Page 30 of Middlegame

Slowly, Reed asks, “What do you mean, they’ve restored contact?”

“The Cheswich girl has been doing that chess tournament thing. It had a stop in Boston. The Middleton boy wound up going to see her play. They were seen speaking after the game. She looked upset.”

“And him?”

“He looked . . . You ever seen the look on a kid’s face right after they’ve seen their puppy reduced to beef stew in the middle of the highway? Like they can’t process what’s happening, so they’re going to be sort of shell-shocked and sad until someone tells them how they’re supposed to feel? He looked like that. He looked just this side of busted.” Leigh shakes her head. “He’s their control, and he can’t even handle a little accidental encounter with his imaginary friend. We should scrub them both and start over with something hardier. Something we raise under lab conditions. My subjects—”

“Are not under discussion,” says Reed sharply. “Was that all? Did they arrange to meet again? Were they seen in one another’s company?”

“No. The girl walked away. The boy left with another girl—pretty thing, completely natural, not tailored at all; we could modify her to suit our needs, if we started now—who didn’t look happy about him speaking to Miss Cheswich. Teenage boys being what they are, the situation has probably already sorted itself out.”

“You’re talking about the only pair of nestmates to have established independent connection without physical contact,” says Reed. “They found each other through sheer loneliness and need. Do you know what a huge leap forward that is?”

“I don’t care what kind of leap forward it is,” says Leigh. “It wasn’t part of the project outline. It isn’t safe, it isn’t right, and it isn’t necessary to the successful manifestation of the Doctrine. This isn’t something we planned for. We don’t control it. We should be treating them as rogues. We should be reacting to this encounter with full censure.”

There’s no question of what “full censure” would represent: with Leigh, there is never any chance of half-measures. She would take their child cuckoos apart if he allowed it, reducing them to component atoms, hunting the place where lead becomes gold, where flesh becomes cosmic principle of the universe. Reed looks at her coolly. He will not tell her no, not in so many words, because Leigh is rarely fully wrong; she understands the deep threads of the project as few others do, himself included. The scales of human mercy do not cloud her eyes.

He will also not accede to her requests. They’ve spent too much time already, devoted too many resources, to cut themselves short when they are so blissfully close to victory. Unless the project has become an active danger, it will continue. The road to the Impossible City has always welcomed accidental travelers. Sometimes he suspects that’s the only way to truly get there at all.

“How are they embracing their aspects?”

Leigh looks at him with sullen hatred in her eyes, and does not speak.

Reed sighs. Sometimes it’s sadly necessary to remind her of what she is, what he is, and why she is here. “You could be replaced, Leigh. It would be a dire loss, and I’d miss you, but you could be replaced.”

“The boy speaks seven languages, and he’s been asking for more lessons,” says Leigh, eyes still burning hate. “His soft palate has remained flexible; there don’t seem to be any sounds he can’t make. He hasn’t realized yet how unusual that is, or what a freak of nature it makes him. Maybe he never will. It depends on how long he remains operational. The girl plays chess at a grandmaster level. She could make a career of it, but she doesn’t care enough; she’d rather be doing pure mathematics. Probably will, once her parents stop pushing her to have a normal life. As if that were ever going to be possible.” There’s a venom in Leigh’s voice that can’t be explained by any of the things she’s said, something deep and cold and brutally cruel.

Reed says nothing. He looks at her, and he waits.

The wait is not a long one. “They’re not good work,” she finally explodes. “The boy could be a king by now—he can make anyone do anything by snapping his fingers and telling them what he wants, and what does he do? Academic decathlon, and a girlfriend, and reading up on linguistic dead ends. We’re supposed to be making tools, not scholars afraid of their own shadows. And the girl! She’s socially maladjusted, she’s withdrawn and dysfunctional, and she hasn’t laughed since we broke contact between the two of them. We need to scrub this generation and start over.”

“It was your idea to sever that initial contact, Leigh. You were the one who used Galileo’s planetary charts to prove that intersecting their orbits too early would be detrimental to their development. I listened to you, because you’ve been right before. Now you’re telling me severing that contact may have damaged them, and that this justifies canceling their portion of the project. Which is it? Did we serve the Doctrine or do it irreparable harm when we untangled them from one another?”

“I said to keep them apart, not to send them out into the world. If we damaged the Doctrine’s manifestation, it was because they weren’t properly made,” Leigh says. “If a vase shatters when you cool it, it’s not because it wasn’t meant to be cooled. You must cool what you bake. But sometimes there are flaws in the making, places where the clay fails to properly bond. It’s not my fault if they’re bad clay. It’s not my fault if they can’t hold when they’re fired.”

“Perhaps not, but I think you’re too swift to dismiss them as poorly made,” says Reed. He sees the reasons for her objection now, sees them more clearly than she ever will. Leigh relishes destruction, the point where one thing can be broken down to make way for the next, because her true devotion is to perfection, the line past which nothing can be improved. To her, their cuckoos have been a spiral of increasing elegance, but they are not yet perfect.

“I think you’re too swift to embrace them as the ideal.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Start again. We know more now; we have a better idea of the shapes we need, the angles we desire. We can make them better.”

Her point is valid. There is a compromise to be reached. “I’ll approve your creation of another generation of cuckoos to race for the manifestation, but you must agree to stop calling for the dissolution of this pair. I want to see what they can accomplish if left to their own devices. They’re developing into something new. The Doctrine, when it manifests, will be something new.” It will also be the oldest thing in the world, the note which, when sounded without obstruction or acoustic manipulation, creates reality. It’s impossible to say whether this pair of cuckoos is on their way to manifesting, for these are uncharted waters. There’s no map. There’s no compass. There is only the project, stretching out ahead of them, unchanging, unchangeable.

This is alchemy of the type the masters could only dream of. Paracelsus, Pythagoras, Baker—not one of them has touched these vaunted heights, or come this close to finally fully realizing their dreams.

Leigh looks at him for a moment more before she bows her head and agrees, “I will leave them.”

“Good.” He leans forward, kisses her forehead, imagines he can hear the rustle of dead leaves and feathers inside the ivory cage of her skeleton. She is dangerous, this construct of dead women and living vermin. She is bright and brilliant, and she will kill him one day, if he isn’t careful. If he allows it. “Remember the auguries. Have faith.”

“I always have,” she says.

“Now get your people. I want that mess upstairs gone before the plane takes off.” He turns and walks away.

Patience is a virtue to Leigh Barrow. She was born in stillness; she will die in motion. Everything between those points is the tension of the coiled spring, the held breath, the knife in the process of being drawn. She holds herself patient and cold as Reed—her keeper, her lover, her master, and her rival, all bound in a single imperfect human skin—leaves her behind.

Only when he rounds the corner and is gone does she move, potential converting into action as she whips around, balancing on the balls of her feet, and runs, cat-light, down the darkened hallway. She doesn’t bother turning the lights on. Even were her night vision poorer than it is, that wouldn’t matter; she knows every curve of this hall. She’s walked it every day for years. She needs no visual cues to tell her where she’s going, and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they were provided.