Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  But not all of them. Some had transferred; mostly computer science majors who needed an actual computer lab to finish their degrees, heading for UC Santa Cruz or Stanford with apologies on their lips and the future in their eyes. Some had dropped out, traumatized by the events of that terrible, earth-shaking afternoon. Others had simply walked away. Like Dodger. One moment she’d been there, and then she’d been gone, packing up whatever of her things had survived the quake and vanishing, presumably heading back down the coast to her parents’ house, but really, this was Dodger. Who knows where she ended up?

  Roger has never tried to find her, not then, and not now. What they made between them … no. No matter how much he misses her, some things can never be allowed.

  He walks across campus to Telegraph, which has been similarly sea-changed. Some of the old buildings are gone, new structures in their place; others remain in skeletal form, piles of rubble that have yet to be bought by new owners, cleared away and replaced by something shiny and new, something that’s never felt the ground shake beneath it, never felt the need to fall. Some of the old businesses managed to ride out the earthquake, protected by rebuilt foundations and quirks of geography: Rasputin Records is still there, as is Moe’s Books. He can’t remember the low buildings on the left side of the street clearly enough to know whether the Fat Slice is original or rebuilt. They use the same recipes they always have. He supposes that’s as good as having the original masonry. Maybe better.

  (On some level he’ll always be glad, and guilty about his gladness, that the city where he and Dodger were finally together, finally allowed to be friends and siblings and everything they should have been for their entire lives, fell down before he walked away from her. He got a fresh start. He hopes she got the same.)

  He walks down to Derby, turns, and heads into the residential neighborhoods concealed behind the commercial veneer, tucked oh-so-neatly out of the public eye, where tourists and visiting parents never see them. This is the part of Berkeley where the rebuilding is the most visible, because this is the part of Berkeley that has, for the most part, refused to change. The people who live here cherish their Victorian homes, which now stand shrouded in scaffolding, being restored to life one shingle and piece of careful wiring at a time. There was an entire street that chose to go without electricity for three weeks because of the chance one of their houses could catch fire; when they were rewired by a team of electricians, they celebrated with a block party that lit up the sky for miles around. The rents here are low, if you can find someone who’s willing to trust their renovated darling to a stranger.

  Roger’s duplex occupies the ground floor of one of those Victorians, although “floor” is a bit of a misnomer, since he only has half of one: they walk around the holes, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, and sometimes he pretends to be a tightrope walker and sometimes he just wishes he could go to the bathroom without worrying about winding up in the basement.

  There’s an ancient orange cat curled up in a box on the porch, one paw covering half of his face. Roger pauses to bend and give him a gentle pat, using the motion as an excuse to check that old Bill is still breathing. No one knows how old the cat actually is, but he’s lived longer than any outdoor cat Roger’s ever known, and he’s steeling himself against the day the good old fellow’s heart gives up and lets him slip quietly away.

  Old Bill’s side rises and falls in a shallow but steady rhythm. One more day for the best cat in Berkeley, then; one more night for the best cat in the world. When Roger looks up, the front door is open, and Erin is smiling at him.

  He smiles back.

  “Good day at school?” she asks, reaching down to grasp the lapels of his jacket and pull him to his feet. He comes without resistance. It’s best not to fight when a beautiful woman wants him to do something, he’s found. It makes things more pleasant for everyone.

  “Pretty good,” he says, and leans in, and kisses her—a gesture she returns with enthusiasm. When he leans away again, she’s smiling. So is he. “How’s the congregation?”

  “Congregating,” she says deadpan, before laughing at her own joke.

  Erin is the only one of the three people who shared Dodger’s off-campus apartment to remain at UC Berkeley. Candace was killed trying to shield a group of preschoolers from debris. Dodger vanished. Erin remained. She waited outside the apartment, clutching old Bill, until the shaking stopped. Then she put down the cat and went to see what she could do to help. She turned out to be surprisingly good with her hands, citing a family history of construction and medical work. Roger ran into her three days later, outside one of the triage tents. Awkward, he’d asked how she was doing. She’d told him about Candace, about the way their apartment had shaken and crumbled in on itself, about going back to dig clothes from the rubble. He’d asked if she wanted to come back to his place, which was still standing, even if there was no running water.

  She’d moved in that afternoon. When he’d moved out three weeks later, switching to someplace safer, with plumbing that actually worked, she’d come with him. Their first shared apartment had had two bedrooms. This one does too, but one of those rooms is an office, filled with all the books he won’t allow in the room where they sleep. The Unitarian church where she serves as a minister is only half a mile from their current address. Like him, she walks to work most mornings. Like him, she favors feet over other forms of transit.

  For both of them, on some deep level, the ground is still shaking, and always will be.

  Erin kisses him again before stepping to the side and letting him in. She closes the door behind him, shutting out the world that isn’t theirs, that wasn’t designed to contain and comfort the two of them. “So just a normal day?”

  “Someone built a book tower in the library that came down while I was doing some shelving,” he says, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the hook. “Oh, and I’m almost done translating that manuscript Christopher brought in. It’s a really interesting Breton dialect.”

  “Have the walls started bleeding yet?” she asks mildly. “Because that’s always what I worry about when you’re translating some manuscript that’s been lost to human eyes for centuries. That the walls are going to start bleeding, and then we’re going to have the risen dead and a bunch of animated trees to contend with.”

  “I’d give myself a chainsaw hand for you,” he says, and she laughs, and everything is wonderful; everything is perfect. There are pieces missing, sure, and not just in the living room floor, but whose life doesn’t have a few missing pieces? Missing pieces are what makes it real, rather than just a painting of a life that could never actually exist. Missing pieces are essential.

  Roger tries to tell himself that as he follows Erin to the kitchen. There’s nothing in a melancholy day that a cup of coffee and a lemon scone can’t fix.

  She walks with a calm assurance he never quite manages to match, stepping with absolute confidence that her feet will find the structurally stable parts of the floor. She’s the reason they can live here at all: the place should technically be considered uninhabitable, but somehow she found the right combination of laws and loopholes to make it home. The rules love her almost as much as he does. Her ash-colored hair is lovely in the light slanting through the hallway window, and this is home, this is harbor, this is everything it needs to be.

  This may not be the life he thought he wanted, but somehow it is absolutely the life that he deserves.

  * * *

  It can take Roger a long time to go to sleep, but when he does, he sleeps deeply and completely, with the conviction of a child. He sprawls, revealing the true length of his lanky limbs, which he so frequently keeps tucked in close to his body, out of the way. Erin sits in the bed next to him, watching him snore.

  She wishes she could love him the way she suspects he loves her. She wishes she could respond to his increasingly frequent hints about marriage, children, a home in Albany or the Berkeley hills. She wishes she could tell him it’s never g
oing to work out the way he wants it to, that she’s here because she has to be, and while aspects of their relationship have been organic—things she chose to do, rather than things she was ordered to do—the relationship as a whole has always been engineered. The same could be said about the both of them. Neither came into this world the way children are supposed to. Neither is likely to leave it that way, either.

  Roger wrinkles his nose, makes a grumbling sound, and rolls onto his side. Erin takes this opportunity to slip out of the bed. If he doesn’t leave space for her when he rolls back over, she’ll sleep on the couch. She’s done it before, and he’s always been understanding. That’s just the sort of person he is.

  Sometimes she contrasts him with Darren, her brother, who was all hard edges and sharp demands and the only other male she’s ever lived with. He would have followed her out of the bedroom, asking why she was disrupting his sleep by disappearing when he expected her to be there, accusing her of screwing with the natural order of things. They would have fought, his voice low and tight and reasonable, hers arcing ever higher, until it seemed like any glassware in the area would be sacrificed on the altar of their anger. The fight would have ended when one of them admitted fault or when morning came, whichever happened first, and then they would fall asleep like puppies, tangled together in a ball of limbs and silence.

  It’s been long enough since he died that he shouldn’t still be haunting her. She thinks sometimes that he’ll haunt her until she follows him into whatever void awaits creatures such as they on the other side of the veil. If the twins are followed by the scar tissue of visions and revisions to their personal timeline, she’s followed by the ghost of a teenage boy who died for no good reason in the shadow of the corn. He has no grave. She’s his living mausoleum.

  She sits, cross-legged on the couch, and waits. Three minutes after midnight, her phone rings. She picks it up. Brings it to her ear.

  “Hello, Erin.”

  She nearly drops the phone.

  Normally, the evening report is requested by Leigh: a serpent, to be sure, but a serpent she knows intimately, and who knows her just as well. Leigh made her, molded her, chose the color of her skin and the texture of her hair. Leigh is not her mother—more her architect—and one of them will kill the other one day, but Leigh is familiar. This voice …

  This voice is softer and harder at the same time, an iron bar wrapped in a sheet of velvet, rubbing against her skin in a sickly-sweet parody of seduction. She hasn’t spoken to Reed in years, not since she left the lab, but still, she knows that voice. She knows it very well.

  “Sir,” she manages to say through a constricted throat, with a mouth gone dry as ashes.

  “You’ve done well keeping the language aspect of your pairing under observation. The math can’t hurt anything on its own. A trigger’s required if a gun’s to be of use.” He chuckles at his own joke, a dry, humorless sound, like bones clicking together in a tomb. When he speaks again, that small levity is gone. “Your assignment has changed. Kill him.”

  “Sir?”

  “We have a better candidate, a pair that’s managed to mature without separation, and we can’t have the Doctrine’s loyalties confused when it tries to take physical form. The Middleton boy has become a liability. Your service is appreciated, and you need to terminate the experiment. Clean up whatever mess it creates. We’ll expect you back here within the week—oh, and Erin? Try to be more subtle this time. They can’t all be electrical fires.”

  The line goes dead. The call has been terminated.

  Erin lowers the phone and stares blankly at the hallway. At the end of it, Roger is sleeping, defenseless, unwary. He has no idea what she is, what he’s welcomed into his home, his bed. He’s never suspected her, not once. She could let him go like that: let him die innocent of what he was made for, of what he can do. It’s the only choice she can be sure she’s never made before. The odds of Dodger managing to reset the timeline on her own before she dies from disconnection shock are slim. So no, this is a thing she’s never done. Every time, every timeline, every revision, she’s chosen to refuse her duty. She’s chosen to fight.

  She’s so tired. The cuckoos have the luxury of forgetting their trips to the Impossible City. Not her. She’s been tangled up with them for lifetimes, and the temptation to end the story here is stronger than she expected. One knife, one throat, and she gets to be something more than their pretty little killer. She gets to go back to the lab, to the comforts of the world she was made for, and see what kind of world this would be with the Doctrine truly embodied, truly activated.

  A world controlled by Reed, with Leigh at his red right hand. For the (tenth? hundredth? thousandth?) time she looks at the choice, and stands, still knowing what she’s going to do, to walk into the shadows of her home.

  Flight Risk

  TIMELINE: 00:15 PDT, JUNE 16, 2016 (SAME NIGHT).

  “Oof!” Roger sits upright, dreams dissolving into a confused haze of fragmentary images. The color red—true red, the red he’s never seen with his own eyes—lingers, and he knows he was dreaming of Dodger. (Or dreaming with Dodger: assuming she’s still on this coast, it’s not unreasonable to think their sleep cycles might occasionally align, and their subconscious minds might keep reaching out even after their conscious minds have decided to cut contact. He misses her. He imagines she feels the same.)

  Still groggy, he looks down to see what hit him. It’s a backpack, already half-full. He picks it up and looks inside, finding clothes, and notebooks, and his tablet.

  “You have five minutes,” says Erin. Her voice is cold. There’s no teasing or laughter there now, only the sort of steely resolve he hasn’t heard from her since before the earthquake. He looks up. She’s standing in the doorway, dressed in dark gray leggings and a matching tank top. It looks like she’s getting ready for a yoga class, or a run.

  “What?” Roger rubs his eyes, reaches for his glasses, takes a look at the clock on the bedside table. “Erin, it’s after midnight. What’s going on?”

  “We’re getting out of here.” The statement is calm, matter-of-fact: it leaves no room for argument. “This isn’t the time to explain. You need to trust me.”

  “I do trust you, but Erin, I’m not going to get out of bed and … run away … because you had a bad dream.” He schools his face, trying to look understanding when all he feels is confused. “Come back to bed. You can tell me all about it.”

  “You’ve been hearing your sister’s voice in your head since you were in elementary school. I don’t know exactly when it started in this timeline, since you never trusted me enough to tell me, but I’m guessing between the ages of seven and nine. You told me once that that was the ‘sweet spot’ for acceptance in small children.” That had been another timeline, another Roger. Her memory of the conversation is hazy, but the fact that she remembers means it was important, that he told her to hold on to the information no matter what came next. She remembers him without glasses, with shorter hair, with a mustache. It’s all superficial, the result of small choices gone differently, culminating in someone who was almost, but not quite, the Roger in front of her.

  They destroy themselves every time they destroy the world. Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.

  Roger gapes before his mouth snaps shut and he sits up straighter, some of the old wariness coming back into his eyes. “I don’t have a sister.” The lie is automatic. He’s ashamed of it: his cheeks redden, he presses on, saying, “Even if I did, that wouldn’t make us … whatever that would make us.”

  “I know most people believe every word that comes out of your mouth, but I was Dodger’s roommate before I was your girlfriend, and I’m not going to forget her. She’s your sister, and if you’re in danger, so is she. I had to stay with one of you, and you were the more dangerous, so you got me. We need to find her.” Erin purses her lips. “Unless you think she’d listen if you called? Give it a try. She needs to be warned. I
honestly don’t know if they have her under surveillance, and if they do, we could be running for nothing.” She can’t count on the way the other timelines have played out to give them time to get to Dodger. The trouble with starting from scratch over and over is that things can change. If they’ve changed too much, this is the end of the game, and she’s throwing herself away on a plan that can never work.

  Roger is looking at her with increasing dismay. He’s a smart man. There are things he hasn’t thought about for years, moments when she broke character, when she tried to warn him. She can see him putting the pieces together, finding the way they fit together, however much he wants them not to.

  “Erin…?” he finally says. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “Dodger Cheswich is your sister,” she replies. “Denial is fun, and I’ve encouraged it, to be fair, but the time for denial is over. You need to wake up if you don’t want this to be the ending. Did you really manage to forget I knew about her—did you run away from yourself that hard? Why else would I have let you keep her picture next to our bed for all these years? Seriously, you’re smarter than that. Think.”

  “That doesn’t mean…” He tapers off, stops dead, and gives her a narrow-eyed, suspicious look. “Her being my sister doesn’t mean any of those other things.”

  “Yeah, it does. We’ve met before, Roger, on the improbable road, and I know where you come from.” The answer is so much bigger and more complicated than that, but these are the answers he can accept here and now, and she needs him to accept. She needs him moving. If she doesn’t do her job by morning, they’ll know, and they’ll send someone who will. She’s not their only hunter. “Can you call her or not?”