Page 72 of Middlegame

By the time campus security shows up, with the scream of fire engines not far behind, there’s nothing left to save.

BLAME

Timeline: 06:02 PST, December 9, 2008 (the next day).

Someone hammering on the door drags Roger from a sound sleep. He was dreaming of his parents, sitting with them around the kitchen table, trying to explain how he has a sister, and that while she doesn’t need to be a part of their family, she’s always been a part of his. In fact, Dodger haunted all his dreams last night, calling his name, trying to get his attention when something else always seemed more pressing.

The hammering on the door hasn’t stopped. He rolls out of bed, wiping the grit from his eyes, and bellows, “Hold your water!” The hammering doesn’t lessen. If anything, it increases, like the person trying for his attention has been rewarded by the proof that he’s home.

“I’m going to fucking murder someone,” he says pleasantly, as he grabs yesterday’s jeans off the floor. He doesn’t bother hunting for a shirt. Whoever it is can cope with the sight of his bare chest, and if that’s too much for their delicate sensibilities, too bad for them. He wasn’t planning to be out of bed before nine. He certainly wasn’t planning on this bullshit.

Then he opens the door and Dodger’s there, also wearing yesterday’s clothes, her hair snarled like she hasn’t bothered to run a brush through it. She wails something incoherent, more sound and agony than words, and flings herself at him, eyes closed before she hits his chest. When she speaks, her words echo both inside and outside of his skull, like reverb applied to the real world.

“She’s dead there was a fire last night and now she’s dead the Life Sciences Annex is gone and she’s dead and they called to say classes were canceled because you can’t have a class without a classroom and she’s dead and is this our fault? Did we do this?” She doesn’t pause for air so much as she stops to suck it in, filling lungs that must have been deflated like balloons. She pushes back, opening her eyes, and this time when she speaks, her voice comes only from outside. For that moment, she sounds like a stranger.

“Roger, Smita’s dead, and so are six other people. We made her look at our weird DNA. We made her start trying to figure out what we were. Is this our fault?”

Two things occur to Roger simultaneously: first that she’s serious, her eyes wide and brimming with terrified tears. Second that they’re standing at the threshold of his apartment, with door wide open and their conversation being broadcast to the world. It would be nice if their quantum entanglement came with silent communication, but it never has, and this doesn’t seem like the time or place to try.

The comprehension of what she is saying comes third, and that almost grudgingly, like his mind has no interest in accepting her words. It would reject them if it could, and when he refuses it that right, it responds by dropping them, thuddingly, into the forefront of his awareness, where he must deal with them unsupported.

Roger’s eyes widen. “Come on, Dodge,” he says. “Let’s get inside. I’ll see if there’s some coffee left in the pot from last night.” Her love of stale coffee borders on the surreal. He’s seen her drink the stuff when it was six days old and capable of supporting life. If anything’s going to lure her, this should be it.

She isn’t lured. “Smita’s dead,” she says again, louder. “What are we going to do?”

Curtains twitch in nearby windows. A trick of the light, perhaps, a manifestation of a mind that’s guilty but shouldn’t be—or maybe the neighbors are waking up, and things are about to turn awkward. Roger grimaces as he puts his arm around Dodger’s shoulders and half-guides, half-pulls her into the apartment. “We’re going to have coffee, and you’re going to let me wake up, and then you’re going to try this again, slower and with more words, until I understand you.”

Dodger doesn’t resist. If anything, Dodger seems relieved to be pulled, to let someone else take responsibility for what she does next. She’s trembling, a movement so slight and so comprehensive that at first he doesn’t notice. There’s no part of her that isn’t shaking. She’s an earthquake forced into the shape of a girl, and as the door swings shut behind them, he wonders whether the fault lines at the heart of her are about to give way completely.

The hall runs from his bedroom to the front door, with the bathroom, kitchen, and small living room branching off at various points. He leads her to the kitchen, their footsteps muffled by the worn brown carpet, and seats her at the folding card table that serves as his dining room and study nook. (It’s also where he plays poker with some other members of the English department. None of them are any good, and sometimes he thinks about bringing Dodger along, just to see the looks on their faces when she takes them for everything they have.)

Dodger won’t stop shaking. He wants to hug her and tell her everything is going to be all right, and he doesn’t want to lie to her. He knows she’d believe him; that’s why he can’t do it. Instead, he fills two mugs with coffee, reheating them in the microwave. His is taken black, with two sugars. Hers, with milk and six sugars. Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.

“Here you go,” he says, setting the mug in front of her.

She picks it up; wraps her hands around it; doesn’t drink. She seems content to hold it, letting the warmth seep through the ceramic and into her skin. Eyes on the liquid, she says, “The phone rang. I have tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. Had. I had tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. I don’t anymore; they’re canceled. The building burned down last night, sometime after the rain stopped. It was . . . They think it was some sort of wiring fault that managed to catch fire. Once it reached the chemistry labs, it found all the accelerants it needed to beat the weather. Those labs aren’t even supposed to be there. They were going back to their own building as soon as their plumbing was repaired. A freak accident. People are going to call it a freak accident. Maybe it was. I don’t know. Maybe it was. But. But.”

“But what?” he asks gently. He already knows—she was clear when she showed up on his doorstep, even if she didn’t give many details—but he doesn’t want to accept it. Not yet. Maybe if he asks the question the right way, he’ll get a different answer.

“But Smita was in her lab,” whispers Dodger, bringing his hopes crashing down around him. “They found . . . they found her body when they went looking for survivors.”

Something occurs to him. “How do you know all this?”

“The Dean’s office called to say my tutoring sessions were canceled. I guess they’re contacting everyone who’s supposed to have been in there today, to try to keep us from showing up at a smoking ruin.” She looks up. There are tears in her eyes. Still or again, it doesn’t really matter. “Erin was already up. She said she’d been out when the police arrived last night, and heard them talking. She didn’t wake me when she got home, because she knew I was going to find out eventually. She didn’t want to be the one who told me.”

Privately, Roger thinks Erin made the right call. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to put this expression on Dodger’s face, and he knows from past experience that he’s the one person who will always be forgiven. He could destroy the world, and she’d love him on the other side of the rubble. That’s what it means to be entangled like they are. That’s what it means to be family.

“Smita probably collapsed from smoke inhalation before she could get to the stairwell,” continues Dodger. “She was fighting all the way to the end. She died before the fire reached her. I guess that’s a good thing. Burning alive isn’t a good way to go.” She says it with such conviction that for a moment, Roger could almost believe she knows from experience.

(The thought is followed by another: he could almost believe he knows from experience. He remembers—although of course it’s not a memory; better to say he imagines—flames closing in on them in an underground corridor ringed with broken windows like blinded eyes. They never looked out on anything real. He imagines remembering putting his arms around her as the flames drew closer, all avenues of escape long since closed; imagines remembering her laughter, thin and brittle and bitter, as she said, “Well, at least this time’s not bullets.” Then, the fire, and his final plea for another chance, before the inferno took them both.)

Roger shudders. Sometimes a vivid imagination is closer to a curse than a blessing. “God, Dodge, that’s awful. She was really great. I hope they do something for her family.”

“What if this is our fault?” Dodger can be like a dog with a bone sometimes. A good attribute for a mathematician, but not the easiest one for a sister, especially not for a sister looking at him with such bemusement and guilt in her eyes. “She was looking at our DNA. What if . . . what if we were split up because there’s something wrong with us, and they thought they could make it better by putting us on opposite sides of the country, like keeping bleach and chlorine apart? We’re not normal. We’ve never been normal. What if Smita died because she got too close to figuring out what’s not normal about us?”

It’s a huge jump from “she looked at our DNA” to “she was killed to keep us secret”; Roger is opening his mouth to tell Dodger to stop being silly. Then he hesitates. For once, words have failed him. Yes, it’s a jump, and yes, it’s ridiculous on the face of things, but can anything really be ridiculous when your starting point is “we’re secret twins who found each other across a continent through quantum entanglement, which is slightly more useful than a telephone, without being as good as telepathy”? Everything about them is ridiculous. It always has been. So what’s one more thing added to the heap?

Haltingly, he says, “I don’t know whether this is about us or not. It could be a freak accident. I hate to say it, but every time we’ve had a fire on campus, it’s been the chemistry kids. Their lab was two floors below hers. They could have knocked something over at the wrong time, and when the wiring sparked . . . I don’t know. I want to say you’re wrong, that there’s no possible way this could be connected to us, but I can’t. I just . . . I don’t know.”