Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, putting his hands out to ward her off, still laughing harder than is strictly good for him. “You looked horrified. I’ve had girls make a lot of faces when they thought I was asking them out, but that’s the first time I’ve managed outright horror. I was not asking you out. I will not be asking you out. I’m in a comfortable lull between girlfriends right now, and I’m enjoying it. Also, I love you, but I don’t love you like that. You’re more like my sister.”

  “Statistically speaking, that’s not as unreasonable as it sounds,” she says.

  Roger blinks. “Come again?”

  “Oh, come on, like you haven’t thought it? We have the same birthday, we have weird closed adoptions where our parents don’t know anything about our biological parents, we have the same eyes, and while quantum entanglement is a fairly extreme manifestation of the phenomenon, the closest thing I’ve found to the way we can talk to each other is in unsubstantiated reports of twins who always knew what the other was thinking, even when they were miles apart.” Dodger shrugs. “We’d need a blood test or something to prove it, but I’d be willing to lay money on us being related.”

  “Do you … do you want to get a blood test?” Roger moves to the nearest chair and sinks into it, unsurprised when Bill appears and leaps up into his lap. Dodger’s not saying anything he hasn’t thought, but hearing it out loud, from someone else, makes it difficult to ignore.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because what if the results say we’re not related? I don’t have a better way of coping with … whatever the hell it is we have going on between us. If I think of us as a really extreme form of twinning, we’re not freaks. We’re just a natural phenomenon turned up to eleven. And what if…” She pauses. “It’s silly, because we’ve both been in the hospital at least once. They’d know if there was something wrong with us. But they weren’t checking our blood for alien proteins or weird machines or anything like that when they were trying to keep us breathing. They were just fixing us. So what if there’s something about us that’s not right? We could go in for tests and open a whole world of badness.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

  Dodger shrugs. “I had a lot of time on my hands.”

  “So you didn’t stay with chess?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I could have, but it was never … There were people I played against who’d spent their whole lives trying to get good enough for those games. They measured their self-worth against how well they could move the pieces. I just know where the pieces need to go. It felt like cheating. Like when I used to help you play Monopoly, and then you’d get mad because it wasn’t fair to your family.”

  “You say ‘help,’ I say ‘shouted in my head like a steamroller because it was taking too long.’”

  Dodger shrugs again, this time smiling almost sheepishly. “I’m the most impatient patient person that you’ll ever meet.”

  “That’s probably true,” says Roger. The conversation has meandered. There’s a reason for that: neither he nor Dodger is comfortable with the idea that whatever it is that lets them speak to each other the way they do has endured into adulthood. It would have been easier, really, if she hadn’t replied; if she’d let him sit in silence in the back garden and allowed this part of their shared past to die.

  But quantum entanglement—or whatever this is—has never been that easy to dismiss. They were always going to wind up here, no matter how far they traveled, no matter how fast they ran. He can see that now, just like he can see the temporary animation draining from her face, leaving her watching him again, patient as only a truly impatient person can be. She’s a predator in her own way, capable of absolute stillness when she thinks she needs it, capable of equally absolute momentum.

  For her part, Dodger is watching to see whether he’s about to turn and run, measuring every twitch and shift in his balance against a checklist built from observing other people—people who aren’t him, aren’t her quantum-entangled maybe-twin, and hence aren’t the exemplar for whom the list was made. His constant state of low-grade animation is perplexing to her, as someone who lives her life in fits and starts, stops and goes. He could run her to the ground just by continuing to press forward after her sprint has been exhausted.

  They balance each other. They always have.

  “So no blood tests,” says Roger. “I don’t think we’re alien robots or anything, but I guess it’s not the weirdest of the possible options.”

  “The weirdest of the possible options involves the phrase ‘Midwich cuckoos,’” says Dodger.

  “I don’t think the book was part of an elaborate cover-up. It seems excessive.”

  “No, ‘excessive’ was the remake of the movie. The book is very dry.”

  “Still not much of a reader, huh?”

  Dodger smiles. “Fiction’s not my thing. You want a nice epigram on spirals, and I’m your girl. Still reading everything you can get your hands on?”

  “Books are made of words.” Roger pauses, feeling like he’s just unlocked something important. Dodger’s start-and-stop, his steady forward movement, it’s related to their fields of specialization. He can almost feel it. He just can’t quite get his hands to lock around the idea, and so it slips away, leaving him saying, “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you. Promise we won’t do this again?”

  “Do what?” she asks.

  “Split up.”

  Her smile is quick and bright and almost overwhelming. “I think we’re past that part of the equation, don’t you?”

  * * *

  That night, after Roger is gone, Dodger stands in her room with a dry eraser in her hand, wiping the latest equations off her walls. She’s still chasing the error she made on the day she ran into Roger, trying to figure out how the math diverged from its original track. There’s something important in the twist of numbers and symbols: she knows that, just like she knows that if she tries to sleep in here with wrong answers scrawled on the walls around her, she’ll have nightmares until morning and be useless in the game theory class she’s TAing. The point of being here is to learn. She can learn a lot sleep-deprived, but like everything else in her life, that’s a delicate equation, one unlocked with trial and error and a few fainting spells. Tonight is the night she sleeps.

  There’s a rapping behind her. The door is standing open; a house rule, after Candace found her curled in a corner, light-headed and disoriented from cleaning fumes.

  “I have proper ventilation, Candy,” she says.

  “It’s not Candy,” says Erin.

  Dodger turns. Blinks.

  This is Erin: five-foot-seven, Midwestern farmer’s daughter tan with a smattering of freckles across the nose (next to her, Dodger looks like the victim of a paintball war), strawberry blonde hair, eyes the color of South American morpho butterflies, down to the black ring around the outside of the irises, which is thick enough to seem unnatural. Blue jeans and a white tank top and the kind of body that seems to have been engineered to satisfy a focus group at one of the girly magazines, the ones where clothing is optional and everyone’s name includes at least one i. She doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a theology grad student; if anything, she looks like she’ll be leading tent revivals one day, all mascara and thanking the Lord for His good gifts.

  Dodger doesn’t dislike her, exactly, but she doesn’t trust her. Something about the woman puts her teeth on edge, some distant feeling of familiarity, like they’ve met before and mutually agreed to forget about it.

  “What’s up, Erin?” she asks. She doesn’t realize she’s raised the pitch of her voice and slowed her words, like she’s speaking to a small child or a dangerous animal.

  Erin realizes. Erin realizes more than anyone understands, and she likes it that way; likes the fact that, by and large, she’s able to move through the world without attracting attention she’s not prepared to deal with. (Oh, she gets stared at. She’s attractive and liv
ing on a college campus, surrounded by people who are combining freedom and the last lingering storms of teenage hormones. She gets noticed. But being noticed is not the same thing as being paid attention to: being noticed is something that can be used, and being paid attention to is something that can get you killed. The difference is subtle. Roger would understand; Roger was designed to understand subtle differences of meaning. Roger doesn’t need it, not like she does. Damned cuckoos, too privileged to understand how lucky they are.)

  “Who was your friend?” she asks, leaning against the doorframe, effectively trapping Dodger in the room. The redhead would have to touch her to get out, and Erin knows she won’t do that. Dodger isn’t a touchy-feely person. “He stayed for hours. I didn’t know there was anyone whose company you could stand for that long.”

  This is it: this is the point where an answer must be given, where things must be put into words and framed for someone else to understand. Dodger hesitates. Erin narrows her eyes, waiting. One cuckoo is dangerous. Two of them together is just shy of the end of the world as everyone knows it. If they’re still in denial …

  “My brother, Roger,” says Dodger. “We haven’t seen each other in a while, and we needed to catch up.”

  Erin lifts an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “It’s … complicated,” says Dodger. “We didn’t grow up together.” Except for the brief periods where they had. Too brief, broken up by silence and mistrust and misunderstanding. They should have been longer. They should have been always.

  “Huh. And you both decided to go to Berkeley? Why? Family reunion? You should’ve gotten an apartment together, spare the rest of us your pre-coffee crankiness.”

  “He’s worse than I am in the mornings.”

  “Now I know the two of you should have gotten a place together.” Erin continues to watch her closely, measuring her replies. “Who’s older?”

  “Roger.” A quick answer: no time taken to think about it. If she’d taken the time to think, she would have agonized over which was the correct response, or whether a response mattered at all. The first answer is almost always the correct one, with Dodger. Instinctive math doesn’t lie to you.

  “Huh. He talks funny. Where’s he from?”

  “Cambridge.” Dodger realizes with a twinge that anyone who remembers her “assault” might find it strange that she’s spending time with someone from the Boston area. The past is never really past. It’s always lurking, ready to attack the present.

  “Wow. When your parents split up, they really split up.” Erin stays where she is, watching Dodger intently. “He seeing anyone?”

  “A few girls.” She doesn’t want Erin dating Roger. It’s not possessiveness, quite: she isn’t bothered by the idea of Roger dating, not the way she was when they were teenagers and she was still trying to work through her own complicated ideas on the subject. (Her main objection to Alison, and to the idea of girls like Alison, had been the thought that Roger might find someone he liked better, someone who came with physical, rather than quantum, entanglement. But that was a long time ago, and she’s better now.)

  “Aw, too bad. Well, if he’s going to be around here pretty often, maybe I can convince him I should be one of them.” Erin pushes away from the doorway, eyes seeming to darken. She looks at Dodger, and Dodger does her best not to squirm under that black-and-blue gaze.

  “Yes?” she finally snaps.

  “Be careful,” says Erin, and she sounds serious for the first time: she sounds utterly and unquestionably serious. “I know it’s nice to rebuild bridges, but you need to remember why you’re here. For your education. To arm yourself for the future. It’s coming, and when it gets here, it’s not going to care how often you and your brother braided each other’s hair, or how much time you spent laughing. It’s going to care whether you have the weapons you need. So be careful. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to do the dishes. You people live like animals.” Then she turns, and walks away, leaving Dodger blinking after her, bemused.

  After a moment, Dodger goes back to wiping the marks off the walls.

  Report

  TIMELINE: 11:19 CST, SEPTEMBER 4, 2008 (THE NEXT DAY).

  “Master Daniels tolerated your foolishness, but I am not he, and this has gone on long enough,” spits the new High Priest of the Alchemical Congress—a useless title. The religious aspects of what they do have faded long since, replaced by skepticism and stoic scientific method. “What you say you would attempt—”

  “I attempt nothing,” says Reed, voice smooth and calm. “I appeared before Master Daniels to tell him it was done, and to ask for readmission to your number, that you might all share in the glory to come. I did this to honor Asphodel’s memory, and not out of any obligation. I am here, now, to tell you as I told him that I have embodied the Doctrine of Ethos, that I have changed the mechanism which controls the universe. I will do what none has done since Asphodel. I will unlock the doors of the Impossible City, and I will bring magic back into the world.”

  “You’re a construct, a—a thing,” objects one of the lesser alchemists, a man whose name he has never bothered to learn nor cared to know. “You can’t have achieved what better alchemists have lived and died failing to do.”

  “Magic never left the world,” objects another. “Magic is a natural law, like gravity. It endures.”

  It is the second, less-insulting alchemist who Reed chooses to address. “Magic has been lessened. The age of miracles has been ground to a powder by the twinned stones of caution and rationality. We pulled back too far. We allowed belief to turn against us. This will change.”

  The High Priest shakes his head. “Have sense, Reed. People aren’t ready.”

  “People are sheep. They’ll do as they’re told, once they see that the world is not as they always assumed it was.” Reed smiles. “The Impossible City will open. The world will change.”

  They glare at each other, these two men divided by an impossible ideological gulf, and the Congress holds its breath, frozen and enthralled.

  The Impossible City. It wasn’t always called that. It was Olympus once, Avalon, the Isles of the Dead, the alchemical apex which waited at the peak of all human knowledge and potential. The city that is dreamed of but never claimed or controlled. The place whose streets were paved in gold, whose rivers ran with alkahest, whose trees flowered with panacea. Over time, it had drifted further and further from the known, from the true, until all roads were severed, and there was no way back. It was Asphodel Baker, again, who turned enough of the world’s attention toward that distant ideal to reopen a single narrow path. The improbable road, which could lead the questing home.

  “The Impossible City is a myth,” says the High Priest finally.

  “We shall see,” Reed replies. “Have I broken any compacts? Violated any laws? I seek to open the Impossible City for us all, in memory of Master Daniels, of Asphodel. The children I’ve created are built from my blood and bone, and hence my property. I walk in the light for this endeavor.”

  The High Priest narrows his eyes. “If the City is achieved…”

  “It will be shared, as my agreement with Master Daniels promised.” Reed lies. Reed always lies. But if he can keep the Congress at bay just a little longer, it will be too late for them to stop him. It may already be too late. What a wonderful thought, that it may already be too late. He may already rule the world.

  There is nothing they can charge him with, nothing they can do; he has been too careful. Even the deaths of Master Daniels and his associates have been well concealed. When the session ends, he walks away a free man, glorying in the scope of his success.

  Leigh is waiting for him outside the Congress doors. She looks like a schoolteacher standing in front of the principal’s desk, waiting to hear that her problem students will finally be well and truly punished.

  He favors her with a smile. “The day has been going so well. I trust you’re not here to spoil it?”

  “They�
�ve made contact.”

  Reed knows from experience that Leigh won’t let whatever she’s talking about go until she’s satisfied, and that for her, satisfaction may mean that someone else starts bleeding. “Walk with me,” he says, and continues down the hall, away from the doors, away from prying ears.

  They are less safe here than they would be in their own territory, but sometimes making nice with one’s peers is essential to keeping up the masquerade that one is still interested in their fellowship. One day, he’ll bring all this nonsense crashing down, and he’ll laugh, because this was never necessary. Only will, and the willingness to do what needed to be done.

  When they are far enough away to trip no alarms, he removes a coin from his pocket and plays it between his fingers, eye flashing over pyramid flashing over eye. So long as it remains in motion, they will not be overheard. “Who’s made contact?”

  “The last chicks from your failed rookery,” spits Leigh. “The Middleton boy and the Cheswich girl. They’re attending the same college, and they ran into each other as soon as they were both on campus.”

  “I thought you had minders assigned to them.” Reed’s tone is mild, but the accusation it harbors is clear: if his cuckoos have made contact, it’s because Leigh has failed to do her job. She’s failed to keep them apart, distracted, maturing in their separate shells. They put a country between these children, and yet the children have come together over and over again, as if to spite their creators.

  “The Middleton boy’s minder had to be … removed … from the program due to a failure to hold his attention,” says Leigh, with a surprising degree of delicacy, at least for her. “I thought you had convinced the girl that her ‘brother’ was a fantasy.”

  “Compulsions never stand up to confrontation with reality,” says Reed, dismissing the idea of his culpability with a wave of his hand. “What of the Cheswich girl’s minder?”

  “Doing her best, but she’s limited. They’re inherently chaotic creatures, and she channels the opposing force. Once they came together, she was overwhelmed.”