Page 76 of Middlegame

Reed stands with his hands behind his back and a frown on his face, watching the model of the universe as it attempts, one misaligned twist at a time, to tear itself apart. He didn’t build the astrolabe, has never been a mechanical engineer, never cared that much about things that aren’t biological, but he loves it all the same, loves it for what it represents: everything. This is what he one day hopes to control. Everything. He coveted it the moment his mother-maker showed him her blueprints for its construction, when he was an apprentice, when Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist in North America, spreading her calm propaganda masked as fantasy, when it seemed like a gangling experiment in base metals turned flesh named James Reed would never be anything but a carnival miracle-peddler, capable of mixing snake oils and minor cures, but nothing more. He’s lied, cheated, killed, and bargained to work his way to this place, this lab, to ownership of this astrolabe. The chaos he now oversees is either a sign that success is finally at hand, or an omen of failure yet to come.

It must be the first. He won’t consider the second.

Something has happened to or with their cuckoos. The astrolabe has run in reverse dozens of times since they were sent out into the world. He remembers no timelines but this one, because he’s not one of them, but the astrolabe . . . that remains his secret weapon. It’s so finely calibrated, so carefully attuned to the functionality of the living universe, that it cannot help but adjust itself when something changes. A shift in the timeline is a shift in the universe. A shift in the universe must be reflected by the astrolabe, or it becomes nothing but a pretty collection of jeweled planets and glittering stars, with no value beyond that intrinsic in its component parts. Even if Reed were willing to allow that, the astrolabe would not be.

There is a knock at the open door behind him. He doesn’t turn.

“Which ones?” he asks.

“Cheswich and Middleton,” says Leigh. “You were right. They’re almost mature.”

“What have they done?”

He can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks again. Leigh has always been an admirer of destruction, when executed well and without petty complications. “An earthquake in California. The largest the region has seen in decades. FEMA is responding; the death toll is going to be in the thousands, and that’s just the primary effect. Disruption to power, water, local services, those are going to kill even more. I’ve never killed that many people. Not even cumulatively.”

Slowly, Reed turns. “And you believe they did this?”

“I know they did.” Leigh is beaming. This pair isn’t hers, wasn’t raised according to her standards; she would order their handler to take them to pieces without a moment’s hesitation, if she thought it would benefit the cause. But destruction is destruction, and she can’t deny the quality of their work. “Did you read my report?”

“Refresh me.”

It’s not a request. Leigh feels her smile slip away. Reed is dangerous under the best of circumstances, and this isn’t the best of circumstances. He’s used the astrolabe repeatedly to prove that his cuckoos are maturing, citing every instance of misbehavior as proof that time has been rewritten. “Two of them have reached maturity at some point in the future,” he’s claimed, over and over again. “Two of them will inevitably embrace themselves, and us, when the time is right. The fact that they keep trying to put the moment off doesn’t change the reality of it.”

Oh, but it does, it does; Leigh knows it does, that the future is unwritten for a reason. Until they actually confront the mature cuckoos, until they see the awakened Doctrine given flesh and conscious will, it could be any of their pairs. This is why she has been pushing so hard to get him to let her start the experiment over, to push its conclusion forward. His investors wouldn’t have liked the delay, but his investors are gone, dust and bones scattered over a dozen states. It’s better that way. Boring, balding, hidebound old men don’t deserve to change the universe. They think they do, but boring, balding, hidebound old men have always believed they deserve absolutely everything. When he proposed the Galileo solution for the second generation of cuckoos, she hadn’t expected it to work.

They should have grown up powerless and incomplete, unable to function in the big, terrifying world of people born in the normal way rather than created as metaphors given flesh. They should have killed themselves by the age of eighteen or been drugged insensate by adults who wanted to “fix” them. There’s no possible way they could have found each other, become entangled, opened the lines of communication and kept them that way for year on year, despite all the obstacles in their way. What they had done, what they’ve become . . . it’s all impossible. It’s all unlikely in the extreme. And it’s all real and true and undeniable.

Leigh didn’t make this mess. She still has to deal with it.

“Erin reported that Cheswich and Middleton had gone to a student, Smita Mehta, and asked her to run blood tests to determine whether they were related. She explained that blood tests wouldn’t be enough; DNA testing was required. She performed those tests.” Leigh’s lips twist downward. “They were nearly exposed as artificial creations by a little girl with a box of toys and a fondness for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. She found the antigen markers, she found the genetic similarities, and if she’d been allowed to continue her work, she would have found that the DNA wasn’t entirely natural. She had to be stopped.”

“So you had her killed.”

“It’s within my remit.”

“Only if you could do it without attracting attention.”

“There was a fire. It was very sad. Erin interviewed the girl extensively first, using a Hand of Glory for cover, and confirmed she hadn’t shared her findings. I believe she was planning to write a paper about non-identical identical twins.” Leigh shakes her head. “Poor fool. She had a good scientific mind, but she was out of her depth the moment she picked up the needle.”

“There was nothing about the killing that could be traced back to Erin, or to us?”

Leigh shakes her head again, more firmly this time. “Nothing. You know how skilled she is. I decanted her myself; she won’t have slipped. Unfortunately, the Cheswich girl has an overactive sense of responsibility. It’s the numbers. All the mathematical children have shown a tendency to catastrophize and assume responsibility for things that aren’t their fault. If she’d been alone on campus, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. She wasn’t. She went to the Middleton boy. She expressed her concerns. He agreed to help her investigate the fire. While they were there, they somehow partially activated.” A look of frustration sweeps over her face. “I don’t know how. Any cameras in the building were destroyed by the fire, and Erin wasn’t present. What we know is that our cuckoos entered the building, and the earthquake began eight minutes later, with them as the epicenter. They’ve begun to understand what they can do.”

“My astrolabe supports this,” says Reed. “Are they mature?”

“Erin doesn’t think so.” She brightens. “I could check the omens. If there’s a good candidate for haruspicy—”

The entrails will speak truly only if he cares about what’s being sacrificed. Some rules are older than alchemy: some rules cut all the way down to the bones of the earth. “Take one of the other experiments to the surface,” he says. “Let them see the sky.” That should stun whatever prize she picks long enough for Leigh to do what must be done, and an augury works best in sight of the sun.

Leigh raises her eyebrows. “Truly?”

“Truly.”

“And if the entrails say your cuckoos aren’t mature?”

“We leave them.”

Leigh’s surprise fades, leaving her stricken. “But—”