Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Her psychologist, Dr. Peters, is sitting at her dining room table. He has a gun in his hand. The gun is pointed at her.

  The strangeness of this tableau causes Dodger to freeze, expression shifting to one of profound puzzlement. Dr. Peters says nothing. For a long moment, neither does she. Then, in a politely baffled voice, she asks, “Is this a new therapy technique? Did I approve this when I signed the new insurance paperwork last week? Because I don’t think I like it.” She didn’t approve this, she knows that much. Dodger may not be a recreational reader, but she’s never signed anything she didn’t understand. For someone in her line of work, that would be tantamount to career suicide.

  “Put the bags down, Miss Cheswich,” says Dr. Peters. “I don’t want to upset you any more than I have to.”

  “I don’t see the connection between those two statements,” says Dodger, setting the bags on the counter. She keeps her purse. It’s a big brown leather bag, bought with the advance from her first book. It cost more than she liked to consider at the time, but she’d run the numbers, and knew this was the sort of purse she’d only need to purchase once: it would last her entire life, classic enough never to go out of style, sturdy enough to tolerate the abuse she heaped on her possessions. She’s had it for five years, and so far, it’s managed to keep its side of the unspoken bargain just fine.

  “You don’t like making messes,” says Dr. Peters. He stands. The gun is still pointed at her. “I’m afraid we’re going to make a mess. That can’t be helped. At least this way you’ll know that your corpse was the only thing leaking on the floor.”

  “Ah,” says Dodger. Inwardly, she’s raging and frozen at the same time, fear warring with fury for control. How dare he come into her home, her space, and threaten her this way? He’s her therapist, for God’s sake. He’s supposed to be one of the people she can trust. There are few enough of those in this world. How dare he? “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you planning to kill me? I don’t keep all my money in a lockbox under the mattress. There’s nothing here to steal. You’d make a lot more if you just kept being my therapist.”

  “I’m afraid that’s none of your concern,” says Dr. Peters, and takes a step forward.

  Dodger tilts her head.

  The room is fifteen feet long and eleven feet wide, with eight-foot ceilings. Dr. Peters is six foot three inches tall, giving him a base stride of thirty-one inches. Momentum plus velocity plus kinetic absorption rate equals—

  Dr. Peters steadies his gun. His hand tenses. Dodger moves. This is her space, her place, and all she needs to know is in the numbers. She grabs a can of chicken noodle soup from the top of the bag, flinging it as hard as she can for the wall to his right. It misses his ear by inches, and he’s starting to laugh when it hits the wall just so, finding the perfect angle for recoil, and bounces back to hit him in the head. Dr. Peters stops laughing. Dr. Peters pulls the trigger.

  But Dodger isn’t there. This is her space; it has no secrets from her. The house is a mathematical model, and she is the only one who knows it both inside and out, knows every angle to the slightest degree. The house is not a living thing, but it is an equation, and she moves through it with a speed that can’t be matched by someone who needs eyes to see where the furniture is placed, needs to pay attention to their surroundings. In this moment, Dodger Cheswich is her surroundings, and she’s gathering speed.

  The next thing to strike Dr. Peters is a coffee mug, flying apparently from nowhere to hit him in the throat. He roars anger and confused pain. This isn’t how the situation was supposed to play out. The little mathematician was supposed to cry, to beg, to apologize for the self-absorbed way she’d always interacted with him. She was supposed to say she was wrong, that she’d do anything to save herself, anything. This job, this whole situation, has been a trial. This is where he was meant to reap his reward. Instead, the girl is a ghost, moving from place to place like she’s somehow found a way to fold the fabric of space itself.

  More things fly at him. A glass paperweight, a potted succulent, a rock. Why does she have a rock in the damn house? It doesn’t matter, because the more she throws, the more he’ll know about where she is.

  “Stop this while I have some patience left,” he says. “I only have to shoot you once.”

  “True enough,” she says, from behind him. He turns. Dodger is right there, less than a foot away. She looks … awake, for lack of a better word, like she’s been sleepwalking through life the whole time he’s been dealing with her, and has only just decided to open her eyes.

  The toaster impacts with the side of his face so hard that he feels bone give way, and then he’s falling into the dark, and it doesn’t matter anymore.

  * * *

  Dodger stands over the body of her therapist, panting, the toaster clutched in her hands. It’s a good toaster. Why did she never notice before what a good toaster it is? There’s a dent in one shiny metal side the exact size and shape of Dr. Peters’s skull. It probably won’t make toast anymore. That’s a pity. It was a good toaster.

  Her purse begins ringing.

  Dodger looks down at it, uncomprehending at first, then with dawning understanding. The phone. It’s her phone. She sets the toaster on the counter and digs the phone from her purse, checking the display. UNKNOWN NUMBER, it says. A telemarketer, probably, or someone looking for a donation to a political campaign. She should ignore it. She has bigger problems.

  But then, bigger problems sometimes get easier to solve when she steps back from them. She slides her thumb to the little green Answer icon, raising the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Oh my God it worked.” The voice is breathless, excited, and so damn young.

  The voice is her own. Dodger blinks. Frowns. Says the only thing she can, under the circumstances:

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Oh! Uh. Hello, Dodger in the future. This is Dodger from the past. Specifically, this is Dodger from December tenth, 2008. I would have called yesterday, but the phones were pretty much out of commission after the earthquake. I hitched a ride to Palo Alto. I’m calling from our parents’ place.” A nervous giggle. “This is so weird. I’ve talked to the future before, but I was never the one to make the call. Do you think this counts as long distance?”

  Dodger sits down, hard, on the floor. She doesn’t remember making this call—quite—but the feeling of déjà vu gets stronger with every word the other Dodger says. By the time she hangs up, she’s sure she’ll remember the conversation from both sides. The math is changing. “Why are you calling me? How are you calling me?”

  “Oh. Um. After Roger called us from the future, I opened our thirty-year planner and circled the first date I saw. I didn’t have a way to show my work, but instinctive mathematics can be as good as practical ones if you’re not being graded.”

  “And this number?”

  “It’s my number too, just not yet. I dialed the most logical combination I could think of.”

  None of this makes sense, and because of that, every bit of this makes perfect sense. Everything the younger Dodger is saying meshes with the older Dodger’s understanding of the world, which is made of math. It’s just that occasionally, the math makes its own rules. Math gets to do that, if it wants to.

  “Why are you calling?” she asks.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I don’t think I can, until you tell me,” she says. “This hasn’t happened for me yet. I’m the future, but I’m not your future until you finish the call.” It should be terrifying, the thought that she’s changing the equation that comprises her reality. Because this will change things. She knows that, as surely as she knows that every second takes away more of her slim opportunity to escape becoming the future self of a girl she, as yet, never was.

  (And it’s a relief, really, to know time can be revised like this. It makes so much about her life start to hang together. A good mathematician is always willing to check their work, to change the pieces that
don’t serve the overall equation. That’s what she’s doing now. Just … changing pieces, and making something better of herself. She would never have picked up the phone in the past if it wasn’t for the sake of making a better future.)

  “Roger called me,” says her past self, and Dodger in the present closes her eyes and listens, silently, to every perfect, painful word.

  Long Distance

  TIMELINE: 11:15 PST, DECEMBER 10, 2008 (SEVEN YEARS AGO; TIME IS UNWINDING).

  The apartment is empty when Dodger arrives. All the windows have shattered. New cracks run through its foundation. She scratches some equations into the dirt that constitutes their narrow strip of a yard—she could do them in her head, but they’re easier to trust when she can see them—and decides it should be safe, if she’s quick. If she smells gas or smoke or anything else that shouldn’t be there, she’ll get out. Until that happens, she can seek comfort in the broken familiar and gather her things.

  She doesn’t know yet where she’s going—back to her parents, probably—but she can’t stay here. Not after the way Roger looked at her, with fear and loathing and longing tangled in his eyes. Not after the way Smita died. Running away may not be the grownup thing to do, but Dodger has never put much stock in being a grownup. Sometimes logic says the childish thing is the right one.

  The bookshelves in the hall have toppled over, spilling their contents across the floor. Over the Woodward Wall has fallen open to the center illustration, the Impossible City in gold and mercury glory. Dodger stops for a moment, transfixed by the image. Something about it …

  No. This isn’t the time. She shakes herself free and picks through the mess, occasionally pausing to recover an especially beloved childhood treasure. There was never any real filing system here. At least the ceiling held; at least the broken glass was minimal. At least they didn’t die. Roger may have looked at her like she was a monster, but they didn’t die. They may still find a way through this.

  She steps into her room. The damage here is even more minimal, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders. There’s a dusting of plaster over everything, fallen from the ceiling; the pillow has toppled off the bed, and all her markers are on the floor. Somehow, the earthquake has erased half of one wall, reducing the equation to a black smear. She doesn’t know how that’s possible, but she’s not in the mood to ignore the evidence of her own eyes.

  Dodger walks to the bed, sits, and puts her hands over her face. The temptation to reach for Roger is enormous. She wants to talk to him. She wants to know that everything is okay. But everything is not okay. They made the quake. She doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why, but she knows they did it, the two of them working together. They’re dangerous. Maybe not individually, but together? Together, they could destroy the world.

  It’s not a pleasant thought. It’s the only one she has.

  Her phone rings.

  Dodger lowers her hands. It could be her parents, checking up on her; it could be Candace or Erin, trying to confirm that she’s alive. The idea that it might be Roger doesn’t even cross her mind. He won’t be calling her today. Maybe not ever again.

  She answers the phone. (The feeling of jamais vu rises, breaks around her, because she didn’t answer the phone, not the first time: the first time, it was voice mail and a stuttered message that was somehow enough to make things a little better, to cause the situation to repeat the next time around. This is not the first time. It’s closer than they’ve been in years.)

  “Hello?”

  “Dodger.” The voice is Roger’s, and it’s not: he sounds older, exhausted, not at the end of his rope but some distance past it, holding on through sheer force of will. “I know you’re mad at me, and I know I’m the last person in the world you want to talk to right now, but I need to ask you to please not hang up.”

  (this was a message last time this was a message on my voice mail; we got it wrong, we got it wrong at least once more, even after we thought we were getting it right)

  “Mad at you?” Laughter bubbles in her throat. She swallows it. “Why would I be mad at you? I’m worried about you. You ran away so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to tell you we’d be okay. Are you okay? You don’t sound so good.”

  “I’m not okay, really. But … didn’t the earthquake just happen? Wasn’t that today?”

  “Oh,” she says, things falling into place as the world goes crystalline and clear, all the numbers lining up for a change. Of course. It’s the only thing that makes sense, because there’s no way Roger would be calling her: not now, anyway. “You’re in the future, aren’t you?”

  He doesn’t swallow his laughter as well as she swallows hers. It seeps up around his words as he says, “You figured that out even faster than I thought you would. I’ve really missed you, Dodge.”

  So they don’t make things right between them, then: so this silence that echoes in her skull, filling the space he should be occupying, becomes the new normal. She shivers. “I haven’t had time to miss you yet, but it sounds like I’m going to get it,” she says, forcing her voice to stay level. “I wish I didn’t have to.”

  “Me, too,” he says, and she believes him. “But I—I mean, the me in your timeline—he needs his space if he’s going to accept what’s going on. You’ve always adapted faster than I did. And he—I—needs to accept this, because it’s not going away.”

  “I’m following the numbers. They tell me what to do.”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d been the one to get the math,” he says, and is quiet for a moment before continuing: “The Roger in your timeline is a fool. He’s not ready to accept what he needs to know, and he’s pushing you away because he’s scared. I can’t change that. The trick that lets me call you doesn’t work if I’m trying to call myself, because I’m not math, I’m words, and words can change a lot of things, but they can’t break the laws of time. You’re the only person I can reach this way. So please, Dodge. I want you to give him time. I want you to let him come to you. But I want you to remember that I love you. That he loves you, and he never stops, not for a second, not even when he’s trying to convince himself the two of you were involved in some sort of messed-up folie à deux for all these years.”

  “We don’t have a shared delusion,” Dodger protests. “It’s all real. If you take away the quantum entanglement, we’d never have met.” A wave of uneasiness sweeps over her, because they would have met, wouldn’t they? They would have met in a room she can’t quite remember but can’t quite forget, with bruises on their arms and the ghosts of sedatives in their veins, and they would have clung to one another and promised never to lose track again. That’s where this started. That’s when they learned what they could do.

  But it’s all vague and hazy, and she can’t quite grasp hold before it dissolves into shadowy outlines and déjà vu. The feeling has haunted her for her entire life, the strong sensation that almost everything she does has happened before at least once, and maybe more. She’s almost used to it at this point. Maybe everyone goes through their lives on a wave of uncertainty and false memories.

  “I know,” says Roger, and he sounds so tired, and she hears something in the background, unmasked by his silence—something that sounds like gunfire.

  Dodger’s skin prickles. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” he says. “I screwed up, Dodge. I ran away after the earthquake, and when I needed you, you weren’t there, because you didn’t … I don’t know. Maybe you didn’t love me anymore, or maybe you just got tired of dealing with my bullshit insistence that I knew best. It doesn’t matter, because I ran and you didn’t think I wanted you to follow, and so we’re both in a bad place when I am. I need you not to give up on me, okay? That’s all. When I come crawling back, I need you to remember this call, and be willing to give me one more chance. Please.”

  “I could never give up on you,” she says, and she sounds so wounded, and so young, that it makes his chest ache. “Is there anything I can do for you? The future you who’s
on my phone, I mean, not the now-you. I’ll give the now-you his space, and I’ll be ready when he comes back to me, if you’re sure he’s going to come.”

  Roger laughs, thin and pained. “I can be a dumb-ass sometimes, and I can be an asshole sometimes, but I’ve never been stupid enough to run away from you forever. He’ll come. I’ll come. And then you can make it so this version of me never exists, because I won’t have to. You can change the math.”

  Dodger is quiet for a moment, taking that in, along with the distant sound of gunfire. Finally, she asks, “Am I with you, in the future?”

  “You are.”

  “What am I like?”

  “Lonely.”

  It’s just one word, but it encompasses so much, like an equal sign finishing the equation. Dodger closes her eyes, wishing she could treat the gesture the way she so often has: as an excuse to reach out and not be alone anymore. She knows she can’t. Future-Roger is outside of her range, and present-Roger needs her to leave him alone if he’s ever going to let her back in. That doesn’t make the emptiness of her own skull any easier to bear.

  “That makes sense,” she says. “Tell her I’m going to make it better for us. I’m going to wait for you. I’m not going to give up.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear.”

  There’s a finality in his voice. Cold terror grips her, and she knows, without question, that he’s about to hang up: that their brief connection, whatever it is or was or will someday be, is coming to an end. She also knows that when he hangs up, he’ll cease to exist—either because he’s going to die, or because he changed the equation so profoundly that he can never become. Either way, she can’t let him go without telling him something.