Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Yes,” says Erin. She doesn’t say any of the other things, the things about the costs of such an action, the reasons most people would never dream of doing such a thing. Sometimes when the facts speak for themselves, they do so by telling blatant, beautiful lies. “But if you want to be able to make an alchemist do what you want, you need to manifest. You need to know where we are.”

  Dodger looks at her flatly before she reaches across the table and grabs the salt and pepper shakers, removes their lids, and dumps their contents onto the Formica, stirring the mess with her fingers until it has been inextricably mingled. (The resulting blend looks distressingly like the coal dust and ground silver Leigh favors. Dodger doesn’t know this. Erin does, and she shivers.)

  “We need to determine the properties of the set in order to define the quadrants,” says Dodger. “You said this is either water or fire, correct?”

  “Yes,” says Erin.

  “Assigning values to the four possibilities, with water standing at negative two and fire standing at positive two, we begin by subtracting air and earth from each…” Dodger’s fingers continue to move as she speaks, drawing lines and equations through the mess she’s made, sinking deeper and deeper into her own little world.

  The air around their booth is getting colder. What Dodger is doing isn’t math in the truest sense of the word, and at the same time, it’s a deeper, truer arithmetic than she’s done in years. It is the instinctive math of children weighing parental disapproval against the rapidly setting sun, and the heartbroken math of sailors measuring the holes in their boat against the distance to the shore. This is the math that moves the universe, the measure and countermeasure that dances over and around the numbers. Dodger holds this kind of math in her bones, and her fingers dance through the blend of vegetable and mineral scattered in front of her, separating them from one another with almost thoughtless swipes. Bit by bit, the figures she is pulling from the bone and char blending are becoming paler, losing the charcoal tint of the pepper.

  When she’s done, she has separated the salt and the pepper. It should have been impossible. She doesn’t even appear to realize it’s happened. Dodger taps the table beneath her last line of incomprehensible figures and says, “Water. That’s why we’re having this drought, or part of it. Whatever Baker’s enemies—I can’t believe I’m saying this—whatever Baker’s enemies did to unmake her work, it’s still going on, and part of it is trying to deny the quadrants their essential natures. So you take as much of the water away from the place that’s supposed to represent water in the equation as you can, and hope eventually it gets so unbalanced that it can’t hold together anymore.”

  “Makes sense,” says Erin. “Baker purified the elements when she divided them. She tied each of them to a concrete anchor point, but nothing in nature wants to be pure for long. If someone wanted to destroy the Impossible City, they’d begin by destabilizing the elements. That’s what Baum was trying to do, with his mixed and muddled Oz. The old bastard.”

  “I don’t care about your dead alchemists and their stupid plans,” says Dodger. She stands. This time, no one stops her. “We’re in the element of water, and if you can give me the dimensions of its borders and the alchemical flux that attends them, I can lead you straight to whatever serves as its center. Now can we go?”

  “There’s just one more thing we have to do first,” says Erin.

  “What?” demands Dodger.

  Erin smiles implacably. “I have to pay the check.”

  Even under the circumstances, Roger can’t keep from laughing.

  * * *

  They walk the mile and a half to the BART station, through abandoned business parks and silent residential neighborhoods. Erin takes the lead at first, with Roger behind her and Dodger bringing up the rear. Dodger is muttering to herself, taking quick, tight looks around, like she’s measuring things. Roger keeps looking back at Dodger, reassuring himself that she hasn’t run away. Finally, he turns his face forward and closes his eyes.

  “Hey, Dodge.”

  The sound of Roger’s voice echoing in her skull is enough to make her jump. He’s still walking. She narrows her eyes. “You’re going to trip and fall.”

  “I’m not.” Being this close to his body while he’s in her head gives his words a strange echo effect, inside and outside layering over each other to create something entirely new. “I learned this trick from you. Remember, during the earthquake? You closed your eyes and kept running, because you had mine to look through. It was pretty clever.”

  “It’s almost like I’m smart or something,” she says bitterly. “This isn’t the way to have a private conversation. Your girlfriend can still hear us.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” he says. “I don’t know if she ever was. Dodge … we have to find a way to get through this without losing each other. I don’t think I can handle it.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you let her use you to put me on a leash,” she says. “It’s not safe to be around you.”

  “I won’t do it again without your permission. I promise.” He pauses. That doesn’t seem like enough. “I swear,” he amends, and it’s more childish, and that makes it more sincere.

  “I don’t think that’s a promise you can keep. I don’t want to be apart from you, but I don’t believe you when you say you won’t hurt me. You’re going to hurt me.”

  “Of course I am. I’m your brother. I’m going to hurt you and annoy you and drive you crazy, and you’re going to do the same to me. So what if I got super-persuasion powers? You can break time. That’s pretty badass, Dodge. But it only works if we stay together. I’m tired of feeling like something’s missing. I’m tired of wondering what color my apples are. Stay with me. Sure, we’ll probably hurt each other, but no one else will ever hurt us again.” That’s what she’s always wanted, isn’t it? For no one to hurt her.

  Dodger is quiet for a moment. Then, in a soft voice, she says, “I’ll kill you if you break your word. I can do it. No matter how strong you get, I can do it.”

  “I know.”

  She smiles to herself, nods, and says, “Get out of my head.”

  Roger opens his eyes and feels her hand slipping into his. He glances to the side and there she is, walking beside him, eyes still fixed front.

  “If this Leigh woman is as smart as you say, she’ll be watching for us to get on the BART,” she says. “It’s the easiest way to get around the Bay Area once you give up having a car. So we need to do something else.”

  “Something else like what?” asks Erin. “You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”

  “Because I still don’t know,” says Dodger. “But I know we need to get to the water. Do you have any more cash on you?”

  “I always have cash on me.”

  “Good.” Dodger’s smile takes on an almost feral edge. It’s the sort of smile that gives children nightmares, and Roger is obscurely relieved. If Dodger is giving other people nightmares, she isn’t too weighed down by her own. “I hope you have a lot, because we’re taking a taxi.”

  “To where?”

  “Far away.”

  * * *

  “Far away” turns out to be Berkeley: they’re back where they started from, in the city where the ashes of the house where Roger and Erin shared so many happy years still smolder. The air feels electric when they step out of the cab, and Roger realizes it’s partially because it’s been so long since he was here with Dodger, who takes his hand as soon as she’s out of the vehicle. The last time they were together in this city, they killed more than a thousand people, and destroyed landmarks that should have stood for another hundred years. Now, they’re just two cuckoos on the run, two more supplicants on the way to the Impossible City. The moment should have more weight to it, should matter more. It doesn’t. This is just a way station. This was only ever a way station.

  “The Transbay bus picks up from the Albany BART station,” says Dodger. “We’ll take that as fa
r as the Financial District. There’s a bike rental kiosk near the bus stop. We can get where we need to go from there.”

  “And where do we need to go?” asks Erin.

  “I still don’t know.”

  The cab dropped them three blocks from the station, at Dodger’s insistence. It’s a paper-thin ruse; it won’t cost Leigh and her people more than a few seconds. A few seconds is better than nothing. They walk to the station and stop, looking at its bright lights, its modern lines. This is what normalcy looks like. This is the life that they, for better or for worse, have been forced to leave behind.

  “We need more time,” says Dodger abruptly. She turns to Roger. “Order me.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what to do, and we don’t have time to stand around waiting for me to figure it out. It’s only spiders in my brain when I don’t want you to do it. I want you to do it. Tell me to buy us more time.”

  Erin steps back, folding her arms, and watches. They need to do this, to find the empty spaces between them and determine the best ways to fill them. She remembers this, or something very much like it, from other timelines, attempts to manifest which ended in failure, and in everything being set back to the start. She doesn’t know when Roger told her to remember it, but remember it she does: she knows this is important. She will not interfere.

  It still aches. She remembers the hurt she felt the first time she realized she’d never be part of their closed circle, their nation of two. Reed might have split the Doctrine into two bodies, each with their own thoughts, personality, and desires, but he was never strong enough to make them independent of each other. They’d always come back together, and when they did, they’d always form a single whole, without a crack between them to let anyone else slither in.

  Roger grimaces. “Are you sure?” he asks, voice unsettled.

  “I am,” says Dodger. “Tell me.”

  He takes a deep breath. “Dodger,” he says. “Find us more time. That’s an order.”

  The air around them seems to plummet four degrees as Dodger’s eyes widen and go glassy. Behind them, her mind is working double-time, making connections and throwing them aside at a speed she wouldn’t be capable of on her own. Then, without a word, she starts to walk away. After only a few steps, she breaks into a run.

  Erin and Roger run after her, following her into the bright open-air lobby of the BART station. She digs in her pocket, pulling out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and feeds it to the machine, punching a series of keys that shouldn’t do anything but confuse the poor computer. Instead, it spits out a hail of golden dollar coins and three tickets, each set to the value of a one-way trip to Fremont. She fills her pockets with dollar coins, keeps one ticket, and holds the other two out toward her companions.

  “Take them,” she says, when they fail to move.

  They do.

  She licks her ticket on the side without the magnetic strip, and gestures for the others to do the same. They do, and she snatches the tickets from their hands, running away across the station. Roger and Erin stare after her.

  “Do you know what she’s doing?” Roger asks.

  “Not a damn clue,” says Erin.

  Dodger returns at a trot, hands empty. “Gave them to some homeless kids looking for a place to take a nap,” she says. “The tickets are ours. Everything about them says ‘ours.’ Breath and spit and purpose. As long as they’re in the BART system, anyone running the numbers to try and find us is going to get a false positive off those tickets.” She hesitates, face falling. “Leigh wouldn’t … she wouldn’t derail an entire train to take us out, would she?”

  “No,” says Erin, before Dodger can run to try to reclaim the tickets. She says it so firmly, with so much certainty, that it’s almost possible to believe she’s not lying. “That’s too public. She’ll avoid that sort of thing if there’s any way.”

  “Great,” says Dodger. “The bus leaves in five minutes. We should be on it.”

  They are.

  The sun won’t be up for another hour. The bus slides through the darkness, all cool, processed air and drowsy commuters. They can’t sit together and so Erin sits apart, easing herself back into the reality where this is her natural condition: where loneliness is not only a consequence but the water in which she swims, melancholy mermaid never more to come to land. Dodger takes the window in the seat she shares with Roger, and he closes his eyes, letting her watch the trip for both of them. His color vision is coming, but it’s not as nuanced as hers. Seeing San Francisco by night with her depth and complexity of color is … it’s amazing.

  It’s amazing.

  They glide through the fog clinging to the Bay Bridge, long, snaking thing that it is, incongruous palm trees waving to their left, rooted in soil suspended over water (there’s alchemy in those trees, in earth over water, surrounded by air and the hot steel combustion engines of the cars; now that he knows this force exists, is not just a children’s story, he’s beginning to see it everywhere). Then the fog breaks, and there is San Francisco, glorious in the darkness, lit up like a beacon to the weary and the lost. Dodger’s hand tightens over his. Roger goes still.

  Every city is the Impossible City, when a savior is needed badly enough. When that’s where the road of alchemical enlightenment leads.

  “Can we survive this?” asks Dodger, eyes still on the window, and Roger doesn’t answer her, and maybe that’s for the best. Maybe some questions don’t need to be answered.

  The bus stop is cold and industrial, surrounded by the sleeping giants of the Financial District. The Greyhound depot isn’t far away. Dodger vanishes inside, returns with three tickets to three different destinations, repeats the trick with saliva and strangers. When Leigh goes looking, she’ll find that not only are they on the BART, they’re also heading for Reno, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington, all places where the lakes are liquid and water’s claim might be seen as stronger. There’s a chance she’ll see all four options and deduce that none of them is true, but she’s smart enough to know that they’ll have considered that possibility, and might be banking on it. She has to check at least one of their false leads. Dodger has done what she promised. She’s bought them time.

  They move across the parking lot and down the street, a silent trio of refugees running from a war that can’t be real. The bicycle rental rack is bolted to the street in front of a deli, automated, no humans involved. Dodger feeds it golden dollar coins until it surrenders three bikes, all new and white and glossy. Even the tires have been scrubbed clean.

  They take their bikes and stand there, unmoving, all three of them clutching their handlebars hard. Erin speaks first.

  “Now where?” she asks.

  “Don’t you know?” asks Dodger.

  Erin looks at her and shakes her head. “I’m the living incarnation of the force of Order,” she says. “I didn’t get cosmic knowledge or the ability to change the universe. I got the urge to organize your CDs. It’s on the two of you. Where are we going?”

  Roger and Dodger exchange a look.

  “Mathematically, this place is water,” she says.

  “We need something on or near water, that was standing when Baker was alive, or she wouldn’t have used it as an anchor point,” says Roger. “Leave out natural landmarks—she was hung up on the idea of the Impossible City and finding a way for man to coexist with nature, so she won’t have used something no one built.”

  “Which is good, because if she’d gone for natural beauty, we’d need to get ourselves to Santa Cruz,” says Dodger. “Natural Bridges is Baker’s sort of place.”

  “The monarch migration alone would have sealed the deal,” agrees Roger. “It would have been something manmade, something she thought would endure—”

  “—so nothing that looked temporary or like a passing thing,” says Dodger. “Golden Gate Bridge is tempting, but I think that’s why it doesn’t add up. It’s a false flag—”

  “—too much of a tourist a
ttraction to risk using, and not about water. It’s about being above water. I’d almost buy it for fire, if you told me it had to be a landmark, but it feels less like our destination and more like one of—”

  “—the ways to get there. Add the sum of the bridges, subtract the average distance traveled, and the date…” Dodger stops slowly this time, breaking the rhythm of the theory they’ve been tossing between them. Her eyes widen. “It’s gone. Whatever it is, it’s gone.”

  Roger blinks. “Show your math,” he says, because that’s always been the one thing she’s happy to do, no matter what else is going on: she’ll always, always stop to show her math.

  “Reed’s been trying to undo everything Baker did. He has to have known where the anchors were, because he probably helped Baker create them. So we need something that fits the parameters, matches the math, and isn’t there anymore.”

  “Ah,” says Roger, understanding. He pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to concentrate.

  History is a form of language. It tells the story of an area, of a city, of an idea (because all any civilization is, really, is a string of ideas tied together in a shining cord, tangled sometimes, frayed, but continuous and beautiful, even when it’s not). It’s never been his specialty. Still, he picks things up. Sometimes he feels like he picks them up straight from the city itself. And who knows? Maybe he does. Maybe he does.

  “1896,” he says. “Erin, what was Baker doing in 1896?”

  “Gathering apprentices, teaching elementary school, laying the seeds of her philosophy,” she says. “She knew what she wanted to do with the Up-and-Under, but the first book hadn’t come out yet. She wasn’t sure it could be accomplished.”

  “And she banked on the belief of children to act as an anchor for the more extreme ideas,” he says. “The Sutro Baths were opened to the public in 1896. They were supposed to be a permanent fixture of the city. Dodger, what do the numbers say?”

  Her eyes go glossy again. He may never get used to that, and maybe that’s a good thing. A sister should be a sister first, after all, and not a search engine for the wonders of the cosmos.