Page 85 of Middlegame

“Roger called me,” says her past self, and Dodger in the present closes her eyes and listens, silently, to every perfect, painful word.

LONG DISTANCE

Timeline: 11:15 PST, December 10, 2008 (seven years ago; time is unwinding).

The apartment is empty when Dodger arrives. All the windows have shattered. New cracks run through its foundation. She scratches some equations into the dirt that constitutes their narrow strip of a yard—she could do them in her head, but they’re easier to trust when she can see them—and decides it should be safe, if she’s quick. If she smells gas or smoke or anything else that shouldn’t be there, she’ll get out. Until that happens, she can seek comfort in the broken familiar and gather her things.

She doesn’t know yet where she’s going—back to her parents, probably—but she can’t stay here. Not after the way Roger looked at her, with fear and loathing and longing tangled in his eyes. Not after the way Smita died. Running away may not be the grownup thing to do, but Dodger has never put much stock in being a grownup. Sometimes logic says the childish thing is the right one.

The bookshelves in the hall have toppled over, spilling their contents across the floor. Over the Woodward Wall has fallen open to the center illustration, the Impossible City in gold and mercury glory. Dodger stops for a moment, transfixed by the image. Something about it . . .

No. This isn’t the time. She shakes herself free and picks through the mess, occasionally pausing to recover an especially beloved childhood treasure. There was never any real filing system here. At least the ceiling held; at least the broken glass was minimal. At least they didn’t die. Roger may have looked at her like she was a monster, but they didn’t die. They may still find a way through this.

She steps into her room. The damage here is even more minimal, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders. There’s a dusting of plaster over everything, fallen from the ceiling; the pillow has toppled off the bed, and all her markers are on the floor. Somehow, the earthquake has erased half of one wall, reducing the equation to a black smear. She doesn’t know how that’s possible, but she’s not in the mood to ignore the evidence of her own eyes.

Dodger walks to the bed, sits, and puts her hands over her face. The temptation to reach for Roger is enormous. She wants to talk to him. She wants to know that everything is okay. But everything is not okay. They made the quake. She doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why, but she knows they did it, the two of them working together. They’re dangerous. Maybe not individually, but together? Together, they could destroy the world.

It’s not a pleasant thought. It’s the only one she has.

Her phone rings.

Dodger lowers her hands. It could be her parents, checking up on her; it could be Candace or Erin, trying to confirm that she’s alive. The idea that it might be Roger doesn’t even cross her mind. He won’t be calling her today. Maybe not ever again.

She answers the phone. (The feeling of jamais vu rises, breaks around her, because she didn’t answer the phone, not the first time: the first time, it was voice mail and a stuttered message that was somehow enough to make things a little better, to cause the situation to repeat the next time around. This is not the first time. It’s closer than they’ve been in years.)

“Hello?”

“Dodger.” The voice is Roger’s, and it’s not: he sounds older, exhausted, not at the end of his rope but some distance past it, holding on through sheer force of will. “I know you’re mad at me, and I know I’m the last person in the world you want to talk to right now, but I need to ask you to please not hang up.”

(this was a message last time this was a message on my voice mail; we got it wrong, we got it wrong at least once more, even after we thought we were getting it right)

“Mad at you?” Laughter bubbles in her throat. She swallows it. “Why would I be mad at you? I’m worried about you. You ran away so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to tell you we’d be okay. Are you okay? You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m not okay, really. But . . . didn’t the earthquake just happen? Wasn’t that today?”

“Oh,” she says, things falling into place as the world goes crystalline and clear, all the numbers lining up for a change. Of course. It’s the only thing that makes sense, because there’s no way Roger would be calling her: not now, anyway. “You’re in the future, aren’t you?”

He doesn’t swallow his laughter as well as she swallows hers. It seeps up around his words as he says, “You figured that out even faster than I thought you would. I’ve really missed you, Dodge.”

So they don’t make things right between them, then: so this silence that echoes in her skull, filling the space he should be occupying, becomes the new normal. She shivers. “I haven’t had time to miss you yet, but it sounds like I’m going to get it,” she says, forcing her voice to stay level. “I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Me, too,” he says, and she believes him. “But I—I mean, the me in your timeline—he needs his space if he’s going to accept what’s going on. You’ve always adapted faster than I did. And he—I—needs to accept this, because it’s not going away.”

“I’m following the numbers. They tell me what to do.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d been the one to get the math,” he says, and is quiet for a moment before continuing: “The Roger in your timeline is a fool. He’s not ready to accept what he needs to know, and he’s pushing you away because he’s scared. I can’t change that. The trick that lets me call you doesn’t work if I’m trying to call myself, because I’m not math, I’m words, and words can change a lot of things, but they can’t break the laws of time. You’re the only person I can reach this way. So please, Dodge. I want you to give him time. I want you to let him come to you. But I want you to remember that I love you. That he loves you, and he never stops, not for a second, not even when he’s trying to convince himself the two of you were involved in some sort of messed-up folie à deux for all these years.”

“We don’t have a shared delusion,” Dodger protests. “It’s all real. If you take away the quantum entanglement, we’d never have met.” A wave of uneasiness sweeps over her, because they would have met, wouldn’t they? They would have met in a room she can’t quite remember but can’t quite forget, with bruises on their arms and the ghosts of sedatives in their veins, and they would have clung to one another and promised never to lose track again. That’s where this started. That’s when they learned what they could do.

But it’s all vague and hazy, and she can’t quite grasp hold before it dissolves into shadowy outlines and déjà vu. The feeling has haunted her for her entire life, the strong sensation that almost everything she does has happened before at least once, and maybe more. She’s almost used to it at this point. Maybe everyone goes through their lives on a wave of uncertainty and false memories.

“I know,” says Roger, and he sounds so tired, and she hears something in the background, unmasked by his silence—something that sounds like gunfire.

Dodger’s skin prickles. “Are you okay?”

“No,” he says. “I screwed up, Dodge. I ran away after the earthquake, and when I needed you, you weren’t there, because you didn’t . . . I don’t know. Maybe you didn’t love me anymore, or maybe you just got tired of dealing with my bullshit insistence that I knew best. It doesn’t matter, because I ran and you didn’t think I wanted you to follow, and so we’re both in a bad place when I am. I need you not to give up on me, okay? That’s all. When I come crawling back, I need you to remember this call, and be willing to give me one more chance. Please.”

“I could never give up on you,” she says, and she sounds so wounded, and so young, that it makes his chest ache. “Is there anything I can do for you? The future you who’s on my phone, I mean, not the now-you. I’ll give the now-you his space, and I’ll be ready when he comes back to me, if you’re sure he’s going to come.”