Page 5 of Middlegame

“Our first attempt to embody the Doctrine was a success,” he says, before mutters can become outright revolt. “We forced a guiding principle of the universe into human flesh. There have been . . . complications, yes, but the theory remains sound.”

Complications: a boy with so much of reality resonating in his head that he can’t be bothered to interact with anything beyond what he sees behind his closed eyes. The child has never spoken. He stopped eating three years ago, and while he still lives, sustained by clever machinery and feeding tubes, he hasn’t opened his eyes in eighteen months. The Doctrine is imprisoned within his shivering skin. There’s no way to extract it, to make the world dance to their whim, save for giving it a new home and putting its old one in the ground.

“The difficulty of the Doctrine is its size. When placed inside the mind, there’s no room for humanity. We believe that by splitting the Doctrine into its component parts—mathematics and language—we can create a gestalt of sorts. Two people who will embody the concepts we’re attempting to harness, but whose abilities will be limited enough when separated that they will remain pliable and easy to control.”

“How pliable?” asks an investor.

“Pliable enough. We’ve arranged for an upbringing that will both encourage their endangered humanity to flourish, and teach them that pleasing us is paramount. Once they’re reunited, they’ll do whatever we ask if they want to stay together—and they will. Their natures will leave them no choice, and we’ll have them. We’ll control their access to everything, including each other.” What sweet torment it will be for them, these cuckoo children of the Doctrine, to be denied their other halves until he deems them worthy of reunion. “They won’t be ordinary children—that is denied to them, and gloriously so—but they’ll change everything.”

“How long can we expect to wait before we know whether this is another failure?” asks Mr. Smith.

Reed grits his teeth. “That’s what I’ve brought you here to see,” he says. He snaps his fingers, and the wall rolls up, revealing three small white rooms. The first two are occupied, one by a pair of children coming on two years of age, the second by a pair of sleeping babies, no more than a year old. The third is empty, save for two isolated bassinets.

The investors gape and goggle at these children like creatures in a zoo. Reed allows himself to smirk.

“We’ve already succeeded,” he says. The door at the back of the third room opens and two nurses step inside, each with a babe in arms. The newborns are placed reverently on their mattresses. The nurses slip away.

Three sets of children, representing three years of births. All were delivered by Cesarean section at the stroke of midnight, ripped from their mothers when the time was right, each pair divided by a single rotation around the sun. The original incarnate Doctrine will be gone by now, released from his earthly form as soon as the third pair of carefully tailored children drew their first unhappy breaths. All six of them are worthy hosts, and who owns the Doctrine now is anyone’s guess.

Well. Not anyone’s. No matter which of these pairs has drawn the concept home, they still belong to him.

“Gentlemen, I give you the Doctrine of Ethos,” he says. “One of these pairs will embody everything we have been working toward, and when they do, the universe is ours.”

Ours, and not yours, you pompous, short-sighted fools, he thinks. The investors crowd around the glass, fighting for a better view of their future.

The babies sleep on.

Later, when the investors have been ushered out, red-faced with excitement and buzzing about how the world is going to change, how they are going to change the world, Dr. Reed shrugs off his tailcoat and returns to the lab to check on his newest creations. The technicians and laboratory assistants whose shifts have kept them here this late into the night look up when the door swings open, paling before rushing to resume their duties. None of them want to catch his eye. Sometimes he has ideas about how things should be done. Sometimes those ideas are enforced in ways that leave scars.

Reed walks with shoulders back and head held high, content with the way things are progressing. Those fools in the Congress said it couldn’t be done, said no man could blend science and alchemy without losing the best parts of both, drove Asphodel to lengths beyond imagining to prove them wrong, and now here he is, king of all he surveys, dragging the old ways into the new world one inch at a time. There have always been avatars, he argued when this began; all he seeks to do is bring them under proper control. Maybe Asphodel’s ideas gave him his starting point, but by God, the rest has been his own.

(Summer kings and snow queens, Jacks in the green and corn Jennies; he knows the names, knows the secret stories whispered about them in the dark places of the world. He knows better than to try for the naturally incarnate concepts. That will come later. When he controls the Doctrine, when cause and consequence dance to his commands, then he’ll be able to reach out and collect the other things that should be his by right. He’ll hold the universe in his hands, and woe betide any who question what he chooses to do with it.)

“There you are.” The voice is accompanied by a woman popping around a corner like a cork out of a bottle, his own personal djinn in blue jeans and flannel. Leigh is the finest alchemist he’s had the misfortune of meeting since Asphodel’s death, a whirlwind of motion with acid holes in her shirt and hair kept short to minimize the amount of time it spends on fire. She has a wide, honest face, freckles scattered like stars across the bridge of her nose. She looks like peaches and cream, like Saturday afternoons down by the frog pond, innocence and the American dream wrapped up in a single startlingly lovely package. It’s a lie, all of it. He believes in exploiting the world for his own gains, but she’d happily ignite the entire thing, if only to roast marshmallows in its embers.

She is deeply flawed, and impossibly useful, and he’ll enjoy the day when he’s finally in a position to take her apart and reduce her to the components her originating alchemist used to make her. The old fool forgot the lessons of Blodeuwedd and Frankenstein: never create anything smarter, or more ruthless, than yourself.

Something about that thought bothers him—something about Asphodel, who was many things, but was never a fool. He shoves the thought aside, focusing on Leigh. “How was the delivery?”

“Smooth. Fine. Butter. Whatever word you want. The excess material has been harvested and disposed of.” She waves a hand carelessly. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

He knows when she says “excess material,” she means more than just the afterbirth, which will possess strong alchemical properties of its own, thanks to the method of the manikins’ creation. She means the woman who gestated them, unwitting surrogate to a pair of cuckoos. He doesn’t know where Leigh found the surrogate, and he has enough humanity—if only barely so—not to ask. The cost of having his composite alchemist’s brilliant mind at his beck and call is that she’ll occasionally do things like this—and because of the woman’s long proximity to the subjects, her body may be of alchemical interest. It’s never possible to know in advance.

“The boy?”

“Dead. waiting for you in your private lab. I know you wanted the honor of the dissection.” Her lips draw back from her teeth in displeasure. When something needs to be taken apart, she prefers to do it herself.

Reed pays her unhappiness no mind. “And the subjects?”

“The male was removed from the womb first, which means he’s likely the control; he’s fine, healthy, and ready to ship to his adoptive family. The female was extracted less than two minutes later. She screamed for half an hour before she settled down.”

“What calmed her?”

“The male. When we put them together, she doesn’t cry.” Leigh’s mouth quirks. “Isn’t the flight to her new home going to be fun?”

Reed nods. “And the others?”

“The adoptions have been arranged. We’re cutting along the Humors. Two each to Fire and Water, one each to Earth and Air.” For the first time, Leigh’s veneer of confidence cracks. “Are you sure about sending them out? I mean, really sure? I’d be more comfortable keeping them here, under controlled conditions.”