Page 121 of Middlegame

Her wide-eyed gaze turns wary. “You’re them. You’re the ones who stole the Doctrine.”

“No, honey, we’re not. We’re the ones who earned it, and we’re the ones who want to save you. Unless this is what you want your life to be?” He waves his free hand, indicating the tunnel around them. “If we get away, so do you. You’re just a kid. You deserve the chance to be something more than everything.”

“That’s what the other lady said, before she stole my candle.”

Other lady . . . “You saw Erin? You gave her a Hand of Glory?” God, when did all this start making sense? When did these become the building blocks of an ordinary conversation, on an ordinary day?

Kimberley nods tightly. Roger sighs.

“All right. Erin’s . . . going to do what Erin’s going to do. Right now, we need to save my sister. Can you help me?”

“Mr. Reed says when we’re the Doctrine, we won’t need anybody to help us.”

“Mr. Reed is wrong,” says Roger. “You’re always going to need people. Please. Let me need you now.”

“Okay,” she whispers. He lets go of her arm. She offers her hand and he takes it, only jumping a little at the jolt that passes between them. It’s not the same as the space he and Dodger make when they’re together, but it’s similar enough that he knows this girl is of their kind; she and her brother both are their kin, and must be protected at all costs.

“Guess the family just got a little bigger,” he says, and lets her lead him into the dark.

They haven’t gone very far when they break back into a run.

Dodger and Leigh roll around the floor for almost a minute before the bone saw scores a bright line of pain down Dodger’s back and she breaks free, retreating to a safe distance. Leigh is laughing, delighted by the whole exciting digression from the original plan.

“Oh, little cuckoo, you are a wonder and a delight and a nuisance,” she says, shifting her bone saw to her other hand. A bit of blood has dripped onto her arm. She lifts it to her mouth, running her tongue along the stain and smiling. “I am so going to enjoy taking you apart.”

“You stay the hell away from me.” Dodger retreats farther. She needs time to do the math, time to find the numbers that will set her free. Roger says she needs to let go of the rules, but rules are what make the numbers work. There will always be rules, for her. That’s probably a good thing. Without them, she would unmake everything just to make him happy.

There is equipment piled against the walls, where they had missed it in their hurry to escape. Long benches of beakers and vials, the tools of the alchemist’s trade. But no knives. No convenient hacksaws or axes. She grabs a few beakers, holding them to her chest as she backs away from Leigh. When the other woman advances, she flings, calculating the arc of momentum and descent with unconscious ease. They burst against Leigh’s chest and shoulders, making her laugh even harder.

“Really? This is how you fight me? With flung glassware, and the idea that good will triumph? This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who knows how to use it. Right now, you have all the power you could want, but you don’t know what to do with it. There are a thousand ways the Doctrine could get you out of this room, and you aren’t smart enough to find any of them on your own. You are the incarnate force that powers a universe, and the best you can do is throw things at me.”

Dodger keeps backing away. Her heel hits something that sloshes, and she risks a glance to see that she’s almost put her foot into a bucket of clear liquid. Water, or cleaning fluid, no doubt. If she were alone, she’d take this opportunity to wash the markings off her skin, slowing the ritual they’re intended to be part of just that little fraction. But she’s not alone, and Leigh is coming.

“Your math is bad and I refuse to let it stand, and I can throw other things,” she says, and grabs the bucket, barely noticing the rows upon rows of alchemical symbols etched around its circumference as she tosses its contents onto the advancing woman.

(she is a child of the Up-and-Under, but that is not the only story here, and there is a history of trapped girls throwing buckets of liquid on witches in Oz, and “witch” is just another word for “alchemist” when the frills are removed; there is a tradition behind her motion, even if she has little understanding of what she does, even if her hands are guided by all the Dorothys who came before her, gowned in gingham with silver slippers on their feet, by all the Zibs who couldn’t make it quite this far, their hair full of tangles and their hearts full of a boy with a smile like a country funeral)

The three treasures of alchemy are the transmutation of base materials, the creation of the panacea, and the distillation of the alkahest, the universal solvent which can dissolve virtually anything. Baker found all three treasures and made them easier to call from the walls of the world. For something such as the creation of a host for a universal force, or the removal of that force from an unwilling host, all three were required. The bucket falls from Dodger’s suddenly nerveless fingers. A few drops of liquid bounce free when the bucket hits the floor, and she unconsciously maps their trajectory, stepping backward, never getting a speck of the solution on her.

Leigh, drenched from head to toe, is not so lucky.

She screams as she dissolves. Dodger backs away farther, and thinks she will hear that sound, the wailing of a dozen dead women finally consigned to the grave, until the day she dies.

“Dodger!”

She turns, and there’s Erin in the doorway, Erin with a Hand of Glory so freshly extinguished that its stubs are smoking, and she’s never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

“I killed her,” she says, in a dazed tone. “She . . . she melted. I melted her.” She wraps her arms abruptly around her stomach. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Don’t throw up,” says Erin. “Where’s your brother? We need to get you out of here.”

“He went looking for help. He should be back any second.”

“Great. We’ll find your clothes, and we’ll go. This was a terrible idea. I’m so sorry. I—” Erin stops, mouth moving soundlessly.

Dodger screams when the knife emerges from the front of Erin’s shirt, when Dr. Reed shoves the living (dying) incarnation of Order into the room like so much trash. She’s still screaming when he advances past the threshold, glancing almost disinterestedly at the smoking remains of his second-in-command.

“You killed Leigh,” he said. “Fascinating. I never expected one of you to have the guts. You’ve done me a favor, in a way. She was getting ideas above her station, and killing her would have been difficult for me. We were simply too much alike.”