Page 77 of Middlegame

“We leave them. If they can do this much damage at the beginning of their maturation, imagine what they’ll be able to do when they’re fully grown. We’ve done it, Leigh. We’ve embodied the Doctrine. Keep them under supervision, and notify me if anything seems to be changing.” Slowly, he begins to smile.

“Soon, we’ll have everything we’ve worked for,” he says, and Leigh says nothing at all.

It was difficult to remember exactly where Avery had been before he went away. He had taken his shadow with him, which seemed suddenly, unspeakably rude, even though Zib had never thought of it that way before. Shadows should stay behind when someone was planning on coming back, to mark the place they were going to be.

A hand touched her shoulder. She looked up to find the Crow Girl looking at her encouragingly.

“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll be back, safe and sound, you’ll see.”

“How do you know?” asked Zib.

“Why, because we’re on the improbable road to the Impossible City, and right now, what could be more improbable, or impossible, than your friend coming back to you?” The Crow Girl smiled a bright and earnest smile. “There’s no possible way it could happen, and that means it’s virtually guaranteed.”

Zib stared at her for a moment before bursting, noisily, into tears.

—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

Book VII

The End of All

Let all the number of the stars give light

To thy fair way!

—William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

—T.S. Eliot

COST

Timeline: five minutes too late, thirty seconds from the end of the world.

There’s so much blood.

Dodger has her back to him, one hand clasped against her side in an effort to keep some of that blood inside her body. The other hand is a blur of motion, finger-painting equations on the wall with increasingly shaky fingers. Her handwriting is losing its precision, becoming harder to read—not that he was ever any good at following her when she went deep into the math. She’s in her own little world, and there’s no room for him there, and there’s so much blood.

He’s not a doctor, but he’s pretty sure there shouldn’t be so much blood, not if she’s planning to walk away from here—and really, that’s the answer, because he knows she’s not planning to walk away. She was happy before he crashed back into her world, happy with her books and her public appearances and her life, which she had crafted, one careful piece at a time, from the wreckage he’d left her in. She was happy, and then he’d come barging in with her old college roommate in tow, and he’d taken it all away. She thinks she’s going to die here, and he’s pretty sure she doesn’t mind, because if she dies here, she never has to go through this again. She never has to worry about a knock on the door turning out to be the brother who abandoned her, coming back for one more favor that she doesn’t want to grant.

Her career is over. Her ideas about the universe have been shattered. What’s a life when compared to that?

He wishes he could tell her he’s sorry. He wishes he could say he didn’t know. He doesn’t say anything. She has to finish this equation, has to finish solving them for zero, or all of this will have been for nothing—like it’s been for nothing so many times before. Erin didn’t want to tell him that part. Erin never wants to tell him anything if she can help it, says ignorance is bliss, or at least ignorance leads to better choices: ignorance doesn’t try to account for the costs and consequences of a hundred doomed timelines every time it takes a step. He wishes he knew how it was she could remember.

And then he knows.

“Dodger,” he says, and his voice is low, almost drowned out by the gunfire from outside their little corner of the ruins. Erin is holding off their attackers as best she can. She can’t hold them off forever. “When did it go wrong? When, exactly, did it go wrong?”

“Like you have to ask?” She keeps painting. There’s more blood seeping between her fingers now. There’s so much blood. “You’re the one who came to me.”

“Before that. When did it go wrong before that?”

She turns her head, her fingers going still. She’s so pale. She’s always been pale, but there’s so little blood left for her to spill. Her hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, her two-hundred-dollar hairstyle ruined by gunpowder and blood and exertion. Her earrings are diamond set in platinum. She looks like an adult, and he still feels like a child.

“The earthquake, Roger,” she says softly. “That’s when I knew you were never going to stop leaving me. That’s when I decided to stop letting you.”

“I didn’t mean—”