Page 65 of Middlegame

There’s a wealth of information in that question. Roger unpacks it without thinking, finding the nuance, finding the things Peter wouldn’t be able to say without a few beers and a lot of time to dwell. First and foremost, however, is the thing that must be addressed before it becomes the elephant in the room: the question that defines everything.

“Yes, sir, I was,” says Roger. “Dodger and I have compared adoptions. We were born on the same day, both placed with sealed records. I’ve had no contact with my birth family, and honestly, I haven’t been tempted to go looking for it. I love my folks. It’s just, well . . .” He looks to Dodger and shrugs.

She picks up the thread. Still the better liar, even if she’s not as preternaturally convincing as he is; sometimes it’s not the words, it’s the way they’re used. “We met at chess camp. Remember?”

Heather’s eyes widen. “The pen pal you wanted us to go to Cambridge to meet. Dodger, honey, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I told her not to come,” says Roger. “I was a kid. I was scared. Here was this girl saying she thought we might have the same birth parents, and the kids at school used to make fun of me because I wasn’t wanted. But I was wanted. Being adopted meant I knew my parents loved me more than anything. They’d chosen me out of all the kids in the world. I was afraid if I saw Dodger again and she really was my sister, like she said, that things would change. Our birth parents would appear out of nowhere and take us away from the people who loved us.”

Erin says nothing. This isn’t her conversation, and he’s closer to the truth than he knows, whether by chance or because he harbors vague memories of other, older timelines where that exact thing had happened. If the cuckoos came together too early, they were separated. The pattern never varied. Its echoes still hang over them all.

“I thought if he was really my brother, like I’d thought he was, he’d love me too much to tell me to stay away,” says Dodger, picking up the thread of the lie with ease. They would have been terrifying if they had actually grown up together. They’re more than a little terrifying now. “So I didn’t talk about it. We met again when I did that chess tour, the one that went to Massachusetts. We lost touch after I . . . hurt myself.”

She looks down, cheeks burning red, as if the patio floor can absolve her of the sins of her past. She doesn’t say anything about lying when she allowed them to think that Roger had been the one to hold the knife; she doesn’t need to. The confession is in her silence.

Peter and Heather exchange a look. When they turn back to the trio, they’re both smiling, her sadly, him seeming somewhat strained.

“Thanksgiving is for family,” she says. “Let’s eat.”

That night, with Erin and Smita on the floor of Dodger’s room and Roger in the guest room, Heather turns toward her husband in the bed and asks, “Do you really think she just happened to turn around and stumble over her twin brother?”

The word “twin” has entered the conversation without fanfare. It makes too much sense to be omitted: they were born on the same day. They have the same eyes, the same underlying bone structure, the same tense, uncompromising posture. Dodger shows it in the tightly wound way she stands, the way she reacts to the slightest sound. Roger seems more relaxed, but he’s just as aware; he simply masks it better.

“It looks that way,” says Peter.

Heather shakes her head. “And then there’s the names. Thank God those poor children didn’t grow up together. Can you imagine?”

“I wonder if his parents got the same ‘you can’t change your child’s name’ rider on their adoption,” says Peter.

“Some people shouldn’t be allowed to name their own children.”

“No,” he agrees.

Heather is quiet for a time before she says, “I suppose I should feel tricked, like she snuck him past the borders to make sure we couldn’t push him away. But really, I’m relieved. She has a brother. She has someone her own age who understands the way her mind works. How can that be anything but good for her?”

“It can’t,” says Peter, and kisses his wife goodnight.

Down the hall, Dodger lies awake, staring at the slowly dimming constellations on her ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark paint still holds a charge, even after all these years; she can tell the time by the half-life of her artificial sky. She wants to talk to Roger. She wants to ask him what he thought of the meal, of her parents, of the overall situation. She can’t. Smita is asleep, but Erin is right there, close enough that she’d notice if Dodger started talking to herself.

We should have worked harder at that whole “silent communication” thing, she thinks, and counts the stars, and tries to sleep.

Erin listens as Dodger’s breathing levels out, turning deep and slow as the other girl sinks into unconsciousness. When she’s sure Dodger is well and truly gone she opens her eyes, brushing the hair out of her face with one hand, and counts silently to ten in ancient Sumerian. There’s no movement from the mathematician. She’s not fully manifest yet; there will come a time when someone so much as thinking of numbers in her presence will catch the corner of her attention, risking her full regard. Erin won’t take risks like this then, assuming they’re still together, assuming they’re still alive.

Carefully, she sits up, watching for any signs of motion. When they don’t come, she stands, and pads toward the door.

The air in the house is still. Roger is asleep in his room, she’s sure; put them this close together and the cuckoos will either be continually on guard, sleeping in shifts, watching one another’s backs, or they’ll be utterly relaxed, synchronizing in ways even they haven’t started to figure out yet. Erin can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they discover how deep their entanglement goes.

This is not a house built for war. Everything in it speaks of peace, of indolence; no one who thinks in terms of a battle coming would choose cream carpets, or pastel accents in their wallpaper. Erin pauses at a picture of the Cheswich family in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disney World. Dodger, who looks all of twelve years old, is wearing mouse ears and grinning the broad, bright grin of a child whose greatest trials have involved an imaginary friend who stopped talking to her and a series of math teachers who don’t understand. Her parents glow with love and satisfaction. It’s things like this that make these cuckoos so dangerous; there are bricks in their road to the Impossible City that are neither wind nor stardust but simple red stone, forged in the real world, where alchemy is a fantasy and immortality an impossibility.

“You made them too normal, and that’s where you fucked up,” she murmurs, touching the frame. Then she resumes walking, heading for the back door, and out into the green California evening.

Erin left the lab for New York City after Darren died, sent to a foster family as dedicated to the cause as the Middletons, to learn the things she’d need to know for her coming mission. Her “mother” taught her to wield civility like a weapon, to put on eyeliner and lipstick and a smile she didn’t mean, one sharp enough to slice through skin, bone, and social barriers alike. Her “father” taught her to break down a rifle, wipe it clean, and reassemble it in under a minute, putting her through the kind of hard, unrelenting drills that would have made a military academy proud. They’d been working for the glory of the cause, working for citizenship in the Impossible City, and they had made her the kind of weapon that could be used to change the world.

The trouble with weapons is that they can be aimed in any direction. She sits on a lawn chair near the fence (the same chair Dodger, in another timeline, reclined in while Roger’s life fell apart; the chair where she ordered a reset of the universe to save him from the consequences of his parents’ choices) and pulls out her phone. The number she dials is found in no directory, listed in no database; even the phone company would have difficulty determining who owns it.

Dodger, I’m sorry, she thinks, and raises the phone to her ear, and waits.

There is a click. “Report,” says a voice.