Page 3 of Middlegame

When she is done, she steps back and considers her handiwork. So much of her plan depends on this piece being perfect. But what is perfection, really, if not the act of winning? So long as he can carry her to victory, he’ll be perfect, no matter what his flaws.

“You will rise against me, my beautiful boy,” she says, in a voice like honey and hemlock intertwined. “You will throw me down and swear you saw my bones. You will take my crown and my throne and carry my work into the new century, and you will never look back to see what follows in your wake. You will be my good right hand and my sinister left, and when you fall in finishing my design, you will die without complaint. You will do what I cannot, for your hand will never waver, and your mind will never sway. You will love me and you will hate me and you will prove me right. Above all else, you will prove me right.”

She puts down the bowl and picks up a vial filled with liquid starlight, with mother-of-pearl that dances and shines against the glass. She raises it to his lips and pours a single drop between them.

The man she has assembled out of the dead gasps, opens his eyes, and stares at her with fearful wonder.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Asphodel,” she says. “I am your teacher.”

“Who am I?” he asks.

She smiles. “Your name is James,” she says. “You are the beginning of my greatest work. Welcome. We have so much to do.”

He sits up, still staring at her. “But I don’t know what the work is.”

“Don’t worry.” Her smile is the first brick in what she will one day call the improbable road. Today, now, in this moment, they are beginning their voyage toward the Impossible City.

“I’ll show you,” she says, and the deed is done.

It’s too late to turn back now.

Avery looked at Zib, and Zib looked at Avery, and neither of them knew quite what to do with what they saw.

Avery saw a girl his age, in a skirt with mended tears all the way around the hem. Some of them were sewn better than others. Some of them were on the verge of ripping open again. Her socks were mismatched and her blouse was patched, and her hair was so wild that if she had reached into it and produced a full set of silverware, a cheese sandwich, and a live frog, he would not have been surprised. She had mud under her nails and scabs on her knees, and was not at all the sort of person his mother liked him to associate with.

Zib saw a boy her age, in a shirt that was too white and pants that were too pressed. She could see her own reflection in his polished shoes, wide-eyed and goggling. His cuffs were buttoned and his jacket was pristine, making him look like a very small mortician who had somehow wandered into the wrong sort of neighborhood, one where there were too many living people and not nearly enough dead ones. He had carefully clipped nails and looked like he had never ridden a bike in his life, and was not at all the sort of person her father liked her to associate with.

“What are you doing here?” they asked in unison, and stopped, and stared at each other, and said nothing further.

—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

Book I

The Second Stage

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things.

—Ada Lovelace

Sorrow is knowledge.

—Lord Byron

ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER

Timeline: 23:58 CST, July 1, 1986.

For a man on a mission, a hundred years can pass in the blinking of an eye. Oh, it helps to have access to the philosopher’s stone, to have the fruits of a thousand years of alchemical progress at one’s fingertips, but really, it was always the mission that mattered. James Reed was born knowing his purpose, left his master in a shallow grave knowing his purpose, and fully intends to ascend to the heights of human knowledge with the fruits of his labors clutched firmly in hand. Damn anyone who dares to get in his way.

Damn them all.

He waits at the end of the hall for his moment, standing in the place where the light, by careful design, fails to reach. Asphodel taught him everything she could: he learned the delicate arts of alchemy and the blunter arts of the con side by side, drinking knowledge like mother’s milk. This is all a show, and these men—these craven, prideful men, who think themselves kings of their corporate veldt—are his rubes, ready to be taken for everything they have.

(The Alchemical Congress does not approve of his dealings with the more mundane world, calling them risky and arrogant. The Alchemical Congress has no room to speak. Its members are arrogance personified, and their day of reckoning is coming sooner than they can possibly know or understand. Oh, yes. They’ll learn soon enough that they should never have crossed Asphodel Baker, or by extension, her son, heir, and greatest creation.)

This is his sideshow of wonders, his collection of freaks, laid out for the edification and carnival-glass seduction not of the masses, but the chosen few: