Middlegame Read online

  (This is her first chess tour. She signed up for the college credit, and because her father promised she could audit one of Professor Vernon’s courses if she did something extracurricular this semester. She loves Professor Vernon. He’s been a mentor to her, and she thinks losing Roger would have broken her even worse than it did if she hadn’t been able to run to Professor Vernon for support. This is also her last chess tour. She could be a darling of the sort of people who enjoy these things, the little girl who never smiles as she annihilates her opponents, but there would be no joy in it for her, and without the joy, she doesn’t understand the point. Chess is meant to be something sacred, not a party trick to be trotted out and used to entertain people who’d be just as happy to watch a seal balance a ball on the tip of its nose.)

  That night, she returns to the hotel. As the youngest, she has a room of her own, with a connecting door to the room where the tour chaperone sleeps. For the first couple of stops, she’d been required to leave that door propped open, so the chaperone could see she was in her bed and not off getting into trouble. Pleading difficulty falling asleep and showing no inclination to leave her room after curfew has earned her a few privileges, chief among them a door that can actually be closed, giving her the privacy she needs.

  Carefully, she removes her performance clothes and trades them for flannel pajama pants and a faded Jurassic Park T-shirt. Dinosaurs are okay, but in the grand scheme of things, she wears the shirt in honor of Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional mathematician slash rock star and focus of more than a few confusing teenage dreams. She’s worn this shirt so much that the seams are fraying. It’s not attractive, not the sort of thing she should be wearing to invite a boy into her room, much less into her head. But it’s comfortable. It’s comforting. Right here, right now, that’s what matters.

  She wants to be angry. Wants to pull back and let him have it with both barrels, as her dad always says; wants him to understand how badly he hurt her, that she’s not the sort of girl who forgives on a moment’s notice. She can’t do any of those things. As badly as he hurt her, as badly as she’s still hurting, she missed him twice as much. She doesn’t have the words for what she’s feeling—and there was a time when, if she needed a word, she would have reached for Roger, trusting him to supply the missing piece. For the last five years, she’s been muddling through this alone. So has he, but math is easier to avoid than words are. Words are everywhere. Words hurt.

  Carefully, she stretches out on her bed, eyes closed, hands folded across her stomach. She feels like she’s measuring herself for her own coffin. That should make her uncomfortable. Right here, right now, it’s a set of simple parameters that makes everything better. Six feet by three feet by two feet; the dimensions of the world. Breathe in, breathe out, fill the world. Let everything else fall away. Let everything else go.

  She’s been lying there for a while (seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds) when the world shifts, a new weight appearing behind her eyes.

  “You’re late,” she says. It’s not “hello,” but it’s the only thing she feels: he’s late. He’s seventeen minutes and five years late, and she’s been alone too long.

  “I had to say I had a headache to explain why I was going to bed early,” says Roger. He sounds apologetic.

  Dodger relaxes, and hates herself for doing it. She wants so badly to be angry with him, and all she can feel is that damned relief, like she’s the lucky one because he chose to come back, after being the one who chose to go away in the first place. She wants to yell, to rage, to shut him out and see how he likes it. She doesn’t do any of those things. They would all be bad math, creating equations her heart might not survive.

  “I didn’t just mean tonight,” she says, and her voice is a whisper, her voice is a shadow of the anger she wants it to contain. She sounds small, and lost, and alone.

  Roger sighs. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you leave me?”

  “They said … this psychologist came to my house and said people at school had seen me talking to myself. She said if something was wrong with me, the contract my parents signed during my adoption meant she could take me away and place me with another family.”

  Dodger frowns. “You believed her? Roger, that’s stupid. Adoption doesn’t work like that. Why would they want to take the broken kids back? It’s hard enough to find homes for the ones who aren’t broken.”

  She hears him sigh again. When he speaks, he sounds beaten-down, and for the first time, she realizes she’s not the only one who’s been alone for the last five years. “I know that now. I read a lot of law books, and there’s no way that sort of contract could be binding, even if it was real—which I don’t know. My parents seemed to think it was. They were wrong, but I guess when you’re a parent, sometimes impossible things can be scary anyway, and they were so scared of that woman, Dodge, and it was my fault; I was the reason she could come into our house and scare them like that. I was nine. I made the wrong choice. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t sleep for three months.”

  The admission is so simple, so unornamented, that Roger stops, examining it, looking for the key to open it up and force it to make sense. The key isn’t there. He’s not accustomed to words not making sense. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. I didn’t sleep for three months, because I was waiting for you to stop being mad and try to talk again, and I didn’t want to miss you.” Dodger’s tone turns distant. “I couldn’t be in bed or I’d start to drift off, so I’d sit at my desk with tacks to hit against my thumbs, so the pain would keep me up. My parents caught on after a month, when I started seeing things. They begged me to sleep. They finally took me to the doctor and got these pills that were supposed to knock me out. It took them another month to realize I was spitting the pills out, and a month after that for them to stop me from hurting myself to stay awake. I’d pretty much given up by then. I was just staying awake because I’d forgotten what it was like to sleep. Because I thought I had to have done something to make you go away. I thought I deserved it.”

  “Dodger, I’m sorry. That wasn’t … I didn’t … They threatened my family.” Roger is out of the habit of speaking quietly to himself: it takes too much effort to keep his voice from peaking on the final word. “They said they’d take me away. You were my best friend. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. But you would have done the same thing if they’d come after your family. You would have had to.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she says. “I would have lied. I would have said ‘oh, that was a game, I didn’t know it was bothering anyone,’ and I would have promised not to do it anymore, and I would have been more careful. I would have told them it was over, and I would have kept going, because you were important to me. I was supposed to be important to you, too. That’s what you always said. So I would have lied for you, because that’s better than leaving you alone.”

  Roger is silent.

  “That’s what you did, Roger. You left me alone. You left me with no one to … to explain things, or to tell me everything was going to be all right. You said we’d be friends forever and I believed you. I don’t believe anyone about anything, but I believed you, and you left me alone. You decided for me that I didn’t deserve to be your friend anymore. Maybe it’s selfish to be mad at you, because you were scared about your family and we were little and you thought I was stronger than I was. I don’t know. I don’t care. You left me. I can’t forgive you for that, no matter how much you want me to. No matter how much I want to do it.”

  Dodger stops talking. Tears burn her eyes, turning her vision blurry. What Roger can see of the room is smeared and out of focus, like a badly done watercolor painting. It seems so unreal. This began with a girl he used to think didn’t really exist speaking inside his head; maybe it’s right that it seems unreal now. Maybe this was always the way it had to be.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t have any words but those ones. I did what I thought I had to do. I know I
was wrong. I can’t get those years back. Time doesn’t work that way.”

  Dodger has a vague idea that time could work that way, if she figured out how to twist the numbers. More and more, she’s starting to feel like time is an intricate puzzle box, and she has the key hidden somewhere in the space between breath and heartbeat, as much a part of her body as blood and bone and marrow. She doesn’t say anything. It’s her turn to be silent, to see what Roger is going to say. She’s made her speech, and she’s exhausted. Words were never—will never be—her forte.

  “But you weren’t the only one who was hurting, and you’re not the only one who got punished when I shut the door. I left you alone. I left me alone, too.”

  Dodger knows that isn’t true, has seen the evidence: the girl with the possessive hand and dubious eyes, holding Roger’s elbow like she might lose him if she loosened her grip. There’s no point in saying that, though. It would look like self-pity if she admitted how there’s never been anyone in the world who looked at her like that girl looked at him—if she tried to explain how much time she’s spent by herself, trapped and trembling on the borders of her own life.

  And it doesn’t matter. He’s said sorry. He’s invoked the magic of apology. Dodger closes her eyes, leaving them both in blackness.

  “Okay,” she says. “But don’t do it again.”

  On the other side of the city, Roger smiles.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he says, and everything is going to be all right.

  Calibration

  TIMELINE: 12:01 CST, JUNE 20, 2000 (THE NEXT DAY).

  “Master Daniels. What a pleasant surprise.”

  This is not a pleasant surprise. This is a danger, a disaster, a calamity in all senses of the word. Reed holds himself perfectly straight, perfectly still, blocking as much of the entrance to the compound with his narrow frame as he possibly can. He has often wished that Asphodel had taken the time to build him a body with more heft: he is tall and slim and attractive to the eye, but none of these are things that get a man taken seriously in the presence of other men. If the alchemists accompanying Master Daniels wish to move him, he will be moved.

  (Leigh could stop them. Leigh is small, swift, and utterly deadly when he needs her to be, striking like the scalpel her creator used in piecing her together. But Leigh is inside, deep in the lab, securing the experiments these men must not see, locking the doors they must not be allowed to open. They were never intended to come here. They were never meant to find this place.)

  “Is it, James?” Master Daniels’s voice is gentle, and weary. He dislikes being here, in this Ohio cornfield, surrounded by the emerald of the harvest, beneath the sapphire sky. He is a creature of sepia-toned rooms weighed down with the import of the things that have been done within them. “It seems to me you’ve been keeping secrets, out here in the hinterlands. It seems to me that we should have been keeping a closer eye. We have allowed you to do yourself harm, and for that, you have my sincere apologies. It was our responsibility to do better by you. We owed it to you, and to Asphodel.”

  “Master Baker.”

  For the first time, Master Daniels looks confused. “I’m sorry?”

  “On your lips, in your mouth, her name was Master Baker. She was the greatest alchemist of her age. There has been no greater since.”

  The alchemists who have accompanied Master Daniels—Reed doesn’t know their names, doesn’t care to know them; they serve no purpose in his grand design—look first amused, and then offended. One of them steps forward.

  “Remember your place,” the man snaps. “We have allowed you back within our number, but that does not give you the right to lie.”

  “I tell no lies. I only speak the golden truth, which you have struggled for so long to transmute into basest lead.” Reed looks at Daniels with murder in his eyes. “If you must speak of her, speak of her with the respect she deserves.”

  “She was never a master of our order, James,” says Daniels gently.

  “Because you forbade her that position. Because you, and the men like you, dismantled as much of her design as you could, all before you’d admit that a woman had bested you at your own ambition! Because you—”

  “You killed her,” says Daniels.

  Reed stops.

  “If we have any culpability in this matter, if we bear any blame for her death, it’s that when she created you, we allowed it. Transmutation of the dead into the living has always come more easily to the female of the species. She proved nothing with your assembly, save that she was, in the end, exactly what we had always assumed her to be. Talented, yes. Gifted, there can be no doubt. But she was a dabbler. She never swam far enough from shore to understand the dangers of the depths.” Daniels smiles. Perhaps he thinks he’s being kind. Perhaps he considers this a form of absolution. You killed your maker and your master, but see, you were always her superior. She could only have held you back.

  Reed grinds his teeth until his molars ache, and wonders what it will sound like when Daniels dies.

  “You were the knife. She honed you with her own hand. A strangely elaborate form of suicide, but suicide all the same. A failing of her kind.”

  “And what kind would that be?” asks Reed, in a voice like a rusty saw being drawn across bone.

  “The weak. The wanting.” Master Daniels’s eyes flash. “But we’re not here to discuss Miss Baker, however much you try to bait us. We’re here to talk about you. Have you been keeping secrets, Reed?”

  “I told you I had embodied the Doctrine. We’re merely waiting for it to mature.”

  “Yet you won’t allow us to examine it. Why is that?”

  “The conditions for proper maturation—”

  “We understand delicate work. We’re men of science, in our own way. We can be trusted around your experiment.”

  Master Daniels takes a step forward, the other two flanking him.

  “Let us in, Reed. We are all on the same path to enlightenment.”

  But they’re not, they’re not. Reed left the path to enlightenment behind long ago. The improbable road is different. The Impossible City is not enlightenment, but something more, for the enlightened have no need for power, and the City is power incarnate. Whoever holds the City will hold the world.

  “I did not invite you to my sanctum,” he says. “Leave, and I will forgive this trespass.”

  “I cannot, child,” says Master Daniels.

  “Then I am sorry,” says Reed, and raises his hand in a beckoning gesture. A boy steps out of the corn.

  He is slim, skinny even, with dark hair and mistrustful eyes. His arms hang by his sides, loose and gangly. He is, perhaps, at most, nineteen years old.

  “What is this?” asks Master Daniels, suspicious. “I wasn’t informed you were taking an apprentice.”

  “Darren,” says Reed calmly, “kill them all.”

  The boy nods, and lunges.

  What follows would be comic, were it not so dreadfully serious. The first alchemist pulls something from inside his coat, a vial filled with a terrible smoke that writhes like a living thing. He throws it, but somehow the boy is no longer there, somehow the boy has stepped to the side and the vial is in his hand, ready to fling back at its maker with a terrible swiftness. The vial breaks when it strikes the man’s chest, and the smoke is loose, the smoke is devouring the flesh from his bones as he screams and screams and—

  The second alchemist looks in horror at his compatriot, who has fallen to his knees, hands clawing at his diminishing face. It is a pause that lasts only a few seconds. A few seconds is long enough. Darren is upon him, a knife suddenly in his hand, and the alchemist’s throat is an open book, spread wide, spilling its contents onto the ground.

  Reed has not moved. Master Daniels has not moved.

  Darren pivots, launching himself at Master Daniels with knife held high, ready to end this. The old man produces a handful of dust from his pocket and flings it at the boy, catching him in the eyes. Darren cries out, fal
ls back, collapses. He does not rise again.

  “You shame me,” says Master Daniels, turning back to Reed.

  But Reed is gone.

  There is time only for realization and resignation before the spike of hardened silver is shoved through the old man’s heart from behind, before his wizened body goes limp and he falls, silent, to join the others. Reed alone remains standing, panting slightly, blood on his hands.

  There is something like regret in his eyes as he looks at Darren. This was not intended. Apologies will have to be made to Leigh, excuses given to his counterpart. Still. The girl was ready for better things, and the boy was only ever made to be a killer.

  “There are more in your order who are loyal to me than you could ever know,” he tells the corpse of the man who would deny him his birthright. “The plane that would have carried you home will crash. Such a mystery. Such a shame. They’ll never know where your body fell, and you will be forgotten.”

  There is no greater curse he can utter. Satisfied, he turns and walks to the shed which offers access to his domain. He enters, and descends.

  * * *

  The air is cooler beneath the ground, scented with cleaning products in place of corn. Reed relaxes. This is his Kingdom, this underground warren of labs and cells and strange alchemic altars. Here, he has already won.

  “Well?” Leigh demands, emerging from a darkened doorway like a bad dream. “Is it done? I need Darren. Erin’s having some sort of attack, and only he can calm her down.”