Page 116 of Middlegame

Soon, even that is done, and the rest is silence.

GHOSTS

Timeline: 14:49 CDT, June 23, 2016 (three days later).

They cross the country as ghosts: silently, swiftly, leaving no footsteps. Buses let them board without tickets; trains do the same, although the number and variety of the conductors means either Roger or Dodger has to be awake at all times, to smile blithely and work their own version of the strange magic surrounding them. (Roger pulls what he insists on calling “Jedi mind tricks,” telling the conductors their tickets are in order. Dodger produces bits of paper—receipts, movie stubs, old index cards—and holds them up for inspection, nodding solemnly when they’re taken for valid tickets. It’s penny-ante stuff, the sort of tricks that will be beneath them before much longer, and yet they can’t conceal their glee when it works. Here it is: the proof that they are what Erin said they were, and more, that they’re getting stronger, more capable, by the day. It won’t be long before no one will notice them if they don’t want to be noticed, if they tell the air to keep them hidden, the world to keep them safe. Roger thinks this is a quiet tragedy. Dodger thinks this is a miracle. Both of them are right.)

They’re getting stronger. They’re still holding themselves back. Erin, who knows more than they do, even if she’s never been here before, refuses to tell them what to do. They have to figure it out on their own. This time, every time, if she wants it to work, she has to let them figure it out on their own.

But oh, they’re moving so slowly, and oh, she’s so afraid they won’t be fast enough when they need to be.

The last bus lets them off in Ohio, where the air is hot with summer and the sky is bruised with the promise of a storm. There are cities here—they’ve seen them, even passed through a couple, when the bus routes curved just so—but this is the country, the kind of wide, flat country neither of them has ever seen. They were born here. That doesn’t make it home. They are children of the jagged, coastal places, the spots where the land drops away and the sea comes up to catch it. This grand flatness, this tornado-catcher of a country, has never belonged to them. The man they are on their way to meet made sure of that.

“Not too late,” says Dodger, and she’s lying.

“Always was,” says Roger, and he’s not. He takes her hand, and together they follow Erin into the corn.

They are less than a week into their manifestation and already the signs of it are clear, for anyone with eyes that know how to see, with ears that know how to hear. They stand taller, walk straighter, move with more ease. Dodger shows no signs that she’s barely recovered from a life-threatening injury; if anything, she looks healthier than she’s ever been, walking fast, moving faster, her every gesture an attack on the world around her. She’s fully integrated her new depth perception into her vision, and has stopped running into things quite so often, although she still runs at them like she expects everything, even walls, even mountains, to stand aside.

Roger, on the other hand, ambles through the world. Let Dodger race ahead; he’ll always catch up. He moves smoothly, easily, and everything around him rearranges to let him pass. He is comfortable in both his own skin and his place in the world. It’s a terrifying combination, for those few who can look at it and understand what it means. Erin supposes that, after they have faced down Reed, for better or for worse, the people who can tell what Roger and Dodger are by looking at them will never trouble them again. Some risks are too dangerous to take when there’s any way for them to be avoided.

The corn rustles around them, husks rubbing one against the other like the legs of a thousand insects. Dodger wrinkles her nose.

“This is very outdoors,” she says. “I don’t like outdoors. That’s where you get sent when you’ve been bad.”

Roger, who has started hearing the echoes of the things she doesn’t say, hears the words “where your parents send you,” even though they go unspoken. He reaches for her hand, takes it, squeezes it, and keeps walking.

(He can raise the dead, but he needs something to raise, and there was nothing left when Leigh was done. Her parents are as lost to her as his are to him, and he wishes at least one of them had been spared.)

“Reed wants to be well concealed,” says Erin. “He likes to think of himself as a spider, sitting in his web, pulling his strings and keeping things hidden. The new King of Cups.”

There’s so much Roger wants to say. He says none of it. That Reed must die is certain. That Erin, not Dodger, not him, will be the one to pull the trigger is equally certain. All of them have people they want to avenge, deaths they want repaid. But Dodger’s never killed anyone, and the only people he’s killed—Leigh and the man of earth—were killed in self-defense. However necessary this is, it’s still murder.

They wade through the corn until it seems like the world is nothing but corn, gold like the Impossible City, like the Sutro Baths. Maybe this is the true essence of the Up-and-Under, of transmutation, of everything: the purification of the base materials of soil and sky and water into golden kernels, growing sweet and patient on their stalks. Erin darts ahead, and suddenly there’s a shack in the middle of the corn, small and listing to one side, made of corrugated tin. Someone has painted it with silver paint, until it shines like mercury in the sun.

Roger and Dodger both stop and blink at the shack, nonplussed.

“Is that it?” asks Dodger.

Erin opens the door and smiles, quick and tight. “It’s a long way down.” Then she’s gone, vanishing into the gloom inside the shack, and they have no choice but to follow. She is their only guide, now that they’ve committed themselves to walking the improbable road all the way to the King. They can’t afford to lose her.

The shed door swings shut behind them, and all is silence. Silence, and the corn.

Erin wasn’t joking when she said it was a long way down: a hatch in the shed floor opens on a spiraling staircase descending down, down, into the darkness below the corn. They descend until it begins to feel ridiculous, until Dodger—who grew up in earthquake country, not twister country—is sticking so close to Roger’s side that he’s afraid he’ll trip over her and send them both tumbling down into the dark.

The stairs are dark. There are lights every ten feet or so, but they’re barely enough to split the gloom. They’ve descended almost fifty feet before he realizes the lights are getting brighter, matching the adjustment of their eyes. This system will keep people disoriented for as long as humanly possible, rather than letting them fully adjust to either dark or day. He’d be impressed, if he weren’t so angry.

The light brightens. The stairwell opens up as it drops away. The last fifteen feet of the spiral stair winds through the open air, descending into a room that looks more like an airplane hangar. The walls are tin, like the shed upstairs; the floor is industrial linoleum. Dodger looks around, eyes narrowed, assessing everything. Roger wants to ask what she sees. He doesn’t dare speak aloud.

Erin quickens her pace. They do the same, and the three of them reach the ground still alone, still without pursuit.

“Now what?” whispers Dodger.

“Now we tell Daddy dearest that we’re home—don’t look so alarmed, Roger. I’m an adoptive sibling at best, and a distant, distant, distant cousin at worst. You didn’t screw your sister.”

“Ew,” says Dodger.

Erin chuckles—a quick, bitter thing—before she cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “James Reed! We’re here for you!”