Middlegame Page 31

  And the shaking continues.

  The quake does not confine itself to campus, does not restrict its force to the narrow band of real estate associated with the school, but it begins there, deep beneath the Life Sciences building, and the devastation is worst around the heart of it. The walls of the library crack. The clock tower doesn’t fall, but it leans, and that’s somehow even worse; a fallen thing can be rebuilt, while a damaged, listing thing must be left until the last, until the broken glass has been swept away and the shattered foundations restored. The clock tower is the heart of campus, the landmark that leads the students home, and it is visibly broken.

  Dodger scrambles to her feet, faster in a crisis than Roger has ever been; her nervous energy has become a survival skill. More pieces of ceiling are tumbling down, and the walls look as if they might cave in at any moment, turning a Nancy Drew adventure into a horror film. Roger stumbles as she pulls him up, her fingers tight on his, anchoring him, crushing flesh against bone. The pain is almost welcome. It makes the scene seem real.

  “It’s moving too fast!” she shouts—and why she’s shouting, he doesn’t know; there’s no real noise beyond the low rumbling, and the sound of falling things. She could speak conversationally and still be heard. Panic changes the rules, and she’s panicking as much as he is, seemingly calm, until she speaks. “I have to close my eyes!”

  Roger doesn’t understand what she’s saying at first: it doesn’t make any sense. She’s the one leading the way through the falling debris. Why would she close her eyes? But she does, she does, and she’s charging forward, eyes screwed shut, weaving around the rubble as it falls.

  Roger closes his own eyes, too terrified to watch, and suddenly they’re slamming to a stop, so abrupt that his shoulder hits hers before she screams—not shouts, screams, like a victim in a horror movie that’s suddenly all too real, all too immediate, all too all around them—“Keep them open, you have to keep them open!” and he understands.

  Dodger has no depth perception. She can do the math of velocity and descent in her head, dodging the debris with an accuracy any other human would be hard-pressed to match, but only if she’s starting from the correct position. She needs to see the point of descent as something three-dimensional and true, not just figures moving on a flat surface. So long as she knows the distance between them (and she does, he knows she does; the length of their arms, the difference in their heights, those are commonplace numbers for her, the sort of math she can do in her sleep, and probably does, on the nights when she needs to ward against bad dreams), she can chart their trajectory without fail. She can get them out.

  He opens his eyes. Dodger starts running again, pulling him in her wake.

  Later, this will seem like a dream. The earthquake rolling on and on, tearing down walls, shattering windows, and planting cracks in foundations that could have endured for another hundred years on less seismically active soil, and the two of them running through the heart of it all, a girl with her eyes closed tight, a boy following her blindly with his eyes wide open. Outside, the open spaces have become masses of pressed-together bodies, strangers holding one another and screaming, or weeping, or doing nothing at all, just staring in wordless shock at the chaos. People have taken refuge wherever they could. The air is ablaze with screams, with weeping, and with the steady roar of car alarms, which have taken this assault for larceny, and struggle to summon their owners to save them. The air is black with smoke, with dust, and with the beating wings of panicked campus pigeons, which cannot land, but circle in endless, terrified flight.

  Dodger pulls Roger around the hole that was the stairs, runs past the elevators, and hits the front door with her shoulder so hard that, if it were any quieter, they’d both be able to hear the bone break. As it stands, the pain is intense enough that for a moment, Dodger is afraid she’s going to pass out. She pushes it aside as best she can, shunting it, and is somehow unsurprised when she hears Roger cry out behind her. She doesn’t need to look to know that he’s holding his shoulder. His eyes are fixed on the back of her head, and she wants to apologize, but there isn’t time.

  She hits the door again, shunting, and Roger gasps, in too much pain to scream. She doesn’t feel a thing. Maybe she’s damaging herself by refusing to feel the damage firsthand, but there isn’t time for that, either. This door should open. It’s not locked; the combination of fire damage and the earthquake has it wedged into its frame, and she can see the pressure points that will cause it to let go. It has to let go. It has to. Their survival matters more than a torn rotator cuff or a fractured collarbone.

  She hits the door for a third time. Roger’s vision goes briefly gray with pain. The door comes open, and she opens her eyes, letting her own vision take over as she hauls him out of the crumbling building, down the familiar steps, back into a world where the geometry makes sense. Things are falling here as well—tree branches, pieces of masonry, power lines—but they’re more widely spaced. She has time to calculate their arc of descent before impact, time to weave between them, still pulling Roger along. He isn’t in pain anymore, but he can feel its echo, filtered through her nerves. As soon as she opened her eyes she broke the connection, as much as it can be broken; their quantum entanglement is strong and getting stronger. Roger’s childhood fears were more justified than either of them realized.

  She wonders if he realizes it now. She wonders if he’s going to pull away. And it doesn’t matter now, because they’re still running. Dodger takes the time out of their own escape to move a few feet to the side and knock a freshman out of the path of a snapped electrical wire; she could see the boy’s hair catching flame, see his body jittering and dancing from the current, before she hit him and changed the math. No one comments on their appearance from the Life Sciences building; everyone has their own problems. Everyone is focused on their own survival.

  They run until they reach a place Dodger judges safe, far enough from the falling debris that they won’t be hit, far enough from the other students that they won’t be overheard. The shaking is beginning to slow. The aftershocks will last for days, but the main quake, the big quake … that’s almost over.

  Roger lets go of her hand.

  (Later, that’s what she’ll remember: she’ll remember he let go of her first. She’ll remember that they had each other, they were holding on, and then he was gone, pulling away with a finality that left her reeling. The pain still hadn’t come back into her shoulder; her mind was clear. She felt him let her go.)

  “Roger?” She turns to him, curious, concerned. He seems as far away as he always does, when she sees him with her own eyes: close enough to reach for, close enough to touch. But the ground between them tells a different story. It tells her he’s taken a step away; if she reached out now, her hands would close on nothing. It tells her she’s alone.

  Someone in the distance is sobbing like their heart’s been broken. Dodger feels her own begin to crack.

  “Did we do this?” he asks, his voice a thin echo of her own from earlier in the morning. She’d been asking about a fire, about a death; six deaths, really, but only one she was willing to claim as their responsibility. He’s asking about an earthquake, about a campus in ruins around them, about the cost in human lives. Neither of them is stupid. They both know enough about this sort of disaster to know that the death toll will be counted in the hundreds if they’re lucky, and the thousands if they’re not.

  “Roger—” she begins, and stops dead as she sees the way he’s looking at her. Like he’s lost. Like she’s the monster on the other side of the glass.

  Like he never wants to see her again.

  “Did we do this?” he repeats. “Don’t you lie to me, Dodge. I’d know, so don’t you lie.”

  She opens her mouth to lie. She stops. She can’t do it. She physically can’t do it. She wants to: can see the lie in the space behind her eyes, shimmering and perfect, a gem of prevarication and deceit. She’s been practicing her lies for years. She just needs to pu
t the words in the right order, and they’ll do the work she has for them. But she can’t. Roger has told her not to, and she can’t do it.

  Roger is the first of them to be afraid of what they can do together. Dodger is the first to be afraid of what he can do alone.

  “I think so,” she says, and her voice is a whisper, her voice is a sigh; her voice is almost swallowed by the murmuring rumble of the dying quake. The shaking has ended. The rolling has gone with it. All that remains is the faintest tremor in the ground, and in a moment, even that will be gone. “We … I think we did something when we were playing, and I think it maybe broke some stuff. We started the quake. But we didn’t mean to hurt anybody. We couldn’t have known.”

  “Now we do.” He sounds sad, so sad, and she doesn’t need quantum entanglement to know what he’s thinking: she can see it in his eyes. He steps close again, leans forward, plants a kiss on her forehead, gentle as a farmer planting an apple tree. Then he’s gone, stepping away, turning on his heel, and running, running, running into the ruins of campus, away from the thing they make when they’re together, away from the consequences of what they’ve done. He’s running, and Dodger, for once, is not; she just stays where she is, eyes open and filling slowly with tears, and watches him go.

  Report

  TIMELINE: 12:01 CST, DECEMBER 9, 2008 (SAME DAY).

  The astrolabe spins wildly, astral bodies shuddering and twisting through their orbits.

  Pluto—beautiful, jeweled Pluto, crafted from the finest platinum, studded with icy diamond chips—has begun spinning backward, racing in reverse through the mechanical cosmos. A collision seems inevitable, but over and over, it skirts past Neptune, dodges Jupiter, and continues on its implacable, incomprehensible way. The sun is the only piece of the model which does not move. It sits, motionless, in the center of the chaos. (Later review will show the astrolabe began to misbehave when the earthquake began in Berkeley, and that the sun stopped when the quake did. How this is relevant will be less clear.)

  Reed stands with his hands behind his back and a frown on his face, watching the model of the universe as it attempts, one misaligned twist at a time, to tear itself apart. He didn’t build the astrolabe, has never been a mechanical engineer, never cared that much about things that aren’t biological, but he loves it all the same, loves it for what it represents: everything. This is what he one day hopes to control. Everything. He coveted it the moment his mother-maker showed him her blueprints for its construction, when he was an apprentice, when Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist in North America, spreading her calm propaganda masked as fantasy, when it seemed like a gangling experiment in base metals turned flesh named James Reed would never be anything but a carnival miracle-peddler, capable of mixing snake oils and minor cures, but nothing more. He’s lied, cheated, killed, and bargained to work his way to this place, this lab, to ownership of this astrolabe. The chaos he now oversees is either a sign that success is finally at hand, or an omen of failure yet to come.

  It must be the first. He won’t consider the second.

  Something has happened to or with their cuckoos. The astrolabe has run in reverse dozens of times since they were sent out into the world. He remembers no timelines but this one, because he’s not one of them, but the astrolabe … that remains his secret weapon. It’s so finely calibrated, so carefully attuned to the functionality of the living universe, that it cannot help but adjust itself when something changes. A shift in the timeline is a shift in the universe. A shift in the universe must be reflected by the astrolabe, or it becomes nothing but a pretty collection of jeweled planets and glittering stars, with no value beyond that intrinsic in its component parts. Even if Reed were willing to allow that, the astrolabe would not be.

  There is a knock at the open door behind him. He doesn’t turn.

  “Which ones?” he asks.

  “Cheswich and Middleton,” says Leigh. “You were right. They’re almost mature.”

  “What have they done?”

  He can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks again. Leigh has always been an admirer of destruction, when executed well and without petty complications. “An earthquake in California. The largest the region has seen in decades. FEMA is responding; the death toll is going to be in the thousands, and that’s just the primary effect. Disruption to power, water, local services, those are going to kill even more. I’ve never killed that many people. Not even cumulatively.”

  Slowly, Reed turns. “And you believe they did this?”

  “I know they did.” Leigh is beaming. This pair isn’t hers, wasn’t raised according to her standards; she would order their handler to take them to pieces without a moment’s hesitation, if she thought it would benefit the cause. But destruction is destruction, and she can’t deny the quality of their work. “Did you read my report?”

  “Refresh me.”

  It’s not a request. Leigh feels her smile slip away. Reed is dangerous under the best of circumstances, and this isn’t the best of circumstances. He’s used the astrolabe repeatedly to prove that his cuckoos are maturing, citing every instance of misbehavior as proof that time has been rewritten. “Two of them have reached maturity at some point in the future,” he’s claimed, over and over again. “Two of them will inevitably embrace themselves, and us, when the time is right. The fact that they keep trying to put the moment off doesn’t change the reality of it.”

  Oh, but it does, it does; Leigh knows it does, that the future is unwritten for a reason. Until they actually confront the mature cuckoos, until they see the awakened Doctrine given flesh and conscious will, it could be any of their pairs. This is why she has been pushing so hard to get him to let her start the experiment over, to push its conclusion forward. His investors wouldn’t have liked the delay, but his investors are gone, dust and bones scattered over a dozen states. It’s better that way. Boring, balding, hidebound old men don’t deserve to change the universe. They think they do, but boring, balding, hidebound old men have always believed they deserve absolutely everything. When he proposed the Galileo solution for the second generation of cuckoos, she hadn’t expected it to work.

  They should have grown up powerless and incomplete, unable to function in the big, terrifying world of people born in the normal way rather than created as metaphors given flesh. They should have killed themselves by the age of eighteen or been drugged insensate by adults who wanted to “fix” them. There’s no possible way they could have found each other, become entangled, opened the lines of communication and kept them that way for year on year, despite all the obstacles in their way. What they had done, what they’ve become … it’s all impossible. It’s all unlikely in the extreme. And it’s all real and true and undeniable.

  Leigh didn’t make this mess. She still has to deal with it.

  “Erin reported that Cheswich and Middleton had gone to a student, Smita Mehta, and asked her to run blood tests to determine whether they were related. She explained that blood tests wouldn’t be enough; DNA testing was required. She performed those tests.” Leigh’s lips twist downward. “They were nearly exposed as artificial creations by a little girl with a box of toys and a fondness for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. She found the antigen markers, she found the genetic similarities, and if she’d been allowed to continue her work, she would have found that the DNA wasn’t entirely natural. She had to be stopped.”

  “So you had her killed.”

  “It’s within my remit.”

  “Only if you could do it without attracting attention.”

  “There was a fire. It was very sad. Erin interviewed the girl extensively first, using a Hand of Glory for cover, and confirmed she hadn’t shared her findings. I believe she was planning to write a paper about non-identical identical twins.” Leigh shakes her head. “Poor fool. She had a good scientific mind, but she was out of her depth the moment she picked up the needle.”

  “There was nothing about the killing that could be traced back to Erin,
or to us?”

  Leigh shakes her head again, more firmly this time. “Nothing. You know how skilled she is. I decanted her myself; she won’t have slipped. Unfortunately, the Cheswich girl has an overactive sense of responsibility. It’s the numbers. All the mathematical children have shown a tendency to catastrophize and assume responsibility for things that aren’t their fault. If she’d been alone on campus, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. She wasn’t. She went to the Middleton boy. She expressed her concerns. He agreed to help her investigate the fire. While they were there, they somehow partially activated.” A look of frustration sweeps over her face. “I don’t know how. Any cameras in the building were destroyed by the fire, and Erin wasn’t present. What we know is that our cuckoos entered the building, and the earthquake began eight minutes later, with them as the epicenter. They’ve begun to understand what they can do.”

  “My astrolabe supports this,” says Reed. “Are they mature?”

  “Erin doesn’t think so.” She brightens. “I could check the omens. If there’s a good candidate for haruspicy—”

  The entrails will speak truly only if he cares about what’s being sacrificed. Some rules are older than alchemy: some rules cut all the way down to the bones of the earth. “Take one of the other experiments to the surface,” he says. “Let them see the sky.” That should stun whatever prize she picks long enough for Leigh to do what must be done, and an augury works best in sight of the sun.