Page 81 of Middlegame

Still groggy, he looks down to see what hit him. It’s a backpack, already half-full. He picks it up and looks inside, finding clothes, and notebooks, and his tablet.

“You have five minutes,” says Erin. Her voice is cold. There’s no teasing or laughter there now, only the sort of steely resolve he hasn’t heard from her since before the earthquake. He looks up. She’s standing in the doorway, dressed in dark gray leggings and a matching tank top. It looks like she’s getting ready for a yoga class, or a run.

“What?” Roger rubs his eyes, reaches for his glasses, takes a look at the clock on the bedside table. “Erin, it’s after midnight. What’s going on?”

“We’re getting out of here.” The statement is calm, matter-of-fact: it leaves no room for argument. “This isn’t the time to explain. You need to trust me.”

“I do trust you, but Erin, I’m not going to get out of bed and . . . run away . . . because you had a bad dream.” He schools his face, trying to look understanding when all he feels is confused. “Come back to bed. You can tell me all about it.”

“You’ve been hearing your sister’s voice in your head since you were in elementary school. I don’t know exactly when it started in this timeline, since you never trusted me enough to tell me, but I’m guessing between the ages of seven and nine. You told me once that that was the ‘sweet spot’ for acceptance in small children.” That had been another timeline, another Roger. Her memory of the conversation is hazy, but the fact that she remembers means it was important, that he told her to hold on to the information no matter what came next. She remembers him without glasses, with shorter hair, with a mustache. It’s all superficial, the result of small choices gone differently, culminating in someone who was almost, but not quite, the Roger in front of her.

They destroy themselves every time they destroy the world. Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.

Roger gapes before his mouth snaps shut and he sits up straighter, some of the old wariness coming back into his eyes. “I don’t have a sister.” The lie is automatic. He’s ashamed of it: his cheeks redden, he presses on, saying, “Even if I did, that wouldn’t make us . . . whatever that would make us.”

“I know most people believe every word that comes out of your mouth, but I was Dodger’s roommate before I was your girlfriend, and I’m not going to forget her. She’s your sister, and if you’re in danger, so is she. I had to stay with one of you, and you were the more dangerous, so you got me. We need to find her.” Erin purses her lips. “Unless you think she’d listen if you called? Give it a try. She needs to be warned. I honestly don’t know if they have her under surveillance, and if they do, we could be running for nothing.” She can’t count on the way the other timelines have played out to give them time to get to Dodger. The trouble with starting from scratch over and over is that things can change. If they’ve changed too much, this is the end of the game, and she’s throwing herself away on a plan that can never work.

Roger is looking at her with increasing dismay. He’s a smart man. There are things he hasn’t thought about for years, moments when she broke character, when she tried to warn him. She can see him putting the pieces together, finding the way they fit together, however much he wants them not to.

“Erin . . . ?” he finally says. “Honey, are you okay?”

“Dodger Cheswich is your sister,” she replies. “Denial is fun, and I’ve encouraged it, to be fair, but the time for denial is over. You need to wake up if you don’t want this to be the ending. Did you really manage to forget I knew about her—did you run away from yourself that hard? Why else would I have let you keep her picture next to our bed for all these years? Seriously, you’re smarter than that. Think.”

“That doesn’t mean . . .” He tapers off, stops dead, and gives her a narrow-eyed, suspicious look. “Her being my sister doesn’t mean any of those other things.”

“Yeah, it does. We’ve met before, Roger, on the improbable road, and I know where you come from.” The answer is so much bigger and more complicated than that, but these are the answers he can accept here and now, and she needs him to accept. She needs him moving. If she doesn’t do her job by morning, they’ll know, and they’ll send someone who will. She’s not their only hunter. “Can you call her or not?”

“I don’t have her number.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Erin’s eyes are cold. “Close your eyes, and call her. I know you can. You know you can. We don’t have the time for you to fuck with me right now, Roger, and I don’t have the patience to sit and hold your hand while you work through this. I’m risking my own life to save yours. Show a scrap of gratitude, and call your damn sister.”

She walks past the bed while he’s gaping at her again, kneeling and opening the bottom drawer of her dresser. Pushing away a veil of lingerie and sanitary products—even though Roger has always been understanding about her periods, willing to go to the drugstore when she asks without complaining about it, something she attributes in part to the amount of time he spent with Dodger in his head, putting a box of tampons on top of something she wants left alone has always been a functional deterrent—she produces a lead-lined box. It has no latch; instead, it is sealed with a sheet of candle wax. She breaks it with one hard strike of her palm and looks over her shoulder to Roger. His eyes are still open. He hasn’t moved.

“They’ll know,” she says quietly. “When the sun comes up and their little science projects haven’t suddenly become a lot more powerful, they’ll know you’re still breathing. They’ll assume I failed, that you were too much for me, and they’ll send someone to finish what they think I started. We have until they get here and find an absence of bodies before they know I’ve gone rogue, and once that happens? All bets are off. So call her, before we’re running.”

“Erin, you need to cut this out. Whatever this is, you need to stop. It’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to save your scrawny, ungrateful ass.” She turns back to the box. Opens it. Withdraws its contents. Stands, and turns to face him.

Roger makes a thick urk noise, like he’s trying to speak through a mouthful of concrete. Erin’s smile is as thin as the blade of a knife, and would cut twice as sharply.

“This is a Hand of Glory,” she says. “I made it from the severed hand of a murdered woman, because I knew I was going to need it eventually. I’ve been trying to protect you for a long time. Longer than a lifetime, even, thanks to your asshole sister. I’m sorry to drop this on you so abruptly, but it’s not like there was ever a convenient moment for saying ‘hey, Roger, so you know, you were engineered by alchemists who want to control the world, and they’re hoping they can use you and Dodger for that purpose.’”

Roger knows that hand. It’s been a long time, but there are things he doesn’t have it in him to forget. The shape of Smita’s fingers, long and elegant and nimble; the way she painted her nails in shockingly bright colors, as if to draw attention to her hands, which she considered her best feature. The hand Erin holds belongs to a woman who died in a fire. There’s no way it should be here, no way it should still look so fresh and pliant, but it is, and it does, and the world is no longer making sense.

“Call her,” says Erin. There’s no love in her voice. Maybe there was never any love there at all.

Or maybe there was. Some things are difficult to fake, especially over the length and breadth of the years they’ve had together. There have been a lot of years. Their relationship, informal as it is, has outlasted marriages among his peers; there have been days when he thought they were going to be together forever. Days when it seemed like Erin was his happy-ever-after girl, like they were going to be able to build a future, one brick at a time, just by keeping one another close and never letting go. He’s trusted her since the earthquake, since she stopped being Dodger’s prickly roommate and became his friend, confidant, and eventually lover.

He can’t throw all that away in an instant. So he takes a deep breath, trying to swallow his misgivings, and says, in his most serious tone, “Erin, I want you to explain what’s going on.”

Erin’s eyes widen. “Oh,” she says, in a small, surprised voice. “Every manifestation really does feed into every other. No wonder. No wonder. I . . .” She shakes herself like a wet dog, like she’s trying to shrug off some unwanted control. “I was born in the lab that created you and Dodger. You were the pet projects of a man named James Reed, who’s been trying for over a hundred years to follow Asphodel Baker’s directions for incarnating a universal concept called the Doctrine of Ethos in a human body. Yours was the first generation where he began splitting the Doctrine into equal halves, both to force the hosts to be more like ordinary people, and to make them easier to control. You got language. Dodger got math.”

“And you got a blow to the head if you think I’m going to believe this bullshit.” Roger’s getting angry. He can’t help it. This is ludicrous; this is insane; this would have been impossible to swallow even if Erin hadn’t gone a step too far and invoked Dodger’s name. He doesn’t like to talk about his sister when he can help it. He made his choice. He has to live with it.

(Under the anger is horror, slow and rich and thick as honey. Because what she’s saying is impossible, yes, but so is quantum entanglement with an absent twin; so is causing an earthquake with a game. Erin is putting his life into a new context, one where things that have never been believable make sudden and absolute sense. And he does not want them to.)

“Don’t you want to know what they built me for?”