Middlegame Read online

  Leigh turns, glaring venom, and looks at him as she falls. She hits the waves and is gone. All of them are gone. Roger is alone, hanging by his fingertips above the distant, jagged shore.

  “Dodger!” he howls. The crashing waves take his voice and claim it as their own. That doesn’t stop him. “Bring the floor back! They’re gone, you have to bring the floor back!”

  The mercury glow returns, laced with timid gold. Then the gold overwhelms the silver, and the floor surges back, growing in the same fractal spiral as before. The glow fades, and there is concrete and carpet and the deep wells of empty bathing pools in its place.

  Cautiously, Roger lowers himself down to test the solidity of the floor. It holds his weight with no more give than should be expected of good construction. He lets go of the wall, and still the floor holds him.

  Erin is gone. He should feel worse about that. He should feel more about that, should feel anything at all. Instead, he’s … numb, like this was a somehow-inevitable consequence, sad, yes, even heartbreaking, but no more or less tragic than everything else that’s happened. Maybe he’s a bad person. Maybe he’s always been a bad person, and this is just the world finally proving it to him.

  Or maybe the weight of what they’ve done here today will hit him one night a month from now, jerking him out of a sound sleep as he remembers the resignation on the face of a woman he’d believed himself to be in love with as she fell to her death in the deep, lightless waters of the Pacific. That’s all in the future. The future is Dodger’s department.

  Dodger. His eyes widen for an instant before he closes them.

  “Dodge?”

  There’s no reply.

  He remembers to open his eyes before he breaks into a run.

  * * *

  The room where he left his sister and her math has been transformed into a chamber of horrors. There is blood everywhere. On the walls, the ceiling, the floor; there is blood in places blood should never be. It is brilliantly, violently red, so red that it attacks the eye, shaming and scarring it. And at the center of it all is Dodger.

  She has never looked so small, or so pale. With all the blood, it seems impossible for her to be this pale. She should be a rose garden, drying in a hundred different, subtle shades of red. Instead, she is bone and wax and soapstone, she is snow and teeth and goose feathers. There is no color in her skin at all. Her hair is almost offensively bright next to the wrung-out rest of her.

  Roger runs across the room. He knows the words—exsanguination, hypovolemia, hemorrhage—but he’s never known them like this, as real things, tricky and tangled as venomous snakes. The words can comfort him. The words may be the only things that comfort him. They can’t make things better.

  Or maybe they can. The Sutro Baths are still all around him, solid and real. He’s still here. Erin said he’d die if Dodger did, and he believes her, because he remembers that terrible day when Dodger tried to take herself out of the world. The edges of his vision are becoming riddled with those little black dots that came before the seizures, all those years ago, but they’re small, they’re almost something he can overlook. She’s going. She isn’t gone. Not yet.

  He drops to his knees beside her. The blood is so thick that it squishes like jam on toast, gelatinous and warm and somehow obscene. He swallows his nausea, gathers her in his arms. She is so still. She is so cold.

  But the walls …

  The walls are covered with equations. No: not equations. With equation, one single string of formulae and functions, all leading toward an inevitable sum. It’s beautiful. He doesn’t understand it, and still, he knows it’s beautiful. Dodger has reduced the world, the situation, them, to one room, filled with the quick, arcane figures that, for her, have always equaled reality.

  “Wow,” he whispers, and looks down at her. “You finished. Dodge, you finished. You did the whole thing. You finished it. Wake up now, okay? You finished, and that means you get to wake up, and we get to win.”

  She does not wake up.

  He shakes her a little. He can’t help himself. “Come on. I need you to tell me what this means. I need you to read it to me. Wake up.”

  She does not move, does not react, does nothing, in fact, but lie in his arms and bleed, growing colder and paler with every second. There can’t be that many seconds left for her, and when she goes, he goes too. He has to reset. He has to tell her to take them back. They can go again, they can try again, and maybe next time—

  Maybe next time they’ll wind up right back here again, with all their ghosts still dogging their heels, and all their mistakes made for the second, or hundredth, or two hundredth time. No. He can’t. It might be the right thing to do, and yet still, he can’t.

  Dodger got the math. He got the words. That was how this was supposed to work, right? He looks at the writing on the wall again, the figures and forms that mean just shy of nothing to him, and takes a breath. They did this once before. He knows what to do. He knows what the consequences might be. That doesn’t mean he has a choice.

  “Light,” he reads, letting the symbols on the wall tell him what they want to be, what they want to mean. “This is the light of dark places, the light defined by its own absence, and through definition, becoming darkness; weight, mass, the cessation of emptiness—”

  The building shakes as he reads, becoming the epicenter of its own unending, private earthquake. The walls glow gold and the sky is filled with blazing mercury light, sending a beacon up, up, ever onward into the heavens, into the ceaseless sky.

  Look.

  Look.

  Look at the boy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, always too thin, now so tired he can barely move. He’s uninjured, but that doesn’t matter; he’s still wounded. He holds the body of his sister, and if she’s alive, it’s only barely, survival measured by the thinnest of margins. His clothing is stained with her blood. His hands ache with splinters and with their own stillness, as if through motion he might have redeemed her and, by redeeming her, redeemed himself.

  Look at the girl from Palo Alto, California, so motionless that it’s clear how close she is to the transition from person to past. She is crumpled and cast-aside, exhausted from her own efforts to become something more than a consequence. The wound in her shoulder has crusted over; the bleeding has stopped. That doesn’t matter. There was more than enough damage done to take her to the edge, and over, into what waits beyond. She is ready to return to the Up-and-Under via the graveyard path. When she goes, she knows she will not go alone.

  On and on Roger reads, telling the story of the writing on the wall, and this, too, is something that goes back to the birth of mankind, the storytelling ape, the fire burning in the dark places: humanity has always yearned to interpret the signs around it. He looks at his sister’s math, which he knows describes a universe, and he describes what he sees in ever-grander terms, feeling her body chill in his arms, watching the black spots gather at the edges of his vision, wiping the world away one fragment at a time.

  It’s too late for a reset now. She couldn’t hear him if he called.

  It’s too late to go back and try again. For the first time, their story’s ending.

  “… and their names were Roger and Dodger, because they were named by people who should never have been allowed anywhere near children,” he reads (describes), and squeezes her to his chest, like he would give her half of his own heartbeat, fill her veins with his own blood. “They grew up sort of weird and sort of wonderful and they found each other and lost each other over and over again. But this time, when they found each other, they came as close as they could to the Impossible City. They walked the length of the improbable road, and the girl wrote down everything she knew about the universe, and the boy read it all aloud, and everything was okay. Everything was fine. They got to be together.”

  He stops, looking down at Dodger expectantly. She doesn’t move.

  “Dodge, come on. I read your math.”

  She doesn’t move.

  “
Come on.” He shakes her, and still she doesn’t move. Desperate, he looks back at the wall, searching for something—anything—he might have left out. That he might have missed.

  There’s a thumbprint next to the final figure. It could, under the right circumstances, be interpreted as an asterisk. She must have left it before she fell. So he reaches for her hand, and takes it firmly in his, and reads the ending.

  “And they both lived.”

  Dodger opens her eyes.

  Spindrift

  TIMELINE: 10:32 PDT, JUNE 17, 2016 (AND).

  They walk out of the fading ghost of the Sutro Baths an hour later, Dodger leaning on Roger’s arm, her eyes closed, letting him see the world for them both. They no longer need to reach to make that connection: closing their eyes is enough. Right now, neither of them can be truly alone; every time they blink, the other is there. No loneliness, no risk of separation. No privacy. They’ll worry about that later, when Dodger is stronger, when Roger is less overwhelmed by the language of the world around him.

  Both of them had believed themselves connected to their chosen disciplines. That was before. Before the sky turned to mercury: before the world cracked open and offered them its secrets. When Roger takes the lead, everything has a name, and he can all but see the story of the world hanging in the air. When he closes his eyes and Dodger opens hers, everything is numbers, surrounded by the calm calculation of angles and surface areas. This, too, will take some adjusting to. This will need to be worked on.

  The Baths vanish behind them, gone again as they have been for decades. Dodger lets her head loll against Roger’s shoulder, and smiles.

  “I liked it there,” she says. “We should live there.”

  “We can’t live in a giant bathtub.”

  “Well, then, we should find someplace like there, and live in that place instead.”

  “Someplace that isn’t real?”

  “Someplace that used to be real but stopped for a while.”

  Roger nods. “Whatever you want, Dodge. We can live in a castle that got burnt down a thousand years ago, if it’ll make you happy.”

  She nods, eyes half-closed. “It will.”

  “Good.” He’s been steering them toward the beach, walking around the driftwood and rocks littering the shore. Someone will spot them soon and call the Coast Guard or something. He’s almost looking forward to that. They can take a nice ride in a boat and get Dodger someplace where she can be looked after. He’s pretty sure her body would be thrilled to get a little more blood into it, and he knows he’s a compatible donor. It’s just a matter of finding someone with a needle to spare.

  They walk down the shore, water lapping at their shoes, and somehow it’s no surprise when a bundle of spindrift and kelp resolves into the body of a woman, lying, Ophelia-esque, in the foam.

  “Dodger, can you stand on your own?”

  “I can try,” she says, and steps away from him, opening her eyes and wrapping her arms around herself. She’s looking better. There’s some color back in her cheeks, and when he moves out of her reach, she doesn’t wobble. She’s rebuilding herself, one simple cell division at a time, and biology is in many ways a mathematical function. She’s going to be fine.

  The same cannot necessarily be said of Erin. She’s pale, but lacks the waxen bloodlessness Dodger so recently displayed: her skin has a faint greenish tinge, like she’s lingered too long in the chambers of the sea. Human voices did not wake her. Her clothing is torn, but her limbs seem straight and strong, and she has no visible wounds.

  “Erin.” Roger kneels beside her, lifting her head tenderly from the sand. Dodger, watching, can finally see how they were lovers; can see the delicate hyperspace they sketched between them, before Erin’s betrayal shattered it forever.

  He cups her skull with his fingers, looking at her closed eyes, and smiles, because he can see the story of her. She finally makes sense.

  “You’re okay,” he says. “Open your eyes.”

  There’s nothing to contradict him, no reason she shouldn’t be able to survive the trauma she’s endured. His words are put before the universe, and after a moment, the universe agrees with him. Her eyes open. She blinks, twice, before she gasps, taking a huge, sucking breath of air. Roger takes his hands away as she begins to cough, rolls onto her side, and vomits a lungful of water onto the sand.

  Dodger tilts her head. “What, you can raise the dead now?” she asks. “Fancy.”

  “Hey, you were almost dead what, fifteen minutes ago? Shut your face.”

  “I’ll shut your face,” she says, smirking, amused. She quiets, and watches Erin continue to vomit what seems like half the sea out of her body. There is more water there than woman, or at least it looks that way. Maybe Roger can raise the dead.

  Dodger hugs herself and shivers, and wonders whether that’s a good thing.

  Finally, Erin is finished vomiting. She pushes herself unsteadily upright in the sand and coughs, once, before she smiles. “You did it,” she says, looking from the blood-smeared Roger to the blood-drenched Dodger. “You manifested.”

  “That and a cup of coffee will buy us a night in a holding cell if we don’t get off this beach,” says Dodger. “Someone’s going to call the Coast Guard soon, if they haven’t already, and since we’re probably being looked at for arson right now, maybe that’s not such a good thing? As a thought?”

  “You don’t understand how much things have changed for you,” says Erin. She shifts her weight to her feet, tottering into a standing position. She looks weak as a kitten. “No one’s going to arrest you, or try to put you in jail. No one’s going to touch you, ever again, if you don’t want them to.”

  For a girl who just maybe-drowned, she’s remarkably spry. Roger watches her, an uneasy sense of responsibility spreading through his bones. This is his. He made it, made her, when he called her back from her watery grave. “So we’re done,” he says.

  Erin looks at him. “Not quite. There’s still one person out there who knows what you are, knows what you can do, and knows enough to want to hurt you.”

  “Reed,” says Dodger, in a voice like a sigh.

  Erin nods. “He knows you’ve manifested. When you found yourselves, it was like a signal flare for the people who knew what to watch for. He’s going to be marshalling his forces. If you want to stay alive—if you want to stay free—you need to take this to him. You need to stop him.”

  “And then what?” Dodger is pale and weak-looking, but her voice cracks like a whip. “Is there another dungeon we have to crawl through, another dragon we have to defeat? Don’t look at me like that. I was a nerd kid, I played D&D. Just answer the question. If we do this, do you throw another boss fight in our path, or do you walk away and leave us the fuck alone?”

  “This is the last one,” says Erin. “We stop him, and the Up-and-Under is safe, at least until some other asshole comes along and decides to destroy the house that Baker built.”

  “Well, when that happens, it’s going to be someone else’s problem,” says Roger firmly. “We’ll do this, because we deserve to be left alone. And after that, you’re going to leave us alone. You’re never going to see us again.”

  “Deal,” says Erin. She smiles a skeleton’s smile, all teeth and pallor. “He’s never going to see us coming.”

  Roger looks at her, and hopes she’s right.

  Avery and Zib stood hand-in-hand, looking at the great towers of the Impossible City. The buildings here weren’t like any other buildings they had ever seen. They moved, changing shape and form and function according to the needs of the people who walked on their high walkways, moving between them like dreams.

  Beside them, Niamh sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Zib.

  “I lived here once,” said Niamh. “I never will again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because drowned girls are very possible, and the Impossible City only welcomes impossible things. Girls like me happen too often to ever make it home�
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  —From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

  BOOK VII

  After the End

  It’s mathematics, the ultimate code,

  And the universe was singing in my favorite mode …

  —Dr. Mary Crowell, “The Doctrine of Ethos”

  Everything is measured in the span of a second.

  —A. Deborah Baker

  Cost and Consequence

  TIMELINE: 13:01 EDT, JUNE 20, 2016 (THREE DAYS LATER).

  Leigh is dead and the cuckoos are in the wind and the only thing Reed can’t understand is how it’s all gone so wrong so fast. They were weak, separated, in denial: their only use was in keeping the Doctrine contained until their replacements could mature enough to take it as their own. None of this is in keeping with the plan, and he doesn’t have time for it.

  He would regret the loss of Leigh, if there was time. She was a liability, yes, and he had been planning to kill her, absolutely, but she had been loyal in her way, and she had deserved to die a victor, not … whatever this was. What was the point of traveling to the Impossible City, only to fall before the doors were even opened? It was unfair. It held no resonance. Asphodel would have called it narratively unsatisfying for one of the heroes to die this close to achieving their goals.

  (The thought that Asphodel would not have called Leigh a hero, would not have called him a hero, never crosses his mind. This is his story, has been since he wrested it away from his creator, and of course he’s the hero. How could he be anything else?)

  They’ll be coming for him next. They must. They’re manifest, and they’ll be seeking the City now, seeking it with all the zeal of their conflicted cuckoo hearts. More, they’ll know that he alone, in all the world, holds the keys to their unmaking. So they’ll come for him and, through him, for the Impossible City.