Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  His parents relax a little, his mother’s hands unclenching until the color begins flooding back, his father’s shoulders slumping.

  “There’s this girl.”

  The tension returns. It’s an instant, unmistakable thing: his parents may as well have been replaced by statues that look exactly like them. They barely even seem to be breathing.

  “Her name’s Dodger, and she was adopted the same day I was. Born the same day I was, in the same state. She got her name from her birth parents. Keeping it was a condition of her adoption.” Roger looks between them, waiting for them to say something, to do something, to show, in some small way, that they’re still present. “She’s nice. I think you’d like her, if you met her.”

  “Are you … dating this girl?” his mother asks, in a strangled voice. She looks almost like she’s going to throw up, like she can’t stomach the idea of him and Dodger together.

  Something about that is wrong. Something about that is screaming for him to be careful. He forces his way on, saying, “No, Mom, jeez, no. Dodger’s not my type. I mean, she’s a girl, and she’s smart, and she has boobs, so I guess technically she is my type, but she’s not, because I think she’s my sister. I mean, functionally, I know she’s my sister, but I’m talking about biologically. When you adopted me, did the agency say anything about a second child? Was I a twin?”

  “Go to your room,” says his father, in a soft voice.

  “What?” Roger turns to look at him quizzically. “Dad, I don’t—”

  “Go to your room,” his father repeats, and this time, the stresses on his words are impossible to ignore. Colin Middleton is terrified. More than that: there’s a layer of resignation to his terror, like this is the moment he’s been waiting for since the day they brought Roger home. This was, somehow, the inevitable outcome.

  Roger rises slowly, waiting for his mother to say something, waiting for one of them to start making sense. Neither of them moves. He pushes back his chair, steps away from the table, and climbs the stairs, all while waiting for them to say something.

  Neither of them speaks.

  The stairs haven’t seemed this long since he was a child, being sent to his room for one infraction of the rules or another. This time, he knows, there won’t be a book conveniently hidden under his pillow; his mother won’t be coming by with cocoa or chocolate milk to tell him that all boys are rambunctious sometimes, they understand, they always understand, but if he could just try to be a little quieter, they would appreciate it so, so much. A little neater. A little tidier. Read your book, Roger; finish your homework.

  This is the first time it’s occurred to him that perhaps their reactions to his childhood misbehavior were unusual. Did other kids get antique dictionaries and glossaries of dead languages from their fathers when they were bad? Did they find themselves rewarded with the thing they loved most when they broke a plate or said a swear word? He always assumed they did, and so he never talked to anyone else about it. Maybe he should have.

  Something is very wrong. Something that started with the silence his parents made between them when he mentioned his adoption.

  Roger closes his bedroom door, walks to the bed, and sits. He’ll explore the treasure trove in his closet later; right now, he needs reassurance that he didn’t somehow violate some essential agreement between adopted child and adoptive parents. Closing his eyes, he reaches into the dark behind them, and says, almost meekly, “Dodge? You there?”

  “Roger!” There’s a blink, and the world is cast in startling color. Dodger’s in the backyard of her parents’ house in Palo Alto, sitting near the high, whitewashed fence between grass and gully. They must have rebuilt the fence after her … accident, making it higher, closing the gap she used to wiggle through. He recognizes the birdbath, and the climbing roses Heather Cheswich used to spend so much time tending. He always liked it when Dodger sat on the porch and looked at her mother’s roses, which had so many more colors than the ones in Boston.

  (He didn’t know much about colorblindness back then, or that he couldn’t see the delicacies of shade in the roses in his own neighborhood; he just knew California was supersaturated, more brightly colored than any real place could possibly be, colored like a fairy tale, colored like the Up-and-Under.)

  “Shouldn’t you be downstairs eating pie?” Dodger is stretched out on a plastic beach chair, dragged to the side of the backyard where her father—and the barbecue—aren’t. He can’t feel through her skin, but he knows the sun will be warm, and the air will be gentle, and he’s never missed California like he does right now. He never knew Cambridge could be so cold.

  “Shit’s weird here,” he says—understatement of the night—and forces himself to smile, so she’ll hear it in his voice. He doesn’t want her to worry. “How’s your Thanksgiving going?”

  “Oh, gangbusters. Mom made cranberry pie, which set itself on fire somehow, and Erin made roast root vegetables with garlic and rosemary, which didn’t set itself on fire, and Dad set the turkey on fire twice. He’s about to start barbecuing the corn, and … Roger? What’s wrong?”

  Sometimes he forgets how sensitive their connection is to sound. He hadn’t even considered that his sharply indrawn breath might transmit, or that she might be able to tell it from a yawn. “Like I said, shit’s weird. Erin’s having Thanksgiving dinner with you guys?”

  “I know, it’s bizarre, right? Her flight home got canceled due to weather, and I couldn’t leave her alone in the apartment to eat ramen and look gloomily out the window at old Bill. My folks think she’s pretty cool. She’s really useful in the kitchen, too. Not like me. My talents begin and end with pancakes, and that’s a job for tomorrow morning, not for tonight.”

  “Has she said anything to you?”

  “Anything like what?” Dodger sounds honestly curious, and honestly confused. For once, he’s the one whose world is falling apart, while hers is continuing on a normal keel.

  For the first time, he understands why she didn’t tell him how unhappy she was, all those years and all that bloodshed ago. Being in someone’s head like this, it’s … intimate in a way nothing else in his life has ever been. Barging in on her and telling her how scared he was by the silence and stillness of his parents seems unfair, like an intrusion she didn’t ask for and can’t avoid. He wants to protect her. He wants to let her have her holiday. He can tell her later, with words spoken in the air and not in the space they make between them, about his concerns.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does.” Dodger shifts in her chair. Across the lawn, her father waves. She waves back, smiling through her teeth as she hisses, “Remember what happened last time one of us decided to keep secrets? Now give. What’s going on?”

  “I just … Erin?”

  “Yeah, Erin. What’s going on with your parents?”

  “I don’t know.” Quickly, he describes what happened at the dinner table. He wants to edit, to cast them in a better light. He doesn’t. Dodger appreciates facts, says math is impossible if you don’t know your starting figures. She won’t judge them based on a single meal. She’ll understand.

  When he finishes, she’s quiet. Too quiet, for too long. He’s growing concerned when she says, “Their response to the idea of you and me dating was disproportionate.”

  “What?”

  “Everything else could be written off as an exaggerated reaction to a conversation they’ve been worried about for twenty years. My folks don’t like to talk about the adoption either. Not quite that viciously, but they get twitchy when I bring it up. I could make comforting noises and pretend everything about this was normal, except for that response. Your mother looked disgusted. You said I existed, you set a group of parameters that could apply to dozens of girls, you never said we were romantically involved, and yet she looked like she was going to throw up. That’s not a proportionate response. They know about me. They knew before you brought me up.”

  “I don’t think…”

 
; “Do the math,” she says, and it’s a kind statement, a gentle statement, especially for her, who considers math the only true underpinning of the universe: she’s trying, in her own sledgehammer way, to nudge him along. “Parents of adult adoptees are sometimes sensitive to the idea that their children might go looking for their biological parents; there’s no ‘right way’ to respond. You get helpful parents, parents who’ve been in secret correspondence with the bio parents for years, and you get parents who’ll lie to your face and say the bio parents are dead when they aren’t. Humans are complicated. Humans make decisions based on the data at hand. So yeah, it’s weird that they got twitchy, but if you’ve never tried to talk about it with them before, it’s not outside the numbers.”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s the rest of it.” Dodger sits up fully, draping her arms across her knees. “They shouldn’t have jumped straight from ‘there’s a girl’ to ‘are you dating her.’ If they did, they shouldn’t have been disgusted. Not unless they already knew there was a girl out there for you to find, a girl you shouldn’t be romantically involved with. It doesn’t add up.”

  “What should I do? Should I go talk to them?”

  “No. Wait for them to come and talk to you.” Dodger pauses. “And … be careful.”

  “I will,” he promises, and opens his eyes. The feeling of isolation is immediate, stronger than the norm; usually, he and Dodger pop in and out of each other’s heads a few times a day, checking in, asking questions, and exiting again, as comfortable solo as they are together. Here and now, however, the fact of his singularity is almost upsetting, almost too profound to be real.

  He slides off the bed, aware of the irony of feeling like the absence of telepathic connection across a continent is the unrealistic part of this evening. His parents are moving downstairs; he can hear their footsteps, hear the occasional spike of raised voices. They’re not quite arguing, but their conversation has definitely taken on a strained tone. He can’t make out words with his door closed. Under the circumstances, he’s not sure he wants to.

  Carefully, he crosses to the closet. This time, when his questing fingers find the loose board, he pulls it up, revealing the treasures beneath. A few books that had been too grown-up for him, once upon a time; a dictionary of profanity purchased at the used bookstore down by Harvard Square, hiding it inside his coat and rushing home with it, red-faced and glancing around constantly, sure someone knew he was smuggling something he shouldn’t have into the house. Other boys his age hoarded dirty pictures and copies of Penthouse. He hid books about the origins of words he wasn’t supposed to know.

  There is a layer of the more common detritus of boyhood. A bird’s nest, almost disintegrated with time. A rock-hard bar of Hershey’s chocolate. A few interesting rocks. Some shells, a bone—he doesn’t know what from—a slingshot, a handful of comic books. Ordinary things, from an ordinary childhood. A few of them seem old-fashioned now, but so what? He loved them once, enough to hide them here, where he wouldn’t need to worry about them being accidentally swept up and thrown away by an adult who didn’t understand their significance.

  Under the spindrift remains of his childhood is a folder, yellowed with age, curling at the edges. Carefully, Roger works it loose and opens it. Inside are a few papers his younger self was particularly proud of—an essay about seeing the Red Sox win a game, a spelling worksheet where he had corrected the teacher—and a small pile of crayon drawings. The first, labeled ROGER M., AGE 4 in his already meticulous handwriting, shows a boy he assumes is meant to be him standing in a field, holding hands with a girl. They’re both smiling.

  In the next picture, the girl is gone. It’s just the boy, standing in the same field, a frown on his face. Around him, over and over, Roger has written a single sentence:

  How many times?

  How many times?

  How many times?

  The words fill the sky and cover the field, covering everything but the sad little boy. Roger looks at the two pictures, trying to reconcile them with what he remembers of his childhood. He doesn’t remember drawing them. That’s not unusual—how many people remember the things they drew when they were four?—but they must have been important to him, for him to have hidden them away. For him to have transferred them into this cache. More, he must have known about Dodger, on some level, to have been drawing her. There’s no doubt it’s her in that first picture. Her features are crude as only a crayon figure in a child’s art can be, but the smile goes up higher on the left than on the right and her hair is the dingy reddish brown that red crayon always looked like to him, and he knows. And he knows that, based on the date, he drew this picture three years before the day Dodger had a headache and said hello to the boy on the other side of her mind. He knew.

  “Roger?” His mother’s voice is sweet, almost saccharine as she shouts up the stairs. “Can you come down here, sweetheart? Your father and I have something to show you.”

  “In a minute, Ma!” he shouts back, and starts to put the pictures back in the hole in the floor, alongside his other treasures.

  His phone rings.

  He’s almost forgotten it: it’s an artifact of the present, not the past that drapes around this house like a shroud. He pulls it from his pocket and blinks. Dodger’s number is on the screen. He doesn’t know why she’d call him when she could as easily close her eyes and ask for his attention; maybe she’s assuming he’s with his parents by now, and wouldn’t be able to answer her. No matter. He presses Answer, raises the phone to his ear.

  “You need to call Dodger right now,” says Erin. There’s no greeting, no pause to find out who she’s talking to: she knows who’s on the other end of the line, and she doesn’t have time for pleasantries. She never has. “You need to say the following: ‘take us back to the last fixed point.’ Tell her it is an order. Tell her it is an adjuration. Tell her it is a command. And do it fast, Jack Daw, because the whole damn Impossible City is about to fall on your head.”

  “Erin? What are you doing with Dodger’s phone? Does she know you’re calling me?”

  “No, and I don’t have time to explain it to you, and I’m not going to have time, because you’re about to wipe the last week off the board. This is a bad equation, dumbass; this is a sonnet that doesn’t rhyme. Take whatever metaphor you need, but call her and end this, fast.”

  “Roger!” His father sounds angry, cancelling out his mother’s sweetness. “Get down here this instant!”

  Roger crouches forward, cups his hand around the phone, like that would make any difference in the world. “Look, Erin, I want you to give Dodger her phone back and cut this shit out right now, or so help me—”

  “You found something.”

  He stops dead.

  “I don’t know what it was, because I’m not that attuned to you, but it was something you know shouldn’t exist. A story you wrote about having a sister, maybe, or a photo, or a drawing. You found something that didn’t happen in this timeline, hidden with the things that did happen. That’s because we’ve been here before. Not exactly here, not this precise point, but close enough for government work. We’ve done this often enough for me to start remembering, and you need to call Dodger, and you need to repeat what I told you to say right now.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or this might turn out to be the last timeline. You’re too old for chemical resets and therapy. You’re old enough to be a failure. You listened to me last time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Erin’s chuckle is grim. “We’re still here, aren’t we? Get the fuck off the improbable road, or you’re a dead man, and you’re taking Dodger down with you.”

  The line goes dead. Roger lowers his phone, staring at it. This makes no sense. This can’t be true. But the picture in his hand is real, and there are footsteps on the stairs, and those things don’t make sense either; those things are somehow terrible in their senselessness.

  He closes his eyes. “Dodger?”

>   The backyard, a world in flowering color. Dodger’s perspective shifts as she sits up again. “Roger? You okay?”

  “You need to take us back to the last fixed point.” There are footsteps on the landing now. They’re trying to be quiet, but they don’t know the creaks and groans of the floor the way he does. They didn’t grow up here.

  “I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”

  “Take us back,” he repeats. There’s supposed to be more to it than that. Haltingly, he says, “This is an order.”

  “Roger—”

  The doorknob is turning.

  “This is an adjuration.”

  His father is pushing the door open, tread heavy enough to identify him. “What are you doing, boy? Open your eyes.”

  “This is a command.”

  Roger’s eyes stay closed as his father grabs his arm and yanks him away from the hole in the closet floor. He doesn’t have time to open them before Dodger’s vision goes white, the flash traveling from her optic nerves to his, white taking black, upsetting the whole chessboard.

  We got it wrong, he thinks, and everything is gone.

  The girl had landed in a crouch, more like a wild thing than a child. Slowly she straightened, until she was standing a little taller than Avery, a little shorter than Zib, slotting into the space they made between them like it had been measured out to her specifications.

  She had black hair and yellow eyes, and a dress made of black feathers that ended just above her knees. Her feet were bare and her nails were long and raggedy, like no one had ever trimmed them, but let them grow until they could be used to climb the walls of the world.

  “Who are you?” asked Zib, all awe.

  Avery had to swallow the urge to pull her away. She would stay there forever if he let her, of that much he was sure: she would never realize when she was in danger, and without her, he would never be able to go home.

  “I’m a Crow Girl,” said the stranger. She cocked her head. “Who are you?”