Middlegame Page 15

  “Is Dodger alive?”

  “Yes.” Her voice is a cracked whisper. It seems to surprise her; she shies back, away from it. Then she repeats herself: “Yes.”

  “Oh thank God.” Peter is not a religious man, but he has to fight the urge to kneel. Instead, he turns to the officer, and asks, “Where did they take my little girl?”

  “Mr. Cheswich?” asks the officer. Peter nods, and the officer puts his coffee mug down on the counter, safely away from the edge. “Your daughter sustained severe injuries, apparently self-inflicted. Has she been depressed lately? Has she said anything about fights at school or experienced any unexpected setbacks?”

  “Not a word.” But she had said something, hadn’t she? To that boy who’d called the office. The one who might have saved her life.

  The boy who’d never given his name.

  “How sure are you that her injuries were self-inflicted?” he asks slowly, feeling his way through that minefield of a sentence like it might explode and kill them all.

  The officer’s expression sharpens. “Why do you ask?”

  Haltingly, Peter explains the call he received, the one from the boy with the New England accent. The boy he’d never heard of before, but who seemed to know Dodger was in trouble, who was so sure of her location, even after he’d told Patty that he was at the school.

  When he finishes, the officer’s face is unreadable.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “I think it’s time for me to drive both of you to the hospital,” he says. “You should be there.” He doesn’t say why. That isn’t his job. But he saw the Cheswich girl loaded into the ambulance, as pale as paper, with gauze dressings running from wrist to elbow on both arms. He hopes the father is right about the unknown boy attacking her and making a call, whether out of remorse or simply to gloat: he can’t imagine such a delicate thing doing that much damage to herself, even though that’s what all the evidence indicates. It would be better for her family if she’d been attacked. That way, there would be someone he could bring to justice, someone who could pay. If the girl did this to herself, well …

  She’ll be paying for years, assuming she lives. Failed suicides always pay. From what he saw of the EMTs as they prepped her for transport, that’s far from guaranteed—and that, too, is not his job to explain. Let the folks at the hospital handle the grieving parents, the aftermath of this tragedy. He’ll just get them where they need to be.

  “All right,” says Peter. He steps into the puddle of coffee and puts a comforting arm around his wife. At least, he intends it to comfort. She doesn’t react to his presence. Not at all.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  * * *

  Dodger opens her eyes on a white ceiling in a dimly lit room, and her first thought is that death feels an awful lot like waking up after a bout of the stomach flu. Everything is a little distant and detached, like it isn’t real, but some sort of clever movie set constructed by elves while she wasn’t looking.

  Her second thought is that if this is death, there shouldn’t be so many things beeping at her. She tries to sit up, and finds she doesn’t have the strength; her muscles seem to have been replaced with props alongside the rest of the world. There’s a strange pressure in her right arm. She turns her head. Bandages cover almost all the skin from her shoulder to her wrist; an IV line disappears beneath them at the bend of her elbow. A moan escapes her lips, equal parts frustration and despair. She’s never been the sort of person who dealt well with failure, and this failure? This isn’t the sort of thing people bounce back from. She’s going to stop being the weird genius and become the suicidal girl. The suicidal failure. Couldn’t even do that right.

  Dodger closes her eyes and wonders how much blood she lost. Maybe if I lost enough, I’ll have a heart attack from the shock of the transfusion, she thinks, almost hopefully. She doesn’t know if that’s a thing that can actually happen, but it sounds good, and so she’s going to go with it, at least for now. It’ll help with the disappointment of being the sort of person who can’t even die correctly.

  “Dodger?” Her mother’s voice is a broken thing.

  Dodger opens her eyes again, turning her face toward the sound. “Mom?” she croaks.

  “You’re awake!” Her mother all but flies across the room, stopping just short of her bed, hands fluttering in front of her face like she doesn’t know what to do with them. She’s washed off her mascara, but her pallor remains; like mother, like daughter. Both of them seem to have been drained entirely of blood. “You’re awake,” she repeats.

  “Yeah,” whispers Dodger, closing her eyes. “I guess I am.” She’s so tired. She’s not even sure this is happening, that this isn’t just some terrible dream on her way down to the grave. She braces herself all the same. This is where the shouting begins.

  Only it doesn’t. “The police told us what happened. That boy from New England … they’ll find him. Just give us his name, and I promise we’ll find him.”

  Dodger’s eyes snap open again. She stares at her mother. “What?”

  “He called your father, you know. After he dragged you into that gully and hacked you open, he called your father at work and told him you were out there, bleeding to death. If I hadn’t been home, why…” Heather Cheswich shudders. She can see that future with surprising clarity. It’s a world gone gray. “You’re so lucky, Dodger. We’re so lucky. Just tell the police his name, and we’ll catch him, and he’ll never do anything like this again.”

  “Oh,” whispers Dodger. This time, when she closes her eyes, she leaves them closed.

  So this is how you pay for leaving me alone; you save me when I don’t want to be saved, she thinks, and that’s exactly right, that’s full circle. He left her falling for a long time, but when she really needed him, he was there to catch her. He caught her. He’s catching her right now.

  “I don’t know his name,” she lies, and her mother believes her. So does her father, when he comes, because Dodger Cheswich is a very good liar; because her story is better than the truth, at least this time. At least right now. Maybe forever. The police don’t believe her completely, but they write down her statement, and they say they’ll keep an eye open. She’s going to live. Their job is done.

  It takes a week for her to be released from the hospital. She goes home with stitches running up the inside of both arms like equations she’ll never solve, and when they come out, the scars they leave behind will be minimal, at least to the naked eye. She’ll always know that they’re there, but maybe that’s all right. Maybe that’s the reminder she needs that she can’t jump, because someone will always catch her, whether or not she wants them to.

  She hears Roger’s voice, off and on, for almost a year. She never answers. The police are looking for the boy from New England, and she knows exactly where he is, and she never answers him. Eventually he stops calling. That, too, is exactly right; that, too, is full circle.

  It will be five years before they meet again.

  It won’t be nearly long enough.

  Zib hugged her knees to her chest, watching Avery pace back and forth along the rainbow sheen of the improbable road, his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face.

  “Are you done being angry with me yet?” she called.

  “No,” he replied, voice sullen. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “We needed to give something to the Bumble Bear if we wanted it to let us pass. It couldn’t be my slingshot, and it couldn’t be your ruler. The shine from your shoes was something we could lose. It didn’t hurt us.”

  “It hurt me,” said Avery. He finally stopped pacing and turned to look at her.

  Without their shine, his shoes were ordinary brown leather, like any kid might wear out on the playground. His shirt seemed just a little less starched without them reflecting it; his hair seemed just a little less combed. He looked like an ordinary boy.

  Zib felt fear tickle her ribs. If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it
ever really be able to lead them home?

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

  BOOK III

  Graduate

  Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

  —Edward Lorenz

  There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  Familial Visitation

  TIMELINE: 0:00 PST, SEPTEMBER 6, 2003 (MIDNIGHT).

  The man in the purple coat walks through the hospital by candlelight, and no one stops him, or asks him where he’s going. No one even looks in his direction. He is invisible, or close enough as to make no difference, and all thanks to the wax-dipped hand he carries. Wicks sprout from beneath the fingernails, burning with a steady blue light.

  Darren would be pleased to know that every part of him has been put to good use, or so Reed supposes. It was always difficult to tell, with that boy.

  He walks on, heels clicking against the polished floor, until he reaches a private room. The door is closed. Good. He wants to see her. He hasn’t seen any of them since they were born, and they came so close to losing this pair today.

  Reed opens the door with a twist of his hand and slips inside, into the room where Dodger sleeps.

  She looks so small, lost in the tangle of sheets, connected to the machines which monitor her fate. He thinks this may be the best way to see her: a hospital is much like a lab, after all, sterile and polished and perfect. She is perfect. With her eyes closed, red lashes resting against pale cheeks, she looks so much like Asphodel that even his wizened, hardened heart feels a pang of regret for what might have been, had he not killed his master and taken everything she’d ever loved.

  Heredity is not only in blood. It is in the sympathetic vibration of the universe, in the places where atom becomes alchemy. Asphodel made him and he made this broken child: she is, in a very real sense, Asphodel’s granddaughter, her Zib finally become flesh and laid out in a bed of white linen and gauze, waiting for his approval.

  “Hello, child,” he says, and runs the fingers of his free hand along the curve of Dodger’s cheek.

  The girl whimpers and twists in her sleep, but she does not wake. The Hand of Glory does its work, and does it well.

  “You’ve presented me with a quandary,” he says. “You tried to kill yourself. You nearly succeeded. Either you’re weak, or you’re a failure, and either way, I fear you may be unfit for the program you were designed for. Two of your siblings are already gone. Two more show no promise, only a plodding determination to survive. You have too much fire and not enough firmament. Why should I let you continue?”

  Seth and Beth, dead and dust and dissected; Andy and Sandy, enduring and emotionless and uninspired. They’ll be eliminated soon, failing some great and unexpected change. Dodger and Roger are the last hope of their generation, and as he looks at her, it’s difficult to see where that hope could possibly bear fruit. Perhaps it’s time to start over.

  But the astrolabe began running backward when this pair drew their first breath. Their birth began the final part of his plan, and he wants it to be them, oh yes, he wants it to be them. Even if they lack the strength to lead him to the City, he wants them to draw the Doctrine fully down.

  “Why?” he asks again, and his word has the power of command.

  Dodger sighs in her sleep, small and sad. “The sky burns gold, and the road is so long,” she says. “He can’t get there without me.”

  “He?” Reed leans closer. “He who?”

  “There’s a tower,” she says. “At the center of the city. A tower made of calculations. If I solve them, I’ll know what the universe is made of. Please, may I solve them?”

  Reed hesitates. She’s math, not language; she could be speaking imprecisely. “Can you?” he asks.

  Eyes still closed, breath still steady, she laughs. “I can, I can, I know I can, but I have to get there, may I? Please, please, may I?”

  “Will you solve them for me?”

  “I’ll solve them for myself. I don’t care what happens after.”

  She isn’t Asphodel’s after all, lacks the ambition of the grandmother she so impossibly resembles. She isn’t even his, for all he’s ever wanted is to know the secrets of the City, the lost words in the golden library, the hidden numbers in the diamond tower. She wants to uncover them for the sake of knowing it’s been done, and then walk away.

  She’s perfect.

  “For now, the road is yours,” he says, and leans forward, and kisses her temple. “A gift for you, my daughter, to see you through the days ahead, while you recover: none of this was ever real. The boy was a dream. When you wake up, he’ll be gone.”

  Dodger moans in her sleep, and is still.

  In the morning, she will have a blister where he kissed her. It will burst in a week, remaining red and weeping for the better part of a year before it finally, resentfully heals. But no matter.

  The morning finds her sleeping, alive and alone. Everything continues from there.

  Enrollment

  TIMELINE: 08:35 PST, AUGUST 15, 2008 (FIVE YEARS LATER).

  Dodger hits the edge of campus like she has a grudge, hunched over the handlebars of her bike and pedaling hard. She knows she’s late, three hundred and seven seconds, ticking over into three hundred and eight as she swerves to avoid a squirrel. Three hundred and nine when she rides over the curb, tires somehow finding purchase. She almost wishes they wouldn’t. She won’t hurt herself on purpose—the razor blades and nightmares and group therapy sessions for victims of violent crime are in the past, not the future—but showing up bruised and bloody might garner her a little sympathy, whereas “sorry, I was up until four in the morning arguing with mathematicians on the other side of the world” just makes her look like a flake.

  (Sometimes she thinks the razor blades aren’t that far behind her. She’s transmuted her self-destructive impulses into “healthier” forms, like riding her bike into traffic and shorting herself on sleep until she starts seeing things, but that doesn’t mean the impulses are gone. They’re just harder for anyone else to see. She’s learnt how to be a better liar than she ever thought she could be, even when she was convincing her parents she was fine. Healthy California lifestyle as metaphor for suicidal depression. Roger would have yelled at her for that, saying he didn’t teach her about metaphors—meet-a-fors—so she could abuse them. But Roger doesn’t matter. She’s never going to see him again.)

  Three hundred and seventeen seconds when she skids to a stop at the base of the library stairs, tires audibly shedding rubber on the poorly maintained slate walkway. The rest of her walkthrough group is already there of course, of course, waiting for her, the girl who has now been late one hundred percent of the time. She’ll cut it to fifty percent when she’s on time for their next outing, followed by thirty-three percent, twenty-five, dwindling down and down into meaninglessness, but that won’t matter. Her first impression will always be of lateness. She’s sorry for that, even as she plasters a smile across her face and hops off her bike, leaving it leaning against the base of the steps.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Lost track of time.”

  “Time, space, where you left your keys…” says one of the other incoming grad students, and laughs, a sound unnervingly like a kookaburra’s mating cry. She’s pretty, with dark skin, long black hair, and a sweatshirt patterned in geometric squares of orange, pink, and canary yellow. Maybe she’s the other mathematician Dodger was promised when she signed up for this tour group. That would be nice. Female mathematicians exist, they’re just rarer than she’d like, and most of them have no sense of humor.

  There are six of them in total, counting the girl in the remarkable sweatshirt. A tall boy with a shaved head and eleven visible tattoos; a Chinese girl whose eyes haven’t left her phone once, not even to mark the screeching of Dodger’s tires; a plump, tan girl with pink and blonde hair and an expressio
n of wonderment, like this campus is the most amazing thing she’s ever seen; and a broad, brown-skinned man with a bushy beard and a T-shirt instructing people to ask him how to get to Sesame Street. They all look more awake than Dodger feels, but more importantly, they look like her peers. They have the air of amiable stress that she’s come to associate with graduate students, and the calm resignation to the inevitable that she’s come to associate with people she’s unlikely to drive insane. Maybe they can be friends.

  “We’re waiting on one more,” says the tattooed boy. His voice is surprisingly soft, with traces of a Nova Scotian accent. His leather jacket is a wonderland of badges, safety pins, and patches advertising punk bands she’s never heard of. It’s like looking at a time traveler from several decades and a few continents away. “So hey, you’re not the last one here. I’m Snake.”

  “His parents didn’t name him that,” says the girl with her eyes on her phone.

  “Your parents didn’t name you ‘Jessica,’” says Snake. There’s no rancor in his tone: this is a conversation they’ve had before.

  “No, they gave me a name white people can’t pronounce. I’m tired of hearing it butchered, so everyone gets to call me Jessica, and we all feel good about how progressive we are.” Jessica finally glances up. “You know what white people can pronounce? ‘Tom.’”

  “But I don’t look like a Tom,” protests Snake.

  “You have limbs. You don’t look like a Snake either.”

  Dodger snorts to keep herself from laughing and raises one hand to shoulder height, pulling their attention toward her. “My parents named me ‘Dodger,’ if that helps,” she says.

  “See, that’s cool,” says Snake. “That’s a name I can get behind.”

  “Try going through middle school with me and see if you agree,” she says mildly.

  “Smita,” says the girl in the remarkable sweatshirt, gesturing to herself with one hand.