Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Ms. Brown doesn’t have the reassurance of being in his body, of feeling what he feels. She looks petrified. “Roger, do you know where you are?”

  “Classroom.” His tongue is slow and clumsy. He tries to sit up, and is delighted to find that he can. Everything is reacting normally. If not for the wet patch on his jeans and the sore places where he slammed into the floor, he’d say he was in tip-top condition, no problems here, all systems go. He’s fine.

  “Roger, you need to lie still.” Ms. Brown flutters her hands helplessly, motioning for him to lie back down. The rest of the students are watching in mute fear. The seizure must have been pretty impressive: normally he would have expected at least a few of them to be suppressing snickers over the fact that he wet his pants. “Please. I’ve called the office, they’re going to get you an ambulance—”

  Math is not his strong suit, but he does the math anyway, adding up travel times, test times, the amount of time hospital admissions will take, the possibility of sedation … all the things that stand between him and a phone call if he does as he’s told. The figure he comes up with is brutal in its simplicity, and it says “too long.” He can’t listen to his teacher. If he does, Dodger is going to die.

  The Impossible City is burning, he thinks again, and while he doesn’t know what the words mean, he knows what they’re trying to say. If Dodger dies, so does he.

  “You’re supposed to walk off a seizure if you can,” he says glibly, and it may be the most convincing lie he’s ever told. He climbs to his feet, proud of the fact that his knees barely shake, and bolts for the door before Ms. Brown can order him to stop. The last thing he sees as it swings shut is her face, white as whey, crowned with eyes gone huge and childlike in her fear. He feels bad about that, he really does, but as Dodger is so fond of saying, there isn’t time.

  There’s a “no leaving campus without permission” rule in effect for all grade levels, but this is an emergency, and he’s already going to be in trouble when Ms. Brown gets over her shock and tries to follow him, because he’s not heading for the office. He’s running, full-tilt, toward the street. The rain has stopped, for the moment, but it wouldn’t matter if it were pouring. He’s got to get to a phone. The seconds are ticking by, too fast to trace or catch, and the entire world seems to be oversaturated, too bright, too sharp, until the air irritates his skin.

  This is how Dodger sees time, he thinks, feeling almost fevered. She’s bleeding into him the same way she’s bleeding into the dirt. Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go. Time is running out. He knows that like he knows the shape of his own skin, like he knows the shadow lurking at the back of his mind, threatening another, worse seizure. There’s no way he should be doing this in this condition. He shouldn’t be doing anything but going to the hospital. But there’s no time, time is running out, there’s no time keeps running through his mind, a jumbled string of words that barely holds together as it tumbles end over end, and he knows the hospital won’t save him. He couldn’t say how he knows: just that he does.

  Right now, he’s accepting the fact that given a choice between running off by himself immediately after a seizure or going to the hospital, the right choice puts him on the street. If he goes to the hospital, they’ll both die.

  He hits the sidewalk at what feels like a hundred miles an hour, trying to relax into the motion, to level out his breathing, to find comfort in the act of running. He can’t. Even the shape of his own skin is starting to feel wrong. It’s too long, too lanky, stretched too tight across the bones. He doesn’t want to think about what that might mean, and so he runs, as hard and as fast as he can.

  The sky is a bruise, pulsing with clouds, heavy with the promise of more rain. The air is electric. This is a Frankenstein day, ready to strike out at any moment. He darts across the street without looking, hearing the horns blare behind him and not looking back. He can’t look back. He’s not one of the rich kids, whose parents will trust them with a phone, and he doesn’t know any of them well enough to ask to borrow their phones, not when he’s seizing for no apparent reason, not when he’s running out of time. There’s a payphone half a mile up the road, at Harvard Square. He has a handful of quarters in his pocket, intended for feeding into parking meters when he takes Alison out on Friday nights. She’ll understand if he has to borrow a few dollars. She’ll see that he was helping a friend.

  (Or maybe she won’t, because there’s no way to explain this so normal people will understand: he barely knows how to explain it to himself, and he has the situation burning bright as tinder in his mind, illuminating the dark corners. Here there be monsters, he thinks, and knows if he survives this, if they survive this, there won’t be any more Friday nights with Alison. She’ll never understand why he ran off campus when he needed medical help, why he put himself in danger, why he risked breaking her heart like that. There are no words in their common language to explain why he’s doing these things, and that’s the final nail in the coffin they’ve been building between them, to bury love with honors.)

  Roger reaches the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and JFK as the sky rips open and begins pelting down rain. He’s a little bit grateful as he races for the ledge sheltering the payphone. No one knows you’ve wet your pants when you’ve been drenched by a September storm. The water is frigidly cold, but that’s incidental; as long as he has enough feeling in his fingers to feed the quarters into the machine, he can—

  If the first seizure was a flash of lightning, the second is a roll of thunder. He feels his knees buckle, feels his cheek hit the brick sidewalk hard enough to bruise the entire side of his face, and the world goes sapphire blue before it fades to black, and he feels nothing at all.

  * * *

  When Roger opens his eyes, the rain has stopped and the shadow at the back of his mind is almost gone. There are people walking by on the sidewalk, some with umbrellas still hoisted high, looking at him with the calm disregard of people who can’t find anything more interesting on television. Sitting up is harder this time, more like it should be after a major medical event. The quarters are spilled all around him, gleaming silver under a veil of rainwater. Curiosity and caution appear to have fought each other to a draw, keeping him from being robbed blind. He fumbles for as many quarters as he can, hands shaking, knees aching from their second hard impact in under an hour.

  He feels drunk as he staggers to his feet and reels toward the payphone. The distance is short, but it’s enough to wind him; he stops, hand pressed against the rough brick wall, chin tucked toward his chest, trying to suck in enough air that he won’t sound like a crazy man when he starts making calls. Everything is getting hazy and strange. There’s a third seizure lurking, the granddaddy of them all, slinking closer like one of Dodger’s horror-movie monsters. It’ll have him soon, and then it’s lights out forever. No more words.

  This is the line past which words can’t help him.

  Or maybe they can. “Dodger,” he hisses, and for the first time in his life, he doesn’t give one flat fuck who might hear him or judge him for speaking to his imaginary friend. He throws himself forward into the void, into the space they’ve always made between them, the one that lets him use her eyes as she uses his. “Dodger, what did you do?”

  She doesn’t reply in words; words were never her strong suit, and if they’re slipping away from him, they must have abandoned her completely. Instead, her eyelids flicker open, and he has a glimpse of blackberry brambles, twisted and wild and cradling the last of their late-summer berries; California’s growing season seems to go on forever, ending resentfully, resuming the second the weather allows. It’s an alien world, or it might as well be, filled with creatures whose motivations are as incomprehensible as pi.

  “Dodger. Talk to me.”

  She doesn’t talk to him. They’ve almost never picked up feelings from each other, but maybe this feeling is a language all its own: deep contentment, mixed with a bitter apology that cuts to the bone, knocking the air o
ut of him. She closes her eyes. Not fast enough. He sees the blood on her fingertips (red through her eyes, red, red, red), her outstretched arm the only part of her body that’s in her view, and he knows she predicted this call, this frantic attempt to reach her; she has organized herself with a mathematician’s precision, concealing anything that might tell him what she did, where she pressed the razor, how deeply she bore down. The fingertips were an accident. He knows that, too, and what they represent, how much blood she’d need to lose before she wouldn’t understand that he’d see. He doesn’t think she’s asking to be saved.

  He doesn’t think she understands that she’s taking him down with her—and at this point, he doesn’t think she could do anything if he told her. She’s too far gone.

  “Fuck quantum entanglement,” he mutters, and opens his eyes, and picks up the phone.

  Getting the number for Stanford University is easy: the operator is happy to provide it, even happy to connect him for an extra quarter. His vision is blurring around the edges, what little color he normally sees leeching out of the world, like Dodger’s taking the rest of it with her on her way out the door. He closes his eyes, not to reach out, but to remove one more distraction from a world that seems increasingly full of them. He doesn’t have the time to let himself lose the thread of the narrative now. It’s too late it’s too late the line has been crossed it’s save her now (and save himself in the process) or save her never.

  “Your princess is in another castle,” he says, and laughs, and is still getting his laughter under control when the ringing stops.

  “Stanford Administration, how may I help you?” asks a sharp female voice. It is the voice of someone with no time to waste on nonsense, who will hang up on him if given the slightest reason.

  Roger opens his eyes. Looking at his increasingly blurry feet, he says, in as polite a tone as he can pull from his exhausted reserves of energy, “Hello, ma’am. I need to speak to Professor Cheswich, please.”

  “Professor Cheswich’s office hours are eight to ten on weekdays. He’s not currently available for student calls. I can put you through to his voicemail.”

  Damn. Damn. Those stupid time zones again. Voicemail will be too late; he knows that, would have known it even without the glimpse through Dodger’s eyes, without the blood on Dodger’s fingertips. Time is running down. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but if there’s any way to connect me now, this is important. I’m one of his daughter’s classmates, and Dodger isn’t at school.”

  “I don’t believe this is a matter of sufficient importance—”

  “Please.”

  Hundreds of miles away, on the other side of a continent that might as well be a world, Patsy Sinclair stops. The despair in the boy’s voice is shockingly strong, but more, there’s a command there, and part of her wants to answer it. Part of her wants to do whatever he’s asking her to do. And it’s a loud part. It seems like it’s a part worth listening to.

  Patsy Sinclair has been a secretary for thirty years. She’s good at what she does; she knows how to winnow the wheat from the chaff, as it were, when making sure that cranks and weirdos don’t get through to the faculty in her care. She’s heard it all, from the honors students desperate not to be held accountable for plagiarism to the slackers praying for one more chance. This boy … this boy sounds like he’s dying. Or like someone else is.

  When she speaks again, her own voice is gentler, softer, designed to calm. “It’s all right, son. What’s going on?”

  “Please. Dodger was talking about hurting herself, but we didn’t think she’d do it, only she’s not here, and I think she’s done something terrible. Please, can you try his number?”

  “All right,” she says. There’s a breathlessness to her tone, and Roger knows he has her. Maybe, in the absence of Dodger, he’s a decent liar after all.

  (Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, this is not the time.)

  The line clicks. The line rings. The blurriness keeps spreading across Roger’s field of vision, creating a narrowing tunnel leading down, down, down into the dark. It’s like a rabbit hole. Any moment now Dodger will appear, wearing the White Rabbit’s waistcoat and watch, and tell him he’s going to be late. It’s all falling apart. It’s all going to pieces.

  I’m not bleeding, but I’m suffering the effects of blood loss, he thinks, and that third, final seizure noses a little closer, like a dog straining toward its master’s hand. He isn’t its master, but it doesn’t know that. It will love him to death. We weren’t supposed to go to Wonderland, he thinks, and the Impossible City is burning, and it will all be over soon.

  The line rings, and then—miracle—someone answers. “Professor Cheswich’s office, Professor Cheswich speaking.”

  “Sir, I’m a friend of your daughter’s, and she’s bleeding to death in the gully behind your house.” He’s too tired to lie anymore. He needs to frighten this man into immediate action. “She has a spot under the blackberries. She’s been going there since she was a kid. It’s not too late, but she’s lost a lot of blood. You need to hurry.”

  “Who is this?” There’s rage in Professor Cheswich’s voice, yes, but there’s also fear; enough fear that this may work after all.

  “A friend. Please. I know you don’t want to believe me, I know this sounds insane, but for Dodger’s sake, you need to go home as fast as you can. You need to save her. You need to go home, and you need to save her.”

  Professor Cheswich is sputtering and demanding more details when Roger gently sets the receiver back in its cradle. That’s all; he’s done what he could do. He’s tried. He has reached the end of his endurance, and he has tried.

  “How many times we gonna do this, Dodge?” he mumbles. His words are soft around the edges, mushy, like they’re crumbling away. She can’t hear him. There’s no sense of connection, nothing to indicate the door is even still there. That’s okay. That’s okay. He tried. He tried to … to …

  The third seizure pushes forward, and it’s bigger than the world. Everything else goes away, and then he goes away, and that’s okay. That’s okay. He tried.

  He tried.

  Rescue

  TIMELINE: 7:51 PST, SEPTEMBER 5, 2003 (SAME DAY SAME DAY SAME DAY).

  Peter Cheswich is not easily frightened. He never has been. He watches horror movies with his daughter, laughing at the rubber monsters and over-the-top violence; he reads the news with mounting disgust, but not with fear. Fear has always been for other people, not for him.

  The flashing lights of the police cars parked outside his house when he comes racing around the corner are almost enough to stop his heart.

  They have the driveway blocked, so he slams his car into the first open spot he sees, front wheel humping up onto the curb. He doesn’t care. He’s already out of the car, running for the front door, and when a police officer steps into his way, he howls, “I’m her father!” with such passionate despair that the man steps to the side, not arguing, not asking him to calm down.

  It’s bad. He knew it was bad when that boy with the New England accent hung up on him (he’ll be tracking that boy down, oh yes he will, first to thank him and then to punch him so hard he cracks a tooth, because that boy knew, he knew, and he didn’t call until it was already too late). He knew it was bad when he called home and Heather didn’t know where Dodger was, only that she’d left for school early after kissing her mother goodbye, which wasn’t something Dodger did anymore, was something she hadn’t done since the eighth grade. Every single signpost on the road that started when his phone began to ring has told him it was bad, and he’s believed them all.

  He just didn’t believe it was this bad. Not the kind of bad that has three police officers in his yard; not the kind of bad that has a conspicuous open spot where the ambulance must have been. How quickly did they remove her? Did they remove her, or did they remove a body, something empty and abandoned and useless? She’s an organ donor. Has been since she was old enough to make choices about bodily autonomy.
They’d want to get her to the hospital as fast as possible, whether she’s alive or dead.

  The thought of his daughter’s heart beating in someone else’s chest makes him stagger, catching himself against the doorframe while the officers look sympathetically on. Not one of them moves to help him. It’s bad. It’s so, so bad.

  Heather has waited for him, rather than allowing herself to be bundled into the ambulance. She’s in the kitchen, her hands empty, a coffee mug smashed on the floor. She’s looking at it in dull puzzlement, like she can’t understand how it got there; gravity should have been suspended, says her face, all the essential functions of the universe should have been turned off the second this began. The universe should have warned her. Somehow, somehow, the universe should have warned her.

  There’s another officer here. He holds the twin of Heather’s broken mug, looking at the silent, shaking woman with the wary poise of a man who has seen grief do a lot of strange things. He’ll be here as long as he needs to be, but he doesn’t want to.

  “Heather.” Peter stops shy of the mess on the kitchen floor. His wife continues staring at it, seemingly deaf to the sound of his voice. “Heather,” he says again, louder.

  She looks up. She had time to put her makeup on this morning before he called, screaming for her to go out back and find their daughter; her mascara has run down her cheeks in great muddy lines. She hasn’t even tried to wipe them away. What would be the point?

  “Is she alive?”

  Still the blank stare, the mascara-streaked cheeks, the silence.