Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Privately, Roger thinks Erin made the right call. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to put this expression on Dodger’s face, and he knows from past experience that he’s the one person who will always be forgiven. He could destroy the world, and she’d love him on the other side of the rubble. That’s what it means to be entangled like they are. That’s what it means to be family.

  “Smita probably collapsed from smoke inhalation before she could get to the stairwell,” continues Dodger. “She was fighting all the way to the end. She died before the fire reached her. I guess that’s a good thing. Burning alive isn’t a good way to go.” She says it with such conviction that for a moment, Roger could almost believe she knows from experience.

  (The thought is followed by another: he could almost believe he knows from experience. He remembers—although of course it’s not a memory; better to say he imagines—flames closing in on them in an underground corridor ringed with broken windows like blinded eyes. They never looked out on anything real. He imagines remembering putting his arms around her as the flames drew closer, all avenues of escape long since closed; imagines remembering her laughter, thin and brittle and bitter, as she said, “Well, at least this time’s not bullets.” Then, the fire, and his final plea for another chance, before the inferno took them both.)

  Roger shudders. Sometimes a vivid imagination is closer to a curse than a blessing. “God, Dodge, that’s awful. She was really great. I hope they do something for her family.”

  “What if this is our fault?” Dodger can be like a dog with a bone sometimes. A good attribute for a mathematician, but not the easiest one for a sister, especially not for a sister looking at him with such bemusement and guilt in her eyes. “She was looking at our DNA. What if … what if we were split up because there’s something wrong with us, and they thought they could make it better by putting us on opposite sides of the country, like keeping bleach and chlorine apart? We’re not normal. We’ve never been normal. What if Smita died because she got too close to figuring out what’s not normal about us?”

  It’s a huge jump from “she looked at our DNA” to “she was killed to keep us secret”; Roger is opening his mouth to tell Dodger to stop being silly. Then he hesitates. For once, words have failed him. Yes, it’s a jump, and yes, it’s ridiculous on the face of things, but can anything really be ridiculous when your starting point is “we’re secret twins who found each other across a continent through quantum entanglement, which is slightly more useful than a telephone, without being as good as telepathy”? Everything about them is ridiculous. It always has been. So what’s one more thing added to the heap?

  Haltingly, he says, “I don’t know whether this is about us or not. It could be a freak accident. I hate to say it, but every time we’ve had a fire on campus, it’s been the chemistry kids. Their lab was two floors below hers. They could have knocked something over at the wrong time, and when the wiring sparked … I don’t know. I want to say you’re wrong, that there’s no possible way this could be connected to us, but I can’t. I just … I don’t know.”

  Dodger looks at him for a long moment. Then she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, puts her mug down on the table, and stands.

  “We have to find out,” she says, and it’s so simple, and so impossibly difficult, that he can’t argue with her.

  “Let me get dressed,” he says.

  * * *

  Campus security has cordoned off the Life Sciences Annex. Caution tape blocks the usual approaches, orange as a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, ends snapping in the breeze. The air smells of char and flame retardants, all the hallmarks of a terrible fire. Even the sky looks ashy, although that could be a trick of the weather; the rain is threatening to fall again.

  Students queue up along the tape, whispering to each other as they cup their hands over their eyes and squint at the ruins of the building, trying to pick out every ghoulish detail, every unrevealed sliver of information. A few are sobbing, burying their faces against the shoulders of friends. At least six students died in the blaze—maybe more, depending on what the firefighters found, depending on whether someone had fallen asleep in an empty classroom or gone looking for a private place to sit and study—and each of them had friends, family, a whole world of their own. Those worlds are over now. The world keeps ending, every minute of every day, and nothing is going to make that stop. Nothing can ever, ever make that stop.

  Dodger has borrowed one of Roger’s hooded sweatshirts, a baggy gray thing that fits her almost perfectly, her narrower shoulders balanced by her larger chest. With the hood covering her hair and her hands shoved into her pockets, she moves through the crowd like a ghost, and Roger moves in the space behind her, letting her forge the way. This is her part of campus, not his; she knows the shortcuts and the shape of things.

  There are people everywhere. There is no clear approach. “We need to get closer or back off,” says Roger, frustrated. “Those are the options. Dodge? Can you get us closer?”

  She stops, cocking her head hard, like she’s running some complex set of internal numbers. Then, with a quick nod, she says, “Yes,” and turns, heading away from the building at a fast clip. Roger has to rush to keep up with her. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t slow down: she just keeps moving.

  She just keeps moving.

  Her steps are light and her eyes shift constantly from side to side, assessing, recalibrating, looking for a better angle. Most people will never see the world the way Dodger Cheswich sees it, and that’s a good thing: the way she sees the world would drive most people mad. Her lack of depth perception makes it hard to estimate distances, to know for sure where one thing ends and the next begins, but once she paces something out, learns the dimensions, she never forgets. The numbers, the angles, the equations, those are the constants, the stars she steers by and the gospels she keeps closest to her heart. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t need to run. Math, done right, is a calm and steady thing, swift, but not hurried. Never that.

  Roger has given her a problem defined by geography, which is another form of geometry, and she’s going to solve it. Come hell or high water, she’s going to solve it. She leads them down a trail mostly used by joggers and maintenance staff, around the shed at the trail’s far end, into a copse of trees. The cordons keeping the students away from the burnt-out building don’t extend into the trees. That would be silly.

  There’s an old trail tucked deep inside, one Roger has never seen before, one he doubts Dodger has ever seen before, because this isn’t the sort of place where she tends to go exploring. It leads them to a narrow alley, mostly blocked by a concrete planter intended to dissuade students from grinding their skateboards along the brick edges of the flowerbeds. Once they’ve squeezed past the planter, they find themselves between the smoking ruin of the Life Sciences Annex and the nearby Life Sciences Building. The fire didn’t jump the gap, possibly because of the weather, possibly because sometimes, bad luck runs out before everything falls down. The main building is smoke-stained but otherwise untouched, standing strong and inviolate. It could be open within the week, students stealing glances out its windows at the devastation next door. This, too, is normal.

  At the end of the alley is a doorway. The wood is scorched and warped; the frame has bent. The three shallow stone steps leading up to it remain intact, not broken, only stained by the fire. The glass window at the center of the door has melted, running out of its frame like thick, twisted honey. There are holes in the wall to either side, blasted chunks of masonry and insulation showing through the bones of the building. It looks less like the aftermath of a fire and more like the aftermath of a war. There is no caution tape here, no campus security or gaping students. They’re alone.

  Dodger stops dead, the odd, focused look fading from her eyes as she turns to Roger and stands, perfectly silent, watching him.

  “Good job,” says Roger, bemused. “You okay?”

  She shakes her head—the motion of a wet dog trying to becom
e dry—and the strangeness is gone, replaced by her former worried, uncertain expression. “I’m fine. Just worried. This door isn’t usually locked.”

  Roger nods. Then he hesitates, and asks, “Are you sure we should be going in here? There’s just been a fire. The building could be structurally unsound.”

  “So we don’t try to go up to the lab,” says Dodger, dog with a bone again. “Architecture is chaos theory in sheetrock and two-by-fours. I can figure out where the weak spots are.”

  “Math isn’t a superpower.”

  “Says you,” says Dodger, and cracks her first smile since the day began.

  That smile is the best thing Roger could have seen. It means that however upset she is, she isn’t shattered: she’s just taking some time to bounce back. With as long as it can take her to let people in, rather than keeping them at an eternal arm’s length, it makes sense that she’d be so shaken. He smiles back, quickly, before he reaches for the doorknob.

  The metal is stuck, or perhaps fused from the inside. It refuses to turn.

  “Roger…?”

  “I’m sure it’s just jammed,” he says. Letting the doorknob go, he pulls the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his hand and wraps it tight around his fingers. This time he grasps it as hard as he can, willing it to yield; this time he twists until the knob abandons its resistance and the latch clicks open, allowing him to pull the door outward, away from its twisted frame.

  On the other side of the door, water and flame-retardant foam have pooled in puddles and patches on the smoke-stained floor, creating a swampy patchwork of dangers. The walls—what remains of them; many of the interior walls are completely gone, torn down by fire or rescue personnel—are riddled with holes. The building seems cancerous, diseased, a thousand years old.

  There’s a hole in the floor, leading to the basement. The bolt that held the pterodactyl to the ceiling remains, but the fossil beast is gone, fallen below or consumed by flames. Dodger stops and looks at the place where it hung, a look of childish gravity on her face. Something that endured for millions of years is gone; something that should have outlasted them both is over. Somehow, that’s the worst thing yet about this tiring, terrible day.

  Then she turns away, looking at Roger, and says, “We need to look for answers.”

  They’re standing in a burnt-out building; they’ll be arrested, or worse, expelled, if someone catches them here. They’re not arson investigators, or investigators at all. Neither of them is equipped to be here. Neither of them has a clue what they’re doing.

  But Dodger needs this if she’s going to accept that it isn’t their fault that Smita’s gone. She needs to walk the floor and try to figure out why this is happening, and if that’s what she needs, then Roger’s going to give it to her. It’s a small thing. It’s all he can do.

  “Wood burns at—”

  “Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit,” says Dodger, without missing a beat.

  Roger nods. “So we have a starting point.”

  “Absolute zero,” she says.

  “Exactly.”

  They walk the floor like tightrope performers, placing each foot gingerly in front of the other, testing for weaknesses, waiting for the moment when the whole thing gives way. Occasionally, one of them will say something: a word, a number. The other will answer, a number, a word, completing the equation that they make between them, defining the world one step at a time. After a while, they stop looking at each other; they don’t need to.

  “Ceiling tiles.”

  “Ninety-five destroyed, one hundred and sixteen partially destroyed, eighteen intact. Eighty-four.”

  “Chairs damaged in this classroom.”

  “Fifty-three destroyed, seventeen damaged but potentially repairable.”

  It’s never been like this before. They’ve always been holding each other a little bit apart, divided by some reluctance to give in. When they were children, Roger didn’t quite believe in her. When they were teens, she hadn’t quite forgiven him. As adults, they came back together by chance (but there is no chance where they’re concerned; there never has been, only intricate design), and still they’ve been holding back, afraid of giving in, afraid of needing too much.

  They aren’t holding back now.

  “Pounds of fallen masonry.”

  “Seven hundred and three, in this room.”

  “Dust.”

  “Twelve thousand parts per million.”

  On and on they go, the shorthand becoming more extreme, the air going hot and heavy around them, like an electric storm rolling in, like another fire getting ready to ignite, a fire that needs no flame but only the constant friction between the two halves of something which has never, in all the long years of their lives, been fully realized.

  (In an apartment off-campus, a woman who remembers the lab they have been allowed to forget, a woman with so much blood on her hands that she’ll never, never be able to wash it clean, feels the air turn syrupy and slow, thick as molasses and just as capable of suffocating anyone foolish enough to wind up mired in it. She puts down the plate she was washing, drops the dish towel, and walks calmly to the back door. The old orange cat who hangs around out there comes running when she opens it. He feels the strangeness too, with the precognition native to the animal kingdom, and he wants nothing to do with it. He darts under the table, fur fluffed out, hiss rising in his throat. Erin sighs, drops to her knees, gathers him, squirming, into her arms. She carries him to the front door and out into the street, until they reach the small, grass-covered island at the center of their intersection, a place where nothing will fall in the chaos to come. They won’t be safe here. They’ll be close enough. The woman holds the beast tight and waits for the sky to fall.)

  Back in the Life Sciences Annex, Roger and Dodger continue their search. Their initial goal has faded into the background, replaced by this entertaining, all-consuming new game, word for number, number for word. Roger has never understood the math that calls to her, but he feels it now, thrumming in his veins like a promise of miracles to come. Dodger has never grasped the need to put a name to the things she knows to be true, but she understands it now, and accepts the names he throws her way gladly, transforming them through the alchemy of her observations before she throws them back to him. They aren’t children anymore, and were never truly children together, not in the way they both know in their bones that they should have been, but in this moment, they are playing as children play, tragedy forgotten in the face of so much joy.

  So very, very much joy.

  The words and numbers no longer bear any resemblance to each other to the outside ear. “Perspicacity,” he says, and “Four point eight three one five,” she replies, and smiles a small and secret smile, like she’s just said something clever, which perhaps she has. Perhaps, in the language of numbers, she is Shakespeare, she is Eliot, she is Rossetti spinning tales of the Goblin Market and Baker giving life to the Up-and-Under. “Seven,” she says, and “Celestial,” he says, and his smile is as bright as hers, as matched as two peas in a pod, as two children on the improbable road, and she’s laughing, and he’s laughing, and everything is going to be all right. The smell of smoke and wet lingers, but the storm they’re making between them has all but washed it away, replacing it with the smell of ozone, crackling bright and ready to spark.

  “Blue,” says Roger.

  “Two,” says Dodger.

  “Alienate,” says Roger.

  “One,” says Dodger, and “Zero,” they say in unison, and the ground moves beneath their feet.

  * * *

  The earthquake begins directly below the UC Berkeley campus. Seismologists have been saying for years that the Hayward Fault, when it lets go, will rupture so as to cause an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or above. The last time it ruptured in Berkeley, in 1870, the resulting quake was severe enough to level buildings and leave citizens trapped, some for days. Many of the quake’s fatalities were secondary, caused by starvation or dehydration. The B
ay Area was less populated then; the buildings, those that existed, were younger, less rigid, less primed to fall.

  This quake bubbles up through earth gone static and stale over the course of decades, and it bubbles up with a fierce violence that will shock seismologists. It is the quake they’ve always known would come one day, that they have tried to prepare the people for. It is too much, too fast: there could never have been any preparation.

  On her green island in the intersection, Erin holds old Bill as tightly as she dares and watches the apartment she shared with Dodger and Candace crumble. She could have saved some of her possessions, some of their most precious things, but how would she have explained it? No. Let it be enough that she saved herself, saved the cat, was not inside when everything that wasn’t nailed down fell, the mundane turning murderous. There are so many voices around her, and all of them are screaming. She can’t tell them apart. She hopes none of them belong to Candace. Let her sleep; let her die still dreaming.

  In the Life Sciences Annex Roger and Dodger stand frozen, staring at one another, the air around them still electric with what they’ve done, what they didn’t know they had it in them to do. A creaking sound warns them before a section of ceiling tumbles down. Dodger doesn’t close her eyes, but Roger hears the equation in her voice as it flashes through his mind, and then she’s slamming into him, her shoulder to his sternum, knocking him back, out of the way, away from the chunk of masonry and flooring that crashes into the place where he was standing.

  Still the shaking continues.

  The campus dances, side to side and up and down, brought to life by the seismic forces tearing at one another beneath the surface. People are screaming, running for safety. The locals find open places to stop and put their hands over their heads, checking the sky for power lines and nervously gauging the height of nearby buildings. Most will survive. The students who come from other places fare less well. They run for shelter, for doorways and for cupboards; they freeze in terror where they stand. A girl from Wisconsin dies when a chunk of falling brick strikes her head and bears her down to the ground. Another, larger chunk lands a moment later, pinning her body in place. It will take rescue crews three hours to work her free.