Page 120 of Middlegame

“All those things mean ‘zero’ to me. He’s going to use them to siphon off the Doctrine.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t mention the bucket he saw them carry in, the bucket full of what they call “alkahest,” the universal solvent. It can dissolve anything. Even a universal constant.

Dodger didn’t see the bucket. He can’t hear her thoughts, but he knows what she’s thinking: it wouldn’t be so bad to lose the Doctrine, would it? They’d go back to being the people they were before they followed Erin into a building that didn’t exist and solved the universal equations. She’ll still love math. He’ll still love words. They just won’t be tied to those things on a cosmic level. They’ll be able to get out of each other’s heads, to do whatever they want with their lives, to be people, instead of ideas.

Even as she thinks it, she knows it isn’t possible. The math doesn’t work. They aren’t people who somehow inherited a cosmic force of logic and definition: they are that force, made incarnate by someone who should have known better, should have done better, should have been better. They’re ideas who dreamt of being people, and now that they’re waking up, it’s too late for them to be anything else. The children Reed intends to put in their places might still be able to turn human. She and Roger . . . no. Not anymore.

She knows without asking that Roger reached the same conclusion before she woke; he was just waiting for her to catch up. She closes her eyes. “We need to get out of here.”

“Got any ideas?”

“Aren’t we supposed to represent the base forces of the universe?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t come with a Penn and Teller starter course.”

He sounds so frustrated that she laughs a little. Eyes still closed, she says, “Reed wants to strip us to our base components and instill them in our replacements. Which ends with us dead and them pretty screwed-up. I wouldn’t want a mad scientist shoving something into me just because he thought it should be there. There has to be something we can do.”

“Can you math your way out of being tied up?”

Dodger’s eyes open, widen. She stares at the ceiling for a second before she smiles and says, “That’s not a bad idea. Hang on.” She squirms, getting a feel for the rope around her, before looking back to Roger. “Okay. The tables are thirty-six inches in width and four inches thick. That means each loop around the table itself, not including us, involves eighty inches of rope. Adding our geometry—”

She talks faster and faster, until Roger is no longer following what she’s saying. She gets like this when there’s math involved, and he’s not going to interrupt, because he can see the shape of what she means, and what she means is “I can get us out of this.” He watches as she twists just so, shifting her shoulder up, shifting her arms a fraction of an inch to the side. She’s working at the knots without ever touching them, using the physics of the rope and the math of the situation as a whole to get herself free. He isn’t sure she can do it. It shouldn’t be possible. But then, when has anything about them been possible?

This, too, is a manifestation. He’s starting to see how they can walk in the world when all this is over. Magic doesn’t have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes, it’s the subtle things that are the most effective of all.

“—and pull and ha!” Dodger sits up, the rope falling loose around her. She’s still naked and covered in silvery runes, but some things are less important than freedom.

Roger averts his eyes as she runs to his side, and keeps them averted while she’s untying him. Then he sits up, and they look around the room. It’s bigger than it seemed at first, with a floor painted in constellations, like a strange mirror of the starry sky above them. The walls are stained glass, each panel showing a scene from one of Baker’s books, but subtly changed. The King of Cups holds a staff in one hand and a chalice in the other. The Stormcrow Princess is still charred gray, but she wears the robes of a rival wizard, and the color of her skin is clearly the result of chemical poisoning, flesh blistered by things she was never meant to steal.

Through all the panels move Avery and Zib, the students, learning at the hand of the master. Water runs through their hands and is transmuted into blood; dust is transmuted into air. Maybe he could have just . . . asked . . . and the ropes would have gone to wind and nothingness.

“We need to stop thinking like there are rules,” he says.

“These people are bonkers and I want my clothes,” says Dodger.

“Agreed,” says Roger. “The door’s this way. Come on.”

They cross the room with quick, economical steps. It’s remarkably easy to walk without looking at each other; they just keep swapping off whose eyes are closed, letting them both stay anchored in the present without risking seeing something they shouldn’t.

The door slams open just before they would have reached it, and there is Leigh Barrow, grinning like a skeleton, a bone saw in her hands. “Did you think you were going somewhere?” she asks, in a voice like oleander honey, like every poisoned poem the world has ever known. “Lay down. It’ll hurt less if you lay down.”

Dodger breaks away from her brother. Dodger, who has always attacked the world, who has approached every opportunity as the chance to challenge for dominance, and win. Her shoulder hits Leigh in the center of her chest, and then the two are falling, a writhing mass of limbs and deadly edges as Leigh waves her saw, trying to make contact with Dodger without cutting herself.

“Stop!” shouts Roger, and he doesn’t believe it will work, not here, not against the woman who has been the monster in the back of his mind since he was born, since she came to his house and threatened everything he’d ever known. He doesn’t believe it will work, and he’s still growing into the space of his own skin: in the face of his doubt, nothing happens. Leigh continues to thrash. Dodger, who was never his target, continues to fight.

“Run!” Dodger shrieks.

He knows she’s not asking him to abandon her: this request, made here and now, is a cry for help, for him to find a way to save them both. He still hesitates long enough for Leigh’s saw to draw first blood before he runs deeper into the silent compound, looking for an answer.

Nothing here is familiar. Everything here is familiar. The déjà vu that has defined his life haunts him in every hallway, even places where no one would ever take an infant. He’s seen this place before in other timelines, other attempts to manifest. It’s enough to make him wonder how many times they’ve supposedly “won,” only to follow Erin into the dark and die here, miles below the fields of golden corn.

Then a body is running toward him down the hall, and he skids to a stop bare seconds before he would have collided with a teenage girl whose hair carries surprisingly green undertones, like she grew from the corn herself. She makes a small squeaking noise when she sees that he’s naked, her cheeks flaring red, and tries to run past him.

He grabs her arm before he can. “Who are you?” he demands.

“Kimberley,” she says. “Please. I have to find my brother.”

Of course. “His is name is Timothy, right?” She nods, eyes wide. “I’m Roger. My sister, Dodger, is fighting a woman we thought was dead. I need to stop her. Can you help me?”