Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Hey, Erin, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “When we get out of here, I’m going to take you someplace so swank it doesn’t seem real. Like Disneyland.”

  “I believe you.”

  She did. She does. If Darren were here, if Roger could call him back from dust and bones the way she’d been called back from the sea, he would untie her and take her someplace so swank it wouldn’t seem real. He always kept his promises, right up until he promised never to leave her. But that was a foolish promise, wasn’t it? He should have known better. They both should have known better.

  The children made here never know better. She’s banking on that.

  As she has since she was left here, alone, tied up tight as a Thanksgiving turkey, she scans the air, looking for patches of chaos. Air in an enclosed system like this one will always trend toward order, becoming invisible to her. Storm cells are an impossible, painful beauty reserved for the world above.

  This time, her patience is rewarded. There’s a patch of chaos toward the center of the room, a place where the air has been thrown somehow into disarray, even though there should be nothing there. “I see you,” she says, in a calm, carrying voice. “You can put the Hand down.”

  As she’d hoped—prayed, even, although she’s never quite sure what she’s allowed to pray to—a Hand of Glory appears on the table nearest to the disturbance, flames freshly blown out, and a teenage girl with hair so white it verges on pale corn-silk green is there. Unlike the Hand, she doesn’t appear: she’s been there for some time. She was simply, prior to this moment, difficult to see.

  She is too thin, dressed in tattered clothes twenty years out-of-date, shivering in the warm air of the lab. She watches Erin like a fawn, all enormous eyes and unstoppable twitches. Erin looks calmly back at her, face composed, unmoving.

  “How did you know I was there?” the girl asks, finally. “I had … I had a Hand…”

  “I didn’t,” says Erin, and smiles. “Kim, wasn’t it? Untie me, Kim. I have unfinished business with the man who made you.”

  “I can’t. They have my brother.”

  He’s gotten smarter, Reed has: he’s figured out that a hostage is a better lever than a corpse. If only he’d learned that lesson a little sooner, Erin might have stayed loyal. She shakes her head.

  “You can’t let that give them the power to control you,” she says. “Do you know who the people I came here with are?”

  “Usurpers,” says Kim. She doesn’t sound like she understands what the word means. She probably doesn’t. Reed has never been a fan of well-informed subordinates, and she’s not the one with a dictionary where her heart ought to be.

  “They’re the living Doctrine of Ethos. They’re what Reed wants to turn you into. He can’t control them, so he wants to kill them. If he does, if he succeeds, the Doctrine will pass to you and your brother, and you’ll never be free, ever. Do you understand that? He’ll keep you here forever, and he’ll do whatever he must to prevent you from breaking free. You’ll never have your brother back.”

  Kim’s face twists in sudden rage. “Oh, what, and you’ll give him to me? Timothy is scared and he’s alone and you’re trying to trick me into letting him get hurt, because you’re racing Mr. Reed for the universe. If we become the Doctrine, we’ll be safe.”

  “No, you won’t,” says Erin, keeping her voice calm. “If you become the Doctrine, you’ll be pawns, and a man who’d do the sort of things Reed has done will be able to control the universe. Roger and Dodger don’t want to hurt you. They’ll do their best to protect you, but they can only do that if they’re alive and free. Untie me. Let me help them. Let me help you.”

  “He has my brother.”

  “He has Dodger’s brother, too. She’s a math kid, just like you. She sees numbers everywhere she looks. She’s also a prissy princess who doesn’t like anyone talking to her precious Roger, but she fights it down okay. We’re not friends. I think the two of you could be. I think you could learn a lot from each other. What are you, sixteen?”

  “Fifteen,” admits Kim.

  “Having a mentor who actually understands might do you a world of good. Timothy’s all about language, isn’t he? Well, so is Roger, and he’s the sweetest, kindest, most generous fool you’ll ever meet. These are the people you should be throwing your weight behind. Not a humbug alchemist and a dead woman dressed up in her Sunday clothes.” Erin shakes her head. “Untie me. I’ll get your brother back.”

  Kim takes a hesitant step forward. “Promise?”

  “Promise to try.”

  Kim hesitates. Erin looks at her, trying not to focus on how easy it would be to snap her neck, how quickly one small motion would put Reed’s plans into the grave. Timothy—“Tim,” as she’s sure they call him—would die without his other half. There’d be no appropriate second vessel for the Doctrine. Even if he managed to kill Roger and Dodger, freeing the Doctrine from the confines of their flesh, it would be another fifteen years before he could try for an embodiment. All she has to do is kill a child, and she’ll have time for her revenge.

  All she has to do is become Leigh’s monster daughter, and not just her science project.

  When Kim unties her hands, Erin flexes them to bring back the circulation, but she doesn’t reach for the girl’s throat. When Kim unties her arms, Erin begins pulling the ropes away of her own accord, but she doesn’t lunge. Let Leigh be the monster of the piece. Erin will find another way. She knows there has to be one. There’s always another way.

  The Hand of Glory is still half-potent, good for an hour or more of concealing light. She slides off the table, picks it up, and looks at Kim. “I can tie you up if you like,” she says. “They’ll think I tricked you. They won’t be angry. Not at you, anyway.”

  Kim shakes her head. “I need to get to my brother.”

  “Suit yourself.” Leigh always kept the matches on the workbench, next to the henbane. Erin grabs them, touches one to the Hand’s primary wick, and is gone from all human sight.

  Kim stands where she is for a long moment, looking at the place where Erin isn’t. Then she runs for the door. “I’m coming, Tim,” she mutters, wishing he could hear her, knowing she’s alone. “Hold on, because I’m coming.”

  Birthright

  TIMELINE: 16:02 CDT, JUNE 23, 2016 (THE DAY GOES ON).

  Dodger wakes naked on her back in a strange room, held down by ropes of braided silk. She blinks at the ceiling, which is a perfect astronomical map of the night sky. Then she closes her eyes.

  “Roger?”

  “Here.” The voice is close and distant at the same time. She opens her eyes, breaking their temporary connection, and turns her head—all she can easily move, at the moment—to see Roger on a table she assumes is much like the one she’s tied to. Like her, he’s naked. Like her, he’s tied down with silk rope. Presumably also like her, his entire body has been painted with mercury runes. She squints. Their meaning is obscure, but she can see their mathematical value, which trends, inexorably, toward zero.

  “Why aren’t we dead?”

  “Because we are the Doctrine.”

  Silence from Dodger. Roger swallows the impulse to sigh. She’s not being intentionally slow: she doesn’t understand. He wishes he didn’t, either.

  “We have the Doctrine and those kids of Reed’s don’t. If he kills us, we take the Doctrine with us, and he has to start over.” A whole new generation of—what? Science projects? Children? Clones? It doesn’t matter. They end this here and now, or they condemn another series of children just like they were to play out this little drama, over and over, forever.

  “Oh.” Dodger’s voice is small. “He needs to subtract so he can add, instead of just wiping us off the board.”

  “Yes. Can you see how I’m tied?”

  Dodger answers with a question: “Am I covered in weird squiggles?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “What do they mean?”

  He’s too far away
for her to see the fine points of his expression, but he’s not too far away for her to catch the flash of fear when he replies, “Reduction, removal, extraction. I was awake when they were painting us.”

  “All those things mean ‘zero’ to me. He’s going to use them to siphon off the Doctrine.”

  “Yeah.” He doesn’t mention the bucket he saw them carry in, the bucket full of what they call “alkahest,” the universal solvent. It can dissolve anything. Even a universal constant.

  Dodger didn’t see the bucket. He can’t hear her thoughts, but he knows what she’s thinking: it wouldn’t be so bad to lose the Doctrine, would it? They’d go back to being the people they were before they followed Erin into a building that didn’t exist and solved the universal equations. She’ll still love math. He’ll still love words. They just won’t be tied to those things on a cosmic level. They’ll be able to get out of each other’s heads, to do whatever they want with their lives, to be people, instead of ideas.

  Even as she thinks it, she knows it isn’t possible. The math doesn’t work. They aren’t people who somehow inherited a cosmic force of logic and definition: they are that force, made incarnate by someone who should have known better, should have done better, should have been better. They’re ideas who dreamt of being people, and now that they’re waking up, it’s too late for them to be anything else. The children Reed intends to put in their places might still be able to turn human. She and Roger … no. Not anymore.

  She knows without asking that Roger reached the same conclusion before she woke; he was just waiting for her to catch up. She closes her eyes. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “Aren’t we supposed to represent the base forces of the universe?”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t come with a Penn and Teller starter course.”

  He sounds so frustrated that she laughs a little. Eyes still closed, she says, “Reed wants to strip us to our base components and instill them in our replacements. Which ends with us dead and them pretty screwed-up. I wouldn’t want a mad scientist shoving something into me just because he thought it should be there. There has to be something we can do.”

  “Can you math your way out of being tied up?”

  Dodger’s eyes open, widen. She stares at the ceiling for a second before she smiles and says, “That’s not a bad idea. Hang on.” She squirms, getting a feel for the rope around her, before looking back to Roger. “Okay. The tables are thirty-six inches in width and four inches thick. That means each loop around the table itself, not including us, involves eighty inches of rope. Adding our geometry—”

  She talks faster and faster, until Roger is no longer following what she’s saying. She gets like this when there’s math involved, and he’s not going to interrupt, because he can see the shape of what she means, and what she means is “I can get us out of this.” He watches as she twists just so, shifting her shoulder up, shifting her arms a fraction of an inch to the side. She’s working at the knots without ever touching them, using the physics of the rope and the math of the situation as a whole to get herself free. He isn’t sure she can do it. It shouldn’t be possible. But then, when has anything about them been possible?

  This, too, is a manifestation. He’s starting to see how they can walk in the world when all this is over. Magic doesn’t have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes, it’s the subtle things that are the most effective of all.

  “—and pull and ha!” Dodger sits up, the rope falling loose around her. She’s still naked and covered in silvery runes, but some things are less important than freedom.

  Roger averts his eyes as she runs to his side, and keeps them averted while she’s untying him. Then he sits up, and they look around the room. It’s bigger than it seemed at first, with a floor painted in constellations, like a strange mirror of the starry sky above them. The walls are stained glass, each panel showing a scene from one of Baker’s books, but subtly changed. The King of Cups holds a staff in one hand and a chalice in the other. The Stormcrow Princess is still charred gray, but she wears the robes of a rival wizard, and the color of her skin is clearly the result of chemical poisoning, flesh blistered by things she was never meant to steal.

  Through all the panels move Avery and Zib, the students, learning at the hand of the master. Water runs through their hands and is transmuted into blood; dust is transmuted into air. Maybe he could have just … asked … and the ropes would have gone to wind and nothingness.

  “We need to stop thinking like there are rules,” he says.

  “These people are bonkers and I want my clothes,” says Dodger.

  “Agreed,” says Roger. “The door’s this way. Come on.”

  They cross the room with quick, economical steps. It’s remarkably easy to walk without looking at each other; they just keep swapping off whose eyes are closed, letting them both stay anchored in the present without risking seeing something they shouldn’t.

  The door slams open just before they would have reached it, and there is Leigh Barrow, grinning like a skeleton, a bone saw in her hands. “Did you think you were going somewhere?” she asks, in a voice like oleander honey, like every poisoned poem the world has ever known. “Lay down. It’ll hurt less if you lay down.”

  Dodger breaks away from her brother. Dodger, who has always attacked the world, who has approached every opportunity as the chance to challenge for dominance, and win. Her shoulder hits Leigh in the center of her chest, and then the two are falling, a writhing mass of limbs and deadly edges as Leigh waves her saw, trying to make contact with Dodger without cutting herself.

  “Stop!” shouts Roger, and he doesn’t believe it will work, not here, not against the woman who has been the monster in the back of his mind since he was born, since she came to his house and threatened everything he’d ever known. He doesn’t believe it will work, and he’s still growing into the space of his own skin: in the face of his doubt, nothing happens. Leigh continues to thrash. Dodger, who was never his target, continues to fight.

  “Run!” Dodger shrieks.

  He knows she’s not asking him to abandon her: this request, made here and now, is a cry for help, for him to find a way to save them both. He still hesitates long enough for Leigh’s saw to draw first blood before he runs deeper into the silent compound, looking for an answer.

  Nothing here is familiar. Everything here is familiar. The déjà vu that has defined his life haunts him in every hallway, even places where no one would ever take an infant. He’s seen this place before in other timelines, other attempts to manifest. It’s enough to make him wonder how many times they’ve supposedly “won,” only to follow Erin into the dark and die here, miles below the fields of golden corn.

  Then a body is running toward him down the hall, and he skids to a stop bare seconds before he would have collided with a teenage girl whose hair carries surprisingly green undertones, like she grew from the corn herself. She makes a small squeaking noise when she sees that he’s naked, her cheeks flaring red, and tries to run past him.

  He grabs her arm before she can. “Who are you?” he demands.

  “Kimberley,” she says. “Please. I have to find my brother.”

  Of course. “His name is Timothy, right?” She nods, eyes wide. “I’m Roger. My sister, Dodger, is fighting a woman we thought was dead. I need to stop her. Can you help me?”

  Her wide-eyed gaze turns wary. “You’re them. You’re the ones who stole the Doctrine.”

  “No, honey, we’re not. We’re the ones who earned it, and we’re the ones who want to save you. Unless this is what you want your life to be?” He waves his free hand, indicating the tunnel around them. “If we get away, so do you. You’re just a kid. You deserve the chance to be something more than everything.”

  “That’s what the other lady said, before she stole my candle.”

  Other lady … “You saw Erin? You gave her a Hand of Glory?” God, when did all this start making sense? When did these become the b
uilding blocks of an ordinary conversation, on an ordinary day?

  Kimberley nods tightly. Roger sighs.

  “All right. Erin’s … going to do what Erin’s going to do. Right now, we need to save my sister. Can you help me?”

  “Mr. Reed says when we’re the Doctrine, we won’t need anybody to help us.”

  “Mr. Reed is wrong,” says Roger. “You’re always going to need people. Please. Let me need you now.”

  “Okay,” she whispers. He lets go of her arm. She offers her hand and he takes it, only jumping a little at the jolt that passes between them. It’s not the same as the space he and Dodger make when they’re together, but it’s similar enough that he knows this girl is of their kind; she and her brother both are their kin, and must be protected at all costs.

  “Guess the family just got a little bigger,” he says, and lets her lead him into the dark.

  They haven’t gone very far when they break back into a run.

  * * *

  Dodger and Leigh roll around the floor for almost a minute before the bone saw scores a bright line of pain down Dodger’s back and she breaks free, retreating to a safe distance. Leigh is laughing, delighted by the whole exciting digression from the original plan.

  “Oh, little cuckoo, you are a wonder and a delight and a nuisance,” she says, shifting her bone saw to her other hand. A bit of blood has dripped onto her arm. She lifts it to her mouth, running her tongue along the stain and smiling. “I am so going to enjoy taking you apart.”

  “You stay the hell away from me.” Dodger retreats farther. She needs time to do the math, time to find the numbers that will set her free. Roger says she needs to let go of the rules, but rules are what make the numbers work. There will always be rules, for her. That’s probably a good thing. Without them, she would unmake everything just to make him happy.