Page 71 of Middlegame

Smita doesn’t protest, doesn’t argue; she’s already run once, and it got her no farther than a room full of people who couldn’t hear when she begged for help. She isn’t broken yet, but she’s breaking, and when Erin pulls her away from the doorway, she goes willingly, allowing herself to be led back to the elevator. It is somehow utterly reasonable that the woman is carrying the burning hand again. That’s the reason for the isolation, she knows it, and yet she also knows she can’t get the hand away before the knife makes another appearance.

The elevator comes at the press of a button. The sorcery that’s wiped them from the eyes of the world doesn’t affect everything. There should be an escape route hidden in that fact. Smita can’t see it. She’s tired and afraid, and her lungs are burning. There are no escapes left.

Erin guides her into the elevator and presses the button for the top floor. The doors close. They start to move. “I really am sorry about this,” she says, once it’s clear that Smita isn’t going to break the silence. “I like you a lot. You’re good people. If I had another option, I’d take it.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“That’s not on the table this time around, I’m afraid. This is how it ends. The only question left is how badly it’s going to hurt.” There’s a tightness in Erin’s voice. Smita glances toward her. She looks pained, like this is the last thing she wants to do. “Please, don’t make me hurt you more than I have to. Just tell me what I need to know, and I can make this as painless as possible.”

“This is about Roger and Dodger?”

A slight nod, as the elevator doors open and Erin pushes Smita into the hall. “I understand why you agreed when they came to you and asked for help. Who wouldn’t have been willing to help a friend? And Roger can be very persuasive when he wants to be. He doesn’t realize just how persuasive yet. He hasn’t matured fully in this timeline. I only remember snips from the ones where he has—usually because he’s ordered me to remember something before he’s hit the big redhead button—but hoo, boy. I can’t blame anyone for doing what he asks. You didn’t have a chance once he got the idea in his head.”

“Dodger asked me,” says Smita hopelessly. She’s not sure why she’s trying to argue with Erin, with this impossible woman who has somehow isolated her from the world, who pulls knives out of the air. “She said they needed to know whether they were biologically related before they tried to have their adoption records unsealed. I was just trying . . . I was just trying to help a friend. That was all.”

Erin looks at her with sympathetic eyes as she guides Smita, almost gently, back to the lab. She looks sad. She looks like she doesn’t want to be doing this, and somehow that’s the worst part of the whole situation: Smita is going to die, and it’s not even going to matter. She’s going to cease, and the person who kills her won’t be doing it out of passion, or anger, or anything other than a vague, inexplicable regret.

“A lot of us are trying to help our friends,” she says. “Some of us are trying to change the world. Where’s the research?”

Wordless, Smita points to her computer, to her notebooks.

Erin nods. “Have you posted it anywhere? Are there any backups outside this lab?”

“No,” says Smita. Then, without heat or expectation: “Please.”

“You know better,” says Erin. She puts the Hand of Glory on the nearest table before she grips Smita by the shoulder, hard, with her free hand, twisting her around until they are facing away from one another. The pain of that unexpected clutch is enough that Smita gasps, taken by surprise.

Then Erin lets her go and steps back, and both her hands are empty; the knife is gone. Smita looks down, and the knife is found, slipped between her ribs with a magician’s skill, so tidy that for a moment, it looks less like a murder weapon and more like some strange accessory. The hilt has made a seal against her skin. There’s no blood. She knows enough about anatomy to know that this can’t last. Seals break. Blood escapes. She’s not going to die; she’s already dead. The anomaly is her refusal to fall down.

“Thank you,” says Erin, and reaches for her knife.

Smita thinks, too late, to step away, to run; maybe she’s not a ghost anymore, now that she’s been stabbed, now that the seal is broken. She could scream for help, and help might come. She might find salvation in the students three floors down, or in campus security, well-meaning and bumbling as they sometimes are. She might get away. But she doesn’t think in time, and so Erin’s fingers find the hilt, and the knife slips free, and the blood follows, red and hot and so, so plentiful. Smita knows how much blood is in the human body, the volume and the purpose of it, but she’s never seen it. Not like this, flowing bright and precious and irretrievable.

The blade pierced her lung. When she tries to speak, there’s no sound, only the soft whistle of the wind, distant, almost mocking her. She moves her lips anyway, silently cursing Erin, the false friend, the fiend who’s taken everything. She curses Rodger and Dodger. Whatever they are, whatever they do or don’t know about themselves, this was their fault. This is on their heads.

Then she falls. Her last thought is of her mother, who was so proud of her for getting into graduate school, for becoming a scientist, for saving lives. “My Smita is going to save lives” was what she always said, chest puffed out and eyes crinkled at the edges, and Smita’s never going to see her mother smile like that again; Smita is never going to see her mother do anything again. Smita is over. Smita is done.

Her eyes close of their own volition, and her blood spills across the floor, and her part in the story ends.

Erin waits until Smita stops breathing before she sighs, straightens, and picks up the Hand of Glory. Assignments like this are the worst. She should be home, watching TV and ignoring the homework that won’t be graded anyway. (She’s a theology student because they have people in the Theology department, loyal people, people who fear Reed as much as they adore him. She could show up for class naked and singing Queen songs, and they’d use her as an example of modern Dionysian behavior. Her supposed graduate career is just a cover for the life she’s not openly allowed to lead.) Instead she’s here, in this sterile, brightly lit place, watching a woman’s blood—a friend’s blood—spread across the tile floor like a benediction.

“I really am sorry about this,” she says.

Smita doesn’t answer.

The computer where the test results are stored—not by name, but the numeric codes are easy enough to decode, if you know what you’re looking for, and Erin knows what she’s looking for—is unlocked, and offers her the data she requests with mechanical joy, holding nothing back. Computers are orderly things. They want to please her. She combs through Smita’s email, looking for signs the woman lied. It seems unlikely; terror and hope are uncomfortable bedfellows, and when they lie down together, frivolities like lies tend to fade away. Still, she was made to be diligent, and so diligent she will be.

The Hand still burns. No one comes to disturb her while she’s looking at the pieces of a dead woman’s life, and when she’s done, she feels she can say with certainty that Smita was keeping the mystery of the antigens in Roger and Dodger’s blood to herself: it was a toy she wasn’t ready to share. Other students helped with the testing, and they’ll have accidents of their own over the next few weeks, brakes that don’t work, faulty electrical wiring in their dorm rooms, whatever’s required to get the job done, but they’re not a high priority. They won’t have enough of the pieces to do any damage.

The scarring around this moment is less severe than it was before Smita died. She’s probably demanded a reset here more than once, but not much more: two times, maybe three. Little flickering candle flames of alternate chances. They can’t have led to good endings, though, or she wouldn’t be here now. That’s the trouble with playing Choose Your Own Adventure with reality: when they go back to the beginning of the book, none of them remember. Roger and Dodger don’t know yet what she is to them, or them to her. They don’t even know Darren’s name.

Her fingers stumble on the keyboard, which has gone blurry. She blinks her tears away, trying to keep her composure. She shouldn’t have thought of him. It’s that simple. Darren is in the past, and until they find a clear path through this maze, they can’t go back to get him. Each revision has corrected some prior mistake, like Dodger backtracking through her equations and fixing the numbers, but correcting prior mistakes creates the opportunities for new ones.

This would be so much easier if the two of them could reach the point of becoming fully manifest and able to remember. Erin pushes herself away from the computer. Deleting the data would leave a hole. Anything that’s destroyed leaves a hole. The only way around it is to create something instead.

Outside, the rain has stopped. The Hand of Glory sees her through her final bloody errands and out of the building, back into the world. The Hand of Glory keeps anyone from noticing when she lights the match. The fire doesn’t want to catch, resisting in the face of sodden wood and weather-treated stone, but there are ways. There are always ways, if you want something bad enough, and eventually, like a phoenix, the flame rises.

The Hand of Glory keeps her hidden as she stands at a safe distance and watches the building burn. The chemistry students don’t make it out. She’s sorry about that.