Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  There is little time left. Subtlety, such as it is, must fall by the wayside. There is too much left to do.

  * * *

  The box, which left Reed’s hands not three hours prior, is placed before the High Priest of the American Alchemical Congress with the reverence of a sacrament, who looks at the paper—dull lead scribed with platinum sigils—and frowns.

  “What is this nonsense?” he demands.

  “An apprentice of Master Daniels found this in the walls of the old master’s house,” says the alchemist who carried the box into the room. He is slight, slender, and shivering.

  The others dismiss his shaking as awe. Who wouldn’t feel awe, in the presence of the greatest of the American alchemists? They have peers around the country, but none of them can compare to the presence and power in this room.

  Perhaps if they looked closer, they might see that it is not awe but terror that puts the tremble in his hands. Perhaps they might ask themselves why he comes to them now, with so little fanfare; why the box was found now and not years ago.

  Here is a secret about powerful men, one they would prefer go unspoken: their arrogance is one of the greatest forces in the universe. Even the most paranoid among them see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, and this creates cracks through which the clever may insinuate themselves, changing the story around them.

  The alchemist who carried the prize here, to these men, these powerful, greedy, terrible men, closes his eyes. He has to tell himself that his lover will be safe: that Reed will keep his word and let the man go. Every war, however slow, however understated, has its crossfires, and he was, in the end, unable to keep the man he loved above all others out of the way.

  His love will live and he will die, and in this moment, that seems like the only way this could have gone.

  The seal on the package is broken by a greedy master’s hands, unable to scan through the lead paper with any accuracy: the mechanism inside bursts, spraying alkahest from one side of the room to the other, and all that remains is the screaming.

  Soon, even that is done, and the rest is silence.

  Ghosts

  TIMELINE: 14:49 CDT, JUNE 23, 2016 (THREE DAYS LATER).

  They cross the country as ghosts: silently, swiftly, leaving no footsteps. Buses let them board without tickets; trains do the same, although the number and variety of the conductors means either Roger or Dodger has to be awake at all times, to smile blithely and work their own version of the strange magic surrounding them. (Roger pulls what he insists on calling “Jedi mind tricks,” telling the conductors their tickets are in order. Dodger produces bits of paper—receipts, movie stubs, old index cards—and holds them up for inspection, nodding solemnly when they’re taken for valid tickets. It’s penny-ante stuff, the sort of tricks that will be beneath them before much longer, and yet they can’t conceal their glee when it works. Here it is: the proof that they are what Erin said they were, and more, that they’re getting stronger, more capable, by the day. It won’t be long before no one will notice them if they don’t want to be noticed, if they tell the air to keep them hidden, the world to keep them safe. Roger thinks this is a quiet tragedy. Dodger thinks this is a miracle. Both of them are right.)

  They’re getting stronger. They’re still holding themselves back. Erin, who knows more than they do, even if she’s never been here before, refuses to tell them what to do. They have to figure it out on their own. This time, every time, if she wants it to work, she has to let them figure it out on their own.

  But oh, they’re moving so slowly, and oh, she’s so afraid they won’t be fast enough when they need to be.

  The last bus lets them off in Ohio, where the air is hot with summer and the sky is bruised with the promise of a storm. There are cities here—they’ve seen them, even passed through a couple, when the bus routes curved just so—but this is the country, the kind of wide, flat country neither of them has ever seen. They were born here. That doesn’t make it home. They are children of the jagged, coastal places, the spots where the land drops away and the sea comes up to catch it. This grand flatness, this tornado-catcher of a country, has never belonged to them. The man they are on their way to meet made sure of that.

  “Not too late,” says Dodger, and she’s lying.

  “Always was,” says Roger, and he’s not. He takes her hand, and together they follow Erin into the corn.

  They are less than a week into their manifestation and already the signs of it are clear, for anyone with eyes that know how to see, with ears that know how to hear. They stand taller, walk straighter, move with more ease. Dodger shows no signs that she’s barely recovered from a life-threatening injury; if anything, she looks healthier than she’s ever been, walking fast, moving faster, her every gesture an attack on the world around her. She’s fully integrated her new depth perception into her vision, and has stopped running into things quite so often, although she still runs at them like she expects everything, even walls, even mountains, to stand aside.

  Roger, on the other hand, ambles through the world. Let Dodger race ahead; he’ll always catch up. He moves smoothly, easily, and everything around him rearranges to let him pass. He is comfortable in both his own skin and his place in the world. It’s a terrifying combination, for those few who can look at it and understand what it means. Erin supposes that, after they have faced down Reed, for better or for worse, the people who can tell what Roger and Dodger are by looking at them will never trouble them again. Some risks are too dangerous to take when there’s any way for them to be avoided.

  The corn rustles around them, husks rubbing one against the other like the legs of a thousand insects. Dodger wrinkles her nose.

  “This is very outdoors,” she says. “I don’t like outdoors. That’s where you get sent when you’ve been bad.”

  Roger, who has started hearing the echoes of the things she doesn’t say, hears the words “where your parents send you,” even though they go unspoken. He reaches for her hand, takes it, squeezes it, and keeps walking.

  (He can raise the dead, but he needs something to raise, and there was nothing left when Leigh was done. Her parents are as lost to her as his are to him, and he wishes at least one of them had been spared.)

  “Reed wants to be well concealed,” says Erin. “He likes to think of himself as a spider, sitting in his web, pulling his strings and keeping things hidden. The new King of Cups.”

  There’s so much Roger wants to say. He says none of it. That Reed must die is certain. That Erin, not Dodger, not him, will be the one to pull the trigger is equally certain. All of them have people they want to avenge, deaths they want repaid. But Dodger’s never killed anyone, and the only people he’s killed—Leigh and the man of earth—were killed in self-defense. However necessary this is, it’s still murder.

  They wade through the corn until it seems like the world is nothing but corn, gold like the Impossible City, like the Sutro Baths. Maybe this is the true essence of the Up-and-Under, of transmutation, of everything: the purification of the base materials of soil and sky and water into golden kernels, growing sweet and patient on their stalks. Erin darts ahead, and suddenly there’s a shack in the middle of the corn, small and listing to one side, made of corrugated tin. Someone has painted it with silver paint, until it shines like mercury in the sun.

  Roger and Dodger both stop and blink at the shack, nonplussed.

  “Is that it?” asks Dodger.

  Erin opens the door and smiles, quick and tight. “It’s a long way down.” Then she’s gone, vanishing into the gloom inside the shack, and they have no choice but to follow. She is their only guide, now that they’ve committed themselves to walking the improbable road all the way to the King. They can’t afford to lose her.

  The shed door swings shut behind them, and all is silence. Silence, and the corn.

  * * *

  Erin wasn’t joking when she said it was a long way down: a hatch in the shed floor opens on a spiraling staircase de
scending down, down, into the darkness below the corn. They descend until it begins to feel ridiculous, until Dodger—who grew up in earthquake country, not twister country—is sticking so close to Roger’s side that he’s afraid he’ll trip over her and send them both tumbling down into the dark.

  The stairs are dark. There are lights every ten feet or so, but they’re barely enough to split the gloom. They’ve descended almost fifty feet before he realizes the lights are getting brighter, matching the adjustment of their eyes. This system will keep people disoriented for as long as humanly possible, rather than letting them fully adjust to either dark or day. He’d be impressed, if he weren’t so angry.

  The light brightens. The stairwell opens up as it drops away. The last fifteen feet of the spiral stair winds through the open air, descending into a room that looks more like an airplane hangar. The walls are tin, like the shed upstairs; the floor is industrial linoleum. Dodger looks around, eyes narrowed, assessing everything. Roger wants to ask what she sees. He doesn’t dare speak aloud.

  Erin quickens her pace. They do the same, and the three of them reach the ground still alone, still without pursuit.

  “Now what?” whispers Dodger.

  “Now we tell Daddy dearest that we’re home—don’t look so alarmed, Roger. I’m an adoptive sibling at best, and a distant, distant, distant cousin at worst. You didn’t screw your sister.”

  “Ew,” says Dodger.

  Erin chuckles—a quick, bitter thing—before she cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “James Reed! We’re here for you!”

  When she lowers her hands, Roger and Dodger are staring at her. She smirks, shrugs.

  “He’s going to know sooner or later. This is better than skulking around the place, running into all his old experiments.” Erin’s face darkens. “There are things here you should never have to see. That I should never have seen. Consider yourselves lucky that you won’t have to.”

  “But they should have,” says a new voice, a man’s voice, calm and level as any professor. That’s what he sounds like: a teacher, someone to be trusted without question. The sort of man who would grade fairly on the curve, who would take the time to clearly explain the material and make sure the entire class is on the same page.

  Roger and Dodger turn. Erin doesn’t. She’s seen James Reed before. She has no need to see him now.

  He’s tall, as has always been the fashion for men with voices like his, in positions like this one. Baker was a performer, after all. She knew the importance of things like height, like looking the part. So Reed is tall, and Reed is handsome, with a smile that would have made parents worry about the virtue of their daughters when he was younger, when the world was simpler, when virtue was considered something to be lost. His hair is the color of desert sand, and his eyes are like a viper’s, bright as jewels, constantly calculating.

  He is smiling, and both of them are wise enough to see the danger there, and neither of them knows how to turn it aside.

  “I saw what you did, you know,” he says conversationally, walking closer, like a man out for an evening stroll. “I think every alchemist in the world probably saw. You painted the sky like a canvas, and wasn’t it a lovely shade of gold? Which one of you figured out what to do, by the by? My little cuckoo-children, sent into the world to fend for yourselves. I always knew you’d fly back to the nest. Back to me.”

  Dodger’s hand tightens on Roger’s, grinding their fingers together until it hurts. “I didn’t fend for myself,” she says. “I had parents. Heather and Peter Cheswich. You had them killed.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, Dodger; if you had a father in this world, it was me, and little girls shouldn’t speak so to their fathers.” The mask slips. Only for a moment, but long enough for them to see through into the chasm on the other side. He’s dangerous, this jovial humbug of a man, and he’ll kill them if he can. Then the mask snaps back into place, and he says, “I didn’t have them killed, Leigh chose to kill them. There’s a difference there, if you feel like having a productive conversation. I can’t control who my subordinates choose to kill. Why, if I could, you wouldn’t have dropped three of my best people into the ocean just because you were having a bit of a sulk.”

  “They were trying to kill us,” says Roger.

  “I’m not one of your people,” says Erin.

  “Saying you were one of my best wasn’t enough for you?” Reed clucks his tongue. “Kids these days. But you’re not the matter at hand, are you? No, no. Not at all.” He shifts his focus back to Roger and Dodger, continuing to walk toward them. “You could have been perfect. You still could be. Hand me your reins. Let me bind you to my service, be my children, let me love you, and I will let you live.”

  “No,” says Roger. “We’re not here to work for you. We’re not tools.”

  “Oh, but you are, Roger. You always have been. I am a master craftsman, and you’re very much your father’s son.” Reed shakes his head. “If you’re not here to work for me, I assume you’re here to return what you’ve stolen from me. That’s awfully good of you, all things considered.”

  “We don’t have anything of yours,” says Dodger.

  Roger says nothing, but he tugs her back, making sure their shoulders are aligned, that there’s no way for them to be separated without seeing it coming. She’s the better liar. The flipside is that he’s better at telling truth from lies, at least when he hears them coming from other people. He knows what Reed wants.

  “We can’t surrender the Doctrine,” he says. “We are the Doctrine. The only way we could let it go is to…”

  Roger stops as Reed begins smiling the slow, vicious smile of a man who believes he holds all the cards.

  “That’s right,” he says. “You’re going to have to die. I’d apologize, but well. You must have seen it coming.”

  Dodger laughs.

  All the others turn to look at her. Erin is annoyed; Reed bewildered; Roger amused.

  “Oh, man, really?” she asks. “We, like, walk in here as the living embodiment of a cosmic force you felt the need to pin down and incarnate, and you think you can just waltz up and kill us? How were you planning to do that?”

  “By distracting you,” he purrs.

  Leigh drops the Hand of Glory, appearing out of nowhere. The metal rebar in her other hand is long enough to catch them both in the back of the head at the same time. They are still flesh; they are still mortal. They fall. Erin snarls, reaching for the gun in her belt, and stops as the barrel of someone else’s gun is pressed against the base of her skull.

  “Please don’t make me,” whispers a young female voice, green as grass, as springtime, as any usurper’s daughter looking at a throne she doesn’t want and never asked for. Erin goes very still. The other math child, the chosen contender for Dodger’s place.

  “As you can see, my dear, cosmic power doesn’t make a person clever. It just makes them sloppy. Never count a construct out until you’ve seen the body. Leigh came home two days ago. Damp, battered, and angry. You should have been more careful.” Reed steps daintily over Dodger, kneeling next to Roger. “He has my chin … Thank you, Erin, for delivering them to me. Now’s where you try to convince us you’re still loyal. We won’t believe you, of course, but it might be fun to hear what you have to say.”

  “I betrayed you both,” says Erin. “What you’re doing, what you’re trying to do—it’s wrong. I won’t be a killer for you anymore.”

  “The little girl behind you has no such compunctions.”

  The nameless girl makes a small whimpering sound. Erin thinks, but does not say, that she has plenty of compunctions. She just has too much to lose to give them voice.

  Leigh drops her rebar with a clatter. Erin’s eyes flick to her.

  “How are you alive?” she asks, in an almost conversational tone. Anything to keep them talking and keep herself breathing. Roger doesn’t have the skill to put her back together after she takes a bullet to the brain. He will someday. He’s not t
here yet.

  “You can’t drown a dead woman,” says Leigh. There’s a new rasp in her voice, a deep gurgle that speaks of water in the lungs. She narrows her eyes. “How are you alive?”

  “You made me to see the chaotic places in everything. I’m sure the side effect of me hating the world was an accident. Doesn’t matter. I hit the water seeing all the spots where it was wildest and most likely to hurt me. I swam around them.” It was a small way to describe a big, terrifying moment, one that ended, inevitably, with her inhaling a lungful of water and washing up on the shore for Roger and Dodger to find. But she’d done it. She’d made it out of the sea without being battered into pieces on the rocks. Under the circumstances, she can’t see that as anything other than a victory.

  Leigh looks, briefly, almost impressed. “I suppose we did an excellent job with you, your betrayal notwithstanding. I’ll make the next one along the same lines. She’ll be loyal.”

  “If you wanted loyalty, you shouldn’t have killed Darren.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” says Leigh. She looks to Reed. “Can I kill her now?”

  “Kimberley can pull that trigger if you like. I’m sure she’s eager to get down to the business of stripping the Doctrine from these unworthy hosts.”

  Leigh frowns. “I want to do it myself.”

  “You want to do everything yourself. Learn to delegate.” Reed lets go of Roger’s chin, straightening as the other man’s face hits the floor. “I want them stripped, cleaned, and brought to the lab. It’s time to begin.” Then he walks away, whistling.

  Leigh and Erin both glare hatred at his receding back. In that moment, if in no other, they are united.

  The moment passes. Leigh turns back to Erin, and smiles.

  “Bring her, Kim,” she says. “It’s time she learned the penalty for going against her betters.”

  * * *

  The lab where Erin is placed is familiar: she grew up here. She knows every line and color, every piece of well-worn furniture. She can close her eyes and picture Darren anywhere in this room, a smirk on his lips, trying so hard to look cool, even when neither one of them had any idea what “cool” was.