Page 57 of Middlegame

How many times?

How many times?

How many times?

The words fill the sky and cover the field, covering everything but the sad little boy. Roger looks at the two pictures, trying to reconcile them with what he remembers of his childhood. He doesn’t remember drawing them. That’s not unusual—how many people remember the things they drew when they were four?—but they must have been important to him, for him to have hidden them away. For him to have transferred them into this cache. More, he must have known about Dodger, on some level, to have been drawing her. There’s no doubt it’s her in that first picture. Her features are crude as only a crayon figure in a child’s art can be, but the smile goes up higher on the left than on the right and her hair is the dingy reddish brown that red crayon always looked like to him, and he knows. And he knows that, based on the date, he drew this picture three years before the day Dodger had a headache and said hello to the boy on the other side of her mind. He knew.

“Roger?” His mother’s voice is sweet, almost saccharine as she shouts up the stairs. “Can you come down here, sweetheart? Your father and I have something to show you.”

“In a minute, Ma!” he shouts back, and starts to put the pictures back in the hole in the floor, alongside his other treasures.

His phone rings.

He’s almost forgotten it: it’s an artifact of the present, not the past that drapes around this house like a shroud. He pulls it from his pocket and blinks. Dodger’s number is on the screen. He doesn’t know why she’d call him when she could as easily close her eyes and ask for his attention; maybe she’s assuming he’s with his parents by now, and wouldn’t be able to answer her. No matter. He presses Answer, raises the phone to his ear.

“You need to call Dodger right now,” says Erin. There’s no greeting, no pause to find out who she’s talking to: she knows who’s on the other end of the line, and she doesn’t have time for pleasantries. She never has. “You need to say the following: ‘take us back to the last fixed point.’ Tell her it is an order. Tell her it is an adjuration. Tell her it is a command. And do it fast, Jack Daw, because the whole damn Impossible City is about to fall on your head.”

“Erin? What are you doing with Dodger’s phone? Does she know you’re calling me?”

“No, and I don’t have time to explain it to you, and I’m not going to have time, because you’re about to wipe the last week off the board. This is a bad equation, dumbass; this is a sonnet that doesn’t rhyme. Take whatever metaphor you need, but call her and end this, fast.”

“Roger!” His father sounds angry, cancelling out his mother’s sweetness. “Get down here this instant!”

Roger crouches forward, cups his hand around the phone, like that would make any difference in the world. “Look, Erin, I want you to give Dodger her phone back and cut this shit out right now, or so help me—”

“You found something.”

He stops dead.

“I don’t know what it was, because I’m not that attuned to you, but it was something you know shouldn’t exist. A story you wrote about having a sister, maybe, or a photo, or a drawing. You found something that didn’t happen in this timeline, hidden with the things that did happen. That’s because we’ve been here before. Not exactly here, not this precise point, but close enough for government work. We’ve done this often enough for me to start remembering, and you need to call Dodger, and you need to repeat what I told you to say right now.”

“Or what?”

“Or this might turn out to be the last timeline. You’re too old for chemical resets and therapy. You’re old enough to be a failure. You listened to me last time.”

“How do you know that?”

Erin’s chuckle is grim. “We’re still here, aren’t we? Get the fuck off the improbable road, or you’re a dead man, and you’re taking Dodger down with you.”

The line goes dead. Roger lowers his phone, staring at it. This makes no sense. This can’t be true. But the picture in his hand is real, and there are footsteps on the stairs, and those things don’t make sense either; those things are somehow terrible in their senselessness.

He closes his eyes. “Dodger?”

The backyard, a world in flowering color. Dodger’s perspective shifts as she sits up again. “Roger? You okay?”

“You need to take us back to the last fixed point.” There are footsteps on the landing now. They’re trying to be quiet, but they don’t know the creaks and groans of the floor the way he does. They didn’t grow up here.

“I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”

“Take us back,” he repeats. There’s supposed to be more to it than that. Haltingly, he says, “This is an order.”

“Roger—”

The doorknob is turning.

“This is an adjuration.”

His father is pushing the door open, tread heavy enough to identify him. “What are you doing, boy? Open your eyes.”