Page 80 of Middlegame

She’d moved in that afternoon. When he’d moved out three weeks later, switching to someplace safer, with plumbing that actually worked, she’d come with him. Their first shared apartment had had two bedrooms. This one does too, but one of those rooms is an office, filled with all the books he won’t allow in the room where they sleep. The Unitarian church where she serves as a minister is only half a mile from their current address. Like him, she walks to work most mornings. Like him, she favors feet over other forms of transit.

For both of them, on some deep level, the ground is still shaking, and always will be.

Erin kisses him again before stepping to the side and letting him in. She closes the door behind him, shutting out the world that isn’t theirs, that wasn’t designed to contain and comfort the two of them. “So just a normal day?”

“Someone built a book tower in the library that came down while I was doing some shelving,” he says, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the hook. “Oh, and I’m almost done translating that manuscript Christopher brought in. It’s a really interesting Breton dialect.”

“Have the walls started bleeding yet?” she asks mildly. “Because that’s always what I worry about when you’re translating some manuscript that’s been lost to human eyes for centuries. That the walls are going to start bleeding, and then we’re going to have the risen dead and a bunch of animated trees to contend with.”

“I’d give myself a chainsaw hand for you,” he says, and she laughs, and everything is wonderful; everything is perfect. There are pieces missing, sure, and not just in the living room floor, but whose life doesn’t have a few missing pieces? Missing pieces are what makes it real, rather than just a painting of a life that could never actually exist. Missing pieces are essential.

Roger tries to tell himself that as he follows Erin to the kitchen. There’s nothing in a melancholy day that a cup of coffee and a lemon scone can’t fix.

She walks with a calm assurance he never quite manages to match, stepping with absolute confidence that her feet will find the structurally stable parts of the floor. She’s the reason they can live here at all: the place should technically be considered uninhabitable, but somehow she found the right combination of laws and loopholes to make it home. The rules love her almost as much as he does. Her ash-colored hair is lovely in the light slanting through the hallway window, and this is home, this is harbor, this is everything it needs to be.

This may not be the life he thought he wanted, but somehow it is absolutely the life that he deserves.

It can take Roger a long time to go to sleep, but when he does, he sleeps deeply and absolutely, with the conviction of a child. He sprawls, revealing the true length of his lanky limbs, which he so frequently keeps tucked in close to his body, out of the way. Erin sits in the bed next to him, watching him snore.

She wishes she could love him the way she suspects he loves her. She wishes she could respond to his increasingly frequent hints about marriage, children, a home in Albany or the Berkeley hills. She wishes she could tell him it’s never going to work out the way he wants it to, that she’s here because she has to be, and while aspects of their relationship have been organic—things she chose to do, rather than things she was ordered to do—the relationship as a whole has always been engineered. The same could be said about the both of them. Neither came into this world the way children are supposed to. Neither is likely to leave it that way, either.

Roger wrinkles his nose, makes a grumbling sound, and rolls onto his side. Erin takes this opportunity to slip out of the bed. If he doesn’t leave space for her when he rolls back over, she’ll sleep on the couch. She’s done it before, and he’s always been understanding. That’s just the sort of person he is.

Sometimes she contrasts him with Darren, her brother, who was all hard edges and sharp demands and the only other male she’s ever lived with. He would have followed her out of the bedroom, asking why she was disrupting his sleep by disappearing when he expected her to be there, accusing her of screwing with the natural order of things. They would have fought, his voice low and tight and reasonable, hers arcing ever higher, until it seemed like any glassware in the area would be sacrificed on the altar of their anger. The fight would have ended when one of them admitted fault or when morning came, whichever happened first, and then they would fall asleep like puppies, tangled together in a ball of limbs and silence.

It’s been long enough since he died that he shouldn’t still be haunting her. She thinks sometimes that he’ll haunt her until she follows him into whatever void awaits creatures such as they on the other side of the veil. If the twins are followed by the scar tissue of visions and revisions to their personal timeline, she’s followed by the ghost of a teenage boy who died for no good reason in the shadow of the corn. He has no grave. She’s his living mausoleum.

She sits, cross-legged on the couch, and waits. Three minutes after midnight, her phone rings. She picks it up. Brings it to her ear.

“Hello, Erin.”

She nearly drops the phone.

Normally, the evening report is requested by Leigh: a serpent, to be sure, but a serpent she knows intimately, and who knows her just as well. Leigh made her, molded her, chose the color of her skin and the texture of her hair. Leigh is not her mother—more her architect—and one of them will kill the other one day, but Leigh is familiar. This voice . . .

This voice is softer and harder at the same time, an iron bar wrapped in a sheet of velvet, rubbing against her skin in a sickly-sweet parody of seduction. She hasn’t spoken to Reed in years, not since she left the lab, but still, she knows that voice. She knows it very well.

“Sir,” she manages to say through a constricted throat, with a mouth gone dry as ashes.

“You’ve done well keeping the language aspect of your pairing under observation. The math can’t hurt anything on its own. A trigger’s required if a gun’s to be of use.” He chuckles at his own joke, a dry, humorless sound, like bones clicking together in a tomb. When he speaks again, that small levity is gone. “Your assignment has changed. Kill him.”

“Sir?”

“We have a better candidate, a pair that’s managed to mature without separation, and we can’t have the Doctrine’s loyalties confused when it tries to take physical form. The Middleton boy has become a liability. Your service is appreciated, and you need to terminate the experiment. Clean up whatever mess it creates. We’ll expect you back here within the week—oh, and Erin? Try to be more subtle this time. They can’t all be electrical fires.”

The line goes dead. The call has been terminated.

Erin lowers the phone and stares blankly at the hallway. At the end of it, Roger is sleeping, defenseless, unwary. He has no idea what she is, what he’s welcomed into his home, his bed. He’s never suspected her, not once. She could let him go like that: let him die innocent of what he was made for, of what he can do. It’s the only choice she can be sure she’s never made before. The odds of Dodger managing to reset the timeline on her own before she dies from disconnection shock are slim. So no, this is a thing she’s never done. Every time, every timeline, every revision, she’s chosen to refuse her duty. She’s chosen to fight.

She’s so tired. The cuckoos have the luxury of forgetting their trips to the Impossible City. Not her. She’s been tangled up with them for lifetimes, and the temptation to end the story here is stronger than she expected. One knife, one throat, and she gets to be something more than their pretty little killer. She gets to go back to the lab, to the comforts of the world she was made for, and see what kind of world this would be with the Doctrine truly embodied, truly activated.

A world controlled by Reed, with Leigh at his red right hand. For the (tenth? hundredth? thousandth?) time she looks at the choice, and stands, still knowing what she’s going to do, to walk into the shadows of her home.

FLIGHT RISK

Timeline: 00:15 PDT, June 16, 2016 (same night).

“Oof!” Roger sits upright, dreams dissolving into a confused haze of fragmentary images. The color red—true red, the red he’s never seen with his own eyes—lingers, and he knows he was dreaming of Dodger. (Or dreaming with Dodger: assuming she’s still on this coast, it’s not unreasonable to think their sleep cycles might occasionally align, and their subconscious minds might keep reaching out even after their conscious minds have decided to cut contact. He misses her. He imagines she feels the same.)