Page 58 of Middlegame

“This is a command.”

Roger’s eyes stay closed as his father grabs his arm and yanks him away from the hole in the closet floor. He doesn’t have time to open them before Dodger’s vision goes white, the flash traveling from her optic nerves to his, white taking black, upsetting the whole chessboard.

We got it wrong, he thinks, and everything is gone.

The girl had landed in a crouch, more like a wild thing than a child. Slowly she straightened, until she was standing a little taller than Avery, a little shorter than Zib, slotting into the space they made between them like it had been measured out to her specifications.

She had black hair and yellow eyes, and a dress made of black feathers that ended just above her knees. Her feet were bare and her nails were long and raggedy, like no one had ever trimmed them, but let them grow until they could be used to climb the walls of the world.

“Who are you?” asked Zib, all awe.

Avery had to swallow the urge to pull her away. She would stay there forever if he let her, of that much he was sure: she would never realize when she was in danger, and without her, he would never be able to go home.

“I’m a Crow Girl,” said the stranger. She cocked her head. “Who are you?”

“I’m Avery, and this is Zib,” said Avery. “Please, do you know where we are?”

“Why, this is the Up-and-Under, of course,” said the Crow Girl. She cocked her head in the opposite direction. “You must not be very clever, if you don’t even know where you are. I blame the shoes.”

“Shoes?” asked Zib.

“Shoes.” The Crow Girl held up her bare left foot and waggled her toes extravagantly. “If you can’t feel where you’re going, how will you ever know where you’ve been? Skies for wings and roads for feet, that’s what the world is made of.”

“How can something be up and under?” asked Avery.

“Up a tree’s still under the sky,” said the Crow Girl. “Here in the Up-and-Under, we’re both things at once, always, and we’re never anything in-between . . .

—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

Book IV

Complicate

I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.

—L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

They were only pencil sketches, all the fantasies we chased;

Step right up if you can see me, I’m the one who got erased.

—Michelle “Vixy” Dockrey, “Erased”

PHLEGMATIC

Timeline: 17:20 PST, November 16, 2008. Again.

“When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a marker in her hand, adding numbers in a swift, steady stream to the columns already there. She pauses after she asks the question, turning, a perplexed expression on her face. “Or did I already ask you that?”

Roger is cross-legged on the bed, looking equally perplexed. “Yes,” he says, and then, “No,” and then, “I don’t know. I don’t think so? Maybe you thought it really loud, and I picked it up.”

“With my eyes open?” she asks dubiously. “If we’re starting to communicate with our eyes open and our mouths shut, the entanglement is getting worse. We should probably be concerned about that.”

“Or not,” says Roger. “Maybe we’re going through . . . I don’t know, psychic puberty. That usually means more stability.”

“Yeah, when it’s over,” says Dodger. “I don’t know about you, but when I was in the middle of physical puberty, I spent an evening in the kitchen smashing plates and crying for no good reason. Mom didn’t even get mad, because she’d done something similar with a hammer and a bunch of her mom’s wedding china. Do you want to know what kind of damage we’d do during psychic puberty? Because I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that at all.”

“The Midwich cuckoos have nothing on us,” says Roger.