Page 110 of Middlegame

“Stop running and face me!” Leigh is starting to sound angry. Good. Angry people make more mistakes, more errors; they drop things, they lose their focus, they lose their drive. Leigh has been calm and cool for long enough. Erin is ready for her to stop.

“No!”

“I don’t understand why you have to be so unreasonable. I didn’t raise you like this.”

Erin stops, ducks around her pillar, fires two shots at Leigh, who somehow steps easily to the side. “You didn’t raise me at all!”

“I may as well have!”

Too late, Erin realizes she’s being herded. A heavy hand lands on her shoulder, and she looks up into the blank face of a manikin. She struggles to break away, watching Leigh Barrow walk toward her, calm and cruel as a hunting cat. She’s still struggling when the wall in front of her thins and all but disappears, becoming a shining screen of silver.

Erin’s eyes widen. She can’t stop herself.

Leigh smiles. In a motion so smooth it looks practiced, Leigh turns and fires through the thin golden screen of the wall, pulling the trigger twice before the stone snaps back into solidity.

“There,” she says, looking back to Erin. Her smile is smug and unwavering. “Looks like that may have cleared things up nicely, doesn’t it? Now. Where were we?”

Avery took a step forward. His knees were shaking. His teeth were chattering. His whole skeleton felt like it was coming apart at the joints, like it was going to fall into so many bones on the floor. He wanted to turn. He wanted to run away. He didn’t belong here.

But Zib was clinging to the bars of her cage, and he could see the black feathers pushing against her skin, trying to burst free, to turn her into a Crow Girl like all the others. She wouldn’t be Zib if he let that happen. She’d be something else, something wilder and stranger and not his at all. He hadn’t known her long enough to care as much as he did. He cared anyway. He couldn’t let the Page have her.

“You have to give her back,” he said. “She’s my friend, and she doesn’t belong to you.”

The Page of Frozen Waters smiled. “Why should I?” she asked.

“Because . . .” Avery took a deep breath. “Because I asked, and because I’ll cut you into ribbons if you don’t.

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

Book VII

The End of All Things

Now the number is even.

—William Shakespeare, Love’s Labors Lost

It is a callous age.

—L. Frank Baum

OUTCOME

Timeline: 8:03 PDT, June 17, 2016 (and).

There’s so much blood.

Roger didn’t know there could be so much blood. It’s everywhere, hot and red and bitter. Dodger is on her knees, eyes wide and glassy, one hand clasped over the hole in her shoulder. This, then, is where the slightest change changes everything; the length of the words he has given her have dictated her place along the wall. He can see where shortening the equation would have kept her safe, where lengthening it would have put the bullet through her heart. It’s too complex. They cannot win.

His own heart is beating out of rhythm, starting to surrender to the sympathetic pull of Dodger’s pain. He’ll last longer than she does—he has the distant feeling that he always lasts longer than she does when she’s the one who’s hurt; that it has to be like that for them to have any chance—but if she dies, he won’t be far behind. They walk the improbable road together, all the way to the end.

She’s not moving. She’s just kneeling, blood pouring down her arm and soaking into her jeans, and they’re going to die here.

No: not necessarily. He can always tell her to take them back. Erin was clear about that. He knows the words to say, the instructions to give; he can get them out of here.

Dodger lifts her head.

“Wow,” she says, in a voice gone pale with pain. “This hurts a lot. I mean, wow. I did not know how much this would hurt. I need to . . . add this . . . to the equation . . . Roger?”