Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  There is equipment piled against the walls, where they had missed it in their hurry to escape. Long benches of beakers and vials, the tools of the alchemist’s trade. But no knives. No convenient hacksaws or axes. She grabs a few beakers, holding them to her chest as she backs away from Leigh. When the other woman advances, she flings, calculating the arc of momentum and descent with unconscious ease. They burst against Leigh’s chest and shoulders, making her laugh even harder.

  “Really? This is how you fight me? With flung glassware, and the idea that good will triumph? This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who knows how to use it. Right now, you have all the power you could want, but you don’t know what to do with it. There are a thousand ways the Doctrine could get you out of this room, and you aren’t smart enough to find any of them on your own. You are the incarnate force that powers a universe, and the best you can do is throw things at me.”

  Dodger keeps backing away. Her heel hits something that sloshes, and she risks a glance to see that she’s almost put her foot into a bucket of clear liquid. Water, or cleaning fluid, no doubt. If she were alone, she’d take this opportunity to wash the markings off her skin, slowing the ritual they’re intended to be part of just that little fraction. But she’s not alone, and Leigh is coming.

  “Your math is bad and I refuse to let it stand, and I can throw other things,” she says, and grabs the bucket, barely noticing the rows upon rows of alchemical symbols etched around its circumference as she tosses its contents onto the advancing woman.

  (she is a child of the Up-and-Under, but that is not the only story here, and there is a history of trapped girls throwing buckets of liquid on witches in Oz, and “witch” is just another word for “alchemist” when the frills are removed; there is a tradition behind her motion, even if she has little understanding of what she does, even if her hands are guided by all the Dorothys who came before her, gowned in gingham with silver slippers on their feet; by all the Zibs who couldn’t make it quite this far, their hair full of tangles and their hearts full of a boy with a smile like a country funeral)

  The three treasures of alchemy are the transmutation of base materials, the creation of the panacea, and the distillation of the alkahest, the universal solvent which can dissolve virtually anything. Baker found all three treasures and made them easier to call from the walls of the world. For something such as the creation of a host for a universal force, or the removal of that force from an unwilling host, all three were required. The bucket falls from Dodger’s suddenly nerveless fingers. A few drops of liquid bounce free when the bucket hits the floor, and she unconsciously maps their trajectory, stepping backward, never getting a speck of the solution on her.

  Leigh, drenched from head to toe, is not so lucky.

  She screams as she dissolves. Dodger backs away farther, and thinks she will hear that sound, the wailing of a dozen dead women finally consigned to the grave, until the day she dies.

  “Dodger!”

  She turns, and there’s Erin in the doorway, Erin with a Hand of Glory so freshly extinguished that its stubs are smoking, and she’s never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

  “I killed her,” she says, in a dazed tone. “She … she melted. I melted her.” She wraps her arms abruptly around her stomach. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Don’t throw up,” says Erin. “Where’s your brother? We need to get you out of here.”

  “He went looking for help. He should be back any second.”

  “Great. We’ll find your clothes, and we’ll go. This was a terrible idea. I’m so sorry. I—” Erin stops, mouth moving soundlessly.

  Dodger screams when the knife emerges from the front of Erin’s shirt, when Dr. Reed shoves the living (dying) incarnation of Order into the room like so much trash. She’s still screaming when he advances past the threshold, glancing almost disinterestedly at the smoking remains of his second-in-command.

  “You killed Leigh,” he says. “Fascinating. I never expected one of you to have the guts. You’ve done me a favor, in a way. She was getting ideas above her station, and killing her would have been difficult for me. We were simply too much alike.”

  Dodger stops screaming. Reed smiles.

  “That’s better,” he says. “Now, where were we?”

  Dodger dances backward to the workbench. It’s too much to hope that she’ll find another bucket of acid, so she grabs two beakers and holds them like baseballs, ready to throw (the odds say she won’t find two deadly weapons in one room, but the odds are her playthings, and if she throws, the man will die). “Stay the fuck away from me,” she snarls.

  Reed looks at the beakers, narrow-eyed and nervous. “Is that any way to talk to your father?”

  “You’re not my father.”

  “I may as well be. I made you. Built you, one piece and particle at a time. I contributed half the base material to grow the form you occupy. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You knew you were human, on some level. Did you think we’d managed to sprout you from a seed?” Reed steps forward.

  Dodger steps back. “I don’t care if you were the sperm donor. That doesn’t make you my father. Now get out of here before I take away the math that makes you.”

  “Dodger, Dodger, Dodger.” He shakes his head, clucking his tongue apologetically. “I named you, you know. I made you and I named you and by the standards of any empire that’s ever risen, that makes you mine. You belong to me, body and soul, and you owe me the bright light you hold captive in your breast. It was never meant to be yours.”

  “If it wasn’t meant to be mine, why did it choose me?”

  He frowns. “It didn’t. You got in the way. It was meant to belong to another girl. A good girl. A tractable girl. You would like her, I think. You have a great deal in common.”

  “But not pants, which is a little creepy if you’re going to insist that we’re your children.” Roger’s voice is a delight and a salvation. Dodger looks past Reed to where her brother stands in the doorway, a pale, frightened teenage girl by his side. He’s found sweatpants somewhere. His bare chest is still covered in mercury and gold sigils.

  He’s holding a gun.

  Reed stops when he sees it. He puts his hands up, suddenly conciliatory; a gesture ruined by the bloody knife he still holds. “Now, son, let’s not go doing anything you’d regret later.”

  “Like letting you go?” Roger takes a step into the room, eyes never leaving Dr. Reed. “Dodger, you okay?”

  “I just melted a woman. Other than that, I’m dandy.”

  “No one’s hands are clean.” Roger shakes his head. “We came here because we needed to save these kids. But I want you to remember that we would have been happy spending our whole lives never knowing what we were. We would have been fine. You forced our hand. You made this.”

  “I’m Baker’s last living student,” says Reed. “I’m the only one who remembers all her teachings, who truly understands her great work. Do you want all that knowledge to be lost?”

  Roger hesitates. Then, beatifically, he smiles.

  “Should’ve thought of that before you made me the living incarnation of language,” he says. “Nothing is ever lost. It just moves into a different tongue. And you? You stopped existing a long time ago. You’re a story without a storyteller. We don’t need you anymore.”

  “Boy, you’d best stop right there—”

  “You’re not real,” says Roger, and pulls the trigger.

  The alchemical shields that should stop the bullet are gone, reduced to fiction and wiped away. There is nothing to interfere with its flight. The sound of the shot is like a sigh.

  Blood trickling down from the hole in his forehead, James Reed, son and student and creation of Asphodel Baker, the greatest alchemist of her age, falls, and is still, and all is quiet.

  Pants

  TIMELINE: 16:51 CDT, JUNE 23, 2016 (AND ON, AND ON, FOREVER).

  They find Erin’s body, but they don
’t find her pulse; everything took too long. In the end, they leave her where she lies. This will be her tomb, and there is something so right about the idea that they do not question it. Their clothes are in a room three halls over. The sigils covering their bodies vanish when Roger whispers them away, naming and denying them one by one. Some residue is left behind: they are gilded, but no longer prepared to catch the attention of a universal transfer they want nothing to do with.

  Timothy—Tim, as he shyly says he prefers to be called, and of course he does; of course it’s Kim and Tim; when Reed named them, he hid their parallels under the sort of subtlety that has to be learned through experience—was locked in another small room, quite close to the room with their clothing. The locks worked on mathematical principles. Dodger didn’t even have to touch them for them to spring open, ashamed that they even considered keeping her out. Kim is with him now, the two packing their scant belongings and preparing for a life aboveground.

  “We have to keep them, you know,” says Roger, giving Dodger a sidelong look, gauging her reaction.

  “You always did like taking strays,” she says. She pauses. “Did old Bill…?”

  “He survived the earthquake. That cat’s unkillable. Erin put him in the neighbor’s yard before she set the house on fire.”

  Dodger snorts. “Wow. The world is so weird sometimes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The four of them seem to be alone in this vast, echoing compound. There were other alchemists here once: that’s plain from the number of labs they find, the number of empty rooms that must have held specimens, just based on their layout and design. Reed may have let them go when he thought he was nearing his goal … or there may be a reason that the corn here grows so gloriously green.

  Roger and Dodger walk the halls of the place where they were made, hand in hand, looking at everything with silent care. They will not come here again.

  They reach the door to Reed’s office. There is nothing else it can be: it is too ornate, too extravagant to belong to anyone else. They stop there for a moment, looking at it gravely.

  Roger speaks first. “We could start over.”

  “We could.”

  “Erin says we’ve done this at least a dozen times, and I know I’ve been here before. So we could start over, finally knowing how to win, and try for an ending that saves her. That saves a lot of people.”

  “We could,” Dodger repeats, and lets go of his hand, and reaches for the door. There’s a keycard lock. It’s all just numbers. She looks at it coldly and it flashes green, allowing the door to swing open, revealing the splendor of Reed’s astrolabe. “I want to do a lot of math first. We need a clearer path through this.”

  “Of course,” says Roger, and falls silent at the sight of Reed’s lab.

  Gold and copper worlds dance, jeweled and filigreed and beautiful. They are spinning in perfect harmony, and for a moment, the sight is enough to take their breath away. They enter the room, walking in opposite directions around the edge, gaping up at the planets as they spin.

  It is Dodger who reaches Reed’s desk first, who finds the ledger with the golden orbital spiral stamped on its cover. She opens it, looking at its contents first with curiosity, and then with growing, horrified understanding. “Roger?”

  “Huh?” He looks away from the spinning worlds. “What is it?”

  “We can’t start over until we’ve checked every variable. Until we know we can do it perfectly. I’m only doing this one more time, and it has to be flawless.”

  “What?” That’s enough to make him hurry to her side, wonder forgotten. “What is it?”

  “The astrolabe began showing errors the day we were born. Running in reverse, stopping, backing up. Leaping from one time to another. It’s the resets. Some of these columns are describing the ones who didn’t manifest, but I … I know these dates.” She taps a column. “This is where we made contact. See? The last time on that day, that’s when I gave up. Or when you told me not to. It’s all through our lives, all these little corrections, all the times we went back and started again. But I can’t reset without you, and you didn’t know to tell me to reset when I was five.”

  (five years old, and she runs into the street where a truck hits her, putting her into a coma that will last for twenty-five years, until a man she never got to meet is brought to her bedside by a scowling woman with strawberry blonde hair, until the man gives her an order at the woman’s cold command; five years old, and she lived to be thirty, and she never lived at all)

  He doesn’t fully understand. She can see that, and be frustrated by it, even as she forgives him. Sometimes she won’t understand him either. That’s why they have to stay together. They have to explain the universe for one another.

  “Every time we’ve reached the Baths, or whatever else we could use to call the Impossible City into being, we’ve tried again,” she says. “Maybe sometimes we’ve tried again from someplace that looked a lot like this, but it almost never happens until now. Until we’re almost thirty years old. But Roger, the stars haven’t moved. Erin said the Doctrine was a universal force. She meant it. We’ve been resetting the entire universe, because otherwise…”

  “… the stars would have jumped thirty years out of place every time we reset time,” he says, with dawning horror. “Does he say how many times? How many errors he recorded?”

  “This last time was lucky number thirteen—”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “—thousand.”

  Almost half a million years of looping the universe through their lifetimes, of using their own needs as a lever on which to turn everything that is or ever has been. Roger stares at her. For the first time he can remember, words have no meaning. The numbers they describe are too big; the offense they contain is too much.

  Finally, in a choked voice, he says, “Yeah, let’s not fuck with time any more until we’re sure we’re doing it for the last time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s do something else.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Farmer’s market?”

  Dodger blinks before smiling slowly, wearily, but with a depth of joy he hasn’t seen from her in a very, very long time.

  “Sounds good,” she says. “I think we’ve earned some potatoes.”

  He laughs, because there’s nothing else to say.

  * * *

  See them now:

  They walk through the corn, a cluster of four moving two by two, brothers holding fast to sisters, sisters keeping their brothers close. They are not a family, not yet, but they will be; the inevitability of it is written in the too-similar lines of their faces, in the way they share certain small mannerisms, certain subtle ways of holding themselves. They come from the same place. They share experiences that no one else will ever understand, nor should be asked to.

  And they are beautiful. There is nothing arrogant or cruel to their beauty; it’s a fact of existence, as plain as the noses on their faces or the smears of mercury and gold paint still showing on the skins of two of them. They’ve traveled through the Up-and-Under, perhaps the last to make such a pilgrimage, and the things they’ve learnt from this journey will be with them always. For better or for worse, there is no going back to where they started. Not for any of them.

  “California,” says Dodger, and “California,” Roger agrees, and “Anywhere but here,” says Kim, in a voice like a sigh. Tim says nothing. Tim simply looks around with eyes like saucers, drinking in the world.

  But this is not the entire ending. Look:

  In a room beneath the earth, in a place where nothing good endures, a woman left for dead, a woman whose pulse had fallen so far below the threshold needed for saving, stirs. She opens her eyes. She is weak, wrung almost to the point of breaking, but she is alive.

  All she sees is chaos. That isn’t unusual: Erin has always seen chaos, everywhere she looks. But this chaos is almost soothing, because this chaos means it’s over. This chaos means it’s
done. Most of all, this chaos means this time, they’re letting things roll onward. For better or worse, they’ve found a timeline they’re willing to preserve for a while, and they’re willing to let her rest. The idea is almost intoxicating. Rest. What a glorious, impossible goal that seems.

  Rest.

  Hand over hand, Erin drags her near-bloodless body to the Hand of Glory. She digs a match from her pocket, sets it to the fingers, and watches the light return. Her eyes are so heavy. She is so tired. Still, she smiles as she lets the Hand brush fire onto the nearby table, watching the flames consume the silk rope that had been used to bind Roger, then move onto the wood, eating it in greedy gulps. Flames lit from a Hand of Glory will burn almost anything. Best of all, until the Hand itself is consumed, no one will notice the fire. No one will come to stop it.

  Everything will burn.

  She closes her eyes before the flames can reach her. There is Darren, smiling, hands outstretched, offering to lead her somewhere far away, somewhere better than this, somewhere they can be together. For the first time since she began to understand what her life was meant to be, Erin lets go.

  By the time the flames come for her, she’s long, long gone.

  * * *

  There is a strange heat at their backs when they reach the edge of the field. They turn, and see that the hut has become a tower of flame; the corn has become a blazing beacon, lighting up the sky. For a moment, they just stare.

  “Erin,” says Roger, and his eyes sting with tears he doesn’t know how to shed. “She wasn’t…” His voice trails off. They could have saved her. They still can, once they figure out how to revise the world. One last time.

  But not today.

  “She had a Hand of Glory,” says Dodger. “She always did like lighting fires.”

  Roger laughs. He can’t stop himself; he doesn’t try very hard. Dodger glances at him, at the firelight dancing on his face. Then, wordlessly, she offers her hand to Kim, who takes it with matching silence, and holds fast, and does not let her go.