Page 123 of Middlegame

Dodger snorts. “Wow. The world is so weird sometimes.”

“Tell me about it.”

The four of them seem to be alone in this vast, echoing compound. There were other alchemists here once: that’s plain from the number of labs they find, the number of empty rooms that must have held specimens, just based on their layout and design. Reed may have let them go when he thought he was nearing his goal . . . or there may be a reason that the corn here grows so gloriously green.

Roger and Dodger walk the halls of the place where they were made, hand in hand, looking at everything with silent care. They will not come here again.

They reach the door to Reed’s office. There is nothing else it can be: it is too ornate, too extravagant to belong to anyone else. They stop there for a moment, looking at it gravely.

Roger speaks first. “We could start over.”

“We could.”

“Erin says we’ve done this at least a dozen times, and I know I’ve been here before. So we could start over, finally knowing how to win, and try for an ending that saves her. That saves a lot of people.”

“We could,” Dodger repeats, and lets go of his hand, and reaches for the door. There’s a keycard lock. It’s all just numbers. She looks at it coldly and it flashes green, allowing the door to swing open, revealing the splendor of Reed’s astrolabe. “I want to do a lot of math first. We need a clearer path through this.”

“Of course,” says Roger, and falls silent at the sight of Reed’s lab.

Gold and copper worlds dance, jeweled and filigreed and beautiful. They are spinning in perfect harmony, and for a moment, the sight is enough to take their breath away. They enter the room, walking in opposite directions around the edge, gaping up at the planets as they spin.

It is Dodger who reaches Reed’s desk first, who finds the ledger with the golden orbital spiral stamped on its cover. She opens it, looking at its contents first with curiosity, and then with growing, horrified understanding. “Roger?”

“Huh?” He looks away from the spinning worlds. “What is it?”

“We can’t start over until we’ve checked every variable. Until we know we can do it perfectly. I’m only doing this one more time, and it has to be flawless.”

“What?” That’s enough to make him hurry to her side, wonder forgotten. “What is it?”

“The astrolabe began showing errors the day we were born. Running in reverse, stopping, backing up. Leaping from one time to another. It’s the resets. Some of these columns are describing the ones who didn’t manifest, but I . . . I know these dates.” She taps a column. “This is where we made contact. See? The last time on that day, that’s when I gave up. Or when you told me not to. It’s all through our lives, all these little corrections, all the times we went back and started again. But I can’t reset without you, and you didn’t know to tell me to reset when I was five.”

(five years old, and she runs into the street where a truck hits her, putting her into a coma that will last for twenty-five years, until a man she never got to meet is brought to her bedside by a scowling woman with strawberry blonde hair, until the man gives her an order at the woman’s cold command; five years old, and she lived to be thirty, and she never lived at all)

He doesn’t fully understand. She can see that, and be frustrated by it, even as she forgives him. Sometimes she won’t understand him either. That’s why they have to stay together. They have to explain the universe for one another.

“Every time we’ve reached the Baths, or whatever else we could use to call the Impossible City into being, we’ve tried again,” she says. “Maybe sometimes we’ve tried again from someplace that looked a lot like this, but it almost never happens until now. Until we’re almost thirty years old. But Roger, the stars haven’t moved. Erin said the Doctrine was a universal force. She meant it. We’ve been resetting the entire universe, because otherwise . . .”

“ . . . the stars would have jumped thirty years out of place every time we reset time,” he says, with dawning horror. “Does he say how many times? How many errors he recorded?”

“This last time was lucky number thirteen—”

“That’s not so bad.”

“—thousand.”

Almost half a million years of looping the universe through their lifetimes, of using their own needs as a lever on which to turn everything that is or ever has been. Roger stares at her. For the first time he can remember, words have no meaning. The numbers they describe are too big; the offense they contain is too much.

Finally, in a choked voice, he says, “Yeah, let’s not fuck with time any more until we’re sure we’re doing it for the last time.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s do something else.”

“Yeah.”

“Farmer’s market?”

Dodger blinks before smiling slowly, wearily, but with a depth of joy he hasn’t seen from her in a very, very long time.