Page 109 of Middlegame

He goes to her.

“I love you,” he says.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I forgive you.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the wall. “I’m sorry, too.”

“You don’t have to be,” he says.

“Never leave me again?”

“I won’t.”

“Good. The numbers add up. The math is good.”

“What can I do?” he asks.

“Describe the Baths,” she says. He does, and as he speaks she writes faster and faster, turning his words into numbers, reducing the history and splendor of the place to a chain of figures.

“Describe California,” she says next, and he does, and again, she writes, filling the wall and moving on to the next, the universe in figures and functions, an equation that could solve the world, if only they had time to describe and document every piece, every aspect of something so vast that it should be without limit. (And they do have time, they do: for the first time, Roger realizes that their twisting of their own timeline means they can finish anything, if only they can remember beginning it.)

Next is America; after that, the world. The air in the room grows colder and colder, and the mercury glow returns to the walls, glittering and bright. Her Sharpie is still just a Sharpie, black ink and the chemical smell of the marker, but the marks it leaves behind shine like glass, like silver. The rules of reality are turning malleable.

The first gunshot sounds right after Dodger has asked him to describe the house where he grew up. Roger jumps. She looks up, expression sharp.

“We can’t stop now,” she says. “We’re so close. Keep talking.”

“Dodger—”

“Keep talking.”

So he does. His house, and his impressions of her house, and then himself, Roger Middleton, who was supposed to be ordinary and turned out to be something . . . else. The gunfire continues. Some of it is close; Erin, holding back whoever has come to attack them. That Leigh woman, he assumes. She’s got backup. The cacophony is too much to be coming from just two firearms. There’s an army out there, or maybe only a small mob, and they’re so close, and these walls aren’t really here. These walls are thin. How long can this go on?

He knows the words: doubt, disbelief, skepticism. He knows their power. He hasn’t considered his own power, here and now and in this place where the walls glow mercury bright, where he’s feeding the words that make up the world to the sister-cuckoo who hatched with him from the same egg. He sees the walls flicker. Only for a moment.

A moment is long enough for him to begin to move, hands outstretched, mouth forming a word that will never come.

A moment is long enough for the bullets to break through.

Dodger screams.

SHOWDOWN

Timeline: 8:01 PDT, June 17, 2016 (and on).

Erin keeps her back to the pillar as best she can, ducking around it only to aim, fire, and retreat again. “It’s over, Leigh!” she shouts. “They’re going to manifest! Run now, and maybe you’ll be too far away to worry about by the time they get around to cleaning up Reed’s mess!”

“You stupid idealistic child,” Leigh replies. “They’re not going to manifest. Reed’s already taking the Doctrine from them. You’ve chosen the wrong side. I thought better of you.”

“I chose the wrong side when you killed Darren.” She ducks around the pillar one more time, fires one more time, following the chaotic threads of combat through the air. This time, her shot is followed by the heavy cement-sack sound of a body hitting the floor.

For a moment—a tiny, trembling moment—she allows herself to hope that this is it; that it’s over, that she’s won. Then Leigh says, in a voice dripping with disgust, “You just shot a perfectly good alchemist, and we don’t even have the facility to take him apart. This is why you’re useless, Erin. You’re wasteful. You were never going to be anything other than a tool.”

Her voice is getting closer. Erin breaks cover and runs for the next pillar, moving just ahead of the shining strips of chaos that would put her in the path of Leigh’s bullets. The battle is a grid. She can’t see her own shots true—that would be too much like order—but she can avoid the bright and biting places where the order breaks down. She can keep this up forever.

She hopes she can keep this up forever.