Page 6 of Middlegame

“The girl—”

“All of them.” Leigh shakes her head. “These children are irreplaceable. There’s never been anything like them in the world. They belong here, where they can be studied. Monitored. Managed. Putting them into the wild is asking for something to go wrong.”

“The plan has been carefully designed to maximize the chances of success.”

“You call this ‘careful design’? Placing half of each pair with a civilian family, that’s being careful? At least the other half will be with our people, but that’s not good enough. This isn’t how we control our investment.”

Reed knows what they’re doing: was the one who designed the protocol. Somehow, he manages not to scowl. “I was unaware that this was ‘our’ investment,” he says.

Leigh waves a hand dismissively. “You know what I mean.”

“Do I? Do I really? We’ve been over this. A certain amount of randomness must be introduced if we want the children to learn to access their abilities. We know strict lab conditions don’t work.” More, by raising them away from the lab, they avoid the risk of their subjects learning too much, too soon. Knowledge is power, for these cuckoos more than most. If he keeps them ignorant, he keeps them tractable—and oh, how he needs them to be tractable. Tractable things are so much easier to control.

“At least let us keep one of the pairs here. The newest. They’re young, they won’t know anything beyond what we show them. We can raise them in boxes, keep them apart, control everything they see and hear. We’ve tried absolute isolation together. We haven’t tried it apart.”

“Because it would break them.”

She shrugs. “Some things need to be broken.”

Things like you, he thinks, as aloud he says, “My will is law here, Leigh.”

“But—”

“My will is law.” His hand lashes out, grabbing her throat, slamming her back into the wall. Her eyes gleam with malicious delight. This is what she wanted: the reminder that he is the superior predator, that he has earned his place at the top of their tiny pecking order. How he wearies of the violence. How he understands its necessity. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good girl.” He releases his hold on her throat, pulling his hand away and straightening his collar. “Believe in me, Leigh. That’s all I ask. Believe in me, and I will lead you to the light.”

“And the light will guide us,” Leigh says, ducking her head until her chin almost brushes her sternum.

“We’re following the correct path,” says Reed, touching her shoulder.

As soon as his hand finds her flesh, the alarm begins to ring.

Both of them stiffen, heads snapping up, eyes scanning the lab for some sign of what’s gone wrong. All around them, the technicians who have studiously ignored their disagreement are doing the same, checking their equipment, calling up chemical readouts. Reed is the first to move. He pulls his hand away from Leigh and runs for his private lab. The door is closed, but opens at the swipe of the card he wears on a lanyard around his neck.

Inside, an astrolabe, spinning endlessly, occupies half the space in the vast room. Reed freezes in the doorway. Leigh, sliding to a stop behind him, does the same, as both of them stare.

The dance of planets was calibrated by a master’s hand, designed to mirror the heavens exactly. Asphodel poured years of her life into the spectacular machine, thinking it would be a key component of her legacy—and as her final, crowning touch, she knocked it outside of time, so that it could someday be used to chart the movement of the Doctrine. Reed has taken great pleasure in locking it away, using its mechanical horoscopes solely for his own gain. It is a wonder of technical alchemy. Only a great and terrible misuse of the forces of nature could damage this edifice of gold and copper and spinning jewels . . .

And it’s running in reverse.

Slowly, Reed smiles.

“You see?” he says. “We don’t need to wait to know if this is going to work. We’ve done it. All those old fools who thought they could control the world—Baker, Hamilton, Poe, Twain, even poor, damned Lovecraft—they failed, and we’ve succeeded. Two of those children, two of those six clever, clever children, have just reset their personal timeline. It works.” He turns to her, beaming.

“We’re going to control the world.”

Leigh cocks her head, following his words to their logical conclusion. “Does that mean we don’t need the bankers anymore?”

When keeping predators on a leash, it’s important to give them room to run. Reed nods. “Yes,” he says. “But make sure they understand why we’re terminating our agreement. It’s always better, when they understand.”

Leigh’s face splits in a smile as bright and wide as the gateway to the improbable road. In that moment, she is more terrible than she is beautiful, and Reed wonders how the alchemist who made her could ever have missed the warning signs.