to her before. Her eyes … something about her eyes is broken. Like her smile, they are perfect—and ineffably wrong.
“Don’t try to move,” says Leigh—and the man, who is not Mr. Smith, flinches in response, or tries to. The command does not carry to his limbs. He is frozen, and still, she is smiling.
“You men,” she says. “You foolish, foolish men. You want to control the world, but you never stopped to ask yourselves what that meant, did you? What alchemy truly was, what it could do—you only cared about what it could give you. Congratulations. It gave you to me.”
He recognizes the smell in the air now. He doesn’t know how he could have missed it before, but maybe it was a matter of wanting: he didn’t want to recognize the smell of blood, didn’t want to ask himself where the blood had come from.
His wife is so still, and he is terribly afraid he knows.
“Reed gave you to me,” says Leigh. “You see, we’ve reached the stage at which investors are no longer necessary. But I think you can make one last contribution, and that means I get to tell you a story. Words are power. You’ll be worth more to us if you understand why you have to die. It’s like … homeopathic medicine for the soul. Your flesh will retain the memory of everything I tell you, and that will make it easier to use. Are you comfortable?”
He can’t speak. He can’t answer her. He can only roll his eyes in terror. From the way her smile softens, she knew that before she asked.
“Good,” she says. There’s a knife in her hand. How is there a knife in her hand? He didn’t even see her move. “This is the story of a woman who had too many ideas, and the man she made so she could make them all real. You’ve heard of A. Deborah Baker, haven’t you? Everyone has heard of A. Deborah Baker.”
The knife the knife oh God the knife, and he can’t scream, he can’t move, but when she lifts his arm, he feels his wife’s blood, sticky on his skin. The pain is clear and bright, and the only mercy here is that he can’t turn his face to see what she’s writing, one slow cut at a time.
“She wrote a series of children’s books about a place called the Up-and-Under. I know your kids read them. I saw them on the shelf when I went to visit Emily in her room.”
He has never wanted to scream so much in his life.
“Fourteen books before she died. Six movies, four of them made after she was dust and ashes. Her cultural footprint spans the world. Everyone knows A. Deborah Baker, and her dear creations, sweet Avery and courageous Zib. But did you know that you became one of her acolytes when you wrote your first check?”
Her voice is calm, even soothing. It has a rhythm to it, like she’s trying to whisper a small child into dreaming. If it weren’t for the pain, for the body of his wife beside him and the bodies of his children lying in their rooms (all three of them, oh God, he knows she’s killed all three of them, because a woman like this doesn’t leave survivors, and why can’t he move), it would almost be pleasant.
“Her real name was Asphodel. That’s what the A stands for. She was the greatest of the American alchemists. Don’t look so surprised. What better way to hide your teachings in plain view than to encode them in something that would be beloved of children the world over. She swayed generations to her way of thinking. She changed the way alchemy works. It’s the middle ground between magic and science. It has repeatable results, but only if people truly believe it will work that way. Asphodel Baker rewrote the world by writing a new world into existence. She breathed life into a dying discipline, and the Congress hated her for it, because she was so much greater than they could ever hope to become. Petty fools. They still hate her, even though all they know of her now is what she left behind. They’ll all pay. Soon enough, and forever.”
The pain is so big it is eating the world. She is cutting pieces of him away, and he cannot fight, and he cannot defend himself, and he could not save his family.
“She made Reed by herself, proving she could create life one piece at a time. She made him and tasked him to do what she couldn’t, to finish what she barely had the time to begin. And look—she’s gone, and he remains. He asked me to thank you for your support, for helping him to come this far. But your services will no longer be needed. You have reached the end of the improbable road.”
The knife moves, again and again the knife moves, until consciousness slips away from the man whose name was not Smith, and life follows shortly on its heels.
Leigh Barrow perches on the edge of the dead man’s bed, bathed in blood. Then, smile fading, she bends forward. The real work begins. There is much to harvest, and only so many hours before dawn.
The improbable road spools onward, and outward, and the journey continues from here.
The Impossible City
TIMELINE: 10:22 CST, JULY 3, 1986.
Reed hasn’t felt this good in years.
Leigh is safely back at the compound, up to her elbows in small-minded fools who can, hopefully, be more use in death than they were in life; the three sets of cuckoos have been split up and whisked away to their new homes, to be raised by ordinary people in an ordinary world.
(The fact that three of those supposedly “ordinary” families belong to him, body and soul, is irrelevant. They are failed alchemists all, scholars who had the desire but not the skill to serve him more directly. They will play at being lovers—perhaps some of them will actually fall in love—and they will raise his experiments with dedication and care. They are scientists. They have been given a project to complete. Failure is not an option; it would result in their bodies being given over to Leigh’s tender mercies, and no one who has met the woman would ever take such a risk. They are almost there. The Impossible City will be his.)
The car stops. Reed adjusts the collar of his shirt before he opens the door. Gone are the jewel tones and eye-catching runes, replaced by proper funereal black and a high-buttoned shirt that lends an almost parochial tone to his appearance. The Congress is not susceptible to the same showman’s tricks as his erstwhile investors. They must be handled with a more … delicate hand.
(Asphodel at the end: Asphodel the phoenix, on the verge of bursting into flames from the sheer force of her frustration. “They’re so sure they know what’s possible that they’ve limited themselves,” she snarls, and he could listen to her rage forever, could help her tear down the foundations of the world if that’s what she wants. She is his only love and his only superior and his only regret, for they both know what comes next in the story of their lives. They both know he’ll have to be the one to hold the knife.)
As he expected, they are waiting for him when he steps into the hall, his heels echoing in the stagnant air. The locals think this is a church, although none of them can name the denomination or remember anyone who comes to services here. Still, the shape of it is right, and when they drive by on a Sunday morning, there are always people standing on the green, dressed in modest suits, in sensible gowns. What else could it be?
Sometimes the easiest trick is hiding something in plain sight. That which can be found without looking can’t possibly be dangerous, after all.
Reed regards the four men in front of him with a smile on his lips and murder in his heart. “I see you heard my news,” he says. “I thought I was coming to inform Master Daniels of something that might surprise him. Where is he?”
“Master Daniels has better uses for his time than consorting with the likes of you,” says one of the men, a pale whisper of a thing with barely visible eyebrows.
“I am a member of the Congress, am I not?” Reed continues to smile, and wonders whether the lack of facial hair is natural or the result of a laboratory accident. In either case, it could be resolved with simple cosmetics, and then the issue of the man’s faintly alien appearance would be resolved. “I have as much of a right to appear before our principal as any of you.”
“You tread dangerous ground,” says the next man, stout and solid in his charcoal suit, his businessman’s pose. “The Doctrine is not to be interfered with. Did the de
ath of your master teach you nothing?”
Reed’s smile doesn’t flicker. “You have no right to speak of her, whose heart you broke, whose work you disdained yet do not shy away from using to your own advantage. Or have you retained your boyish figure through some mechanism other than her elixir of life?”
The man’s cheeks redden; he turns his face away. Reed steps forward.
“I will speak with Master Daniels. I will inform him that I have embodied the Doctrine, and give this Congress one more chance to grant me the position and power my accomplishments deserve. If I am refused, I will be quit of you, and my eventual command of this world’s defining forces will be your downfall. Do I make myself clear?”
“As always, you are nothing if not clear, James.”
Reed turns.
Master Daniels was old when Asphodel Baker was young: all her accomplishments, while they have prolonged his life, have not been enough to turn back time. He is old now, old beyond measure, and he walks into the vestry of the church that is not a church with the ponderous slowness of a man whose hurrying days are far behind him. Unlike the others in their sensible suits, he wears the red robes of his office, timeless and antiquated in the same moment.
If there is anyone in the Congress who understands showmanship as Asphodel did, it is Arthur Daniels. Reed’s smile as he beholds the man is genuine. They may stand on opposing sides of a divide, but at least Daniels stands with style.
(Asphodel at the end: Asphodel the penitent, begging her own master to understand what she has been trying to accomplish all the days of her life, head bowed, hands clenched against the ground. Asphodel, her eyes full of tears, pleading with the old fool to listen to her, to see past her woman’s form and her youthful face and hear her, for what is alchemy if not the use of all the myriad pieces of creation to forge a better whole? Refusing women their place in the upper reaches of the Congress only limits them, only lessens what they can do. And Daniels, the old fool, turns away.)
Middlegame Page 3