Page 115 of Middlegame

Avery and Zib stood hand-in-hand, looking at the great towers of the Impossible City. The buildings here weren’t like any other buildings they had ever seen. They moved, changing shape and form and function according to the needs of the people who walked on their high walkways, moving between them like dreams.

Beside them, Niamh sighed.

“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.

“I lived here once,” said Niamh. “I never will again.”

“Why not?”

“Because drowned girls are very possible, and the Impossible City only welcomes impossible things. Girls like me happen too often to ever make it home . . .

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

Book VII

After the End

It’s mathematics, the ultimate code,

And the universe was singing in my favorite mode . . .

—Dr. Mary Crowell, “The Doctrine of Ethos”

Everything is measured in the span of a second.

—A. Deborah Baker

COST AND CONSEQUENCE

Timeline: 13:01 EDT, June 20, 2016 (four days later).

Leigh is dead and the cuckoos are in the wind and the only thing Reed can’t understand is how it’s all gone so wrong so fast. They were weak, separated, in denial: their only use was in keeping the Doctrine contained until their replacements could mature enough to take it as their own. None of this is in keeping with the plan, and he doesn’t have time for it.

He would regret the loss of Leigh, if there was time. She was a liability, yes, and he had been planning to kill her, absolutely, but she had been loyal in her way, and she had deserved to die a victor, not . . . whatever this was. What was the point of traveling to the Impossible City, only to fall before the doors were even opened? It was unfair. It held no resonance. Asphodel would have called it narratively unsatisfying for one of the heroes to die this close to achieving their goals.

(The thought that Asphodel would not have called Leigh a hero, would not have called him a hero, never crosses his mind. This is his story, has been since he wrested it away from his creator, and of course he’s the hero. How could he be anything else?)

They’ll be coming for him next. They must. They’re manifest, and they’ll be seeking the City now, seeking it with all the zeal of their conflicted cuckoo hearts. More, they’ll know that he alone, in all the world, holds the keys to their unmaking. So they’ll come for him and, through him, for the Impossible City.

There is little time left. Subtlety, such as it is, must fall by the wayside. There is too much left to do.

The box, which left Reed’s hands not three hours prior, is placed before the High Priest of the American Alchemical Congress with the reverence of a sacrament, who looks at the paper—dull lead scribed with platinum sigils—and frowns.

“What is this nonsense?” he demands.

“An apprentice of Master Daniels found this in the walls of the old master’s house,” says the alchemist who carried the box into the room. He is slight, slender, and shivering.

The others dismiss his shaking as awe. Who wouldn’t feel awe, in the presence of the greatest of the American alchemists? They have peers around the country, but none of them can compare to the presence and power in this room.

Perhaps if they looked closer, they might see that it is not awe but terror that puts the tremble in his hands. Perhaps they might ask themselves why he comes to them now, with so little fanfare; why the box was found now and not years ago.

Here is a secret about powerful men, one they would prefer go unspoken: their arrogance is one of the greatest forces in the universe. Even the most paranoid among them see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, and this creates cracks through which the clever may insinuate themselves, changing the story around them.

The alchemist who carried the prize here, to these men, these powerful, greedy, terrible men, closes his eyes. He has to tell himself that his lover will be safe: that Reed will keep his word and let the man go. Every war, however slow, however understated, has its crossfires, and he was, in the end, unable to keep the man he loved above all others out of the way.

His love will live and he will die, and in this moment, that seems like the only way this could have gone.

The seal on the package is broken by a greedy master’s hands, unable to scan through the lead paper with any accuracy: the mechanism inside bursts, spraying alkahest from one side of the room to the other, and all that remains is the screaming.