Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Opened 1896, burned to the ground 1966. Arson. Edison made two films there. They were considered a miracle of modern engineering, electricity … people. So many people. Divide by the number of people, subtract the deaths by water, add babies conceived on the grounds behind the maintenance shed, where no one was looking … yes.” Dodger is nodding, slow at first, but gaining speed. “Yes, the math works. The Sutro Baths were the center of this quadrant. They still are. When Reed’s people burned them, they didn’t move the capital, because they didn’t want things to stay anchored.”

  “Can’t take the Impossible City until you take everything else,” says Erin. “How far?”

  “Not far,” says Dodger, and slings her leg over her bike. “Let’s end this.”

  The sun won’t be up for another half hour. Only the moon watches them go.

  Water

  TIMELINE: 6:04 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (IT GOES ON AND ON).

  The air off the Pacific is freezing, and there is no coastline: there is only fog, all-encompassing, all-devouring. None of them are dressed for this. They shiver uncontrollably as they ride down the final short slope to the cliff’s edge, looking out on the remains of the Sutro Baths.

  There’s something timeless about the ruins, something ancient about the great concrete blocks that jut from the sounding sea, the long, smooth foundations being beaten by the waves. The tide is low enough that the shape of the structure is clear, even if there is no obvious way—no marked way—down to its beginning. Signs posted by the state warn against urban exploration, threaten with legal action or death by water for those foolish souls who choose to go any closer, to look any deeper than they can from the safety of the shore.

  “Can you get us there?” Roger asks, looking to Erin.

  And Erin, who sees the weak points in the world—the chaotic places, the things that are getting ready to give way, like the loose earth of a foot trail down a sheer cliff face—nods.

  They descend in a line, Erin first, Dodger behind her where her still-developing depth perception won’t be a danger, Roger in the rear, ready to grab and steady should either of them slip or, worse, fall. The cliff is steep and unforgiving, even though the distance to the concrete foundations is not so great. This was never intended to be climbed on foot, not by God, not by man, and not by the alchemy that arranged for the Baths to burn to the ground.

  (In Fremont, three homeless teens are watched by a nameless alchemist whose planchette insists they’re the cuckoos he’s been seeking. None of these children stand upon the improbable road. He knows that as surely as he knows Leigh would kill them for wasting her time. When he calls in, it’s to say the tickets rode alone, no human hands to hold them, and that their targets are not here.)

  (A bus bound for Reno is pulled over by a state patrolman who has driven this stretch of road, under a variety of identities, for over sixty years. Immortality does not carry with it the skills to change professions, and owing that immortality to a man like James Reed does not leave many opportunities for study or learning a new trade. The three men sleeping at the back with tickets that resonate as someone else’s are left to slumber without incident.)

  (There is value in the loyalty of subordinates. There is mercy in their betrayals.)

  They descend by inches, by feet, by years. The air goes flat around them, losing the resonance of the wind, even as it continues to grow colder. At the same time, the cold loses its power. Roger and Dodger walk straighter, stand taller. Only Erin shivers, and when she looks back at them, she can barely focus on their faces. They don’t have individual features. They are one and they are neither, and they are so close to one of the focal points of the world that there is no difference between those two ideals.

  The door is gone. The stairs are gone. There is only the foundation, gray and cold and blackened in places where the fire had its way. Erin steps aside when she reaches the first of the great implacable stones. Dodger steps forward, head cocked, looking at the structure like she can see it as it was meant to be. And she is Time and she is Math and maybe she can; maybe she sees what was, instead of what truly, terribly is.

  “The blueprints would have put one of the stairways here,” she says, and takes a step into empty air. She does not fall: logic has been suspended. Instead, she shifts her weight onto a step that isn’t there, a step that glimmers mercury silver and purified gold in the shivering sea air. She takes another step, and another, and the steps remain sketched spectral and true behind her.

  Roger and Erin exchange a look. Roger speaks first.

  “Dodger seems to be walking into a building that doesn’t exist.”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “The building isn’t there.”

  “Nope.”

  “But she’s going up the stairs anyway. The stairs that aren’t there either.”

  “Yup.”

  “Can we walk into the building that doesn’t exist?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Roger turns to look at the glimmering ghost of the stairs, and says, with a firm certainty, “The stairs are there. The stairs are real. The stairs will support our weight without dropping us into the ocean to drown or die of hypothermia.”

  The glimmering stairs lose some of their shine, silver and gold replaced by half-visible concrete, like they’re becoming solid again; like he’s called them back into the world. Roger takes his first cautious step. As with Dodger, the steps hold him; there is no give to whatever he stands upon, whatever he’s called more truly into being.

  His sister is almost to the top. He hurries after her, and Erin brings up the rear, and all is silence, save for the beating of the sea against the shore.

  * * *

  The stairs end abruptly. Dodger puts out a foot, testing the air, and there’s nothing there: only emptiness, and the fall that waits beyond it, looking for another body to claim. She pulls her foot back, balanced on the thin ribbon of almost that has carried her this far, and looks over her shoulder to where Roger is hurrying up behind her.

  “There aren’t any more stairs,” she reports.

  “What comes after stairs?” He stops on the step below hers, putting his hands on her shoulders. Color blossoms back into his world, deep and bright and limitless. “Look for it.”

  Dodger turns back to the empty air in front of her, looking at it with new eyes—eyes that see how far it is to the horizon, that can trace and factor every line. She blinks once, hard, and says, “This is where the landing was, where they moved into the body of the Baths. There would have been a short entryway, to keep the saltwater from getting inside, and then the door. The door would have been right here.”

  She steps forward, into the empty air, already reaching for the doorknob. Roger starts to tighten his grip on her shoulders, certain that she’s going to fall … then he stops, and lets her go. They’ve already come so far, done so many things that shouldn’t have been possible. What’s one more? So he lets her go, and trusts the air to hold her.

  Dodger doesn’t fall.

  Her hand finds the doorknob where there is no doorknob, and the door blossoms into being around it, spiraling out in a fractal bloom that grows almost too fast to follow, meeting up with the blooming patches of solidity spreading outward from her feet, drawing a floor to hold her and walls to justify its existence. They start glimmering and thin, mercury and gold, before the gray and brown race in, sketching them into real things, solid things. She opens the door. She steps through. Roger follows, and Erin follows him, and all of them stand there, breathless and unbelieving, as the fractals rush ever outward, drawing walls, windows, deep bathing pools. Re-creating the past.

  “Whoa,” says Dodger.

  “Ditto,” says Roger.

  “Fucking finally,” says Erin. She moves past them and the floor beneath her feet is solid; they have called this place far enough back into being that it can support her. She looks around as she walks, taking the measure of her surroundings. “We’re going to
need to find a place where you can work. I don’t know what manifestation entails, but if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it here—and you need to do it fast.”

  “Why?” asks Dodger. She doesn’t take her eyes off the ceiling, a domed lattice of glass and steel and electric lights that are beginning to flicker on, one after another, pulling on a grid that isn’t real to activate circuits that no longer exist. They are standing inside a ghost. The weight of it hits her like a blow. They are standing inside a ghost, something she called back into being and Roger turned solid around them. This can’t be happening. This is happening.

  “Because something this big is going to be like a goddamn signal fire to the people looking for us. You bought the time to get us here. Now you need to make it count for something.” Erin’s face is grim. “You need to make it matter, or all this was for nothing.”

  Fire

  TIMELINE: 6:14 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (THIS DAY).

  Leigh Barrow is on the phone with James Reed when Dodger steps into the air above what used to be the foundations of the Sutro Baths. Leigh stops mid-word, mouth going slack, eyes fixing on the horizon, where a beam of golden light illuminates the sky. It looks like a castle spire, like a tower, like a beanstalk stretching up toward some distant country in the sky. She hates it. She hates it like fire. She would tear it down with her bare hands if she could.

  Reed is shouting. She snaps out of her fugue, bringing the phone back to her ear.

  “The sky just turned gold,” she says, ignoring whatever he’s trying to tell her. Either it’s about the manifestation, in which case she knows better than he does what’s going on, or it’s not, in which case it doesn’t matter anymore. The cuckoos have found their way to the castle. It’s not the Impossible City, but it might as well be, because like calls to like, and where they are, where they’re standing, they have access to everything the Queen of Wands—everything Baker—ever knew. “They’ve found the capital. They’ve started. Reed, I know you hate to share, but you need to tell me where to go, and you need to tell me right now.”

  Silence, punctuated by heavy breathing. Then: “You forget your place, Leigh.”

  “My place is by your side in the new world, doing the things you don’t want to do, killing the people you don’t want to kill. Your hands have always been too clean. If you want that new world to happen, instead of just being a cute idea you used to talk about before you let two fucking cuckoos seize the Doctrine, this is where you tell me where to go.”

  “I could have unmade you the moment you fell into my hands.”

  “Sure. But you didn’t. You knew what I could do for you, and kept me as I am instead of breaking me down for parts. Right here, right now, I am what you have on the ground; I am what you have that’s capable of stopping these wayward children. Tell me where to go.”

  Reed’s sigh is deep and tired. He’s never allowed himself to sound that weary in her presence before. Leigh hears her death in that exhalation. She has proven too difficult. When she returns to Ohio, he’s going to have her killed.

  You’ll have to see me before I see you, old man, she thinks. The Doctrine is still there for the taking, embodied in those skinny teenagers he has captive at the lab. She can control the forces of an unthinking universe just as well as he can, and her reign will be a lot more fun. Blood will fall from the sky; seas will burn; bodies will litter the streets.

  So much more fun.

  “Baker anchored California around the Sutro Baths,” he says. “She thought the damned things were an architectural miracle, a temple to the idea of water that would never fail, never fall, never lose its luster. She tied the country she was trying to create to a bathhouse. I only wish she could have seen the damn place burn.”

  “Got it,” says Leigh. She moves to hang up, and is stopped by Reed’s voice.

  “Leigh.”

  “Yes?”

  “Bring me their bodies. I want to take them apart.”

  “Can I have the heads?” she asks lightly, even though she knows she’ll never receive anything from James Reed again, save perhaps for a knife between the ribs and a bullet to the heart. Killing her will be difficult, but she’s sure he’ll be willing to put the effort in.

  “Of course.”

  “Then of course. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to save the world.” She hangs up her phone. After a moment’s consideration, she drops it to the street and grinds it beneath her heel, shattering the screen, destroying the delicate internal circuitry.

  “Oops,” she says.

  The nameless alchemist has returned from his attempts to run down the misleading BART tickets (and she knows he found their holders, and let them live; under the circumstances, she has better things to concern herself with). Leigh walks to his car, opens the passenger-side door, and climbs in.

  “Can you see that?” she asks, pointing to the column of golden light in the sky.

  He follows her finger. His eyes widen. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

  “The Sutro Baths, and that’s where we’re going. You’d better floor it,” she says, voice serene. “We’ve got some cuckoos to kill.”

  * * *

  Commuter traffic is just starting to get under way, but they’re a “high-occupancy vehicle”; they qualify for the carpool lane. Between that, some impressively defensive driving, and a glorious willingness to violate traffic laws, it’s a little over an hour before they’re pulling up to what the GPS claims will be the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

  There are no ruins here. There is only a dome of glass and steel glittering in the sunrise, lit from within by electric bulbs and lit from without by the entire sky. The structure glows with mercury light. It will be visible to alchemists for a hundred miles, a bright and welcoming beacon telling them that all is forgiven, that Baker’s dream has endured.

  Leigh hates it as she’s hated little else in her life. She climbs out of the car, producing two pistols from inside her jacket and holding them low against her thighs, where they’re less likely to be seen by passersby. She doesn’t expect that to be a problem. Something like this—the reappearance of a historical landmark, the discoloration of the entire horizon—should have attracted dozens of onlookers by now. Since that hasn’t happened, she assumes the working in progress shares some aspects of its function with the Hand of Glory. No one is here because no one can see what’s happening. No one who isn’t already a part of this fight.

  “Kill anything inside that moves and isn’t me,” says Leigh, looking to the nameless alchemist. “There may be a little strawberry blonde with a trustworthy face. I’d prefer to kill her myself. I understand that may not be possible. If it’s not, make sure it hurts when you take her down. Make sure she suffers. All right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says the alchemist.

  “Good boy. Maybe I won’t kill you after all.”

  There’s no need for them to walk down the cliff: the Baths are back, fully material, glittering in the sunlight. Leigh Barrow walks straight through the front door.

  Concrete

  TIMELINE: 7:35 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (AND ON).

  There isn’t time to explore the Baths, much as each of them would like to, for their own reasons. Roger is enchanted by the history of the place, by the idea that they’ve somehow turned word into deed into material reality. Dodger can’t take her eyes off the angles, the mathematical perfection of the construction, the concrete glory of math become clear and present all around them. Erin simply wants to know the best places to hide when Leigh arrives—because Leigh is going to arrive. This is why they don’t have any time (there was never enough time).

  Dodger leads them through the Baths, eyes half-closed and one hand held in front of her like a dowser looking for water. The others follow, saying nothing. Distracting her would cost time (there is never enough time).

  They walk through vast chambers filled with empty pools, into a long, L-shaped room. The furniture flickers in and out of being, not quite stable; it a
ppeared to have been a sitting room, once upon a time. Vast windows look out on the Pacific, watching the water beat against the rocks. Dodger stops. Roger and Erin stop in turn, watching her.

  “Here,” she says, and heads for the wall, ripping at the wallpaper. It comes away easily, in sheets, weakened by the sea air and by its own unreality. This is a thing that burned years ago. Of course it’s malleable now.

  Roger takes a step toward her, to join her, and stops a second time when Erin catches his elbow. He looks back to find her watching him gravely.

  “If this gets bad, you need to tell her to take you back,” she says. “She won’t be able to refuse. Tell her it’s an order. Tell her it’s a command. Tell her it’s an adjuration. She’ll do it, and if you word it just like that, you may take something back with you that helps us next time.”

  “How do you—”

  “Because you told me.” Her smile is more of a pained grimace. “Order, remember? I see the frayed and broken spaces. I see the scars. Both of you get to be ignorant of how long we’ve been doing this, but I don’t. I don’t have to remember everything, thank God. I think I’d kill you both, and stop this, if I did. I still get more than you do. And sometimes you tell me, explicitly, to remember things for the next time.”

  “Like what?”

  Her smile fades. “Don’t ask me that, Roger. You’ve signed off on things you don’t want to know about. Dodger’s the chess player, but you’re the one who’s said ‘this is a sacrifice for the greater good.’ If I tell you what you’ve told me not to change, you’re going to remember, and you’re going to hate yourself. So don’t ask me. For your sake. For her sake. Let it go.”

  Roger looks at her in silence for a moment before he glances toward Dodger. “How bad?” he asks.

  “Bad enough.”