Page 53 of Middlegame

“Not always,” she says.

Roger catches his breath and holds it, studying her. She doesn’t look upset. If anything, she looks . . . calm. Like she’s finally moving past their separation. He exhales.

“You’re a pretty cool sister, you know that?”

“I’d be a lot cooler if we’d grown up together.”

He pauses. “You rethinking that blood test?”

“Considering it,” she admits. “If we could prove we were related, I could take you to meet my parents. Maybe someday you could take me to meet yours. It would be a lot harder to split us up again, if our entire support structure was conjoined.”

Her father probably wouldn’t take well to having her show up with the boy from Boston; it’s been years, but Roger has absolute faith that Professor Cheswich would recognize his voice. How could he not? There are things that can’t be forgotten, and the voice of the boy who called to say your daughter was bleeding to death has got to be at the top of that list. On the other hand, if they had proof they were related . . .

“What if the blood test comes back and says we’re wrong?” he asks. “What then?”

“That seems less likely with every data point,” says Dodger. “We have the same eyes. We have a similar bone structure. Same birthdate—same birth hour. If you can find your birth certificate while you’re at home, see if you can’t get a birth state. Mine’s Ohio. That can all be falsified, but when you add it to the rest of the data, it becomes pretty conclusive. We know we have the same blood type. Red and brown hair are frequently found in the same family.”

“This is important to you, isn’t it?” asks Roger.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because if we’re related, they can’t ever tell you to give me up again.” Dodger is calm, precise: she’s done the math. “You don’t get to run away from family.”

She’s talking about herself as much as she’s talking about him; more, even. He left her for a little while. She tried to leave him forever. Still. “And if we’re not related?”

“You’re still my brother. Quantum entanglement is thicker than blood.”

“You know, the original quote—”

“Is irrelevant, and I have access to things I can throw, so don’t get pedantic,” she says pleasantly. “If we’re not biologically related, that removes one data point from the list of causes for our entanglement. If we are, then maybe we can start looking for other cases and find out what the possible consequences might be. I’m not going to hurt myself again, but what happens if one of us is in an accident? We already know that a near-death experience for one of us is a near-death experience for both of us, but is it possible for you to survive my death, or vice versa? We need to know how much we’re risking each other every time we do something dangerous.”

“Then what? Wrap ourselves in cotton wool? I can’t ask you to stop living your life just because it might endanger mine.” Or vice versa, but he knows she’d never ask him to do that: her response every time the pressure has gotten unbearable has proven that. Finding proof that all injury could potentially transfer won’t make her careful. It will make her paranoid, locking her door and never letting anyone inside.

“I don’t know.” She makes no effort to conceal her frustration. “This is uncharted ground, and it’s not like we have a physicist to help us figure it out. Maybe if we know the base situation, we can go and find one. Convince them we need help without turning us into a science project. It all starts with a blood test. So can we get a blood test?”

“Sure,” says Roger.

Dodger allows her shoulders to slump, showing her relief. “When?” she asks.

“Maybe after Thanksgiving . . .”

The rest of the evening passes like that, topic flowing into topic, all of them light, many of them easy. It’s nice to sit and talk; both of them think, more than once, that this is how things should have been all along. That this is what the world was supposed to contain. There’s tension, yes, but it’s the tension of minds meeting, the conflict of differing core interests, not the tension of a world about to become terribly complicated.

It won’t last, of course. But neither of them knows that consciously, and even if they did, it wouldn’t change the moment, the comfort it contains, or the fixed point it represents on the tangled structure of their lives. This is one of the moments around which all else will rotate, even when the world starts falling down.

This is one of the moments that will shine.

Roger leaves at eleven on school nights. They mostly meet at Dodger’s place, due to her propensity for writing on the walls; he can keep her in butcher paper, but there’s always the chance she’ll relax so much that she’ll forget he doesn’t have whiteboard paint on everything. He likes his security deposit. He especially likes the way he’s going to get it back when he moves, allowing him to use it again on a new apartment. The competition for grad student housing gets vicious in the fall, when the incoming scholars fight the established ones for the places nearest to campus, or better yet, nearest to the Derby food court. He likes his current apartment, but he has his eye on a place above Amoeba Records which is supposed to come open over the summer. So protecting his security deposit is of the utmost importance, at least for now.

He also likes the walk from her place to his, especially late at night, when the city is quiet and cool and the air smells of that curious wooded-concrete blend the campus pumps off. It reminds him of home. Most of California has its own weird scent profile, a combination of eucalyptus and oleander and desert heat masquerading as human paradise. Berkeley, though. Berkeley smells like the college town it is, and while it isn’t quite Cambridge—nothing is quite Cambridge—it sometimes manages to come close, at least in the middle of the night.

(His being the one who needs to walk home also means Dodger isn’t riding her bike at midnight. She’s good with that thing, handles it like she’s been on it all her life, but accidents happen, and until they know exactly how their entanglement works, he’d rather she didn’t get hit. He’d rather she didn’t get hit after they know how their entanglement works, either—he’d rather she stay healthy and present for their entire lives—it’s just that right now, he doesn’t know what would happen. He might not admit it out loud, but that scares him. That scares him a lot.)

Now that he’s alone, he can admit to himself how excited he is by the idea of beginning the testing process. It starts with blood: he and Dodger came to that conclusion independently, and it feels right. It feels accurate, even, which doesn’t mean the same thing, and has just as much importance here. Dodger’s math doesn’t work if she doesn’t take the steps in the right sequence, following the correct path through the equation. The question of their quantum entanglement feels similar. They need to find the right sequence to make their way through this, take the steps in the right order, or it could all fall down. And he doesn’t want it to fall down.

Dodger’s issues may be more visible—and that makes sense; she’s always worn her heart on her sleeve, a bright banner to attract the world’s snipers, like a bird feigning a broken wing to draw predators away from the nest—but that doesn’t mean she’s the only one who has them. Roger has spent his life trying to balance being the smartest person in the room with a genuine desire to be liked. He wants to talk about phonemes and the number of sounds the human body can produce and baseball and how hard it is to get a decent cup of chowder in this town, and he wants to do them all at the same time, and he can’t. Half the smart people he meets are so hung up on the idea of being smart—the idea that all they can be is smart, defined by the discipline that calls them—that as soon as he mentions baseball, they jump in to tell him how boring they find it. How plebian. How beneath them.