Page 82 of Middlegame

He doesn’t. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll play. What did your mad science masters design you to do?”

“Not mad science: alchemy. Mad scientists are kinder to their creations.” She takes the bowl of spare change from the dresser with her free hand, tilting it forward to show its contents before she flings them into the air. Roger doesn’t have time to react before they hit the ground in a grid around her. Each coin is positioned like the floor had a magnetic coil beneath it, landing at the points of imaginary squares. Every one of them is heads-up. Erin puts the dish back.

“Chaos and Order were early targets,” she says. “It seems like they should be bigger than something like the Doctrine, but it turns out that because they’re primal, they’re also simple. They’ve been employing poppets of my lineage for almost as long as they’ve been working to incarnate yours. I am the living embodiment of Order, and I am ordering you to get the fuck out of that bed and follow me.”

“That was a terrible pun,” says Roger automatically. He can’t deny the evidence of his eyes. He’s always been good at justifying things unseen, but this? This is physical reality. He knows there are no magnets. This is too much for a prank.

Erin scowls. “Are you still not taking this seriously? They’ll send people here when I don’t check in. They’ll find you. And they will kill you.”

“Right.” Roger crosses his arms. “Why are you helping me if these are the people who made you?”

“Because they made me like they made you: they made me to be a part of a pair. Chaos and Order. But we weren’t as entangled as you and Dodger are—remember when she slit her wrists and nearly bled out behind her house? I remember you arguing with her, in a timeline that never existed, about whether that needed to happen. Whether that was something the two of you could revise. She said it had to be allowed to remain part of the timeline, because that event was one of the things that allowed me to convince you to come with me.”

Roger’s eyes have been getting wider and wider, until it seems like they’re set to swallow the top half of his face. He folds his arms tighter, holding himself in a half-comforting embrace.

“You can’t live if she dies, and she can’t live if you die; that’s how it works for the cuckoos, every last carefully designed one of you. Me, I can live without my other half just fine. Doesn’t mean I wanted to.” Darren had been sullen and quick to anger, rigid in ways that were almost comic, coming from an avatar of chaos. He’d wanted everything just so, following patterns he had set and only he could understand. And he’d loved her. Oh, how he’d loved her. They’d been two halves of the same coin, not brother and sister like the incarnations of the Doctrine, but Adam and Eve of the unformed universe, so suited to each other that the thought of being apart had been a painful impossibility. Until the day Reed needed a hammer to pound a stubborn nail. Until Erin needed training. Until the cuckoos needed someone who could watch over their nest while they grew, someone they would be able to accept as a member of their peer group, even though technically they had no peers. Only each other. Only ever each other.

Erin has been here before, over and over, as the timelines looped and changed around her. Darren has never been standing by her side. She suspects that, like Dodger’s attempted suicide, his death may be one of the things that can’t be changed: her willingness to betray Reed hinges on it having happened. She hates them for that, Roger and Dodger, who could have each other if they’d stop pushing one another away. She hates them more than she hates anything, and she’ll die, again, if that’s what it takes for them to stay together. She’s done worse.

“I can’t call her,” he says. “She hasn’t . . . We haven’t spoken in seven years. I didn’t answer when she called, and one day she just stopped calling.”

“Try.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re going to get us both killed,” says Erin, with no rancor in her voice. She reaches into her pocket, produces her phone, and throws it onto the bed. “Try the mundane way.”

“I don’t have her number anymore.”

To his surprise, she laughs. It’s a high, bright, impossibly strained sound, like glass breaking. “Oh, trust me, happy boy. That has never mattered. Try.”

Roger picks up the phone.

Dials the number for her old apartment, the one that hasn’t been there for years.

Waits.

It rings three times, four, five, and he’s about to hang up when there’s a click and Dodger’s voice is in his ear, Dodger is talking to him, saying, “This is Dodger. What’s your deal?”

His mouth is so dry he can barely swallow. He forces himself to do just that before saying, “Uh. Hi, Dodge.”

“Roger?” She sounds puzzled. “Why are you calling me from the roof? Did you finally decide to get a cellphone?”

His mouth dries up even further. He can’t speak.

(Because he remembers this; he didn’t remember it a moment ago, can’t even say for sure whether this is a thing that had happened a moment ago, but it’s something that has actually and for certain happened now. Dodger, coming back from a trip to the kitchen for lemonade and brownies to quiz him on why he’d decided to make a prank call from the roof when he knew she was going to be right back up. Him, protesting that he didn’t have a cellphone and couldn’t have called her. It had been a beautiful day. The air had tasted like honeysuckle. The brownies had tasted of chocolate and marijuana. And it had happened almost eight years ago.)

She’s going to hang up. He knows it, and so he swallows hard one more time, and says, “I missed you. That’s all.”

“Asshole,” she says, with complete fondness. There’s a click as she replaces the receiver in its cradle (landlines, they still used landlines back then), and he’s listening to silence.

Slowly, he lowers the phone and turns his eyes back to Erin. “I just called Dodger.”

“Yeah,” says Erin. “Sounds like it was an old number, though.”

“How . . . ?”

“Pack the backpack. Take what you need.” She pulls a lighter from her pocket and flicks it on before beginning to light the fingers of the Hand. “We need to be gone by morning.”