Middlegame Page 32

  Leigh raises her eyebrows. “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “And if the entrails say your cuckoos aren’t mature?”

  “We leave them.”

  Leigh’s surprise fades, leaving her stricken. “But—”

  “We leave them. If they can do this much damage at the beginning of their maturation, imagine what they’ll be able to do when they’re fully grown. We’ve done it, Leigh. We’ve embodied the Doctrine. Keep them under supervision, and notify me if anything seems to be changing.” Slowly, he begins to smile.

  “Soon, we’ll have everything we’ve worked for,” he says, and Leigh says nothing at all.

  It was difficult to remember exactly where Avery had been before he went away. He had taken his shadow with him, which seemed suddenly, unspeakably rude, even though Zib had never thought of it that way before. Shadows should stay behind when someone was planning on coming back, to mark the place they were going to be.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She looked up to find the Crow Girl looking at her encouragingly.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll be back, safe and sound, you’ll see.”

  “How do you know?” asked Zib.

  “Why, because we’re on the improbable road to the Impossible City, and right now, what could be more improbable, or impossible, than your friend coming back to you?” The Crow Girl smiled a bright and earnest smile. “There’s no possible way it could happen, and that means it’s virtually guaranteed.”

  Zib stared at her for a moment before bursting, noisily, into tears.

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

  BOOK VII

  The End of All

  Let all the number of the stars give light

  To thy fair way!

  —William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Cost

  TIMELINE: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE, THIRTY SECONDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.

  There’s so much blood.

  Dodger has her back to him, one hand clasped against her side in an effort to keep some of that blood inside her body. The other hand is a blur of motion, finger-painting equations on the wall with increasingly shaky fingers. Her handwriting is losing its precision, becoming harder to read—not that he was ever any good at following her when she went deep into the math. She’s in her own little world, and there’s no room for him there, and there’s so much blood.

  He’s not a doctor, but he’s pretty sure there shouldn’t be so much blood, not if she’s planning to walk away from here—and really, that’s the answer, because he knows she’s not planning to walk away. She was happy before he crashed back into her world, happy with her books and her public appearances and her life, which she had crafted, one careful piece at a time, from the wreckage he’d left her in. She was happy, and then he’d come barging in with her old college roommate in tow, and he’d taken it all away. She thinks she’s going to die here, and he’s pretty sure she doesn’t mind, because if she dies here, she never has to go through this again. She never has to worry about a knock on the door turning out to be the brother who abandoned her, coming back for one more favor that she doesn’t want to grant.

  Her career is over. Her ideas about the universe have been shattered. What’s a life when compared to that?

  He wishes he could tell her he’s sorry. He wishes he could say he didn’t know. He doesn’t say anything. She has to finish this equation, has to finish solving them for zero, or all of this will have been for nothing—like it’s been for nothing so many times before. Erin didn’t want to tell him that part. Erin never wants to tell him anything if she can help it, says ignorance is bliss, or at least ignorance leads to better choices: ignorance doesn’t try to account for the costs and consequences of a hundred doomed timelines every time it takes a step. He wishes he knew how it was she could remember.

  And then he knows.

  “Dodger,” he says, and his voice is low, almost drowned out by the gunfire from outside their little corner of the ruins. Erin is holding off their attackers as best she can. She can’t hold them off forever. “When did it go wrong? When, exactly, did it go wrong?”

  “Like you have to ask?” She keeps painting. There’s more blood seeping between her fingers now. There’s so much blood. “You’re the one who came to me.”

  “Before that. When did it go wrong before that?”

  She turns her head, her fingers going still. She’s so pale. She’s always been pale, but there’s so little blood left for her to spill. Her hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, her two-hundred-dollar hairstyle ruined by gunpowder and blood and exertion. Her earrings are diamond set in platinum. She looks like an adult, and he still feels like a child.

  “The earthquake, Roger,” she says softly. “That’s when I knew you were never going to stop leaving me. That’s when I decided to stop letting you.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Done is done. We’re going to die here, and I’m not going to forgive you. Let me work.” She turns back to the wall.

  Roger goes still. Done isn’t done; not according to Erin. Forgiveness isn’t the key. Knowing when to forgive, that’s the key. He can’t change how he reacted to the earthquake: he knows himself well enough for that. But there are things he can change. There are things he can do. Here, and now, and knowing what he knows—knowing what Erin’s told him, what he’s seen in the days they’ve spent running for their lives, the blink between the last grain of sand falling and the hourglass being turned back over—there are things he can do.

  He pulls the phone out of his pocket. Sets it to airplane mode. Changes the clock, until the phone believes it’s ten years ago, the day of the earthquake, the day he ruined his own life in the interest of saving it. Dials a number he knows by heart. Numbers have never come easily to him, but this one, he will never forget.

  He leaves his message, stuttering and stumbling over his words, feeling like a fool, watching as Dodger stops writing and turns to face him, eyes wide and bewildered. When he’s done, he throws the phone aside. It isn’t needed anymore. He opens his arms.

  “Come on,” he says, and Dodger moves toward him. She can’t take her hand away from her side, but he puts his arms around her and gathers her close, smelling her expensive perfume, feeling the way she shivers.

  “You ready?” he asks. How many times have they been here? How many times have they done this? A hundred times, a thousand, a million, and once, because every change begins it all again. They can do this over and over again and never really repeat a thing.

  “No,” she says. She tilts her head back and looks at him, eyes wide and gray and trusting. She still trusts him. Even after everything that’s happened, she still trusts him, and that is the best and worst thing in the world. “Do you think this will work?”

  “If it doesn’t, I guess it isn’t going to matter.” He chuckles darkly. “If it doesn’t, everything that’s ever happened to us has been coincidence, and we’ve ruined ourselves for nothing. You can’t save the world with math unless you can also change it with a question.”

  “Then I’m ready,” she says.

  There it is again, the sensation of déjà vu: unsurprising. He knows from Erin that they’ve been here before. At the same time there’s the sensation of something new happening. He doesn’t think they’ve been here many times before, if ever.

  “Dodger,” he says, and his voice is calm and clear, “don’t you die, and don’t you give up on me. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Do whatever you have to do, break whatever you have to break, but don’t you die, and don’t you let me go. This is an order. This is—”

  This is her nodding before she closes her eyes, pale and silent and so fragile-looking that he wants to protect her from the world, even the part of it that he represents.

  This is the sound
of gunfire going silent outside. Not tapering off; just stopping, like the world has been muted.

  This is the world going white.

  This is the end.

  We got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we

  Avery wasn’t sure he could go any further.

  He was tired. He thought he had never really known what tired was before today: he had heard of being tired, but he’d never really felt it. Tired went all the way down to his bones, wrapping around them like ribbons, until his legs were lead and his arms were sacks of sand suspended from his shoulders. Tired sapped the color out of the world, turning everything gray and dull. Tired hung weights from his eyelashes. Whenever he blinked, he thought his eyes might refuse to open again.

  But Zib—stupid Zib, who thought she knew everything—was supposed to be somewhere around here. That’s what the Page of Frozen Waters had said, before pushing him over the waterfall. He needed to find Zib. He needed to tell her he was sorry.

  There was a bundle of rags on the riverbank, covered in glittering silver dust, like fish scales or moonlight. Avery paused. Rags didn’t normally have tangled, uncombed hair.

  Avery found that he could run after all.

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

  BOOK V

  Aftershocks

  Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it.

  —L. Frank Baum

  You are an alchemist; make gold of that.

  —William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

  We Are

  TIMELINE: 14:02 PDT, JUNE 15, 2016 (SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS LATER).

  Something in the stacks falls with a clatter. Roger freezes in the act of replacing a book on the shelf, cocking his head to the side and considering the noise. Nothing audibly smashed; it wasn’t students sneaking beer into the rare books aisle again. It hadn’t been a meaty sound, either, so no one is passing out back there or otherwise getting up to mischief. The number of people who think library sex is a good idea never fails to astound him. Sure, he’d tried it a few times back in his undergrad days, but it had only taken one paper cut in an unfortunate place to make him realize that going back to his room was a much better solution.

  “Kids,” he says finally, shaking his head and smiling. Somewhere along the way, people who were his peers when he arrived on campus have become “kids,” needing supervision, unworthy of being trusted with the rarer books in the school collection. He’s found himself incapable of finding undergrads attractive recently, his mind calculating how long it’s been since they graduated high school and dismissing them as too young for anything but getting himself into trouble. That’s probably a good thing—he knows a lot of junior faculty who’ve had issues with dating students—but it still feels like one more step toward an adulthood he’s not quite sure how to handle. Growing up was something that was supposed to happen to other people. Not to him. Never to him.

  Roger sets the rest of his books down on the cart and walks, hands in his pockets, toward the sound. He’s one of the younger professors in the UC Berkeley Linguistics department, and many of the students find him more relatable than his peers. If someone is in dishabille back there, they may feel more comfortable with him being the one to point out that the library isn’t the place for such activities. And if it’s another damn squirrel, he can always open a window.

  The floor doesn’t creak beneath his feet; the walls don’t breathe as they settle. The main library at UC Berkeley is only five years old, bright and clean and new, without that smell of dust and time that eventually ensnares every good library. Parents look at the school’s facilities and smile, picturing their precious children being taught in beautiful spaces, learning beautiful things, without needing to worry about black mold or falling masonry. Students like he was look at those same spaces and frown, thinking of ivy-shrouded walls, mysterious reading nooks, and the power of time. He wishes he had a way of telling them that they can be part of transforming this new place into an old one, that sometimes being the one who etches the lines in the façade is as important as choosing something already weathered and worn. But it’s just a feeling, and he knows that if he were ever to articulate it, he would frighten people, so he says nothing.

  Roger Middleton has grown up to be what people always thought he’d be: a college professor in khaki slacks and patched jackets, with an easy smile and a rangy walk that can take him from one side of campus to the other in under twenty minutes. Like many of the survivors of the big quake, he prefers his feet to other forms of transportation: bicycles aren’t dependable on cracking concrete, cars can’t swerve fast enough to avoid falling objects, but feet, ah, feet will see you to safety if there’s any possible way. He rents half a duplex off-campus, and every room is filled floor to ceiling with books, except the room where he sleeps. There, although there are books on the floor and books on the bed, there’s nothing on the walls that could possibly fall. Instead, the room contains several pieces of low furniture: two desks, a dresser, a bedside table.

  There are three pictures on the bedside table. One of himself and his parents; one of himself and his current girlfriend; one of a girl with eyes like his, looking warily at the camera, as if she fears it might be getting ready to attack her. He keeps the picture to remind himself that he can never see her again; that together, they’re a danger to themselves and others. But he misses her. Even if he no longer hears her voice in his head when he’s going to sleep, even if he’s almost forgotten what it is to see the color red reflected through her eyes, he misses her. He supposes he always will. He hopes somehow that will be enough to pay for what they did, for the terrible space they made together, however little they intended to.

  Roger steps around the corner, and there’s the source of the sound: a pile of books on the carpet, dislodged from their shelf by some quirk of the way they’d been stacked. Students are notorious for shoving books in any which way, and sometimes that creates unstable piles which inevitably collapse, replaying the earthquake in pages and volumes. This collapse happened in the Applied Mathematics section. Roger sighs, and stoops, and begins picking them up.

  He has three books in his arms when he finds Dodger’s face staring at him from the floor. He grimaces and picks that book up as well, turning it over to reveal the title. You + Me: The Math of Social Networking, it proclaims, with her name below it in smaller but equally bold lettering. He wonders what color it is, if it’s as bright and candy-colored as he thinks. He wonders if she had any input on the cover design. She never finished her degree, but then, she didn’t need to; not in this brave new world of computers and startups and TED talks and people looking, always looking for the next big thing. She’s been doing her math in the real world since he came back to school three weeks after the quake and found her gone, leaving only a note stuffed into his mailbox.

  ROGER—

  GUESS IT’S YOUR TURN. IT’S ONLY FAIR. I DID IT LAST TIME. CALL IF YOU EVER NEED ME. I LOVE YOU.

  YOUR SISTER.

  She hadn’t bothered to leave a number, and that was like her, too: she assumed that even if he didn’t want to talk to her in the space they made between them, he’d know, or at least be able to find out, how to call. He doesn’t know if she was right about that. He’s never tried. Every time he thinks about it, he feels the ground shift beneath his feet, hears the masonry crashing around them, and remembers that it was their fault. They’re dangerous together. They shouldn’t be—all the laws of physics and nature and simple linear reality tell him they can’t be—but they are. He can’t risk it. No matter how much he wants to, no matter how much he loves her, he can’t risk it.

  He puts her book back where it belongs, surrounding it with the other books in its category, and hopes, not for the first time, that she’s happy wherever she is. That she understands that he didn’t run away to save himself this time. He did it to save the world.

  * * *

  The rebuilding of the UC Berkeley campus was not a
swift process. Even seven years on from the earthquake that reshaped the county, the signs of damage remain, etched into the architecture. Scaffolding shrouds the clock tower, concealing the process of repair. There are grad students who’ve never known it as anything other than tilted, a silent, solemn, broken giant watching over their daily lives. They stop as they cross the quad, looking at the sheets around the tower, and feel an obscure sense of loss, like something they thought would never change is changing, and maybe not for the better.

  (The other grad students, and the faculty, also stop, also look at the tower, but their feelings are different. They are consumed by relief, like the world is finally returning to normal. Fixing a clock can’t raise the dead or turn back time, but it’s still a symbol of a recovery that has been a long time in coming.)

  Roger walks down the broken stone pathways connecting the new library to the quad and tries, as he always does, not to notice how much around him is not what it was on the day he first came to tour the campus, a wide-eyed, hopeful freshman. The faces of the buildings are almost uniformly different. The older, more rigid trees are gone, their roots torn from soil during the great shaking. Even the pathways have changed. Most of them are made from the same artfully cracked stone that greeted him on the first day he set foot on campus, innocent and ignorant of what was to come. It was dug up and re-placed after the quake, creating a small sense of continuity in a world that seemed suddenly devoid of it. He keeps his eyes on the path. If he does that devotedly enough, he can almost pretend that nothing’s changed.

  UC Berkeley didn’t close its doors, not for a day: barely for an hour. The campus and city were in ruins, but there were things to be done, memorials to be held, rooms to be searched, and so the campus remained a hive of activity, blazing with flashlights and ringing with voices, until the rescue crews had come and helped to move the rubble away. After that, it seemed best to just … keep going. Classes were held in open spaces and on the quad, anywhere that wasn’t likely to collapse. Students whose work had been destroyed were helped to re-create it by willing professors and eager grad students. When the state had forgiven a semester’s tuition as part of their disaster response, the survival of the school had been guaranteed. Berkeley students were among the most loyal in the world.