Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  He turns to Dodger, putting a hand on her shoulder (red rushes back into the world, red; he can’t resist stealing a quick glance at Erin, seeing the strawberry color of her hair for the first time in years, and wishing he didn’t find it quite so beautiful) and shaking gently.

  “Hey,” he says. “Dodge. Wake up. You’ve been asleep long enough.”

  She makes a small mumbling noise and slaps at his hand.

  Roger smiles. So much has changed, about both of them. After seven years, he figures it will take a while before he feels like he knows her. But this, at least, has stayed the same. On the rare occasions when she slows down enough for sleep to catch her, she hates waking up. He shakes again.

  “Wake up,” he says. “We need to let my terrifying ex-girlfriend tell us how we’re supposed to manifest a primal force of reality before asshole alchemists set us the fuck on fire.”

  As a sentence, it shouldn’t make any sense. It does, though: he’s proud of that.

  Dodger opens her eyes. “What,” she says flatly.

  “There you are!” He shouldn’t be smiling. This isn’t the situation for smiling. He can’t help himself, because she’s awake, she’s here, and they’re talking again. They’re together again. They can figure everything out from here. “Erin, she’s awake.”

  “Fine and dandy,” says Erin. She looks at the rearview mirror, studying the cuckoos in her backseat. Dodger is groggy and disoriented; Roger is smiling like his entire world hasn’t just been turned on its head. She suspects that’s a sign of shock. None of this is real for him yet. “Dodger, where are we going?”

  “What?”

  “We’re on the improbable road, and you’re the one with the head full of numbers and the compass where your heart ought to be. Where are we going? If you give me directions, I’ll follow them.”

  Roger sits up straighter, suddenly remembering a long-ago night in the fog. One second it’s not there; the next it is, flooding his mind in living color. “You called me Jack Daw.”

  “So you remember now. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I guess we’re going to live with it either way. I called you Jackdaw because that’s what you are, and Jack Daw because that’s who you are, or who you’ll become. She”—a nod toward Dodger in the mirror—“is a Crow Girl, but she can mature into a Rook if you help her. If the Page of Frozen Waters isn’t already on her way here, she will be soon.”

  “What’s with all the Up-and-Under imagery?” asks Dodger. “We’re not six. You don’t need to turn things into a children’s book.”

  “Ah, but see, the Up-and-Under was never about the children. It was always about the symbols, and you both got them, all the way down to your bones. Bones the Page would very much like to get her hands on, by the way. She’ll fold them into herself without a moment’s hesitation, and come away even harder to destroy.” Erin pulls the car onto the shoulder of the freeway, putting on her hazard lights before she twists to face them. “You don’t want to be out in the open when she gets here, kids. She doesn’t play fair.”

  Dodger looks at her dubiously as she wipes her eyes, like the motion could somehow chase the fog of sleep away. Then she stops, blinking at her hands. Slowly, she brings them closer to her face before pulling them farther away. “Whoa.”

  “Depth perception: gotta love it,” says Erin. “Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist of her age.”

  Dodger lowers her hands. “What,” she says. There’s no question there: the word lacks emphasis, intonation, anything but a flat drop into the world.

  “She brewed miracles. She found ways to use electricity and modern methods to speed the production of gold and alkahest—she even perfected the elixir of life. She thought alchemy would bring about a paradise on earth, a world where no one would need to work, or age, or die. Everything about life would be a choice, not a predestination. A remarkable amount of her work lapsed into animism, which she thought was a vital part of the alchemical art, one that had been ignored for too long. She pointed to the existence of natural incarnate forces—Winter, Summer, the Sun and Moon, all those notable assholes—as proof that anything could be embodied, if the alchemist working the process wanted it badly enough.”

  “Natural incarnate forces?” asks Roger.

  “What,” says Dodger again, still flat, still not asking any questions: she’s protesting something unfair and untrue, and her eyes on Erin are like knives, utterly unwilling to forgive.

  Erin sighs. “We don’t have time for this. I need directions.”

  “I’m not giving them to you until you start making sense,” snaps Dodger.

  “Roger, tell her to give me the directions.” Erin switches her attention to him. “This isn’t the time for childish tantrums.”

  “Sounds like you’re about to have one.” Roger folds his arms. “Keep going.”

  This time, Erin’s sigh is deeply aggravated. “Baker spent some time trying to bring other American alchemists around to her way of thinking. She wanted them to stop warring with each other and guarding their secrets; she thought if they worked together, they’d be able to gain more ground and uncover more of the secrets of the universe. They saw this as a bid for power, since she was—at the time—the only one of them to have harnessed electricity to her whims. They were sexists and traditionalists, and they joined ranks against her. They began poaching or assassinating her students, to keep her ways of thinking from gaining too much credence with the masses. In the end, desperate, she began encoding her teachings in fiction, hiding them in plain sight.”

  “The Up-and-Under books are secretly alchemy primers?” asks Dodger.

  Erin nods. “They were intended to show the enlightened mind the way to expand its reach and grasp. The Oz books are similar. Baum was trying to suppress Baker with his own alchemical wonderland. He succeeded—his readership was wider—but he also failed.”

  Dodger stares at her for a moment before reaching for the handle on her door. “Okay, that’s it,” she says. “I’m out. If you’ll both excuse me, I need to go explain to my insurance adjusters how my house spontaneously caught fire, and why it wasn’t arson.”

  “James Reed was Baker’s final creation and only surviving apprentice. James Reed is, in an alchemical sense, your father. He used his own blood and Asphodel’s bones and the body of a living woman, and he crafted you to be his tools in the world to come.”

  Dodger stops mid-reach.

  “Reed killed his maker, but not before she finished her masterpiece. All the rules of alchemy, all the trials of the student, the process of purification and reconstitution of the universe into whatever form you chose, she preserved them in her books. And in her notes, of course. All the things she hadn’t had time to encode. Reed took those notes and continued where his master had left off. But where Baker dreamt of a world that would belong to all—an Up-and-Under, a paradise, a fairy country where no one would grow old, or get sick, or die—Reed dreamt of power. Of control. That’s why he’s been working for so long to force the Doctrine into flesh. It’s such a big concept, such a big part of the universe, that it didn’t want to come quietly. It didn’t want to come at all. He needed help. He recruited other alchemists, some through flattery, some through force. He let them work at embodying lesser ideals, to give him more and more control over the world. He’s killed and lied and stolen. You’re not the first of your flesh. He’s set Jackdaws and Crow Girls on this road before, let them get almost as far as you have, and then he’s had them killed, for one reason or another. They’ve all been imperfect. You’re imperfect. You entangled too early, and you didn’t develop exactly along the lines he had set for you. He wants you dead. He’s said so, in as many words, because your successors are ready to take the iron shoes and rainbow ribbons and wish you right the fuck out of the Up-and-Under. I don’t know how many ways I can say this. You leave, you die. You stay with me, you listen, maybe you live. Probably not. I don’t think the odds are ever going to be in our favor. But at least with me
, you get a maybe.”

  “What does any of this have to do with the Up-and-Under?” asks Roger.

  Erin groans. “Oh, God, I should have found a way to start teaching you this crap years ago. Look: when Baker created the Up-and-Under, she split it into four countries, representing the four stages of the alchemical path—novice, apprentice, journeyman, and master. Hyacinth, Meadowsweet, Aster, and Crocus. More accurately, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. They match the four Humors that control the body, and the four Temperaments that determine everything we do. For a while, this whole damn country matched her map, because she had that much power. She embodied part of the Doctrine in herself through sheer sympathy with its existence, and she got to set the definitions. When her rivals attacked her, that embodiment was the first thing they sought to undermine. They couldn’t undo it completely, not with the number of children who read and believed in her stories, but they were able to break some of the fundamental laws she’d tried to impose on the world. That’s where Baum came in. His fictional countries changed the orientations. Reversed them, cast them into alchemical flux and moved them into sympathy with Oz. The alignments have been switching uncontrollably ever since.”

  “Meaning what?” asks Roger.

  “Meaning we don’t know whether we’re currently in the master’s territory of Fire and the Choleric, or the novice’s territory of Water and the Phlegmatic. And that makes all the difference in the goddamn world if we’re trying to beat a hundred-year-old alchemist at his own game!” Erin’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes are overly bright.

  Roger and Dodger stare at her, united in their dismay. Finally, Dodger asks, “Why should we believe you?”

  “Aren’t you the one who said she talked to her own past?” counters Erin. “You should believe me because if I’m lying, you’re losing your mind. That’s a genuine concern of yours, isn’t it? Little number girl who’s never been able to figure out how humans work, who hears the voice of her brother in her head when she’s scared or lonely. Are you even sure he exists? Maybe he’s something you made up.”

  For the first time, Dodger looks alarmed. “Of course he’s real. He’s right here.”

  “So am I, but you seem awfully eager to dismiss everything I’m saying, even though it answers the questions you’ve been asking your entire life,” says Erin. “Baker was an alchemist. Reed follows her teachings, in a twisted way. You’re the product of an alchemist’s desire to control reality, and while I realize this is a lot to dump on you all at once, all you have to do is think about what I’m saying and you’ll understand how true it is. It’s a single equation that explains your entire life. If you don’t want to accept it, there’s not much I can do for you.”

  Dodger stares at her. Erin glares back.

  Dodger is the first to look away.

  “If we’re going to fight them—and we’re going to fight them; we don’t have a choice, unless the two of you want to roll over, show your bellies, and die the sort of death I wouldn’t wish on a dog—we need to figure out whether we’re in Hyacinth or Crocus. There isn’t time to get to one of the stable countries, and the Impossible City is out of the question.”

  “Why?” asks Roger.

  The look Erin gives him is one he remembers all too well from his childhood, when adults accustomed to dealing with a smart kid would be disappointed by his occasional flashes of childish ignorance, like the word “prodigy” was supposed to have been somehow accompanied by a direct download of the encyclopedia into his brain. His cheeks flare with the ghosts of old embarrassments.

  “The Impossible City is Reed’s territory, even if he’s never been inside; he controls the walls,” she says, words slow and careful. “We’re not ready to take it yet. Maybe we never will be. They say you’re going to manifest if you’re not stopped, and I’m banking on that, but that doesn’t mean I know what it means. No one does. Maybe you’ll just become too troublesome to kill, without actually having the power it would take to stop the greatest alchemist of his age. You could be the new Stormcrows, living in exile while you wait for the King of Cups to weaken enough for you to take him down. There’s only one way to find out, so if we could stop fucking around and get moving, I’d be awfully grateful.”

  “What do we have to do?” asks Roger. He can see that Dodger will be a while in coping with this information. It’s all words, all piled on top of each other: there’s no clear equation for her to complete. This is on him.

  Erin shakes her head. “We need to hide. We need to figure out where we’re going. We need to get there. You need to manifest, and you need to do it fast.”

  “You keep saying that but not saying what it means. What do you want us to do?”

  “I think the closest you’ve come to manifestation was the earthquake. God, the earthquake.” Erin looks wistful as she focuses on Roger, like she’s thinking about good cake or better sex. “I knew it was coming because it’s happened before. There was so much scar tissue around that moment that the air was like molasses. If you’d kept going, if you’d continued to tell her what to do and she’d continued to feed back the numbers … you could have manifested right then and there. I still don’t know why you never do.”

  “You can feel the timeline changes?” Dodger shoves her way back into the conversation—literally. She plants one hand on Roger’s chest, pushing him aside to get closer to Erin. “How? Why? I can’t feel them.”

  Roger says nothing. He’s too busy staring at the world around him, at the colors that intensified by a factor of ten as soon as she touched him. So many words make sense when things look like this. Color is a kind of magic. He hopes people who have it understand that, and don’t take it for granted.

  “Of course not. You cause them.” Erin looks levelly at Dodger. “Every time the timeline has changed, it’s been because your brother told you to make the old world go away. You’re a thermonuclear device on two legs. You’re the flash flood that sweeps people into the Up-and-Under. But him? He’s your trigger. You can’t do most of the things you’re capable of without someone to set you off.”

  Dodger blinks, taken aback. “That’s a little misogynistic.”

  “Reed didn’t pick which of you got which half of the Doctrine: you did that yourselves, while you were incubating. Don’t ask me how fetuses pick anything. You were little science projects with the same genes, only one chromosome apart, and you decided how those genes would manifest. Firstborn gets language, second gets math. Second also gets all the recessives turned on, because the math kids are the expendable ones: they get to be targets all their lives. As long as there’s breath in a math kid’s body, the language kids can order them to reset the timeline to a point before shit got bad. Of the pairs I know of, it was split about fifty-fifty which kid got language and which got math.” Erin never met any of the other incarnate Doctrines: they were given into the care of other handlers, when they were allowed outside the confines of the lab in the first place. She’s grateful for that, in an abstract sort of way. Just this once, in her entire life, she’s pulled the good card. She got the pair who might make it out alive.

  “I think I’ve seen this movie,” says Roger. “I make a lousy Aladdin.”

  “Oh, you’ve got your share of party tricks. When you’re fully manifest, no one will be able to go against you. If you ask for something, you’ll get it. You could rule the world if you wanted to. That’s part of why it was so important that I stay with you, guide you toward academia, let you embrace your love of dead languages and not being an asshole. I didn’t switch sides just to replace the old bastard with a new bastard.”

  Both of them are gaping at her now.

  “I know this is a lot.”

  “You think?” demands Dodger.

  “I know it’s hard to take in.”

  Roger snorts.

  “But we’re out of time. We need to hide, and we need to figure out our next move, and the two of you need to decide whether you’re going to believe me, or whether you’re goin
g to die. Choose, because you’re not getting a third option.”

  Roger and Dodger exchange a look. It’s still uneasy, the space they make between them, packed with the ghosts of seven years and the shaking of the ground beneath their feet. Dodger finally appears to realize that she’s touching him; she yelps and pulls away, back to her half of the backseat. Some wounds don’t heal in an instant. Some wounds don’t heal at all.

  Erin hopes this one isn’t that kind of wound. If it is, they’re all doomed. She twists back around, puts the car back into gear, and pulls off the shoulder. “Tell me where to go.”

  “Uh,” says Dodger. “Left?”

  “Roger? Activate her.” This is it: this is the real test of how much attention they’ve been paying, how willing they are to follow her under the undertow and into the Up-and-Under. She’s no Niamh, no daughter of the sea, but she’s the best guide they’re going to get, and she’s betting more than they can know on what’s about to happen.

  “Don’t you dare,” says Dodger.

  “I’m sorry,” says Roger. He sounds like he genuinely means it, which makes it worse, somehow, when he continues: “Dodger, tell us where to go.”

  The air in the car changes, becoming thick and electric. It’s like the charge they made between them when they summoned the earthquake, but subtly different: it’s brighter, cleaner, more aware of itself. Dodger sits up straight, eyes going wide and glassy for a count of ten. Roger isn’t even sure she’s breathing. She looks like she’s somewhere else, somewhere better.

  When she blinks, crashing back into the present, he feels almost bad for her. Then she shoots a glare in his direction, poisonously mad, and his feelings shift into an odd mixture of self-pity and guilt. He didn’t know it would work. He hadn’t been sure. How can she blame him when he wasn’t sure?

  “Dodge—” he begins.

  She cuts him off. “Take the next exit, and turn left at the bottom of the off-ramp,” she says. “We need to leave the car.”

  Erin smiles to herself and hits the gas.