Page 27 of Middlegame

“You’re late,” she says. It’s not “hello,” but it’s the only thing she feels: he’s late. He’s seventeen minutes and five years late, and she’s been alone too long.

“I had to say I had a headache to explain why I was going to bed early,” says Roger. He sounds apologetic.

Dodger relaxes, and hates herself for doing it. She wants so badly to be angry with him, and all she can feel is that damned relief, like she’s the lucky one because he chose to come back, after being the one who chose to go away in the first place. She wants to yell, to rage, to shut him out and see how he likes it. She doesn’t do any of those things. They would all be bad math, creating equations her heart might not survive.

“I didn’t just mean tonight,” she says, and her voice is a whisper, her voice is a shadow of the anger she wants it to contain. She sounds small, and lost, and alone.

Roger sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you leave me?”

“They said . . . this psychologist came to my house and said people at school had seen me talking to myself. She said if something was wrong with me, the contract my parents signed during my adoption meant she could take me away and place me with another family.”

Dodger frowns. “You believed her? Roger, that’s stupid. Adoption doesn’t work like that. Why would they want to take the broken kids back? It’s hard enough to find homes for the ones who aren’t broken.”

She hears him sigh again. When he speaks, he sounds beaten-down, and for the first time, she realizes she’s not the only one who’s been alone for the last five years. “I know that now. I read a lot of law books, and there’s no way that sort of contract could be binding, even if it was real—which I don’t know. My parents seemed to think it was. They were wrong, but I guess when you’re a parent, sometimes impossible things can be scary anyway, and they were so scared of that woman, Dodge, and it was my fault; I was the reason she could come into our house and scare them like that. I was nine. I made the wrong choice. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t sleep for three months.”

The admission is so simple, so unornamented, that Roger stops, examining it, looking for the key to open it up and force it to make sense. The key isn’t there. He’s not accustomed to words not making sense. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I didn’t sleep for three months, because I was waiting for you to stop being mad and try to talk again, and I didn’t want to miss you.” Dodger’s tone turns distant. “I couldn’t be in bed or I’d start to drift off, so I’d sit at my desk with tacks to hit against my thumbs, so the pain would keep me up. My parents caught on after a month, when I started seeing things. They begged me to sleep. They finally took me to the doctor and got these pills that were supposed to knock me out. It took them another month to realize I was spitting the pills out, and a month after that for them to stop me from hurting myself to stay awake. I’d pretty much given up by then. I was just staying awake because I’d forgotten what it was like to sleep. Because I thought I had to have done something to make you go away. I thought I deserved it.”

“Dodger, I’m sorry. That wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . . They threatened my family.” Roger is out of the habit of speaking quietly to himself: it takes too much effort to keep his voice from peaking on the final word. “They said they’d take me away. You were my best friend. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. But you would have done the same thing if they’d come after your family. You would have had to.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she says. “I would have lied. I would have said ‘oh, that was a game, I didn’t know it was bothering anyone,’ and I would have promised not to do it anymore, and I would have been more careful. I would have told them it was over, and I would have kept going, because you were important to me. I was supposed to be important to you, too. That’s what you always said. So I would have lied for you, because that’s better than leaving you alone.”

Roger is silent.

“That’s what you did, Roger. You left me alone. You left me with no one to . . . to explain things, or to tell me everything was going to be all right. You said we’d be friends forever and I believed you. I don’t believe anyone about anything, but I believed you, and you left me alone. You decided for me that I didn’t deserve to be your friend anymore. Maybe it’s selfish to be mad at you, because you were scared about your family and we were little and you thought I was stronger than I was. I don’t know. I don’t care. You left me. I can’t forgive you for that, no matter how much you want me to. No matter how much I want to do it.”

Dodger stops talking. Tears burn her eyes, turning her vision blurry. What Roger can see of the room is smeared and out of focus, like a badly done watercolor painting. It seems so unreal. This began with a girl he used to think didn’t really exist speaking inside his head; maybe it’s right that it seems unreal now. Maybe this was always the way it had to be.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t have any words but those ones. I did what I thought I had to do. I know I was wrong. I can’t get those years back. Time doesn’t work that way.”

Dodger has a vague idea that time could work that way, if she figured out how to twist the numbers. More and more, she’s starting to feel like time is an intricate puzzle box, and she has the key hidden somewhere in the space between breath and heartbeat, as much a part of her body as blood and bone and marrow. She doesn’t say anything. It’s her turn to be silent, to see what Roger is going to say. She’s made her speech, and she’s exhausted. Words were never—will never be—her forte.

“But you weren’t the only one who was hurting, and you’re not the only one who got punished when I shut the door. I left you alone. I left me alone, too.”

Dodger knows that isn’t true, has seen the evidence: the girl with the possessive hand and dubious eyes, holding Roger’s elbow like she might lose him if she loosened her grip. There’s no point in saying that, though. It would look like self-pity if she admitted how there’s never been anyone in the world who looked at her like that girl looked at him—if she tried to explain how much time she’s spent by herself, trapped and trembling on the borders of her own life.

And it doesn’t matter. He’s said sorry. He’s invoked the magic of apology. Dodger closes her eyes, leaving them both in blackness.

“Okay,” she says. “But don’t do it again.”

On the other side of the city, Roger smiles.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he says, and everything is going to be all right.

CALIBRATION

Timeline: 12:01 CST, June 20, 2000 (the next day).

“Master Daniels. What a pleasant surprise.”

This is not a pleasant surprise. This is a danger, a disaster, a calamity in all senses of the word. Reed holds himself perfectly straight, perfectly still, blocking as much of the entrance to the compound with his narrow frame as he possibly can. He has often wished that Asphodel had taken the time to build him a body with more heft: he is tall and slim and attractive to the eye, but none of these are things that get a man taken seriously in the presence of other men. If the alchemists accompanying Master Daniels wish to move him, he will be moved.

(Leigh could stop them. Leigh is small, swift, and utterly deadly when he needs her to be, striking like the scalpel her creator used in piecing her together. But Leigh is inside, deep in the lab, securing the experiments these men must not see, locking the doors they must not be allowed to open. They were never intended to come here. They were never meant to find this place.)