Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “I’m Avery, and this is Zib,” said Avery. “Please, do you know where we are?”

  “Why, this is the Up-and-Under, of course,” said the Crow Girl. She cocked her head in the opposite direction. “You must not be very clever, if you don’t even know where you are. I blame the shoes.”

  “Shoes?” asked Zib.

  “Shoes.” The Crow Girl held up her bare left foot and waggled her toes extravagantly. “If you can’t feel where you’re going, how will you ever know where you’ve been? Skies for wings and roads for feet, that’s what the world is made of.”

  “How can something be up and under?” asked Avery.

  “Up a tree’s still under the sky,” said the Crow Girl. “Here in the Up-and-Under, we’re both things at once, always, and we’re never anything in-between…”

  —From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

  BOOK IV

  Complicate

  I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.

  —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  They were only pencil sketches, all the fantasies we chased;

  Step right up if you can see me, I’m the one who got erased.

  —Michelle “Vixy” Dockrey, “Erased”

  Phlegmatic

  TIMELINE: 17:20 PST, NOVEMBER 16, 2008. AGAIN.

  “When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a marker in her hand, adding numbers in a swift, steady stream to the columns already there. She pauses after she asks the question, turning, a perplexed expression on her face. “Or did I already ask you that?”

  Roger is cross-legged on the bed, looking equally perplexed. “Yes,” he says, and then, “No,” and then, “I don’t know. I don’t think so? Maybe you thought it really loud, and I picked it up.”

  “With my eyes open?” she asks dubiously. “If we’re starting to communicate with our eyes open and our mouths shut, the entanglement is getting worse. We should probably be concerned about that.”

  “Or not,” says Roger. “Maybe we’re going through … I don’t know, psychic puberty. That usually means more stability.”

  “Yeah, when it’s over,” says Dodger. “I don’t know about you, but when I was in the middle of physical puberty, I spent an evening in the kitchen smashing plates and crying for no good reason. Mom didn’t even get mad, because she’d done something similar with a hammer and a bunch of her mom’s wedding china. Do you want to know what kind of damage we’d do during psychic puberty? Because I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that at all.”

  “The Midwich cuckoos have nothing on us,” says Roger.

  “They changed the title to The Village of the Damned when they made the movie,” says Dodger. “Anyway, those kids weren’t good planners. We would be the end of days.”

  “Probably less oddly sexist, though.”

  “Ever notice how our last names make the word ‘Midwich’ if you cut them in half?” asks Dodger. “Middleton gives us ‘mid,’ and Cheswich gives us ‘wich.’ Midwich. It’s like a lousy word puzzle.”

  Roger straightens, looking down the length of his nose at her. “Did you seriously just ask me whether I had noticed a word puzzle? Even a bad one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been inhaling marker fumes again?”

  “Yes.” Dodger widens her eyes, giving him her best sappy smile. “They make my head all bubbly.”

  Roger picks up a pillow, weighs it carefully in his hands, and flings it at her. She dodges, laughing, and for a moment he can almost forget the crushing sense of déjà vu hanging over the room. We’re diverging from the original script, he thinks, and that makes no sense, but it soothes his nerves all the same. Divergence is good. We got it wrong, he thinks, and that makes even less sense, and does nothing for his nerves. If anything, it sets them back on edge.

  “Well?” says Dodger. He looks back to her. She’s put the cap on her marker and is looking at him expectantly, clearly waiting for something.

  Roger hastily reviews their conversation, backtracking to the point where everything went strange. His answer should be easy. It’s not. “I don’t think I’m going to go,” he says, and the feeling of disoriented doom recedes. He can breathe again. “It’s not a good time to fly to Boston. The tickets are refundable, I can say I have to stay on campus for some reason … Could I come to Thanksgiving dinner at your place? It’s cool if I can’t, I’m happy to roast a chicken and lecture it for not being a turkey.”

  “Charming as I find the image of you yelling at your dinner, of course you can come home with me,” says Dodger, expectant look melting into a frown. She drops her marker on the floor. That’s standard behavior: she leaves them scattered around the room like breadcrumbs, waiting for her to pick them up and begin another mathematical journey into mystery. She walks over to the bed, perches, birdlike, on the edge, looking at him gravely. “What’s wrong? You were so excited about seeing your parents.”

  “I just don’t think this is a good time.” He can see how things will play out, like watching a flickering home movie projected on a makeshift screen. Each piece leads inevitably to the next, from his mother’s cornbread to the footsteps on the stairs. The images are already starting to fray around the edges, and he’s glad of that, in a way: these aren’t thoughts he wants to have about his parents. These aren’t memories he wants to keep.

  He’s also terrified. How many times? The question echoes. It has no good answer.

  Dodger frowns. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “My family’s a little much sometimes.”

  “I could do with a little much.” He manages to smile. He does it for her, and is rewarded when some of the tension leaves her shoulders. She trusts him not to lie to her. She’s the better liar of the two of them, and sometimes she forgets that doesn’t make him incapable of deception: he’s good too, in his own way. “Hey, speaking of family, have you thought more about getting our blood tested?”

  She blinks before her whole face lights up. “I have!” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually. I think we should do it. I want to know whether the quantum entanglement has a basis in biology, or whether we were just in the wrong place at the right time and somehow blundered into a cosmic anomaly—”

  She keeps talking, and he keeps listening, clinging as he does to the thin line that reminds him, over and over, how something has gone wrong; how something is out of true. He responds when necessary, letting her carry the bulk of the conversation. We got it wrong, he thinks, and he doesn’t know what “it” is, and the not knowing is like a splinter in his mind. He wants to talk to her about it. He doesn’t know how.

  By the end of the evening, he’s confirmed for Thanksgiving in Palo Alto, and they’ve agreed to talk to Smita about performing a blood test after the holiday. She’ll probably consider it beneath her, but at least they both know her, and they trust her to jab them with a needle. He leaves promptly at eleven. It’s a school night, after all.

  Dodger walks him to the door, all smiles, and shuts it firmly behind him. Only then does she let her knees buckle, sinking to the hallway floor. Candace is already in bed and she hasn’t seen Erin in days; she’s not concerned about her roommates walking in on her, thank God. Everything is spinning, everything has been spinning since she asked Roger when he was leaving. It’s like the world has transformed into a carnival ride, constantly in motion, never growing still. She’s experienced this before, but it’s never been this bad. When Roger was talking, it was all she could do to keep smiling, to keep from running out of the room to vomit.

  He’d think there was something wrong with her if he knew. He’d think she was broken, or that their quantum entanglement was overloading her synapses. To be honest, she’s not sure that’s not what’s happening. There was a click earlier in the evening, like a metal rod being shoved into a battery pack, and ever
ything went white for a heartbeat. It’s happened before. Not often, of course, but often enough that the sensation was familiar. She almost welcomes those electric-shock moments when they come, because those memories will always remain sharp and crisp and easy to revisit, preserved in time like amber.

  (The day she opened her wrists in the gully is one of those frozen moments. It’s not a pleasant memory, not by a long shot. She’s still grateful to have it trapped in her mind the way it is. Every time she starts to feel like the world is getting narrow, like she needs to open herself to let the blackness out, she goes to that memory. She remembers the way it felt: that it wasn’t better, it wasn’t an answer, it solved nothing, but it nearly took everything away. Sometimes perfect recall is a blessing that can be used to counterbalance all the curses in the world.)

  Not here; not now. She starts to cry, big, wracking sobs that shake her entire body and make her eyes burn. She’s getting snot down her front—she’s probably getting snot in her hair—and that doesn’t matter, because the world is still spinning, the worst carousel the world has ever known, bobbing and weaving around her. She doesn’t know how to make it stop. She doesn’t know how to make it stop. There is no exit from this funhouse.

  Eventually, the tears run out. She curls herself into a tight ball on the hallway floor and waits in silence for the world to stop spinning.

  * * *

  Roger knows none of this, because she doesn’t call for him, because he doesn’t like to walk with his eyes closed. He’s halfway home when he hears the footsteps. This time, he knows who they belong to. He stops walking and turns, waiting for Erin to catch up. She looks … satisfied, somehow, like things are going according to some complicated plan that she hasn’t felt the need to share with anyone else. He hates her for having that smug look on her face. He hates himself for putting it there.

  “What did you do to me?” he demands.

  Erin’s smile doesn’t falter. “I have no idea,” she says. “I’m not you, Jackdaw. When I see the Impossible City, I forget it afterward, unless you order otherwise. I guess this time you didn’t care to retain the information.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “No, I’m not,” she says. “That’s the fun part. Because see, come morning, all this is going to seem like a funky dream—even this conversation, which wouldn’t have happened if not for the things that came before it. Your mind is going to edit out the pieces that don’t make sense. It’s going to lie to you, and you’re going to let it. The world’s more comfortable that way. The world hangs together better that way. And you need a lot more foundation stones before you can start building this tower.”

  “Do you speak entirely in metaphor with everyone, or am I lucky somehow?”

  Erin’s eyes seem to darken. “Oh, you’re luckier than you know. You’re lucky I’m the one they chose to watch over you. You’re lucky they hurt me. And you’re lucky your sister is one of the tenacious ones. The guns are fragile. They need their triggers to keep them in check. The other pairs they separated didn’t make it. You did. They want to know why. They want to understand you.”

  “They who?” asks Roger.

  “The guards at the Impossible City. The Page of Frozen Waters. But the King of Cups most of all. You could be what he’s been looking for his entire life—and he’s not the sort of man you want paying attention to you. He’s not a humbug, like some other wizard figures I could name. This isn’t that kind of story. He’s the real deal.”

  Roger scowls at her. “Do you know what happened to me tonight or what?”

  “You remember I had something to do with it,” says Erin. “That’s fascinating. That means we’ve been here before more than once. Time is like skin: it can scar if you cut it enough times. Your sister, she knows how to cut it, but she isn’t allowed to pick up the knife unless she’s given permission. You gave her permission, and she cut time.” She tilts her head, looking at him calmly. “You did this to yourself.”

  “You told me to.” He’s not sure why he’s so certain of that—it’s a feeling more than a fact, something snarled in the rapidly fraying cobweb of memory carried over from a timeline that never happened. “You said I had to.”

  “Is that so? Well, if I said something like that, I probably had a damn good reason.” Erin sobers, the dark levity draining from her face, and looks at him. “I speak in metaphor because you’re a Jackdaw, you’re Jack Daw, and they didn’t stuff you with feathers, they stuffed you with words. Things that make too much sense will drop right through you. Metaphors snag and stay. You need things that will stay with you. You need to figure this out. I can’t help you.”

  “You’re helping me now.”

  “No, I’m planting seeds in your subconscious, because I know that come tomorrow morning, you’ll think this was all a dream.” Erin takes a step closer. “I wouldn’t even be doing this much if we weren’t in the immediate lee of a timeline reset. When you cuckoos break the laws of reality, it creates a soft spot before it scars. The world is out of order. It wants to get back into order, and that gives me more flexibility than I’d normally have. I am all about taking advantage of flexibility. That’s what I was designed to do. I’m like you, Jackdaw; we come from the same lab. I’m just not as important, or at least that’s what the people who made us like to think. You and me and that crazy sister of yours, we’re going to change the world, but only if I can keep you alive and innocuous-looking long enough for you to figure out how. You’re not going home for Thanksgiving?”

  Roger shakes his head before he stops to think about it. “No,” he says.

  “Good. Your parents aren’t to be trusted, not anymore. They were safe enough when you were a kid—never really safe, but safe enough. They’re not safe now. They’ll turn you in and take your replacement in the same afternoon. If you can stay here for Christmas, too, that would probably be for the best.” Erin’s smile is entirely devoid of pleasure. “You’re the word boy. Find an excuse that they’ll believe.”

  “What are you even talking about? If you know so much, why aren’t you helping us?”

  “But I am helping you,” she says, and for once, there’s nothing mocking or strange in her tone: she’s telling the truth as she understands it. “You’re not ready to hatch yet, let alone stand up and fight. If you attract attention now, you’re dead, both of you. So I need to keep you safe and kicking until you break that shell and start claiming what’s yours. You can’t skip to the end of the story just because you’re tired of being in the middle. You’d never survive.”

  Roger looks at her for a long moment, puzzling through her latest words, comparing them to the ones she started with. Finally, he asks, “Are you saying that because we’ve already tried?”

  She smiles, quick and sharp as a knife’s edge. “Now you’re getting it. Go home. Go to sleep. Forget all this, but remember to tell your parents that you’re not coming. That’s the only thing you have to hold on to.”

  “Erin—”

  She turns on her heel. “See you at the Impossible City, Jackdaw,” she says, and then she’s gone, slipping into the maze of Berkeley’s streets and leaving him alone.

  Roger stares at the place where she was for a moment. Then he starts to walk again, slowly at first, but with increasing speed, until he’s running, taking the last two blocks between Dodger’s place and his at a dead sprint. He has to try three times to fit his key into the lock.

  There’s always a blank book next to his bed. He tries to remember to write down his dreams, but all too often, his mornings are a haze of need-coffee, need-cigarette, need-pants because class starts in five minutes. He grabs the book, grabs the nearest pencil, and drops to the mattress, starting to write with fevered speed. He writes until his wrist aches and his hand feels tight and hot, like it’s grown three sizes, even though it looks the same to the naked eye. When he’s done—when he’s written down every scrap he can remember, every feeling, every impression, and every word that Erin said—he st
ares at it for a moment. Then he slumps over sideways, exhausted.

  He’s asleep before his head hits the pillow.

  * * *

  Morning announces itself with its usual lack of tact: by sending sunlight flooding in through his bedroom window, where the curtains he failed to close last night do nothing to protect him. Roger groans and rolls over, burying his face in his pillow. The zipper of his jeans digs into his skin, and he realizes with bemusement that he’s fully clothed. He’s even wearing his shoes. His head aches like he’s hungover, but he was at Dodger’s last night, and Dodger doesn’t drink. Pot and the occasional recreational hallucinogen, sure. Alcohol, though, that’s not her style. She doesn’t like being sloppy, and when he’s with her, he usually doesn’t either. Dodger is merciless when she feels like she has an advantage.

  Still groggy, he sits up. His dream book is askew; he must have woken at some point in the night. He picks it up, opens it, and peers at the scribbled notes inside. None of them make any sense. It’s like he’s written the outline of some dystopian nightmare about Over the Woodward Wall, all mixed up with familiar faces.

  “Golly, Zib, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he mutters, and chuckles dryly, a sound that turns into a cough as the crud that’s settled in his lungs overnight shifts and cracks. Smoking’s going to be the death of him one day. The thought makes him realize how much he needs a cigarette. He stands, leaving the book behind, and heads off to start the morning.

  It will be much, much later before he realizes that this was the moment when he decided which part he was going to play. By then, it will be a thousand miles too late.

  Variation

  TIMELINE: 13:11 PST, NOVEMBER 22, 2008 (SIX DAYS LATER).

  The doorbell rings. Dodger tears herself away from an ecstasy of Thanksgiving garlands, shouts, “I’ll get it!” and races for the door, leaving her craft supplies scattered across the table.