Page 112 of Middlegame

Roger hesitates. He can’t help her. Going back in there would just distract her, give her something else to worry about, and she isn’t calling for him. He can save Erin, if he tries. “Why don’t you try to take me apart now?”

“She doesn’t like it when the meat fights back,” says Erin. “That’s why the only people who’ll work with her willingly are made of mud.” She kicks the leg of the man who holds her. For the first time, Roger sees the strange smoothness of his skin, the blankness of his eyes. He’s a constructed thing, and not a human being at all.

Dodger is a constructed thing. So is Erin. So is Roger. What does that make them?

Leigh turns her attention back to her captive, eyes narrow and body vibrating with fury. “That’s it. I’m sorry, dearest, but you’re fired.”

She takes aim, the gun trained this time on Erin’s forehead. A bullet at that range . . . there’s no chance Erin will survive. No chance. Unless . . .

Roger closes his eyes. “Dodge, I need you to help me,” he says, voice low, words quick. He’s disrupting her train of thought. He knows that, and he’s sorry, but some things can’t wait. “Leigh has Erin captive by the far wall. There is a lot of water between her and me. I’m on a different section of floor. Can we . . . let that other piece go?”

“Show me.”

He opens his eyes. There’s a flicker in his vision, the sense of someone else looking through his eyes (has the feeling ever been that strong? Has it ever been that easy to know when he’s not alone, when one has become two has become something that is not a number, but is instead an inevitability?), and then, so soft that it barely qualifies as a whisper:

“No. Brace yourself.”

The walls are not smooth. There is a delicate filigree to them, lips and ridges; the natural sort of refinements one puts into a bathhouse designed for the amusement and entertainment of legions. Roger jumps, grabs the nearest bit of protruding wall, and holds fast. It’s a childish activity, dangling by his fingertips. There was a time when this would have kept him amused for hours, jumping up, hanging until he got tired, and then dropping down again. This time, he doesn’t dare let himself fall. The feeling of Dodger watching through his eyes recedes.

The floor goes with her.

Not a section of floor, not a piece or portion: no. That would require too much finesse, and this is not a time for finesse. This is a time for brute force. The entire floor disappears, revealing the distant concrete ruins that are all that truly remain of the Sutro Baths, and the cold, cruel sea that beats itself against the shore. Erin has time to scream. The man holding her falls without a sound. And Leigh . . .

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.