Page 50 of Middlegame

“Wow. When your parents split up, they really split up.” Erin stays where she is, watching Dodger intently. “He seeing anyone?”

“A few girls.” She doesn’t want Erin dating Roger. It’s not possessiveness, quite: she isn’t bothered by the idea of Roger dating, not the way she was when they were teenagers and she was still trying to work through her own complicated ideas on the subject. (Her main objection to Alison, and to the idea of girls like Alison, had been the thought that Roger might find someone he liked better, someone who came with physical, rather than quantum, entanglement. But that was a long time ago, and she’s better now.)

“Aw, too bad. Well, if he’s going to be around here pretty often, maybe I can convince him I should be one of them.” Erin pushes away from the doorway, eyes seeming to darken. She looks at Dodger, and Dodger does her best not to squirm under that black-and-blue gaze.

“Yes?” she finally snaps.

“Be careful,” says Erin, and she sounds serious for the first time: she sounds utterly and unquestionably serious. “I know it’s nice to rebuild bridges, but you need to remember why you’re here. For your education. To arm yourself for the future. It’s coming, and when it gets here, it’s not going to care how often you and your brother braided each other’s hair, or how much time you spent laughing. It’s going to care whether you have the weapons you need. So be careful. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to do the dishes. You people live like animals.” Then she turns, and walks away, leaving Dodger blinking after her, bemused.

After a moment, Dodger goes back to wiping the marks off the walls.

REPORT

Timeline: 11:19 CST, September 4, 2008 (the next day).

“Master Daniels tolerated your foolishness, but I am not he, and this has gone on long enough,” spits the new High Priest of the Alchemical Congress—a useless title. The religious aspects of what they do have faded long since, replaced by skepticism and stoic scientific method. “What you say you would attempt—”

“I attempt nothing,” says Reed, voice smooth and calm. “I appeared before Master Daniels to tell him it was done, and to ask for readmission to your number, that you might all share in the glory to come. I did this to honor Asphodel’s memory, and not out of any obligation. I am here, now, to tell you as I told him that I have embodied the Doctrine of Ethos, that I have changed the mechanism which controls the universe. I will do what none has done since Asphodel. I will unlock the doors of the Impossible City, and I will bring magic back into the world.”

“You’re a construct, a—a thing,” objects one of the lesser alchemists, a man whose name he has never bothered to learn nor cared to know. “You can’t have achieved what better alchemists have lived and died failing to do.”

“Magic never left the world,” objects another. “Magic is a natural law, like gravity. It endures.”

It is the second, less-insulting alchemist who Reed choses to address. “Magic has been lessened. The age of miracles has been ground to a powder by the twinned stones of caution and rationality. We pulled back too far. We allowed belief to turn against us. This will change.”

The High Priest shakes his head. “Have sense, Reed. People aren’t ready.”

“People are sheep. They’ll do as they’re told, once they see that the world is not as they always assumed it was.” Reed smiles. “The Impossible City will open. The world will change.”

They glare at each other, these two men divided by an impossible ideological gulf, and the Congress holds its breath, frozen and enthralled.

The Impossible City. It wasn’t always called that. It was Olympus once, Avalon, the Isles of the Dead, the alchemical apex which waited at the peak of all human knowledge and potential. The city that is dreamed of but never claimed or controlled. The place whose streets were paved in gold, whose rivers ran with alkahest, whose trees flowered with panacea. Over time, it had drifted further and further from the known, from the true, until all roads were severed, and there was no way back. It was Asphodel Baker, again, who turned enough of the world’s attention toward that distant ideal to reopen a single narrow path. The improbable road, which could lead the questing home.

“The Impossible City is a myth,” says the High Priest finally.

“We shall see,” Reed replies. “Have I broken any compacts? Violated any laws? I seek to open the Impossible City for us all, in memory of Master Daniels, of Asphodel. The children I’ve created are built from my blood and bone, and hence my property. I walk in the light for this endeavor.”

The High Priest narrows his eyes. “If the City is achieved . . .”

“It will be shared, as my agreement with Master Daniels promised.” Reed lies. Reed always lies. But if he can keep the Congress at bay just a little longer, it will be too late for them to stop him. It may already be too late. What a wonderful thought, that it may already be too late. He may already rule the world.

There is nothing they can charge him with, nothing they can do; he has been too careful. Even the deaths of Master Daniels and his associates have been well concealed. When the session ends, he walks away a free man, glorying in the scope of his success.

Leigh is waiting for him outside the Congress doors. She looks like a schoolteacher standing in front of the principal’s desk, waiting to hear that her problem students will finally be well and truly punished.

He favors her with a smile. “The day has been going so well. I trust you’re not here to spoil it?”

“They’ve made contact.”

Reed knows from experience that Leigh won’t let whatever she’s talking about go until she’s satisfied, and that for her, satisfaction may mean that someone else starts bleeding. “Walk with me,” he says, and continues down the hall, away from the doors, away from prying ears.

They are less safe here than they would be in their own territory, but sometimes making nice with one’s peers is essential to keeping up the masquerade that one is still interested in their fellowship. One day, he’ll bring all this nonsense crashing down, and he’ll laugh, because this was never necessary. Only will, and the willingness to do what needed to be done.

When they are far enough away to trip no alarms, he removes a coin from his pocket and plays it between his fingers, eye flashing over pyramid flashing over eye. So long as it remains in motion, they will not be overheard. “Who’s made contact?”

“The last chicks from your failed rookery,” spits Leigh. “The Middleton boy and the Cheswich girl. They’re attending the same college, and they ran into each other as soon as they were both on campus.”

“I thought you had minders assigned to them.” Reed’s tone is mild, but the accusation it harbors is clear: if his cuckoos have made contact, it’s because Leigh has failed to do her job. She’s failed to keep them apart, distracted, maturing in their separate shells. They put a country between these children, and yet the children have come together over and over again, as if to spite their creators.