“For your safety,” says Dr. Barrow, in a voice like butter and cyanide. (He knows that voice he knows it, somewhere deep down, deeper than memory, and he’s afraid.) She turns to Roger, smiling a small, concerned smile that doesn’t come anywhere near her eyes. “Hello, Roger. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Hello,” he says automatically, manners overriding confusion. He watches her warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop. His parents are terrified, he’s sure of that now. His mother is brave. His father is the bravest man he knows. For them to be this scared something must be genuinely wrong.
“Roger, do you understand that you were adopted?”
“Yes.”
“Did your parents ever talk to you about the circumstances of your adoption?”
“No.”
“Please don’t be concerned that I’m here to take you back to your birth mother—that’s never going to happen. But when you were placed here, there were some conditions. One is that if we ever found evidence that your mental health was suffering, we’d have to remove you from the home and find you a new one.” Dr. Barrow continues to look at him with false compassion, her own hands occupied with cupping her mug. His parents are pressed together, virtually shaking. “Roger, we received a very worrisome phone call. Your school nurse says you’ve been talking to yourself. Not playing pretend—all children do that—but really talking to yourself, like you were carrying on a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. Do you want to tell me about it?”
Terror crashes down on him, hot and fast and utterly consuming. He doesn’t want to be taken away, has never known this was something that could happen. He’s happy here, with his family and his things and his familiar little world. If he lies, she’ll be able to prove it: someone at school must have seen him talking to Dodger. A lie paints this woman as in the right, and puts his family in danger. The less appealing option is the only one that remains.
“I wasn’t talking to myself,” he says, and sees his father relax, just a little—enough to make him sure he’s doing the right thing. He focuses on Dr. Barrow and says triumphantly, “I was talking to my friend Dodger. She lives in California, and we communicate via quantum entanglement. That’s why I can talk inside her head and she can talk inside mine.”
His mother gasps and buries her face against his father’s shoulder. Dr. Barrow’s expression becomes one of understanding and, more worryingly, pity.
“Oh, Roger, sweetie,” she says. “I wish you’d said something sooner. I wish you’d told someone about this delusion. The adults in your life have only ever wanted to take care of you.”
“Please,” moans his mother, raising her head. “Please, we didn’t know, he didn’t show any signs, please. We’ll get him the help he needs. We’ll make sure this stops. Just don’t take our little boy away from us, please.”
“Mom?” says Roger. His voice is a squeak.
“There will have to be tests,” says Dr. Barrow. “A brief hospitalization may be necessary. We’ll want to avoid medicating him long-term if we possibly can; a brilliant mind like his shouldn’t be subject to the sort of side effects that come with antipsychotic drugs.”
There is another moan. Roger realizes, with surprise and dismay, that it came from his father.
“But if Roger is willing to work with us to recant his delusions, I don’t believe removal from the home would be in the child’s best interests.” Dr. Barrow’s eyes are sharp and glittering as she turns her attention back to Roger. “Well, Roger? Which is more important to you? A little girl who doesn’t exist, or your family?”
“I don’t want to go!” He will never remember moving, but he moves; he shoots across the room like an arrow, wedging himself between the bodies of his parents, clinging to them harder than he’s ever clung to anything in his life. This is where he belongs, this is home, and yes, he loves Dodger, she’s his best friend, but a best friend isn’t worth a family. She’ll see that. She’ll understand. The numbers don’t add up.
He turns a tear-streaked face to Dr. Barrow. “My family. My family is more important than anything in the world. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do. She’s not real, she’s just a g-game I play that got too big for me, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t talk to her ever again, I’m sorry. Don’t make me go.”
Dr. Barrow smiles.
Refuse Me
TIMELINE: 23:17 PST, FEBRUARY 11, 1995 (HOURS LATER).
Reed is waiting when Leigh returns, still dressed in that ridiculous suit she put on to go and put the fear of God—the fear of him—into the Middleton boy. “Well?” he demands.
“It’s done,” she says. She stops in the middle of the hallway, looking at him. “He won’t make contact again. He’s too afraid. We should have pulled him from that household. Brought him back here. Broken him. They still have potential as a pair—so damn much potential, if they’ve figured out how to access the improbable road without us telling them how—but they need guidance. They need to be controlled.”
“It sounds like you’re questioning me, Leigh. You know what happens when you question me.”
Leigh scowls, radiating frustration. “These are children, Reed. Messy. Unpredictable. They need to be brought to heel.” She was never a child. The individual women who are her foundations were, but their childhoods are the filmy memories of ghosts, and carry little weight with the creature they have been combined to become. “You want to have sway over my children. Why can’t I have some input on yours?”
“You have only what I allow you to have, Leigh. No more and no less.” Reed’s voice is cool. “Those children were never yours in anything but name.”
“I—” Leigh takes a step back. She recognizes danger when she blunders into it. “My mistake. I misspoke.”
“Good girl.” He smiles, quick as a knife. “As to my cuckoos: right now, they’re too real. We need them to cross the border into fiction. We need them to become more than they are. Only then will they find the improbable road and lead us to the Impossible City. Don’t you want to go to the Impossible City?”
Leigh looks hurt. “Of course I do.”
“The Impossible City will only become manifest if we restore Baker’s definitions,” says Reed. His tone is patient. His eyes are not. “She told this country what to be in alchemical terms when there was no one strong enough to argue with her, and she roused the whole damn Council against her. Baum, Lovecraft, Twain, they broke themselves against the tide to rewrite her definitions, but they did it. We can’t go against that much belief. The world won’t change unless we have a bigger lever.”
“We could do this without—”
“No.” The word is a wall. She runs against it and can go no further. Reed walks toward her. “We can’t do this without the Impossible City. It is the key. We take it, we make it our own, or we take the country knowing there’s a weakness in our defenses the size of a canyon. We must hold the City, or all this is for naught, and to take the City, we must change the rules. We need the Doctrine. Everything else we’ve done … we can be rich, we can be powerful, we can be immortal, but without the Impossible City, we can never be gods. Don’t you want to be a god?”
Leigh Barrow—perhaps the last person in creation who should have a divinity’s power, who should be allowed to set reality’s rules—sighs. “Yes.”
“Then leave them. Trust me.”
“I need to hurt something.”
Reed cocks his head. “Then hurt something.”
Leigh smiles.
Checkmate
TIMELINE: 16:35 EST, JUNE 19, 2000 (FIVE YEARS IN ISOLATION).
It was supposed to be a big deal when the Academic Decathlon team got tickets to watch a bunch of grandmasters play chess. It was presented like a real treat, a sporting event for smart people, and skipping it was out of the question. Roger doesn’t even like chess—too many numbers, too much focus on pattern-recognition—but he likes his teammates, and he really likes Alison O’Neil, who does science and plays chess and sometime
s smiles at him out of one corner of her mouth with her eyes dipped low, like she has a secret. Alison has been excited about the exhibition since their advisor said they might get to go, and if Alison’s excited about it, he supposes he can find a little enthusiasm.
Roger Middleton is fourteen years old—will be in two weeks, anyway, and that’s basically the same thing—and sometime in the past eighteen months, girls have changed. Or maybe he’s changed. He knows the words, puberty, hormones, metamorphosis, but the words can’t contain the raw excitement he feels when Alison touches the back of his hand, or when he catches the scent of her shampoo. Everything is changing. He guesses he’s okay with that.
Their seats are near the front, in an area set aside for local middle school and high school geniuses who might be inspired by watching a bunch of people push pieces around a chessboard for a couple of hours. It’s a circular arena, like a football stadium but smaller, and the organizers have wisely put up four matches at a time, each with their own sector of the arena and their own announcers to explain the game. A game is wrapping up as they sit, an older Chinese man against a younger Latino boy. The man moves a piece. The announcer calls “checkmate,” and the two shake hands before they vacate, leaving their board to be reset by the event attendants.
“Wow,” says Roger. “Bad timing.”
Alison wrinkles her nose at him. “Are you kidding? We get to see a whole new game. We’re so lucky!”
Then she hugs his arm, and there’s no way Roger would even dream of disagreeing.
The attendants prep the table before vanishing, clearing the way for the next set of players. One is a white man about the age of their teacher, gawky in his corduroy pants and red bow tie. Order of play must have been decided at the beginning of the event: he sits at the black side of the board.
His opponent is a teenage girl with skin the color of bone china, hair cut in a pageboy bob that frames her face without getting in her eyes. She looks like she hasn’t seen the sun in a year. She wears what looks like the uniform of some unnamed private school: a gray pleated skirt, a white blouse, a short blue tie. Her shoes are patent leather, and squeak when she walks.
Roger is aware that he’s staring, aware that he shouldn’t be, but he can’t stop himself. He knows her. He watches Dodger—the girl he turned his back on five years ago—take her seat on the white side of the board. She hits the clock and moves her first piece, and the match begins.
He knows Alison is talking, but for the first time since he realized she was beautiful, he doesn’t hear a word she’s saying. All his attention is on the girl, her hands moving too fast to follow whenever it’s her turn. He’d be an inch or so taller than her if they were both standing (when did that happen, he thinks wildly, remembering a perspective that switched to a dizzying height when he looked at the world through her eyes; the thought is followed by another, despairing: how much did I miss), and his shoulders are broader than hers, but they still look surprisingly alike. They have the same eyes. He doesn’t know much about chess, but he knows enough to see that she’s good, she’s genuinely good; this exhibition game is for masters, and she’s playing a man more than twice her age into a corner, her pieces chasing his relentlessly across the board. She plays like her life depends on it, remorseless and cold, and her expression never changes. She never smiles, not even when she stops playing and starts winning.
Their game takes half the time of the other three. When Dodger’s opponent cedes and stands to offer his hand, she takes it, shaking with her eyes still trained on the board, like she’s looking for the mistakes she knows are there, the ones that will let her play the game faster, clearer, more flawlessly. She never looks at the audience.
Roger is suddenly aware of Alison’s hand on his elbow. He glances toward her, and sees that she’s staring at Dodger, cold venom in her eyes.
“Like the game?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says, and offers a smile, hoping it looks sincere enough to be believed, not sure what else he’s supposed to do. Dodger isn’t real. Dodger was never real. He knows that, just like he knows thinking anything else could ruin everything. “You want to teach me to play?”
And Alison is suddenly all smiles again, and everything is going to be all right.
When he glances back to the arena, Dodger is gone.
That’s for the best, all things considered. It’s time for him to get on with his life.
They had been walking for some time—long enough for Avery’s shoes to become scuffed at the toes, and for Zib to have climbed and fallen out of three different trees—when Quartz waved them to a halt. The crystal man’s formerly jocular face was set into a scowl.
“What,” he asked, “do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re walking to the Impossible City, so the Queen of Wands will send us home,” said Avery, and frowned, because that sentence should have made no sense at all.
“No, you’re not,” said Quartz. “To get to the Impossible City, you need to walk the improbable road.”
“But we are!” protested Zib.
“You’re not,” said Quartz. “Everything you’ve done has been completely plain and probable. If you want to walk the improbable road, you need to find it.”
Avery and Zib exchanged a look. This was going to be more difficult than they had expected …
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
BOOK VII
The End of
Yet this my comfort; when your words are done,
My woes end likewise with the evening sun.
—William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
Chess is life.
—Bobby Fischer
Deed
TIMELINE: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE, THIRTY SECONDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.
There’s so much blood.
Dodger hasn’t moved in almost a minute, her hand outstretched like she’s going to resume using her own blood to sketch numbers on the crumbling brick, an expression of quiet resignation on her face. She’s breathing, but barely, and those breaths are slowing, weakening, becoming less reality and more hopeful thinking.
He should finish the equation she was writing when she fell, should show her work and bring it to a close, but he can’t. She stopped explaining the math to him when they were nine years old, when he was convinced to give her up by hollow threats and lies that could never have become reality. He’s a genius. He knows all the words—prodigy, polyglot, natural—but his genius and hers were never the same, and he can’t understand the symbols that spiraled from her unmoving fingers.
They’ve lost. They didn’t even know they were playing a game, and still, they’ve lost. They lost a childhood together, they lost the balance they could have provided one another, and now they’re going to lose their lives, all because he doesn’t know how to finish the figures surrounding them, red drying into brown as his sister’s chest rises in shallower and shallower arcs, winding down toward eternity. He can’t keep them on the improbable road. Not alone. Neither of them could ever have made this journey alone.
When she stops breathing, his own heart will follow hers into the dark. He knows that as surely as he’s ever known anything, as surely as he knows the difference between myth and miracle, between legend and lie. It’s almost over.
The gunfire continues outside, and it’s not like it is in the movies, it’s not loud and dramatic. It’s a whisper in a thunderstorm, and that whisper is going to be enough to kill them. Erin’s gun speaks periodically through the din, and either her silencer isn’t as good or she’s just not using one, because he hears every shot she fires.
He hears when her gunshots stop.
This is it, then: this is the end. They’ve lost, it’s over. Erin is dead and Dodger is bleeding to death and he’s never going to reach the Impossible City, and he’s never going home. This is where they stop. He fumbles for his sister, gathers her in his arms, not caring how much damage he does in the process of pulling her as close as she al
ways should have been. It’s not like he can kill her. She’s already dead. She just doesn’t know it yet.
“Dodger. Hey, Dodge. I need you to wake up. I need you to help me stop the bleeding.”
Her eyes stay closed. Only the shallow rise and fall of her chest betrays the fact that she’s still with him.
There’s so much blood.
“Come on, Dodge. Leaving isn’t a competition. You don’t have to get me back like this.” His own injuries aren’t as bad as hers. One bullet to the side of the head, taking out a chunk of his ear. It bled like nobody’s business, but there were no arteries involved; if it weren’t for the fact that he can feel her impending death looming over him like a shadow, he’d expect to recover. He won’t. “You can’t. You can’t go. I just got you back again. Are you listening? You can’t go. I need you.”
Her eyes stay closed. There’s so much blood.
When you can’t win the game, knock over the board. He doesn’t remember who said that. Maybe it was his first girlfriend, Alison, with her equal passions for chess and for picking fights over the smallest things. Maybe it was someone else. It doesn’t matter, because they’ve been working toward this since the beginning. This is the only way. Her chest is barely moving, and there’s so much blood, there’s so much blood, and it doesn’t matter that he knows the words. The words are what’s going to take her away.
“I can’t do this alone. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
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