Page 122 of Middlegame

Dodger stops screaming. Reed smiles.

“That’s better,” he says. “Now, where were we?”

Dodger dances backward to the workbench. It’s too much to hope that she’ll find another bucket of acid, so she grabs two beakers and holds them like baseballs, ready to throw (the odds say she won’t find two deadly weapons in one room, but the odds are her playthings, and if she throws, the man will die). “Stay the fuck away from me,” she snarls.

Reed looks at the beakers, narrow-eyed and nervous. “Is that any way to talk to your father?”

“You’re not my father.”

“I may as well be. I made you. Built you, one piece and particle at a time. I contributed half the base material to grow the form you occupy. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You knew you were human, on some level. Did you think we’d managed to sprout you from a seed?” Reed steps forward.

Dodger steps back. “I don’t care if you were the sperm donor. That doesn’t make you my father. Now get out of here before I take away the math that makes you.”

“Dodger, Dodger, Dodger.” He shakes his head, clucking his tongue apologetically. “I named you, you know. I made you and I named you and by the standards of any empire that’s ever risen, that makes you mine. You belong to me, body and soul, and you owe me the bright light you hold captive in your breast. It was never meant to be yours.”

“If it wasn’t meant to be mine, why did it choose me?”

He frowns. “It didn’t. You got in the way. It was meant to belong to another girl. A good girl. A tractable girl. You would like her, I think. You have a great deal in common.”

“But not pants, which is a little creepy if you’re going to insist that we’re your children.” Roger’s voice is a delight and a salvation. Dodger looks past Reed to where her brother stands in the doorway, a pale, frightened teenage girl by his side. He’s found sweatpants somewhere. His bare chest is still covered in mercury and gold sigils.

He’s holding a gun.

Reed stops when he sees it. He puts his hands up, suddenly conciliatory; a gesture ruined by the bloody knife he still holds. “Now, son, let’s not go doing anything you’d regret later.”

“Like letting you go?” Roger takes a step into the room, eyes never leaving Dr. Reed. “Dodger, you okay?”

“I just melted a woman. Other than that, I’m dandy.”

“No one’s hands are clean.” Roger shakes his head. “We came here because we needed to save these kids. But I want you to remember that we would have been happy spending our whole lives never knowing what we were. We would have been fine. You forced our hand. You made this.”

“I’m Baker’s last living student,” says Reed. “I’m the only one who remembers all her teachings, who truly understands her great work. Do you want all that knowledge to be lost?”

Roger hesitates. Then, beatifically, he smiles.

“Should’ve thought of that before you made me the living incarnation of language,” he says. “Nothing is ever lost. It just moves into a different tongue. And you? You stopped existing a long time ago. You’re a story without a storyteller. We don’t need you anymore.”

“Boy, you’d best stop right there—”

“You’re not real,” says Roger, and pulls the trigger.

The alchemical shields that should stop the bullet are gone, reduced to fiction and wiped away. There is nothing to interfere with its flight. The sound of the shot is like a sigh.

Blood trickling down from the hole in his forehead, James Reed, son and student and creation of Asphodel Baker, the greatest alchemist of her age, falls, and is still, and all is quiet.

PANTS

Timeline: 16:51 CDT, June 23, 2016 (and on, and on, forever).

They find Erin’s body, but they don’t find her pulse; everything took too long. In the end, they leave her where she lies. This will be her tomb, and there is something so right about the idea that they do not question it. Their clothes are in a room three halls over. The sigils covering their bodies vanish when Roger whispers them away, naming and denying them one by one. Some residue is left behind: they are gilded, but no longer prepared to catch the attention of a universal transfer they want nothing to do with.

Timothy—Tim, as he shyly says he prefers to be called, and of course he does; of course it’s Kim and Tim; when Reed named them, he hid their parallels under the sort of subtlety that has to be learned through experience—was locked in another small room, quite close to the room with their clothing. The locks worked on mathematical principles. Dodger didn’t even have to touch them for them to spring open, ashamed that they even considered keeping her out. Kim is with him now, the two packing their scant belongings and preparing for a life aboveground.

“We have to keep them, you know,” says Roger, giving Dodger a sidelong look, gauging her reaction.

“You always did like taking strays,” she says. She pauses. “Did old Bill . . . ?”

“He survived the earthquake. That cat’s unkillable. Erin put him in the neighbor’s yard before she set the house on fire.”