Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Please!” Smita’s voice is a shout this time; it echoes in the confines of the lab, inescapable, impossible to overlook.

  And not one of them turns around.

  A hand lands on her shoulder, squeezing until she feels her clavicle bend under the pressure. Like the chemistry students she still watches with helpless, hopeless eyes, Smita does not turn around.

  Erin’s lips brush her ear as she says, in a conversational tone, “I warned you. I told you that you were already a ghost. You could have stayed upstairs, and never realized how much I meant that. Now you get to make a choice.”

  “Please let me go,” Smita whispers.

  “It’s too late for that. It’s far, far too late for that. But if I kill you here, they’ll see the blood. I can’t sterilize their whole lab while they’re in it, not even with the Hand of Glory protecting me. If I kill you here, I have to kill them too. Do you want that?”

  Yes, thinks Smita fiercely, looking at the chemistry majors as they laugh, flicking pizza toppings at each other, unaware that the laws of science are being violated only feet away. What’s happening is impossible. But she feels Erin’s fingers grinding on her shoulder, and she knows no amount of denial will change the reality of her situation. She’s going to die here. All that’s left to her is to remember how to die with dignity.

  Dignity means not condemning three innocent bystanders simply because she can’t stand the idea that they will continue after she has stopped. “Please don’t hurt them,” she says.

  “Good girl,” says Erin. “Let’s go back to your lab. We can take the elevator this time. You must be tired.”

  Smita doesn’t protest, doesn’t argue; she’s already run once, and it got her no farther than a room full of people who couldn’t hear when she begged for help. She isn’t broken yet, but she’s breaking, and when Erin pulls her away from the doorway, she goes willingly, allowing herself to be led back to the elevator. It is somehow utterly reasonable that the woman is carrying the burning hand again. That’s the reason for the isolation, she knows it, and yet she also knows she can’t get the hand away before the knife makes another appearance.

  The elevator comes at the press of a button. The sorcery that’s wiped them from the eyes of the world doesn’t affect everything. There should be an escape route hidden in that fact. Smita can’t see it. She’s tired and afraid, and her lungs are burning. There are no escapes left.

  Erin guides her into the elevator and presses the button for the top floor. The doors close. They start to move. “I really am sorry about this,” she says, once it’s clear that Smita isn’t going to break the silence. “I like you a lot. You’re good people. If I had another option, I’d take it.”

  “Don’t kill me.”

  “That’s not on the table this time around, I’m afraid. This is how it ends. The only question left is how badly it’s going to hurt.” There’s a tightness in Erin’s voice. Smita glances toward her. She looks pained, like this is the last thing she wants to do. “Please, don’t make me hurt you more than I have to. Just tell me what I need to know, and I can make this as painless as possible.”

  “This is about Roger and Dodger?”

  A slight nod, as the elevator doors open and Erin pushes Smita into the hall. “I understand why you agreed when they came to you and asked for help. Who wouldn’t have been willing to help a friend? And Roger can be very persuasive when he wants to be. He doesn’t realize just how persuasive yet. He hasn’t matured fully in this timeline. I only remember snips from the ones where he has—usually because he’s ordered me to remember something before he’s hit the big redhead button—but hoo, boy. I can’t blame anyone for doing what he asks. You didn’t have a chance once he got the idea in his head.”

  “Dodger asked me,” says Smita hopelessly. She’s not sure why she’s trying to argue with Erin, with this impossible woman who has somehow isolated her from the world, who pulls knives out of the air. “She said they needed to know whether they were biologically related before they tried to have their adoption records unsealed. I was just trying … I was just trying to help a friend. That was all.”

  Erin looks at her with sympathetic eyes as she guides Smita, almost gently, back to the lab. She looks sad. She looks like she doesn’t want to be doing this, and somehow that’s the worst part of the whole situation: Smita is going to die, and it’s not even going to matter. She’s going to cease, and the person who kills her won’t be doing it out of passion, or anger, or anything other than a vague, inexplicable regret.

  “A lot of us are trying to help our friends,” she says. “Some of us are trying to change the world. Where’s the research?”

  Wordless, Smita points to her computer, to her notebooks.

  Erin nods. “Have you posted it anywhere? Are there any backups outside this lab?”

  “No,” says Smita. Then, without heat or expectation: “Please.”

  “You know better,” says Erin. She puts the Hand of Glory on the nearest table before she grips Smita by the shoulder, hard, with her free hand, twisting her around until they are facing away from one another. The pain of that unexpected clutch is enough that Smita gasps, taken by surprise.

  Then Erin lets her go and steps back, and both her hands are empty; the knife is gone. Smita looks down, and the knife is found, slipped between her ribs with a magician’s skill, so tidy that for a moment, it looks less like a murder weapon and more like some strange accessory. The hilt has made a seal against her skin. There’s no blood. She knows enough about anatomy to know that this can’t last. Seals break. Blood escapes. She’s not going to die; she’s already dead. The anomaly is her refusal to fall down.

  “Thank you,” says Erin, and reaches for her knife.

  Smita thinks, too late, to step away, to run; maybe she’s not a ghost anymore, now that she’s been stabbed, now that the seal is broken. She could scream for help, and help might come. She might find salvation in the students three floors down, or in campus security, well-meaning and bumbling as they sometimes are. She might get away. But she doesn’t think in time, and so Erin’s fingers find the hilt, and the knife slips free, and the blood follows, red and hot and so, so plentiful. Smita knows how much blood is in the human body, the volume and the purpose of it, but she’s never seen it. Not like this, flowing bright and precious and irretrievable.

  The blade pierced her lung. When she tries to speak, there’s no sound, only the soft whistle of the wind, distant, almost mocking her. She moves her lips anyway, silently cursing Erin, the false friend, the fiend who’s taken everything. She curses Roger and Dodger. Whatever they are, whatever they do or don’t know about themselves, this was their fault. This is on their heads.

  Then she falls. Her last thought is of her mother, who was so proud of her for getting into graduate school, for becoming a scientist, for saving lives. “My Smita is going to save lives” was what she always said, chest puffed out and eyes crinkled at the edges, and Smita’s never going to see her mother smile like that again; Smita is never going to see her mother do anything again. Smita is over. Smita is done.

  Her eyes close of their own volition, and her blood spills across the floor, and her part in the story ends.

  * * *

  Erin waits until Smita stops breathing before she sighs, straightens, and picks up the Hand of Glory. Assignments like this are the worst. She should be home, watching TV and ignoring the homework that won’t be graded anyway. (She’s a theology student because they have people in the Theology department, loyal people, people who fear Reed as much as they adore him. She could show up for class naked and singing Queen songs, and they’d use her as an example of modern Dionysian behavior. Her supposed graduate career is just a cover for the life she’s not openly allowed to lead.) Instead she’s here, in this sterile, brightly lit place, watching a woman’s blood—a friend’s blood—spread across the tile floor like a benediction.

  “I really am sorry about this,” she says.

  Smita
doesn’t answer.

  The computer where the test results are stored—not by name, but the numeric codes are easy enough to decode, if you know what you’re looking for, and Erin knows what she’s looking for—is unlocked, and offers her the data she requests with mechanical joy, holding nothing back. Computers are orderly things. They want to please her. She combs through Smita’s email, looking for signs the woman lied. It seems unlikely; terror and hope are uncomfortable bedfellows, and when they lie down together, frivolities like lies tend to fade away. Still, she was made to be diligent, and so diligent she will be.

  The Hand still burns. No one comes to disturb her while she’s looking at the pieces of a dead woman’s life, and when she’s done, she feels she can say with certainty that Smita was keeping the mystery of the antigens in Roger and Dodger’s blood to herself: it was a toy she wasn’t ready to share. Other students helped with the testing, and they’ll have accidents of their own over the next few weeks, brakes that don’t work, faulty electrical wiring in their dorm rooms, whatever’s required to get the job done, but they’re not a high priority. They won’t have enough of the pieces to do any damage.

  The scarring around this moment is less severe than it was before Smita died. She’s probably demanded a reset here more than once, but not much more: two times, maybe three. Little flickering candle flames of alternate chances. They can’t have led to good endings, though, or she wouldn’t be here now. That’s the trouble with playing Choose Your Own Adventure with reality: when they go back to the beginning of the book, none of them remember. Roger and Dodger don’t know yet what she is to them, or them to her. They don’t even know Darren’s name.

  Her fingers stumble on the keyboard, which has gone blurry. She blinks her tears away, trying to keep her composure. She shouldn’t have thought of him. It’s that simple. Darren is in the past, and until they find a clear path through this maze, they can’t go back to get him. Each revision has corrected some prior mistake, like Dodger backtracking through her equations and fixing the numbers, but correcting prior mistakes creates the opportunities for new ones.

  This would be so much easier if the two of them could reach the point of becoming fully manifest and able to remember. Erin pushes herself away from the computer. Deleting the data would leave a hole. Anything that’s destroyed leaves a hole. The only way around it is to create something instead.

  Outside, the rain has stopped. The Hand of Glory sees her through her final bloody errands and out of the building, back into the world. The Hand of Glory keeps anyone from noticing when she lights the match. The fire doesn’t want to catch, resisting in the face of sodden wood and weather-treated stone, but there are ways. There are always ways, if you want something bad enough, and eventually, like a phoenix, the flame rises.

  The Hand of Glory keeps her hidden as she stands at a safe distance and watches the building burn. The chemistry students don’t make it out. She’s sorry about that.

  By the time campus security shows up, with the scream of fire engines not far behind, there’s nothing left to save.

  Blame

  TIMELINE: 06:02 PST, DECEMBER 9, 2008 (THE NEXT DAY).

  Someone hammering on the door drags Roger from a sound sleep. He was dreaming of his parents, sitting with them around the kitchen table, trying to explain how he has a sister, and that while she doesn’t need to be a part of their family, she’s always been a part of his. In fact, Dodger haunted all his dreams last night, calling his name, trying to get his attention when something else always seemed more pressing.

  The hammering on the door hasn’t stopped. He rolls out of bed, wiping the grit from his eyes, and bellows, “Hold your water!” The hammering doesn’t lessen. If anything, it increases, like the person trying for his attention has been rewarded by the proof that he’s home.

  “I’m going to fucking murder someone,” he says pleasantly, as he grabs yesterday’s jeans off the floor. He doesn’t bother hunting for a shirt. Whoever it is can cope with the sight of his bare chest, and if that’s too much for their delicate sensibilities, too bad for them. He wasn’t planning to be out of bed before nine. He certainly wasn’t planning on this bullshit.

  Then he opens the door and Dodger’s there, also wearing yesterday’s clothes, her hair snarled like she hasn’t bothered to run a brush through it. She wails something incoherent, more sound and agony than words, and flings herself at him, eyes closed before she hits his chest. When she speaks, her words echo both inside and outside of his skull, like reverb applied to the real world.

  “She’s dead there was a fire last night and now she’s dead the Life Sciences Annex is gone and she’s dead and they called to say classes were canceled because you can’t have a class without a classroom and she’s dead and is this our fault? Did we do this?” She doesn’t pause for air so much as she stops to suck it in, filling lungs that must have been deflated like balloons. She pushes back, opening her eyes, and this time when she speaks, her voice comes only from outside. For that moment, she sounds like a stranger.

  “Roger, Smita’s dead, and so are six other people. We made her look at our weird DNA. We made her start trying to figure out what we were. Is this our fault?”

  Two things occur to Roger simultaneously: first that she’s serious, her eyes wide and brimming with terrified tears. Second that they’re standing at the threshold of his apartment, with door wide open and their conversation being broadcast to the world. It would be nice if their quantum entanglement came with silent communication, but it never has, and this doesn’t seem like the time or place to try.

  The comprehension of what she is saying comes third, and that almost grudgingly, like his mind has no interest in accepting her words. It would reject them if it could, and when he refuses it that right, it responds by dropping them, thuddingly, into the forefront of his awareness, where he must deal with them unsupported.

  Roger’s eyes widen. “Come on, Dodge,” he says. “Let’s get inside. I’ll see if there’s some coffee left in the pot from last night.” Her love of stale coffee borders on the surreal. He’s seen her drink the stuff when it was six days old and capable of supporting life. If anything’s going to lure her, this should be it.

  She isn’t lured. “Smita’s dead,” she says again, louder. “What are we going to do?”

  Curtains twitch in nearby windows. A trick of the light, perhaps, a manifestation of a mind that’s guilty but shouldn’t be—or maybe the neighbors are waking up, and things are about to turn awkward. Roger grimaces as he puts his arm around Dodger’s shoulders and half-guides, half-pulls her into the apartment. “We’re going to have coffee, and you’re going to let me wake up, and then you’re going to try this again, slower and with more words, until I understand you.”

  Dodger doesn’t resist. If anything, Dodger seems relieved to be pulled, to let someone else take responsibility for what she does next. She’s trembling, a movement so slight and so comprehensive that at first he doesn’t notice. There’s no part of her that isn’t shaking. She’s an earthquake forced into the shape of a girl, and as the door swings shut behind them, he wonders whether the fault lines at the heart of her are about to give way completely.

  The hall runs from his bedroom to the front door, with the bathroom, kitchen, and small living room branching off at various points. He leads her to the kitchen, their footsteps muffled by the worn brown carpet, and seats her at the folding card table that serves as his dining room and study nook. (It’s also where he plays poker with some other members of the English department. None of them are any good, and sometimes he thinks about bringing Dodger along, just to see the looks on their faces when she takes them for everything they have.)

  Dodger won’t stop shaking. He wants to hug her and tell her everything is going to be all right, and he doesn’t want to lie to her. He knows she’d believe him; that’s why he can’t do it. Instead, he fills two mugs with coffee, reheating them in the microwave. His is taken black, with two sugars. Hers, with m
ilk and six sugars. Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.

  “Here you go,” he says, setting the mug in front of her.

  She picks it up; wraps her hands around it; doesn’t drink. She seems content to hold it, letting the warmth seep through the ceramic and into her skin. Eyes on the liquid, she says, “The phone rang. I have tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. Had. I had tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. I don’t anymore; they’re canceled. The building burned down last night, sometime after the rain stopped. It was … They think it was some sort of wiring fault that managed to catch fire. Once it reached the chemistry labs, it found all the accelerants it needed to beat the weather. Those labs aren’t even supposed to be there. They were going back to their own building as soon as their plumbing was repaired. A freak accident. People are going to call it a freak accident. Maybe it was. I don’t know. Maybe it was. But. But.”

  “But what?” he asks gently. He already knows—she was clear when she showed up on his doorstep, even if she didn’t give many details—but he doesn’t want to accept it. Not yet. Maybe if he asks the question the right way, he’ll get a different answer.

  “But Smita was in her lab,” whispers Dodger, bringing his hopes crashing down around him. “They found … they found her body when they went looking for survivors.”

  Something occurs to him. “How do you know all this?”

  “The Dean’s office called to say my tutoring sessions were canceled. I guess they’re contacting everyone who’s supposed to have been in there today, to try to keep us from showing up at a smoking ruin.” She looks up. There are tears in her eyes. Still or again, it doesn’t really matter. “Erin was already up. She said she’d been out when the police arrived last night, and heard them talking. She didn’t wake me when she got home, because she knew I was going to find out eventually. She didn’t want to be the one who told me.”