Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  * * *

  They leave the car in a Fremont Park-and-Ride, stuffing bills into the machine until it produces a parking ticket good for twenty-four hours. Dodger snatches it from Erin’s hand, darting off into the maze of vehicles and returning a few minutes later with a different ticket clutched in her hand. This one is good for only eight hours. She sticks it to the windshield, glancing at Erin and saying, “Anyone who looks at this car will think it’s been here for more than half the day already. It can’t be how we got here.”

  She’s not just describing physical concepts anymore, although she may not realize that: she’s in shock. They both are. This is the sort of thing that should be presented gradually, a little bit at a time, easing the subjects into their new reality. Instead, Erin has shoved them into the deep end of the pool and is counting on them to figure out how to swim.

  And they are. Dodger is right about the tag, about the car. There are ways for someone like Leigh to track them to this parking lot, even after they leave the vehicle behind. The Hand of Glory guttered out somewhere on the freeway, leaving them visible to both mundane and metaphysical surveillance. They’re going to be found. But when Leigh gets here, she’ll find a trail that’s been cold for sixteen hours, because all that time has been shunted somewhere else. All that time has been moved.

  Dodger doesn’t know what she’s doing. That isn’t going to stop her from doing it. Once they get moving, the children of the improbable road act on instinct, and their instincts are rarely wrong.

  “All right,” says Erin. “Let’s go. We need to figure out where we are, and then we need to get wherever it is we’re going.”

  They’re in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area; all of them know that, and all of them know it doesn’t matter. Where they really are is the Up-and-Under, and in the Up-and-Under, sometimes the hardest thing to find is the road that takes you home.

  The woman was impossibly beautiful. She looked like sunshine on a Saturday, like chocolate cake and afternoons with no homework. She had a smile like a mother’s praise, all sugar and softness, and Zib stared at her, wanting nothing more than to throw herself into those welcoming, unfamiliar arms.

  If you trust her, you’ll never get home, whispered a voice in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded so much like the Crow Girl that Zib nearly looked over her shoulder to see if she’d been followed. That was silly. The Crow Girl was with Avery, looking for a lock to fit their skeleton key. Avery couldn’t be left alone. He was delicate.

  Zib had never been allowed to be delicate. From the day she was born, she had been told to be tough, to be bold, to pick herself up and dust herself off and keep running. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, to be allowed to fall down and stay fallen.

  “Hello, little girl,” said the incredible woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Zib,” said Zib.

  “They call me the Queen of Swords. I would very much like to be your friend…”

  —From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

  BOOK VI

  Up-and-Under

  Forgive me, my children, but I will never know you.

  —A. Deborah Baker

  I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

  —Edgar Allen Poe

  Coal Dust

  TIMELINE: 00:01 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (AT LAST, A NEW DAY).

  Midnight greets Leigh Barrow as she steps off the plane and onto Californian earth for the first time. (But not for the first time, never for the first time; there are so few first times for someone like her, a mosaic, a palimpsest of a woman; there are too many souls woven into the depths of her. Somewhere deep, a woman she once was rolls over and cries in restless slumber, remembering the scent of eucalyptus on the wind, the taste of sea air, the cries of the gulls that flew, white-winged and bright, above the California coast.)

  She shivers away the feeling of the ghosts at her foundation stirring and strides toward the car sent to do her bidding. The man behind the wheel is an alchemist, a student of Reed’s art who realized long ago that his survival would be more certain if he was well outside his master’s ever-questing grasp. The other man, the one who opens the door for her without a word, is a construct, mud and frogs and clever science. Leigh spares a smile for him, poisonous and sweet.

  “How long ago did you make him?” she asks, once she’s settled in the backseat, belt buckled across her waist, pistol resting in her lap. On the tarmac, the private jet which brought her here is taxiing away, heading toward the hangar where it will wait for her return.

  “Six years, ma’am.”

  “Clay, native amphibians, and…?”

  “Railway iron, ma’am. Stolen from the tracks. I had to trade any chance of speech for the additional resilience, but you could hit him with a bus and he wouldn’t notice.”

  “Hmmm,” says Leigh speculatively. The massive construct gets into the front passenger seat, not bothering with his own seatbelt; it wouldn’t stretch across the barreled expanse of his chest. “We’ll have to see about that.”

  The alchemist behind the wheel goes as silent as his construct. No one who works with or for James Reed doesn’t know about Leigh Barrow: where he found her, what she is. For a manikin to outlive their creator … it requires an immense amount of power.

  “Have you found them?” The question is asked lightly, almost sweetly. In that moment, Leigh could have been anyone, harmless and looking for her friends.

  “No, ma’am,” he says.

  “Why not?” The moment has passed. Her voice is a promise of pain unavoidable, and his hands clench on the wheel.

  He knew when Reed called that he probably wouldn’t survive the night. He had no way to refuse. Until this moment, he was still holding on to hope. Hope is gone now; hope has fled.

  “They left their car. I can take you there.”

  “Do that,” she says, leaning back in the seat. “And drive quickly. I’m not feeling patient tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Clyde?”

  The construct opens the glove compartment and withdraws a Hand of Glory. This one is very small. The owner, when living, couldn’t have been more than six years old. Leigh doesn’t comment. The refusal of some people to use Hands of Glory made from children has never made sense to her; a murdered child will not magically be un-murdered if you refuse to exploit the resources they’ve left behind. Meat is meat. Meat exists to be used, and anyone who thinks differently is deluding themselves about their place in the world.

  The construct lights the Hand. The car fills with the sweet smell of wax and burning flesh. Leigh breathes deeply, and the nameless alchemist hits the gas, accelerating beyond the speed limit, hidden from the watchful eyes of the police, as he drives toward the illusion of salvation.

  * * *

  It takes less than thirty minutes to travel between the private airfield and the lot where Erin’s car is hidden. Leigh steps onto the sidewalk and looks dismissively around. This is a small town aspiring to become a city, still connected to the people who forged it; they no doubt remember the names of their founders, celebrating them every year, as if creating a settlement were something special and unique, and not the human urge to propagate writ large. Better to celebrate the people who came after the sweet rush of newness, the ones who fought their way through floods and famine to build a functioning municipality, an infrastructure worth sustaining. Better to support the ones who fought and died in the name of something that would never be theirs, would always belong to some sainted, long-dead founder.

  The Up-and-Under belongs to the Averys and Hepzibahs, but it’s the Queens of Wands who will be remembered. It’s not fair. That’s how it goes.

  Leigh walks away without looking back; doesn’t see the still-nameless alchemist heave a sigh of relief. He’s a boy who imagines himself a man. He’ll be dead before morning. She knows herself and knows what this search will require in the way of alchemy, of science, of murder. His heart will fuel a tracking tinct
ure, his hands form the cloaking devices to keep her from being seen. He is, at his core, expendable, and she doesn’t have the time or energy to spare in making him aware of that fact. Instead, she walks, steps quick and fleet as a hunting hound’s, nose turned to the wind, looking for traces of alchemy. Like speaks to like, and Leigh Barrow is a woman made of many women, bone and feather and soil. She can no more overlook the signs of a working than she can grow wings and fly, the crow beating in her breast notwithstanding. She weaves between the cars, and she never stops, and she never looks back.

  The air cools as she approaches a green Honda. She steps closer, and the scent of wax caresses her nostrils, identifying her target. That doesn’t explain the coolness: the coolness is something she’s never felt before. It’s as if the behavior of the air has changed, the molecules slowing down, losing some of their excitement.

  The doors are locked. That’s never been a problem for her. One quick application of her elbow later, the window is shattered and she’s letting herself into the car, where the air is even colder. A great working has happened here, a working she doesn’t know or recognize. The thought is chilling in a way the air is not. If they’re beginning to manifest, if that bitch Erin has found a way to coax them toward their destiny …

  (Will they be tame creatures, under her control? Will Erin find a way to reduce phoenixes to firebirds, turning burning things into something manageable, something that wants to be commanded? Or will they blaze out of proportion to the fuel available, igniting and destroying the world? Leigh won’t lie, not even to herself: the thought is beguiling, attractive in a way almost strong enough to overcome her lingering loyalty to the man who holds her reins.)

  She shakes herself as brutally as a hound shakes a rat, chasing the too-tempting, too-terrible thought away, and bends to pluck the discarded Hand of Glory from the footwell. The wax is still soft and malleable; the fire can’t have burnt down more than a few hours ago. Reaching into her pocket, she produces a handful of coal dust streaked with glints of silver. The coal came from a mine where a disaster claimed the life of over a hundred men; the silver, melted down from the jewelry of a woman whose husband had choked the life from her body before bedding his mistress in her marital bed. It’s a subtle, complex thing, is alchemy. Reed isn’t half the alchemist Baker was, but he’s smart enough to know when he should give his employees their freedom. Leigh’s art was refined under the tutelage of the man who made her, a man who recognized that the aspects of alchemy belonging to the dead were best practiced by the dead themselves. It wasn’t until that man died (she will not even think his name) and her leash was pressed into Reed’s hand that she began to flourish. Where the dead are, so is she, and where she is, she can work miracles.

  She spreads the dust thinly across her palm, purses her lips, and whistles five notes of a threnody written to honor the death of Abraham Lincoln. The coal dust moves; the silver does not. Leigh frowns. According to the candle, the car has been here less than an hour. According to the humors of the air around it, the car has been here all night and for the better part of a day, drinking in sunlight and moonlight alike, growing ripe with potential. The contradiction shouldn’t be possible.

  But there is a chill in the air, and the Doctrine is half made of time. Leigh’s hand snaps shut, nails digging into her skin until it splits, allowing dark, sluggish blood to seep forth. The smell is sweet, like decaying meat.

  They’re manifesting.

  When she climbs out of the car some five minutes later, her face is smooth, her shoulders relaxed; her hands dangle by her sides, fingers pointed daintily downward, betraying none of her dismay. She walks back through the maze of cars to her ride. The construct stands outside his vehicle, keeping watch, guarding against the dangers of the night. She knows herself for the greatest of those dangers, and she smiles without pleasure at the thought.

  The alchemist rolls down his window when she gestures for him to do so. “Ma’am?”

  “They were here. Now they’re not. They have no car. What are their transit options at this hour of the night? Don’t gawp at me, we don’t have time. Where could they go?”

  “The trains aren’t running. Not for another three hours. They’d have to either steal a car or find something that stays open all night.”

  Leigh has monitored the missing cuckoos since the cradle. Dodger doesn’t drive: Roger does, but can hardly be considered mechanically inclined. Her smile is a terrible thing. “Good,” she says. “Then they’re stuck, and we can move them.”

  The alchemist says nothing.

  Up All Night

  TIMELINE: 00:01 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (TIME PROCEEDS).

  As Leigh Barrow’s plane taxis to a stop on the runway, Dodger walks briskly down a sidewalk, with Erin and Roger in close pursuit. The bag holding everything she has left in the world is slung across her shoulders, both too heavy and too light for her to bear. How can it be everything when it’s so small? How can her life, her world, be compacted into something she can carry without trouble, lift without strain?

  It’s the sort of thought that can drive a person mad. She shunts it to the side, focusing on the task at hand. “BART doesn’t start running until four, and there’s no all-night bus in Fremont,” she says, not slowing, not looking back. “We don’t have a car, and I at least don’t know how to steal one. Erin?”

  “What, because I’m an arsonist I must also be a car thief? No. I can’t help you there.”

  “Maybe you should have spent more time picking up useful skills and less time fucking my brother,” says Dodger. “I don’t know where we’re supposed to be, but I know we’re not supposed to be here. Can either of you ride a bicycle?”

  “No, and right now, you shouldn’t be riding one either,” says Roger.

  Still she doesn’t turn. “Why’s that?”

  “Because your hair is red,” he says.

  That stops her. She twists around, frowning in his direction. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “If I’m getting the color of your hair, you’re probably getting depth perception through your own eyes for the first time in your life,” he says. “I’d crash the first time I saw an orange cat. You wouldn’t even get that far. You’d get distracted by the shadows on a curb and ram yourself into a plate glass window. Honestly, I’m amazed you can walk.”

  “You’ll both adjust, given time, assuming you have any, which is why it’s so important you stop screwing around and manifest,” says Erin sharply. “Dodger. You need to get us someplace safe. Unless you think what we’re looking for is in Fremont?”

  “I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” she says. “You haven’t told us. You’ve spouted a lot of crap about the Up-and-Under and A. Deborah Baker and killer death alchemists, but you haven’t followed it up with ‘and we just need to find the magic Denny’s where they sell the coffee of conjuring and everything will be hunky-dory.’ It’s like playing D&D with an unprepared dungeon master. You’re the one who knows the rules to this bullshit game.”

  Erin blinks. “Good call,” she says. “I think it’s about a half mile that way.” She points, as both Roger and Dodger stare at her.

  “What is?” Roger asks, after a moment’s bewildered silence.

  Erin grins. “The Denny’s. Come on.”

  * * *

  Three creations of terrible alchemy sit crammed into a booth in the all-night Denny’s, pressed against the red vinyl seats, looking at their menus. “Maybe it’s a sign that this has all been too much for me, but pancakes sound really good right about now,” says Roger.

  “Get whatever you want. Just keep in mind that we can’t use credit cards,” says Erin. “I have plenty of cash.”

  “Maybe don’t say that so loud?” Dodger glances nervously around. “Some of the people in here look like they’d mug their mothers for fun.”

  “I’d like to see them try.” Erin’s grin is feral. “Remember: you were made to control the universe, and I was made to
make sure you’d get that far. I’d love a good, easy mugging right about now.”

  “Are you sure you should be mentioning the ‘control the universe’ thing in here?” asks Roger.

  “People don’t listen,” says Erin. “Everyone thinks of themselves as so important, so integral to the human condition, that someone must be hanging on their every word, but that’s not true. It never has been. Maybe when there’s a witch trial on, I guess. No one’s listening to us. Which is sort of funny when you consider how important the two of you are. No. We need to hide, we need to lay low, and part of that is being completely natural and open about everything. It keeps people from looking at us too hard. No one with anything to lose would be sitting in Denny’s after midnight, eating pancakes.”

  “This is so weird,” says Dodger.

  “Isn’t it great?” Erin smiles again—more normally this time, lips drawn tight over teeth—and goes back to looking at her menu. “I think I’m going to have a milkshake.”

  Dodger’s phone rings.

  All three of them go silent, turning to look at her backpack as if it’s suddenly revealed itself to be full of venomous snakes. The phone continues ringing. In a light, pleasant tone laced with menace, Erin asks, “What part of ‘we’re trying to lay low’ means ‘leave your phone on’? If there’s a GPS locator in there, I may as well kill you both and hope Reed will believe me when I tell him that this was a long game to let me determine how close to manifestation you were.”

  “I did turn it off,” protests Dodger, rummaging through the backpack until she comes up with the small box of her cellphone. The screen is blank. She rummages deeper, and produces the battery, which she slides across the table to Erin. “See? I took the fucking battery out.”

  The phone is still ringing. Roger looks at it nervously. “When did you get a fancy battery-free phone?”