Page 73 of Middlegame

Dodger looks at him for a long moment. Then she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, puts her mug down on the table, and stands.

“We have to find out,” she says, and it’s so simple, and so impossibly difficult, that he can’t argue with her.

“Let me get dressed,” he says.

Campus security has cordoned off the Life Sciences Annex. Caution tape blocks the usual approaches, orange as a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, ends snapping in the breeze. The air smells of char and flame retardants, all the hallmarks of a terrible fire. Even the sky looks ashy, although that could be a trick of the weather; the rain is threatening to fall again.

Students queue up along the tape, whispering to each other as they cup their hands over their eyes and squint at the ruins of the building, trying to pick out every ghoulish detail, every unrevealed sliver of information. A few are sobbing, burying their faces against the shoulders of friends. At least six students died in the blaze—maybe more, depending on what the firefighters found, depending on whether someone had fallen asleep in an empty classroom or gone looking for a private place to sit and study—and each of them had friends, family, a whole world of their own. Those worlds are over now. The world keeps ending, every minute of every day, and nothing is going to make that stop. Nothing can ever, ever make that stop.

Dodger has borrowed one of Roger’s hooded sweatshirts, a baggy gray thing that fits her almost perfectly, her narrower shoulders balanced by her larger chest. With the hood covering her hair and her hands shoved into her pockets, she moves through the crowd like a ghost, and Roger moves in the space behind her, letting her forge the way. This is her part of campus, not his; she knows the shortcuts and the shape of things.

There are people everywhere. There is no clear approach. “We need to get closer or back off,” says Roger, frustrated. “Those are the options. Dodge? Can you get us closer?”

She stops, cocking her head hard, like she’s running some complex set of internal numbers. Then, with a quick nod, she says, “Yes,” and turns, heading away from the building at a fast clip. Roger has to rush to keep up with her. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t slow down: she just keeps moving.

She just keeps moving.

Her steps are light and her eyes shift constantly from side to side, assessing, recalibrating, looking for a better angle. Most people will never see the world the way Dodger Cheswich sees it, and that’s a good thing: the way she sees the world would drive most people mad. Her lack of depth perception makes it hard to estimate distances, to know for sure where one thing ends and the next begins, but once she paces something out, learns the dimensions, she never forgets. The numbers, the angles, the equations, those are the constants, the stars she steers by and the gospels she keeps closest to her heart. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t need to run. Math, done right, is a calm and steady thing, swift, but not hurried. Never that.

Roger has given her a problem defined by geography, which is another form of geometry, and she’s going to solve it. Come hell or high water, she’s going to solve it. She leads them down a trail mostly used by joggers and maintenance staff, around the shed at the trail’s far end, into a copse of trees. The cordons keeping the students away from the burnt-out building don’t extend into the trees. That would be silly.

There’s an old trail tucked deep inside, one Roger has never seen before, one he doubts Dodger has ever seen before, because this isn’t the sort of place where she tends to go exploring. It leads them to a narrow alley, mostly blocked by a concrete planter intended to dissuade students from grinding their skateboards along the brick edges of the flowerbeds. Once they’ve squeezed past the planter, they find themselves between the smoking ruin of the Life Sciences Annex and the nearby Life Sciences Building. The fire didn’t jump the gap, possibly because of the weather, possibly because sometimes, bad luck runs out before everything falls down. The main building is smoke-stained but otherwise untouched, standing strong and inviolate. It could be open within the week, students stealing glances out its windows at the devastation next door. This, too, is normal.

At the end of the alley is a doorway. The wood is scorched and warped; the frame has bent. The three shallow stone steps leading up to it remain intact, not broken, only stained by the fire. The glass window at the center of the door has melted, running out of its frame like thick, twisted honey. There are holes in the wall to either side, blasted chunks of masonry and insulation showing through the bones of the building. It looks less like the aftermath of a fire and more like the aftermath of a war. There is no caution tape here, no campus security or gaping students. They’re alone.

Dodger stops dead, the odd, focused look fading from her eyes as she turns to Roger and stands, perfectly silent, watching him.

“Good job,” says Roger, bemused. “You okay?”

She shakes her head—the motion of a wet dog trying to become dry—and the strangeness is gone, replaced by her former worried, uncertain expression. “I’m fine. Just worried. This door isn’t usually locked.”

Roger nods. Then he hesitates, and asks, “Are you sure we should be going in here? There’s just been a fire. The building could be structurally unsound.”

“So we don’t try to go up to the lab,” says Dodger, dog with a bone again. “Architecture is chaos theory in sheetrock and two-by-fours. I can figure out where the weak spots are.”

“Math isn’t a superpower.”

“Says you,” says Dodger, and cracks her first smile since the day began.

That smile is the best thing Roger could have seen. It means that however upset she is, she isn’t shattered: she’s just taking some time to bounce back. With as long as it can take her to let people in, rather than keeping them at an eternal arm’s length, it makes sense that she’d be so shaken. He smiles back, quickly, before he reaches for the doorknob.

The metal is stuck, or perhaps fused from the inside. It refuses to turn.

“Roger . . . ?”

“I’m sure it’s just jammed,” he says. Letting the doorknob go, he pulls the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his hand and wraps it tight around his fingers. This time he grasps it as hard as he can, willing it to yield; this time he twists until the knob abandons its resistance and the latch clicks open, allowing him to pull the door outward, away from its twisted frame.

On the other side of the door, water and flame-retardant foam have pooled in puddles and patches on the smoke-stained floor, creating a swampy patchwork of dangers. The walls—what remains of them; many of the interior walls are completely gone, torn down by fire or rescue personnel—are riddled with holes. The building seems cancerous, diseased, a thousand years old.

There’s a hole in the floor, leading to the basement. The bolt that held the pterodactyl to the ceiling remains, but the fossil beast is gone, fallen below or consumed by flames. Dodger stops and looks at the place where it hung, a look of childish gravity on her face. Something that endured for millions of years is gone; something that should have outlasted them both is over. Somehow, that’s the worst thing yet about this tiring, terrible day.

Then she turns away, looking at Roger, and says, “We need to look for answers.”

They’re standing in a burnt-out building; they’ll be arrested, or worse, expelled, if someone catches them here. They’re not arson investigators, or investigators at all. Neither of them is equipped to be here. Neither of them has a clue what they’re doing.

But Dodger needs this if she’s going to accept that it isn’t their fault that Smita’s gone. She needs to walk the floor and try to figure out why this is happening, and if that’s what she needs, then Roger’s going to give it to her. It’s a small thing. It’s all he can do.

“Wood burns at—”