Page 31 of Middlegame

Leigh is aware of the contradiction inherent in her existence. She is a human being, a scientist; she remembers half a dozen PhD programs, and another half-dozen disciplines on top of those. Her bones were stolen from the graves and deathbeds of thirteen brilliant women—and if those deathbeds were made by a long-dead alchemist, rather than by natural selection, she has no sympathy for them. Without their deaths, her birth would have been impossible. She is a palimpsest girl, a denizen of the Up-and-Under called into the light and brightness of the modern world, and if the women who make her up didn’t want to die, they should have been more careful. They should have barred their doors and locked their windows, not left them open for a shadow to slip through like a thief in the night, hands full of knives and heart full of larceny. They should have known that what they possessed, the bright, brilliant nature of their minds, was more precious than gold, more transmutable than lead. They should have realized precautions were required.

For her, life is the lab and the lab is life. The lab is where she awoke, confused, filled with the shrieking souls of countless dead. The wings of crows beat in her ribcage, prisoned in the fleshy confines of her heart; sometimes she feels their feathers brushing against her bones, which are a mixture of human, caprine, and whalebone scrimshaw, carved so beautifully that she sometimes thinks it a pity she needs skin. She would be so much more attractive as a walking specter of tendon and bone, exposing her creator’s artwork to the world.

This portion of the lab is her territory before anyone else’s; even Reed is cautious about walking down her halls. There’s never any way of knowing what terrible things she has cooking in her private rooms, or how they might react to someone exposing them to the light. Reed is her master: she won’t directly disobey his orders. Those horrible cuckoo children, with their twee names and their calf’s eyes, will be allowed to live their petty little lives, at least for now. At least until he sees the wisdom of doing things her way.

Someday he’ll understand why she hates them so, all the members of their terrible generation, raised outside the lab and under the all-seeing eye of the unforgiving sun. Someday he’ll see that she was right all along. Until then . . .

She opens the door to her private lab, revealing a white room with bright lights set into the ceiling. Erin is strapped to a chair, writhing and wailing, while several technicians stand around her with solemn faces, making notes.

“Outside,” snaps Leigh. “Reed’s made a mess by the door. Clean it up.”

They go without complaint. They know their place.

Quickly, she crosses to the girl and kneels, reaching up to touch her face. Erin stills. Even in the face of a pain she can’t understand, she knows when danger is at hand.

“Hello, sweetheart,” says Leigh, and smiles. “It’s time.”

BREAKDOWN

Timeline: 8:15 EST, September 5th, 2003 (three more years).

Cambridge is beautiful in September. The weather isn’t always accommodating—some years it seems to rain from the beginning of the month all the way to the end, or to trip over itself in its hurry to present the first iced-over sidewalks—but the city is glorious in the fall. Roger leans against an old maple tree at the edge of campus, smoking a cigarette and watching underclassmen stream through the doors, smirking at the chime of the warning bell. There are certain perks that come with being both a senior and one of the smartest kids in school. Among them is starting the day with a free study period. As long as he’s on school property, he’s neither truant nor tardy, and can do what he likes for the first hour of his day.

Most of the kids in his class chose the end of the day for their free period, wanting to get out of school as fast as they can. He understands that. But he has things to do with his morning—essential things, that can’t be moved—and so he went with the beginning. Besides, Alison is in his seventh-period American History class, having chosen a full course load for her senior year, and he likes to have the excuse to spend the time with her. They’re looking at different colleges, and both of them know their relationship, mutually satisfying as it has been, won’t survive the end of high school. They’re not in love. If they were once, it faded into friendship and physical attraction long ago. That’s been more than enough for both of them.

Roger takes one more drag on his cigarette before dropping it to the dirt and grinding it beneath his heel. Then, calmly, he closes his eyes. 8:20 here is 5:20 in California, and Dodger will be getting out of bed in three . . . two . . .

“Good morning, asshole.” She sounds groggy. She always does when she wakes up. Neither of them is good about going to bed at a reasonable hour, but he at least tries to get five hours a night, if only for the sake of his ability to conjugate irregular verb tenses. When last he checked, Dodger was running at three hours, tops. He’s not sure how much longer she can do that. He’s sure nothing he says is going to make her stop.

They fight more now than they did when they were kids. Part of it is that they’re different people: more rigid, more adult, less willing to accept everything as inevitable and reasonable just because someone else says it’s so. Part of it is that she’s never really forgiven him for cutting off contact the way he did. She says she has, and he knows she’s lying, and she knows he knows, and neither of them does anything about it, because neither of them is sure what there is to do. They have the kind of connection that looks good on paper, but it doesn’t fix anything: they’re not telepaths, he can’t read her mind and figure out the exact right things to say to make her understand that he’s sorry, he’ll always be sorry, he’d change it if he could. She can’t see his thoughts. All they can do is worm into one another’s heads, like the world’s least explicable telephone line.

(At least they can shut each other out now. They can bar the mental doors and throw the mental locks and have some sense of privacy. They couldn’t do that when they were kids. It still doesn’t work if they don’t make an effort. It’s not enough to be unreceptive. They have to be actively opposed, and that’s exhausting. They don’t feel each other the way they used to, either. He doesn’t feel her exhaustion. She doesn’t feel him nod. Something has been lost in the long gulf of their separation, and he doesn’t know whether he wants it back or not.)

It would be different if they could spend some time in the same place. He’s sure of that. She’s still his best friend, and if they could sit in the same room, not talking, not doing anything but existing, they could get through this. He knows they could.

“Good morning,” he replies. “Did we forget to sleep again?”

“I didn’t forget, exactly,” says Dodger. “I had other things to do.”

“Other things like . . . ?”

“There was a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon on TV.”

Roger sighs. “You say you don’t read because you don’t like being lied to by books. Why are you addicted to lousy horror movies? Are you trying to punish me for my sins?”

“Always,” says Dodger. “Anyway, it’s not like you can see my nightmares. How would you know if I were trying to punish you? Just be glad I like something.”

“I have to put up with you when you’re exhausted.”

“Fair point.” She yawns. “Who’s in charge right now?”

“You are. I’m already at school.”

“Lucky dick with your free period.” She opens her eyes, giving Roger an unobstructed view of her ceiling. The cartoonish plastic stars from her childhood are gone, replaced by a solid field of dark blue, spattered liberally with glow-in-the-dark paint. She’s charted the cosmos on her bedroom ceiling. It’s lovely. Sometimes when he has trouble sleeping, he’ll ask her to turn off her lights and let him count the painted stars. He’s never gotten to the end before passing out.

“You could have had a free period too, if you hadn’t decided to do a half-day at Stanford.”

“Because you would totally have been able to pass that up if you had the option. Shadowing Professor Vernon while he teaches the geniuses of tomorrow? Heaven.” Dodger’s field of vision shifts as she slides off the bed and begins rooting around in the clothes littering her floor. “Although I guess that wouldn’t tempt you.”