Page 68 of Middlegame

“Don’t thank me,” says Smita. Her smile is packed with too many teeth. “I’m going to be coming to you for blood for the rest of our time here.”

“And I’ll be happy to give it,” says Roger. “Just keep the juice boxes coming.”

“Don’t worry,” says Smita. “After this, I’ll let you pick the flavors.”

She stands and watches as the two of them leave, Dodger still holding Roger’s hand, like sisters have held on to their brothers since the beginning of time. It’s hard not to see them as a lifelong unit, when she sees them this way; it’s hard to believe that they ever questioned their relationship to one another. Anyone with eyes could see it.

She’s so wrapped up in watching them go that she never glances toward the window; she doesn’t realize that they’re not alone. That’s a pity. It might have saved her life.

Smita and the other genetics grad students have space in the Life Sciences Annex, shoved off to the side, while the biologists and zoologists and their ilk occupy the main Life Sciences Building. There are other disciplines packed in here, taking lab space where they can get it: geologists in the basement, chemists on the third floor. Getting out of the building involves walking past a fossil pterodactyl, hanging from the ceiling with its hinged jaw gaping in an eternal, silent scream. Its fleshless wings are spread wide, like it’s about to swoop down on them, carry one of them away. Normally, Dodger likes to pause and acknowledge this piece of the deep past, which carries a thousand mathematical formulae in the petrified structure of its bones. Math takes something living, strips it down to its essentials, and then rolls forward into the future, not asking the thing what it wants. Math doesn’t care.

Today, neither does Dodger. She lets Roger lead her down the hall and out into the cool afternoon. It’s early enough that the sky is light, but there are dark spots around the edges: sunset is coming. California Decembers aren’t long on light. They aren’t long on dry, either; there’s a storm hovering at the horizon, clouds rolling in almost at a pace with nightfall.

There are people on the steps, students she doesn’t know, talking to each other like the world is the same now as it was an hour ago, as it will be in an hour. She could try to explain how wrong they are. Even if they were willing to listen, she doesn’t have the words. All she can find are numbers, and they don’t speak to most people the way they speak to her. So she keeps her mouth shut, and lets Roger lead her, down the stairs, across the quad, into the green of the trees that grow tall around the creek that flows through the middle of the campus.

Whatever long-gone architect was responsible for the design of the UC Berkeley campus, whoever was put in charge of the seemingly impossible task of creating a school that would embrace its students and honor the land it was built on, they understood that people were people, and people would sometimes need to run and hide from one another. They grasped privacy in a way that’s honestly impressive, given how broad and open and institutional the campus sometimes seems. Together, Roger and Dodger walk under the trees, out onto a wooden path, and around a curve to a half-hidden bench. It will be wet for days after tonight’s rain, deluged by water first falling through and later trapped by the leaves above. For now, however, it’s the perfect place to stop.

Dodger lets go of Roger’s hand first. It’s a small thing. It’s also the first time she’s been the one to move away without running. Normally, she’s the one who holds still while he goes, or the one heading for the horizon as fast as her legs can carry her. Here, now, she’s calm. Serene.

Roger knows the words—shock, surprise, epiphany—but he doesn’t know how to put them in an order his sister (his sister, he has a sister, not just a weird quantum entanglement with a girl on the other side of the country, but a sister, someone whose blood knows his almost as well as his heart does) will be able to hear and understand. He supposes she’s stunned. He knows he’s stunned. The impulse to close his eyes and retreat into the space that exists between them is strong. He forces it aside. This is a real thing; this needs to be a real thing. He didn’t realize until this moment how badly he needs it to be a real thing, something spoken in the open air, something honest and concrete that he can put down between them, look at from all angles, and know for the truth. Real things are too important to entrust to quantum entanglement.

The creek chuckles a few feet away, bound by the banks it will burst as soon as the rain arrives. A crow calls overhead and is answered by one of its cousins. The campus crows are all related. Just like we are, thinks Roger, and is stunned anew by how dizzying the idea is.

Dodger sits on the bench, resting much of her weight on her fingers, curled tight around the wood and keeping her rocked forward, again like someone much younger. Roger’s mind is racing, looking for words that can apply to the situation (and, once they are found, rejecting them and looking for something else, something better, something big enough). She, on the other hand, seems to be sliding back and forth along her own timeline, seeking the mental age where she’ll best be able to handle the reality of the situation.

Finally, in a small voice, she says, “I was right.”

“You were,” he agrees.

“We’re related.”

“Yes.”

“We’re not . . . right. We’re different. Something about us was made, not born.”

“Yes,” he says again. Letting her be the one to fumble her way through the words seems exactly right. He would be too accurate, and right now, that could kill them both.

“All this time . . . we were looking for each other, because they weren’t supposed to split us up. Whoever arranged our adoption wasn’t supposed to split us up.” A note of anger seeps into her voice. How dare they? How dare some long-ago bureaucrats decide making two families whole was more important than preserving a unit that already existed, something sealed in blood and bone and the water of the womb? Both of them loved—and will always love—their adoptive families, and she can no more imagine giving hers up than she could ask Roger to desert his, but just because a thing is loved, that doesn’t mean the thing should have been made. They wouldn’t have loved those people if they hadn’t been given to them. One of their families could have found another child to love and treasure and care for, and the two of them could have grown up together, the way they were meant to all along.

“Probably not,” says Roger. He’s done his share of reading on adoption law and the psychology of adoption. He thinks it’s one of the most selfless things a parent can do, giving their children up for someone else to raise and care for. He’s never regretted not knowing his birth mother. She loved him enough to give him to people who’d love him even more. Right now, however, he wishes he could ask her a few questions. Like whether she’d been aware that she was having two babies, not just one.

Like whether she’d approved of breaking up the set. Like whether it had been her idea, whether she’d thought “if I can’t have this family, neither can you” when she looked at two purple-faced, screaming newborns, and willingly signed the papers that would send them to opposite sides of a continent.

He’s not sure he wants to hear the answers.

“We’re really related.”

“Yes.” He can tell Dodger will be circling this for a while: she’s like this sometimes, incapable of moving on until she’s cracked her latest obsession open to get to the soft parts hidden inside. This was her idea, this was her hope, and yet she’s the one who’s stunned when it proves to be true; she’s the one who couldn’t conceive of her math being as real as she always wants it to be.

But maybe it’s not the relation that’s the shock. Maybe it’s the underlying strangeness, the confirmation that their quantum entanglement is somehow biological in nature. They’re twins, and they aren’t, and they’re something more. It should be terrifying. Maybe it will be, when the shock wears off.

Roger sits on the bench next to her, his own weight shifted back, creating as much space between them as he can. He has a good view of her face from this angle. He can see the tension in her cheeks shifting upward a split second before her neutral bemusement turns into a smile, before her chin tilts down and her eyes slant up and everything is different.

“I guess you can’t get rid of me now, huh?” she asks, and her tone is something like laughter and something like tears and something that isn’t either, something deep and primal and pure. He’s been waiting to hear that note in her voice for his entire life, even though five minutes ago he didn’t know it was possible, and five hours ago he didn’t know he needed her with him as badly as he does, and time is a concept invented by men who didn’t want everything to keep happening at once. Time is irrelevant.

“Nope,” he says, and moves closer, eliminating the space between them. She puts her head against his shoulder, and nothing has ever fit there this perfectly; nothing has ever been this intended to happen.

Everything is perfect.