Page 113 of Middlegame

“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.”