Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Dodger blinks. “What?”

  Roger’s hand settles on her shoulder. She looks up at him, and he shakes his head. “I’ll explain while Erin works,” he says, voice thick with loathing and regret. “Let’s get you packed.”

  “My room is this way,” she says, and the two of them walk away, leaving Erin alone with Dr. Peters.

  “Dodger!” Dr. Peters yells after her.

  She doesn’t turn around.

  * * *

  Dodger’s room is large, spotless, barren: the only furniture is an island of bed and desk in the center of the floor, pressed together so she can roll over in the night and wake up her laptop, getting to work before her eyes are fully focused. The room is also claustrophobically small, thanks to the writing on the walls. The equations begin next to the door and cover every inch of available space. Most are plain dry-erase marker, but a few are scrawled in red, and others are surrounded by boxy outlines, isolating them.

  Roger looks at the room and feels himself relax in the alien face of it all. “I guess some things never change, huh?” he says.

  “I guess not,” Dodger replies. “Are you planning to tell me what’s going on, or am I supposed to pack a bag and trust you after seven years?” She may be a paradox walking, revised by her own hand, but she’s still angry at him, under the forgiveness. That’s almost a relief. She’s changed some of her math; her core equations remain intact.

  “Dodger…”

  “I never gave up on you. I waited for you to call me. I waited for seven years. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I almost started playing chess again, just so I’d have something to do with my time.” Instead, she’s written books, taught classes, traveled the world; tutored high school students who needed help with math, spoken to groups of girls hoping to go into STEM, done work for some of the biggest tech companies in the Valley. She’s kept busy, because she’s had to. As she glares at her brother, she knows she would have given it all up to spend those seven years on campus, arguing about whose night it was to pick the pizza place.

  Roger looks at her for a long moment before he turns away and says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t deal with what we were when we were together.”

  “You mean the earthquake.”

  “I mean the earthquake.” He pauses before he asks, “Don’t you think we caused it?”

  “I know we did.” She shrugs. “I did some consulting with the USGS a few years ago. They wanted mathematical models of probable quakes in this region, and I had a new way of mapping faults that seemed like just the thing. They gave me access to all their data. That quake began directly underneath us and involved a fault that’s never given way in that spot before. We created something we didn’t understand, and it hurt a lot of people.”

  “It’s our fault all those people died.”

  “No.” Dodger sounds surprisingly serene. “It’s the fault of the people who made us.”

  Roger stops for a moment before he asks, “What do you mean?”

  “We’re a government weapons program gone wrong, or some mad scientist’s pet project, or something, because there’s no way we happened naturally. We’re too Midwich for that.” Dodger looks at him levelly. “Someone made us. Someone made us, and then they separated us because we were dangerous when we were together.”

  He laughs. It’s all he can think of to do. “How did you figure this out on your own? Erin had to tell me, and I’m still not sure I believe her.”

  “It helps that I spent part of today talking to myself from seven years ago, right after she spoke to you in the future,” says Dodger. Roger stares and so she explains, telling him about the calls, telling him how the world rewrote itself to account for this new data. History is an equation. It can be changed under the right circumstances. It should be terrifying, but it’s really just wonderful, because it means so many of their mistakes have been curated ones, deemed necessary by themselves in the future.

  When she finishes, Roger sits heavily on her bed and says, “You’d better pack. Erin will be almost done with Dr. Peters by now, and she doesn’t do patient well.”

  “Why is she part of this? Why is she here?”

  “Because the people who made us made her too. She was assigned to keep an eye on us while we were at college. I think … I think she was supposed to make sure nothing like the earthquake happened.” That’s the charitable interpretation. The more probable one says she was supposed to guarantee the earthquake, because the earthquake was what had proved they were growing into their full potential. Without it, they would never have run away from each other, but without it, they wouldn’t have needed to.

  In a vague way, Roger is starting to realize that the earthquake, terrible tragedy that it was, probably saved their lives. Without it, they would have become experimentally uninteresting before graduation.

  Dodger blinks. “That makes sense,” she says finally. “Is she really going to burn my house down?”

  “She burned ours down.”

  That’s new data. Dodger blinks again before she asks, “Girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. Since a couple months after the quake.” His laugh is small and bitter. “I guess without you to be her roommate, she needed to find another way to maintain her cover.”

  “And they had Dr. Peters ready to start watching me,” says Dodger. “You got a girlfriend, I got a therapist. I’m not sure who got the better deal.”

  “You did.” The words are small, and absolutely final: they leave no room for discussion.

  “She really burned your house down?”

  “She did.”

  Dodger pauses, adding these facts to the data she already has before crossing to the closet and opening it. There’s the rest of her things: she has two dressers in there, face to face, so that she can open one by flattening herself against the other. Clothes hang from the rack, and there are several bags shoved into the very back. She digs through them, finding a hiking backpack and tossing it out before she asks her next question: “Did she kill Smita?”

  “Yes,” he says. “The people who made us didn’t like Smita digging in our DNA. I guess it could have … told her things they didn’t want anyone to know. Not even us. Maybe especially not us. And there wasn’t any other way to make her be quiet.”

  Dodger stops, her arms full of clothes pulled down from their hangers, and just looks at him. “She killed Smita and she’s going to burn my house down and you’re okay with this? You don’t see a single thing wrong with the idea?”

  “Your therapist tried to shoot you. I think that lends some credence to the idea that someone’s out to get us, and Erin is trying to keep us alive.” And he’s called the past, and she’s received calls from the future; time is malleable where they’re concerned, unstitching itself one impossible idea at a time. “She says it was alchemists who made us, and that they’ve decided we’re not necessary anymore.”

  “What?” Dodger stares at him. “Why?”

  “Because you weren’t the only pair they made from your template, and they have another one that’s performing better,” says Erin from the doorway, wearily. Both turn to face her. She’s somehow managed to keep the blood from touching her clothing, but whatever strange technique she used wasn’t enough to keep her hands clean. They’re red from fingertips to palm.

  She looks at them with calm resignation, and says, “I wish you’d stayed together. I hate explaining this shit. Dodger. You were designed in a lab by an alchemist who thought he could follow Asphodel Baker’s instructions, harness the Doctrine of Ethos, and use it to control the universe if he put it into a pair of malleable human bodies. The earthquake was proof that the two of you could channel the Doctrine, and the separation was proof you wouldn’t. So he’s continued working with his other cuckoos, trying to find the ones who’d get him to the Impossible City and world domination. Now one of those pairs is ready to manifest the Doctrine fully, which means all the others have to die, to make absolutely sure that none of you are holding part of the Do
ctrine in abeyance and keeping it away from them.”

  Dodger frowns. “They’re treating the Doctrine of Ethos as a single divisible whole, with the theory being that if we exist, we have part of it trapped, and it can’t be unified?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so they’re planning to kill us.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do we make them stop?”

  Erin looks at her gravely, and says, “You manifest first. I think they’re wrong: I can see the universe falling into place around you, and when I see something, it’s usually true. Like calls to like. The first pair to claim the Doctrine will call the rest of it home and have dominion over the entire thing. If you manifest, it belongs to you, and they won’t be able to touch you.”

  Roger stands. “How do we do that?”

  “See, that’s the problem,” says Erin. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Glory

  TIMELINE: 17:06 PDT, JUNE 16, 2016 (THE DAY CONTINUES).

  They leave by the light of an inferno, shielded by Erin’s Hand of Glory. She washed the blood off her fingers before reaching for the matches, but the faint iron smell of it still surrounds her. She doesn’t look back. Neither does Dodger, whose life has been reduced to a single pack slung across her shoulders, to two people who walk beside her. It’s almost freeing, the knowledge that there’s nothing to go back to. Even the laptop with all her research notes is gone, sacrificed to the blaze.

  “I need to call my parents when we stop for gas,” she says, once they reach the car (sensibly parked two blocks over, in case the house was under surveillance).

  Erin shakes her head. “You can’t. They have to believe you died in the fire.”

  Dodger feels her eyes widen. “But—”

  “Your parents don’t work for the alchemist who made you, Dodger. You were a legitimate adoption. That means they’re vulnerable. If you make contact, they could wind up dealing with someone like me—someone who’s acting on orders.” There are worse things than Erin in Reed’s bag of tricks. The thought of the Cheswiches meeting Leigh is chilling. She doesn’t want Dodger to live with the knowledge that she was responsible for the death of her parents. That’s already happened too many times. It’s not necessary.

  She doesn’t think it’s necessary.

  She hopes it’s not.

  “Wait,” says Roger. “Why did you phrase it like that? That she was a ‘legitimate’ adoption. What are you saying?”

  “Only one of you was placed in a civilian household, and it’s not safe for you to contact your parents either, but for a whole different set of reasons.” Erin holds up her free hand. “Give me the car keys. The two of you need to catch up, and that’ll be easier if you’re not trying to pay attention to the road.”

  Roger and Dodger exchange a look, expressions unsure. Erin sighs.

  “I wouldn’t have saved your fucking lives if I was going to drive us off a cliff,” she says. “But you need to get tangled up in each other the way you used to be—don’t look at me like that, I was assigned to watch you, remember? I can tell when you’re sharing one head instead of living in two. You’re not supposed to be completely separate. I need you to manifest as fast as possible, and this is where it starts. With you, in the car, making it right.”

  “You keep using that word,” says Dodger. “‘Manifest.’ What do you want us to do?”

  Erin continues to hold out her hand for the keys. “I want you to do what every molecule of your bodies was designed to do. I want you to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. Once you do that, once you become the living force that holds the universe together, they won’t be able to touch you. They might try, but it isn’t going to matter, because you’re going to be more than they can handle. If you don’t manifest, that’s it: this is the end of the line. They’re going to figure out that I’ve turned, if they haven’t figured it out already, and they’re going to send someone else to clean up my mess. And if we defeat that person, they’ll send another, and another, and the whole time, they’ll be trying to force their new protégés to manifest the Doctrine. This is a race. Do you get that? This is a race, and if you lose, you die.”

  Roger and Dodger stare at her. Roger finds his voice first, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? You’ve had seven years to tell me this.”

  “I love that we live in a world where that’s the confusing part and not, I don’t know, everything else,” mutters Dodger.

  Erin ignores her. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t have to, and because I was hoping you’d decide to make things right with your sister in your own time, and because I didn’t have any way to prove it. I could do the thing with the coins, but that’s not proof; that’s a parlor trick. The whole ‘phone calls to the past’ gimmick was a Hail Mary. I didn’t know for sure that she was going to pick up until she did. Time is her thing, not yours.”

  “Wait, what?” asks Dodger.

  “Time is math made manifest in the physical world,” says Erin. “Time is your thing.”

  “What’s mine?” asks Roger.

  Erin’s smile is more a grimace, baring all her teeth. “You got everything else, and you got her. Now will you give me the damn keys and get in the car? This Hand of Glory isn’t going to last forever, and I don’t have time to make another one. Once it runs out, we’re going to be a beacon for anyone who’s looking for reality distortion. I’d rather not be here when that happens.”

  The wax of the dead woman’s hand has run down, taking her fingers with it; three of them are merely stumps, and one has guttered out completely. Her thumb still burns steadily, but it’s only a matter of time before that runs down as well. As they watch, the flame on her pointer finger goes out.

  “Here,” says Roger, tossing Erin the keys.

  She snatches them out of the air with a sarcastic “Thank you” and climbs into the driver’s seat, setting her Hand of Glory in the passenger’s place. Roger and Dodger exchange a look before getting into the back. She’s right about one thing: they need to get tangled up in each other again, the way they used to be, the way they’ve been running away from since they were children.

  Dodger waits until Erin starts the engine before asking, voice low, “Do you really think she’s telling the truth?”

  “I called you,” says Roger. “I mean, I picked up the phone and called you before the earthquake happened. I called you in the past. I talked to you. I hadn’t heard your voice in seven years, and I called you, and I talked to you.”

  “I think you also called me from an alternate timeline,” says Dodger.

  He looks at her blankly.

  “It was the day of the earthquake. I was back at the apartment, trying to figure out how much could be saved and how much I was going to leave behind—I didn’t know about Candace yet—when my phone rang, and it was you, from the future. But not this future, because this version of you wouldn’t need to say the things that version of you said. When we touch the past, we change it. We revise ourselves. And it’s not something we can take back. I can’t refuse the changes you made when you called me from the future, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I was on the verge of giving up on you until you told me not to.”

  She smiles beatifically, and Roger fights the urge to squirm. She got numbers: she got time. The one commonality in all the instances of phone calls across time is Dodger, and he knows without being told that he’d get nothing but dead air or a stranger’s voice if he tried to call his childhood home and speak to his adolescent self. Time doesn’t bend for him the way it does for her. Reality bends for him. When he asks for something, he usually gets it, because the world listens when given commands.

  Time rewrites itself, but words are what trigger the transformations in people. It’s a bigger responsibility than he could ever have asked for. “Erin, you keep saying you want us to manifest,” he says, turning toward the front seat. “Is there any way to do the opposite? Is there a way for us to refuse the Doctrine, to just give it up and let the
m have it back?”

  “You can die,” she says. “Remember what I said earlier: if you make this choice, you’re making it for both of you. You can’t survive without each other. You’re too tangled up inside.”

  Roger, remembering the seizures he experienced when Dodger attempted suicide, says nothing. Dodger, on the other hand, shakes her head.

  “We can’t give this up,” she says. “Even if that were somehow an option—and I’m glad it’s not—we can’t. Who would you even be without the words, Roger? Who would I be, if you took my numbers away? I’ve needed sleeping pills for years, because my head’s too empty. We’re not supposed to be apart. She’s right. And remember the earthquake.”

  Roger will never forget the earthquake. Part of him will be going through the earthquake forever.

  “Do you want the sort of people who would send someone like Dr. Peters to kill me to have the sort of power that it took to make the earthquake?” Dodger’s voice is earnest, accompanied by her hand, offered to him across the backseat. “They don’t deserve what we have, and we don’t deserve to die. We have to make this right.”

  “We have to try,” Roger agrees, and puts his hand in hers, skin touching skin for the first time in so damn long. Their eyes widen in tandem before they collapse in their seats, bodies going limp, heads lolling to the sides.

  Erin watches all this in the rearview mirror, waiting until she’s sure they’ve lost consciousness before she rolls her eyes and guns the engine.

  “Amateurs,” she mutters, and drives on.

  * * *

  Everything is darkness and everything is light. There is a flash of pink in the distance, at the contradictory edge between the two states, and Roger knows that he is, at least on some level, sharing headspace with Dodger: his memory of the colors he can’t normally distinguish from one another has been getting fuzzy as the years slipped by, the distinct shades beginning to blend together into something beautiful but indistinct.