Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “I don’t have her number.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Erin’s eyes are cold. “Close your eyes, and call her. I know you can. You know you can. We don’t have the time for you to fuck with me right now, Roger, and I don’t have the patience to sit and hold your hand while you work through this. I’m risking my own life to save yours. Show a scrap of gratitude, and call your damn sister.”

  She walks past the bed while he’s gaping at her again, kneeling and opening the bottom drawer of her dresser. Pushing away a veil of lingerie and sanitary products—even though Roger has always been understanding about her periods, willing to go to the drugstore when she asks without complaining about it, something she attributes in part to the amount of time he spent with Dodger in his head, putting a box of tampons on top of something she wants left alone has always been a functional deterrent—she produces a lead-lined box. It has no latch; instead, it is sealed with a sheet of candle wax. She breaks it with one hard strike of her palm and looks over her shoulder to Roger. His eyes are still open. He hasn’t moved.

  “They’ll know,” she says quietly. “When the sun comes up and their little science projects haven’t suddenly become a lot more powerful, they’ll know you’re still breathing. They’ll assume I failed, that you were too much for me, and they’ll send someone to finish what they think I started. We have until they get here and find an absence of bodies before they know I’ve gone rogue, and once that happens? All bets are off. So call her, before we’re running.”

  “Erin, you need to cut this out. Whatever this is, you need to stop. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to save your scrawny, ungrateful ass.” She turns back to the box. Opens it. Withdraws its contents. Stands, and turns to face him.

  Roger makes a thick urk noise, like he’s trying to speak through a mouthful of concrete. Erin’s smile is as thin as the blade of a knife, and would cut twice as sharply.

  “This is a Hand of Glory,” she says. “I made it from the severed hand of a murdered woman, because I knew I was going to need it eventually. I’ve been trying to protect you for a long time. Longer than a lifetime, even, thanks to your asshole sister. I’m sorry to drop this on you so abruptly, but it’s not like there was ever a convenient moment for saying ‘hey, Roger, so you know, you were engineered by alchemists who want to control the world, and they’re hoping they can use you and Dodger for that purpose.’”

  Roger knows that hand. It’s been a long time, but there are things he doesn’t have it in him to forget. The shape of Smita’s fingers, long and elegant and nimble; the way she painted her nails in shockingly bright colors, as if to draw attention to her hands, which she considered her best feature. The hand Erin holds belongs to a woman who died in a fire. There’s no way it should be here, no way it should still look so fresh and pliant, but it is, and it does, and the world is no longer making sense.

  “Call her,” says Erin. There’s no love in her voice. Maybe there was never any love there at all.

  Or maybe there was. Some things are difficult to fake, especially over the length and breadth of the years they’ve had together. There have been a lot of years. Their relationship, informal as it is, has outlasted marriages among his peers; there have been days when he thought they were going to be together forever. Days when it seemed like Erin was his happy-ever-after girl, like they were going to be able to build a future, one brick at a time, just by keeping one another close and never letting go. He’s trusted her since the earthquake, since she stopped being Dodger’s prickly roommate and became his friend, confidant, and eventually lover.

  He can’t throw all that away in an instant. So he takes a deep breath, trying to swallow his misgivings, and says, in his most serious tone, “Erin, I want you to explain what’s going on.”

  Erin’s eyes widen. “Oh,” she says, in a small, surprised voice. “Every manifestation really does feed into every other. No wonder. No wonder. I…” She shakes herself like a wet dog, like she’s trying to shrug off some unwanted control. “I was born in the lab that created you and Dodger. You were the pet projects of a man named James Reed, who’s been trying for over a hundred years to follow Asphodel Baker’s directions for incarnating a universal concept called the Doctrine of Ethos in a human body. Yours was the first generation where he began splitting the Doctrine into equal halves, both to force the hosts to be more like ordinary people, and to make them easier to control. You got language. Dodger got math.”

  “And you got a blow to the head if you think I’m going to believe this bullshit.” Roger’s getting angry. He can’t help it. This is ludicrous; this is insane; this would have been impossible to swallow even if Erin hadn’t gone a step too far and invoked Dodger’s name. He doesn’t like to talk about his sister when he can help it. He made his choice. He has to live with it.

  (Under the anger is horror, slow and rich and thick as honey. Because what she’s saying is impossible, yes, but so is quantum entanglement with an absent twin; so is causing an earthquake with a game. Erin is putting his life into a new context, one where things that have never been believable make sudden and absolute sense. And he does not want them to.)

  “Don’t you want to know what they built me for?”

  He doesn’t. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll play. What did your mad science masters design you to do?”

  “Not mad science: alchemy. Mad scientists are kinder to their creations.” She takes the bowl of spare change from the dresser with her free hand, tilting it forward to show its contents before she flings them into the air. Roger doesn’t have time to react before they hit the ground in a grid around her. Each coin is positioned like the floor had a magnetic coil beneath it, landing at the points of imaginary squares. Every one of them is heads-up. Erin puts the dish back.

  “Chaos and Order were early targets,” she says. “It seems like they should be bigger than something like the Doctrine, but it turns out that because they’re primal, they’re also simple. They’ve been employing poppets of my lineage for almost as long as they’ve been working to incarnate yours. I am the living embodiment of Order, and I am ordering you to get the fuck out of that bed and follow me.”

  “That was a terrible pun,” says Roger automatically. He can’t deny the evidence of his eyes. He’s always been good at justifying things unseen, but this? This is physical reality. He knows there are no magnets. This is too much for a prank.

  Erin scowls. “Are you still not taking this seriously? They’ll send people here when I don’t check in. They’ll find you. And they will kill you.”

  “Right.” Roger crosses his arms. “Why are you helping me if these are the people who made you?”

  “Because they made me like they made you: they made me to be a part of a pair. Chaos and Order. But we weren’t as entangled as you and Dodger are—remember when she slit her wrists and nearly bled out behind her house? I remember you arguing with her, in a timeline that never existed, about whether that needed to happen. Whether that was something the two of you could revise. She said it had to be allowed to remain part of the timeline, because that event was one of the things that allowed me to convince you to come with me.”

  Roger’s eyes have been getting wider and wider, until it seems like they’re set to swallow the top half of his face. He folds his arms tighter, holding himself in a half-comforting embrace.

  “You can’t live if she dies, and she can’t live if you die; that’s how it works for the cuckoos, every last carefully designed one of you. Me, I can live without my other half just fine. Doesn’t mean I wanted to.” Darren had been sullen and quick to anger, rigid in ways that were almost comic, coming from an avatar of chaos. He’d wanted everything just so, following patterns he had set and only he could understand. And he’d loved her. Oh, how he’d loved her. They’d been two halves of the same coin, not brother and sister like the incarnations of the Doctrine, but Adam and Eve of the unformed universe, so suited to each othe
r that the thought of being apart had been a painful impossibility. Until the day Reed needed a hammer to pound a stubborn nail. Until Erin needed training. Until the cuckoos needed someone who could watch over their nest while they grew, someone they would be able to accept as a member of their peer group, even though technically they had no peers. Only each other. Only ever each other.

  Erin has been here before, over and over, as the timelines looped and changed around her. Darren has never been standing by her side. She suspects that, like Dodger’s attempted suicide, his death may be one of the things that can’t be changed: her willingness to betray Reed hinges on it having happened. She hates them for that, Roger and Dodger, who could have each other if they’d stop pushing one another away. She hates them more than she hates anything, and she’ll die, again, if that’s what it takes for them to stay together. She’s done worse.

  “I can’t call her,” he says. “She hasn’t … We haven’t spoken in seven years. I didn’t answer when she called, and one day she just stopped calling.”

  “Try.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re going to get us both killed,” says Erin, with no rancor in her voice. She reaches into her pocket, produces her phone, and throws it onto the bed. “Try the mundane way.”

  “I don’t have her number anymore.”

  To his surprise, she laughs. It’s a high, bright, impossibly strained sound, like glass breaking. “Oh, trust me, happy boy. That has never mattered. Try.”

  Roger picks up the phone.

  Dials the number for her old apartment, the one that hasn’t been there for years.

  Waits.

  It rings three times, four, five, and he’s about to hang up when there’s a click and Dodger’s voice is in his ear, Dodger is talking to him, saying, “This is Dodger. What’s your deal?”

  His mouth is so dry he can barely swallow. He forces himself to do just that before saying, “Uh. Hi, Dodge.”

  “Roger?” She sounds puzzled. “Why are you calling me from the roof? Did you finally decide to get a cellphone?”

  His mouth dries up even further. He can’t speak.

  (Because he remembers this; he didn’t remember it a moment ago, can’t even say for sure whether this is a thing that had happened a moment ago, but it’s something that has actually and for certain happened now. Dodger, coming back from a trip to the kitchen for lemonade and brownies to quiz him on why he’d decided to make a prank call from the roof when he knew she was going to be right back up. Him, protesting that he didn’t have a cellphone and couldn’t have called her. It had been a beautiful day. The air had tasted like honeysuckle. The brownies had tasted of chocolate and marijuana. And it had happened almost eight years ago.)

  She’s going to hang up. He knows it, and so he swallows hard one more time, and says, “I missed you. That’s all.”

  “Asshole,” she says, with complete fondness. There’s a click as she replaces the receiver in its cradle (landlines, they still used landlines back then), and he’s listening to silence.

  Slowly, he lowers the phone and turns his eyes back to Erin. “I just called Dodger.”

  “Yeah,” says Erin. “Sounds like it was an old number, though.”

  “How…?”

  “Pack the backpack. Take what you need.” She pulls a lighter from her pocket and flicks it on before beginning to light the fingers of the Hand. “We need to be gone by morning.”

  Roger stares for a moment. Then, quickly, he begins to move.

  * * *

  The last thing Erin does is set the house on fire.

  She does it with swift precision, touching the Hand of Glory to the aged wood of the front porch and stepping back as the flames begin to leap, growing too fast and voraciously to be ordinary. When the entire front of the house is wreathed in crackling flame, she turns and walks to the sidewalk, where Roger is waiting.

  “We need to stand here for a few minutes,” she says. “The Hand of Glory will keep anyone who shouldn’t see us from noticing that we exist, and we want the fire to get a good grasp on the interior before we go.”

  “You burned the Life Sciences Annex,” he says.

  If Erin is surprised by the non sequitur, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she just nods. “Yes. I did. With the body of your friend inside. I had to. It was an order.”

  “From the people you say ‘made’ us.” His voice turns bitter at the end, twisting the single syllable in “made” until it almost breaks. “Did they also tell you to kill Smita?”

  “Yes.” People are emerging from their houses, pointing at the fire, exclaiming over it, ordering one another to call 911. A few seem a little too interested. They’ll be the ones who have dreams of fire over the next days, the ones whose eyes get bright when they see a candle. The dangerous ones.

  “Why?”

  “Because your blood would have told her that you’re not real. You and your sister were made, not born. You’re too close to identical to be fraternal, and too different to be identical. She was a smart woman with a problem to work at. She would have figured out that something was wrong. The people who designed you don’t want anyone sniffing around their doors. She had to be removed.”

  “But—”

  “We’ve been over this. Believe me, we’ve been over this. I’ve even spared her a few times, when I thought we could risk it. You know what happened? Shit got bad faster. We wound up at the zero point faster. You had less time to get comfortable in the language of your own skin. Dodger had less time to figure out how to work the numbers. We died faster. So don’t argue with me on this. It sucks that she died. I hate that I killed her. But she died quick and she died clean and we got to live in peace for this long, and on the balance of things, I’ll take it. My life over hers, period.”

  The roof caves in with a soft crackling sound. Someone has called 911; the sound of sirens fills the air. Slowly, Roger realizes that no one is pointing at them. No one is approaching to ask if they’re okay. They’ve lived in this neighborhood for years, and their neighbors are acting as if they don’t even exist.

  “What—” he begins.

  “I told you,” says Erin, and takes his hand, and leads him over to the nearest cluster of rubberneckers.

  “Do you think they got out in time?” one of them is asking. He’s in his bathrobe and nothing else, barefoot on the pavement.

  “I hope so,” says another. Her eyes flick past the place where Roger stands like he’s not even there. For her, he isn’t. “They were such a sweet couple.”

  “We’re already past tense for these people,” says Erin. “Let them be past tense for you, too. Come on. We need to find your sister, before it’s too late.”

  Roger hasn’t liked to drive since the earthquake, but that doesn’t mean that a car isn’t sometimes necessary. Theirs is parked on the street. Somehow, none of the neighbors notice when he starts it up and pulls away. A few even step to the side to avoid being hit, but no one points, no one says “hey, there’s Roger and Erin, they’re alive.” They all just keep staring at the fire, and Roger and Erin drive away, shrouded by the Hand of Glory, into an uncertain future.

  Galileo

  TIMELINE: 14:31 PDT, JUNE 16, 2016 (THE SAME DAY).

  Dodger’s keys jingle, juggling her purse and two bags of groceries as she unlocks the door. The sun gnaws at her back and shoulders, bright and hot and uncompromising. The drought means the honeysuckle she would normally have asked her gardener to encourage around the doorway has withered to a thin, clinging vine that provides no shade for moments like these. It’s inconvenient, but a few extra bottles of sunscreen are a small price to pay for a state that’s marginally less parched.

  (She’s done the math: the increase in showering to rinse away all those skin care products is actually greater than the water requirements of her honeysuckle. But her neighborhood is upscale enough to be snobby, and exclusive enough to be nosy. There have been a few “anonymous” tips to the water board about people whose
lawns were too green or whose gardens seemed a bit too healthy. Even Ms. Stewart down on the corner has had to endure her share of “water shaming” over her roses, and she’s eighty years old, with rosebushes that are only slightly younger. A few showers are also a small price to pay, this time for the prize of being left alone by neighbors with nothing better to do.)

  The air inside the house is cool and dry. It smells clean, to her. On the rare occasions when she’s had people over, they’ve found that comforting cleanness unnervingly sterile, asking her nervously whether she’s just had a cleaning service in. More than anything, those reactions have taught her that she shouldn’t have people in her home. It’s hers, after all. She gets to keep it however she likes, as long as she’s not endangering herself or others. If she were breeding cockroaches in the pantry or conducting mold experiments in the bathroom, confusion and even disgust would be warranted. She’s never done either of those things. She’s just kept everything clean enough to live up to its full potential. Shouldn’t that be rewarded?

  The door slams behind her as she makes her way to the kitchen. Some of the groceries need to be put away before they start to defrost. Others need to be put away because groceries don’t belong on the counter. Once that’s done, she can get back to work, secure in the knowledge that she’s done her errands and interacted with humanity today. Her psychologist wants her to interact with humanity every day if she possibly can; he says her tendency to self-isolate isn’t healthy and will only improve if she makes an effort.

  Dodger Cheswich, self-help guru of the modern nerd, seeking help with her own self. It would be comic, if it weren’t so frustrating.

  She’s expecting stillness, calm, and cleanness when she reaches the kitchen. She’s also expecting darkness: the house stays cooler if she keeps the shades drawn when she’s not home. Opening the shades would be too difficult with the groceries she’s carrying, and so she goes for the easier, more ecologically wasteful option, flicking on the kitchen lights. The energy-efficient bulbs spring to life, illuminating the kitchen and dining area. Which is clean, yes, clean enough that virtually every surface is safe to eat off of, and still, yes. But it isn’t empty.