Page 111 of Middlegame

“Dodge.” He finally moves, hurrying to prop her up. There is so much blood. It’s getting everywhere. They’re both going to be covered, and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, because she’s the one doing the bleeding; she’s the one turning everything as red as her hair (no, redder, so much redder; he can see the color as clear as day, and for the first time, he doesn’t care about that either).

“Tell me to finish.”

He stops. That isn’t the order he was expecting to give. Can he even give two orders at the same time? If he tells her to finish, will he be able to make her stop long enough to reset the timeline? Even for them, there are limits.

“Please.” She closes her eyes, grimacing. “It hurts. Can’t focus. You can make me focus. Please. I’m so close to done. I can see the shape of it. I can see . . . I know how to finish. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this close to finishing.”

Roger pauses. “Do you remember being here before?”

“No. But the math does. It’s in the imaginary numbers. They have echoes, places where the unfinished equations influence the way they hang together . . . please. I think I can finish.”

He’s killing her if he does this. He knows that. He might be killing both of them. Or he might be saving them both. “All right,” he says softly. “Look at me.”

Dodger opens her eyes.

“Finish the problem, Dodger. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Finish the problem.”

She smiles, even as her eyes go glassy with something more than pain. Her Sharpie is ruined, and so she doesn’t reach for it; she dips her fingers in her own blood and begins writing on the wall, finger-painting like a child, slowly at first, but with gathering speed as the command and her own nature take control.

Roger straightens, stands. He needs to buy her some time, and he doesn’t have much currency left. But he has one thing.

Dripping with his sister’s blood, shaken to the core of himself, he turns and walks to the door, opens it, and steps out into the Baths.

It takes a moment for the scene he’s walked into to make sense. There’s Erin, held in place by a hulking mountain of a man. There’s a dead man on the floor. There’s a small, smiling woman who looks like she’s just stepped out of a beauty pageant, or a horror movie, pointing a gun at Erin’s chest. He knows Erin sees him; there’s no way she could not. She does not betray him. Her eyes do not widen, her gaze does not waver. She’s brought them this far, knowing her death may be the final coin to pay the ferryman’s fee, and she won’t waver now. There’s something noble about that. More importantly, there’s something stupid about it. Roger wants her to betray them.

Apparently, he has to do some things himself. “Hey!” he calls, waving his arms in a semaphore gesture of look-at-me. “What are you doing over there?”

The beauty queen turns. It’s all he can do not to recoil. She’s lovely, yes, but her eyes are a dead woman’s, so cold and so flat that he can see the death of stars reflected there, even at this distance.

And he’s seen her before, when he was a child, when she came to terrify him into giving up his sister. Until this moment, he didn’t really believe his parents had betrayed him, but she’s the proof. She always has been.

She frowns. “Roger?” she asks.

(Part of him remembers that voice, deep down and tucked away in a corner of his mind. He remembers every voice he’s ever heard, on some level, because that too is a part of language. This voice was the first voice the world contained. This was the voice that pulled him from his mother’s womb and said, “Oh, I think you’ll do,” like he was a tool, a piece of meat, and not a human child. The part of him that’s never forgotten Leigh Barrow shies away from the reality of what he’s about to do, and he is glad to let it go. Some things are easier for the unprepared.)

“Ayuh,” he says, hitting that syllable with as much New England scorn and blank-faced disdain as he can muster. “You’ve got a friend of mine there. I’d prefer you didn’t shoot her.”

“Who, Erin?” Leigh gestures toward the captive woman with the barrel of her gun. “She’s no friend of yours. She’s been watching you on my orders for years. You know that, don’t you? She was never your friend, never loved you, never cared one bit about what happened to you. She was just there to wait for the day when I’d tell her to pull the trigger.”

“Roger, get out of here,” snarls Erin, bucking against her captor. He holds her fast, hands like manacles, arms like chains. She can’t escape from him. She never could. “Run!”

(and they have been here before they have been exactly here before, Erin held captive, Roger emerging to beg for medical assistance—but no, they have not been here before, because he’s come to beg for nothing; for the first time, he begs for nothing)

“Not going to do that, Erin, sorry,” he calls, and focuses back on Leigh. “Seems she changed sides at some point. Maybe when you told her to spend seven years sleeping with me. Even the best agent’s going to start to waver when they get too close. Let her go. Let her down. If you’ll do that, we’ll think about letting you surrender.”

Erin’s eyes widen. Leigh’s gun finally swings around to point at him.

“Oh, you stupid little Jack Daw,” she says, almost sweetly, and pulls the trigger.

“Miss!” shouts Roger, and ducks to the side as the bullet whizzes harmlessly past his head. Leigh scowls and fires again, and “Miss!” he shouts again, and the bullet misses him, again. Roger grins, continuing to dance away from Leigh’s probable line of fire.

“Can’t hit when your bullets won’t obey you, huh?” he asks. “We’re manifest. You should give up while you still can.”

“You’re not manifest,” she snaps, all fury and frustration. “You’re wading at the edge of an ocean, and you’re going to drown. Where’s your sister, if you’re so manifest? She’s bleeding out in a room that doesn’t exist, and as soon as she dies, you’re powerless. If you even survive. I hope you do. I want to take you apart while you’re still struggling to look me in the eye.” Leigh fires again. The bullet misses again.

But it hits the wall. It goes through the wall.

Dodger is on the other side of the wall.