Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Sure,” says Roger.

  Dodger allows her shoulders to slump, showing her relief. “When?” she asks.

  “Maybe after Thanksgiving…”

  The rest of the evening passes like that, topic flowing into topic, all of them light, many of them easy. It’s nice to sit and talk; both of them think, more than once, that this is how things should have been all along. That this is what the world was supposed to contain. There’s tension, yes, but it’s the tension of minds meeting, the conflict of differing core interests, not the tension of a world about to become terribly complicated.

  It won’t last, of course. But neither of them knows that consciously, and even if they did, it wouldn’t change the moment, the comfort it contains, or the fixed point it represents on the tangled structure of their lives. This is one of the moments around which all else will rotate, even when the world starts falling down.

  This is one of the moments that will shine.

  * * *

  Roger leaves at eleven on school nights. They mostly meet at Dodger’s place, due to her propensity for writing on the walls; he can keep her in butcher paper, but there’s always the chance she’ll relax so much that she’ll forget he doesn’t have whiteboard paint on everything. He likes his security deposit. He especially likes the way he’s going to get it back when he moves, allowing him to use it again on a new apartment. The competition for grad student housing gets vicious in the fall, when the incoming scholars fight the established ones for the places nearest to campus, or better yet, nearest to the Derby food court. He likes his current apartment, but he has his eye on a place above Amoeba Records which is supposed to come open over the summer. So protecting his security deposit is of the utmost importance, at least for now.

  He also likes the walk from her place to his, especially late at night, when the city is quiet and cool and the air smells of that curious wooded-concrete blend the campus pumps off. It reminds him of home. Most of California has its own weird scent profile, a combination of eucalyptus and oleander and desert heat masquerading as human paradise. Berkeley, though. Berkeley smells like the college town it is, and while it isn’t quite Cambridge—nothing is quite Cambridge—it sometimes manages to come close, at least in the middle of the night.

  (His being the one who needs to walk home also means Dodger isn’t riding her bike at midnight. She’s good with that thing, handles it like she’s been on it all her life, but accidents happen, and until they know exactly how their entanglement works, he’d rather she didn’t get hit. He’d rather she didn’t get hit after they know how their entanglement works, either—he’d rather she stay healthy and present for their entire lives—it’s just that right now, he doesn’t know what would happen. He might not admit it out loud, but that scares him. That scares him a lot.)

  Now that he’s alone, he can admit to himself how excited he is by the idea of beginning the testing process. It starts with blood: he and Dodger came to that conclusion independently, and it feels right. It feels accurate, even, which doesn’t mean the same thing, and has just as much importance here. Dodger’s math doesn’t work if she doesn’t take the steps in the right sequence, following the correct path through the equation. The question of their quantum entanglement feels similar. They need to find the right sequence to make their way through this, take the steps in the right order, or it could all fall down. And he doesn’t want it to fall down.

  Dodger’s issues may be more visible—and that makes sense; she’s always worn her heart on her sleeve, a bright banner to attract the world’s snipers, like a bird feigning a broken wing to draw predators away from the nest—but that doesn’t mean she’s the only one who has them. Roger has spent his life trying to balance being the smartest person in the room with a genuine desire to be liked. He wants to talk about phonemes and the number of sounds the human body can produce and baseball and how hard it is to get a decent cup of chowder in this town, and he wants to do them all at the same time, and he can’t. Half the smart people he meets are so hung up on the idea of being smart—the idea that all they can be is smart, defined by the discipline that calls them—that as soon as he mentions baseball, they jump in to tell him how boring they find it. How plebian. How beneath them.

  He knows the words: balance, equilibrium, parity. He’s always thought they were a pretty dream, something to be pursued but never caught. Now, for the first time in years, he’s starting to feel as if they might describe something possible. All they need to do is figure out what they are, what they mean, and they can begin moving forward.

  He’s sunk deeply enough into his own thoughts that he doesn’t notice the person falling into step beside him. Their footsteps are soft, and they’re dressed entirely in gray, blending with the moonlit city streets. It’s not until he catches a glimpse of pale hair out of the corner of his eye that he realizes anyone is there at all, and not until he turns that he realizes it’s Erin.

  “Uh,” he says. “Hi?”

  “You have an odd sense of direction,” she says. “We should have turned two blocks ago if you were trying to get home in a timely manner.”

  “I’m enjoying the walk,” he says, flustered. Dodger’s roommates are both strange in their own ways. He finds Candace’s brusque, often paint-covered strangeness endearing; he finds Erin’s strangeness, which is feline and fluid and cold, off-putting. There’s something about her that doesn’t quite synchronize with the rest of the world, like she’s been spliced in from a different story. She pays the rent on time and is almost never home, so Dodger doesn’t mind her, but since that first encounter on the balcony, he’s been doing his best to keep her at a safe remove. Something about her is wrong.

  “You were,” she says, and she’s right, so he doesn’t argue, no matter how polite it would have been to try.

  They walk in silence for a short while, Erin pacing soundlessly beside him, Roger choosing the more economical turns, the ones that will get him home and end this game—whatever it is—that much sooner.

  Finally, Erin asks, “If I gave you advice, would you take it? Or would you just go ‘oh, that’s Dodger’s weirdo roommate, that’s the one who never shows her face, I can ignore her without worrying about the consequences’?”

  “I would consider what you said to me, try to assess it fairly on its own merits, and worry about the consequences endlessly, because I’m me, and that’s the sort of bullshit thing my brain likes to do,” says Roger. His tone is light. His expression is grim. Erin has always seemed off, but here, tonight, the strangeness of her is magnified: here, tonight, she’s a wound in the fabric of the world, and she’s bleeding, oh, how she’s bleeding.

  “Don’t come back from Boston.”

  Roger stops walking.

  Erin continues, momentum carrying her forward another several feet before she stops, and turns, and looks at him. “Stay home,” she says. “There are schools there that would take you. Plead illness. Get your ass off this improbable road before you go too far, because the Impossible City is just ahead, Jackdaw, and it’s waiting for you. It knows you’re coming. Once it sees you round the bend, it’s going to be too late.”

  Roger stares at her. “Uh, Erin? It’s none of my business what you do in your spare time, but are you high? I’m not running away from school because you have some sort of weird Up-and-Under thing going on. And if I’m Jack Daw, what does that make you? The Corn Jenny?”

  “I should be so lucky,” she says, and there’s such a terrible, painful reasonableness in her tone that he takes a step backward, away from her, away from the future she represents. “I don’t walk the improbable road, Jackdaw; I don’t go to meet the Queen of Wands. I’ve already been to see the King of Cups, and the Page of Frozen Waters made sure I knew I’d crossed the line. Hurt yourself if you want to, but think about Dodger. She’s breakable right now. Her kind always are. Crow Girls and Jack Daws have a lot in common, but where you burn, she’ll soak up all the water in the world and drown under the weight of her own l
ungs. You’re the control. She’s just the trigger mechanism. Stop this now before it’s too late for both of you.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy,” says Roger patiently. “I was willing to tolerate a lot of weird, because you’re Dodger’s roommate and I don’t know what you’ve had to smoke tonight, but you’ve crossed a few lines, and one of them is the line of reason. Go home, Erin. Sleep whatever this is off. I’ll see you after Thanksgiving.”

  “I can see the fixed points in your timeline. I can’t alter them or move between them the way you people can, but I can see them, and you’ve just passed one. Don’t you get it? You’re heading through the temperaments and into the center, and once you get there, I can’t save you. Once you get there, no one can save you. The King of Cups will see you now. The King sees all the cuckoos when they come home to roost.”

  “Go home, Erin.” Roger starts walking again, faster this time, quickly passing her. She doesn’t move to follow him. He’s grateful for that, but he doesn’t slow down.

  “When the time comes for you to see the King, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she calls after him. “Don’t say I didn’t try!”

  “Go home, Erin,” he says, and turns the corner, and is gone.

  Erin stays where she is, counting down from one hundred, giving him time to come back. He might. It could happen. Some people, when warned about impending doom, come back to ask for more details. Most don’t. Most would rather pretend the warning never came, that they had no idea of what might be coming for them.

  Roger doesn’t come back. Somehow, she’s not surprised. She called him a Jackdaw, a Jack Daw, because that’s what he is, according to Baker’s formulae—that old bitch, with her carefully coded instructions for a generation of alchemists to emulate. But really, everyone who walks the improbable road to enlightenment is an Avery, a Zib, and Roger is no different. He and his sister only have one iron shoe apiece. That doesn’t matter. As long as they walk together, they’ll still walk all the way, and then …

  “We’ll see what we’ll see,” she says quietly, and turns, and disappears into the night.

  Home Again

  TIMELINE: 19:54 EST, NOVEMBER 22, 2008 (SIX DAYS LATER).

  The house smells like Thanksgiving, that complicated mix of turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and mashed potato and pie that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It smells like holiday. It smells like home. When he was a kid, Roger thought Thanksgiving was the best possible holiday. It didn’t involve lies or home invasion like Christmas; it didn’t cram him into an itchy suit and tight shoes like Easter; even Halloween had its issues, with the masks and the monsters. But Thanksgiving … Thanksgiving was about food and family and spending time with the people you loved. Thanksgiving was perfect.

  Now that he’s grown, Thanksgiving still seems perfect. Sure, Mom cooks a smaller turkey, since he no longer has a teenage boy’s appetite to see them through the leftovers, and sure, Grandma never taught anyone how to make her cranberry cheesecake, so when she died, the recipe died with her, but the feeling around the table is the same. Thanksgiving is the safest holiday, the one that encourages lowering walls and filling stomachs and enjoying the one place in the world that will always, always be safe.

  The house seems smaller and bigger than it used to at the same time. Living in a cramped off-campus apartment means a four-bedroom single-family home with a backyard is basically the Promised Land: this is what half the people in his classes dream about at night. Having space. Space to collect things, space for clutter, space to lose yourself in. But the worn patch on the wallpaper where he used to rest his hand is impossibly low. He can’t ever really have been that short. That contrast is everywhere he turns. Doorknobs that should dwarf his hand fit snugly into his palm. Windows that should be too high to reach are situated at eye level. He even got the blender from the top of the fridge for his mother when she was whipping the cream; for the first time ever, he’s the tallest person in the house.

  His old room has been redecorated. Still his, but adult-him, not child-him. There are a few shelves of beloved toys and souvenirs from his childhood—the rock he found the first time he went to the beach with his grandparents; the mouse ears from his first trip to Disney World—but the wallpaper is new, untorn, untattered, undefaced by crayons or markers. Looking at it makes him think of Dodger and her white walls covered with numbers; it makes his fingers itch to commit similar graffiti, scrawling verb tenses and lines of classic poetry over that unnerving newness. But he doesn’t. This is his parents’ house. For the first time in his life, he’s a guest here. You really can’t go home again. Not all the way. No matter how hard you try.

  “Roger!” His mother’s voice comes up the stairs the way it always has, bouncing off the walls, a distinct echo that calls all the way back to when he was a toddler clinging to the bannisters and wailing at the steepness of the stairs. “Dinner’s about to be on the table!”

  “Coming, Ma!” he calls back, and stands, leaving the too-new bed behind. He looks to the open door. Then, on a whim, he walks to the closet, kneels, presses his hands against the floor. It creaks. The loose panel where he used to store his childhood treasures is still here.

  It was a silly idea, stolen from a hundred movies: pry up a board in the closet floor, sand the nails so it won’t completely latch down again, and use the space between the floor and the downstairs ceiling as a secret compartment. Maybe it worked because it was so silly, because no one could believe a kid as smart as he was would try something so elementary. Whatever the reason, when they renovated the room, they didn’t find his treasures.

  “Roger!” The voice belongs to his father this time, louder, more strident. “Come help your mother set the table!”

  “Coming!” he calls. The mysteries of childhood will be there later, ready to be explored at his leisure. Dusting his hands against his legs, Roger walks to the door, and out.

  * * *

  Dinner is delicious. That’s no surprise; Melinda Middleton has always been an excellent cook, and having her boy home for Thanksgiving has motivated her to even greater heights than normal. The turkey is perfect. The pie is better. By the time the last dish is cleared away, Roger feels like he’s run a marathon of calories. He could sleep for a year, snuggled under his childhood comforter, surrounded by the walls he grew up in. His father is leaning back in his own chair, sipping a cup of coffee, looking utterly content with the world. His mother is across from him, picking at one last piece of pie.

  Maybe it’s the comfort, and maybe it’s the comfort food, but this feels like the perfect time to ask. He takes a breath and says, “I’d like to talk to you about something, if that’s okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay, son?” asks his father. There’s gray in his hair that wasn’t there when Roger went away for college, marching forward every day, slowly conquering the territory from scalp downward. (At least he still has his hair is the automatic thought, followed by the dull flush of shame; what does it matter if Colin Middleton still has his hair or not? It’s not like Roger has any of his genes. Roger’s future is a mystery.) The sight carries its own brand of dull shock. When did he get so old? When did they both get so old?

  Blissfully unaware of the thoughts filling his son’s head, Colin continues, “We’ve always been happy to talk with you.”

  “Unless you’ve managed to get some girl pregnant,” says Melinda. “That’s between you and her, and we’re not going to give you any advice beyond ‘think about your future’ and ‘think about her future.’”

  “Mom,” says Roger, scandalized. “Do you really think I’d do that?”

  “Accidents happen,” says Melinda. “Not to us, of course. You were perfectly planned, every inch of you.”

  Relief replaces shock. Roger sits up straighter in his chair, trying to look like the adult he is and not the child he always feels like in this house, where the walls are full of remembered bogeymen and the attic creaks with childhood’s ghosts. “That’s actually wh
at I wanted to talk to you about.”

  He’d have to be stupid to miss the glance that passes between his parents. It’s quick, but it’s so laden with dread and dismay that it falls into the convivial atmosphere of a family Thanksgiving like a rock into a quiet pond.

  His mother recovers first. “What do you mean, dear?” she asks, and her voice is honey and sugar and dread. He analyzes her words—he can’t help himself—and finds them packed with fear. Even the cadence is off, tension turning a question he’s heard a thousand times before into a tripwire primed to catch him off-balance.

  They’re worried I want to make contact with my birth parents, he thinks, and it’s a reasonable explanation for an unreasonable response: it works, it fits the facts without distorting them. It’s the explanation that leaves his parents in the right, no matter what comes next, because what adoptive parent wouldn’t worry about their child someday finding someone to love more? He could try to explain that they’re irreplaceable, that they were so perfect for him that he might as well have chosen them—his bookstore-owning father, his stay-at-home, intellectually flexible mother—but for once, he doesn’t feel like he has the words. The only way out is onward.

  “We’ve never talked about my adoption,” he says. “I’ve always known I was adopted, and I know my birth mother didn’t want any contact with me after the adoption was finished. I’ve seen the paperwork. Before we go any further, I want to say I love you—both of you—very much, and you’re the only parents I’ll ever want or need. I’m not looking to find the woman who gave me up. Whether that was her mistake or her looking out for me, it gave me the best family anybody’s ever had, and I’m grateful, but I’m not indebted to her.”