Page 91 of Middlegame

Roger and Dodger exchange a look, expressions unsure. Erin sighs.

“I wouldn’t have saved your fucking lives if I was going to drive us off a cliff,” she says. “But you need to get tangled up in each other the way you used to be—don’t look at me like that, I was assigned to watch you, remember? I can tell when you’re sharing one head instead of living in two. You’re not supposed to be completely separate. I need you to manifest as fast as possible, and this is where it starts. With you, in the car, making it right.”

“You keep using that word,” says Dodger. “‘Manifest.’ What do you want us to do?”

Erin continues to hold out her hand for the keys. “I want you to do what every molecule of your bodies was designed to do. I want you to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. Once you do that, once you become the living force that holds the universe together, they won’t be able to touch you. They might try, but it isn’t going to matter, because you’re going to be more than they can handle. If you don’t manifest, that’s it: this is the end of the line. They’re going to figure out that I’ve turned, if they haven’t figured it out already, and they’re going to send someone else to clean up my mess. And if we defeat that person, they’ll send another, and another, and the whole time, they’ll be trying to force their new protégés to manifest the Doctrine. This is a race. Do you get that? This is a race, and if you lose, you die.”

Roger and Dodger stare at her. Roger finds his voice first, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? You’ve had seven years to tell me this.”

“I love that we live in a world where that’s the confusing part and not, I don’t know, everything else,” mutters Dodger.

Erin ignores her. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t have to, and because I was hoping you’d decide to make things right with your sister in your own time, and because I didn’t have any way to prove it. I could do the thing with the coins, but that’s not proof; that’s a parlor trick. The whole ‘phone calls to the past’ gimmick was a Hail Mary. I didn’t know for sure that she was going to pick up until she did. Time is her thing, not yours.”

“Wait, what?” asks Dodger.

“Time is math made manifest in the physical world,” says Erin. “Time is your thing.”

“What’s mine?” asks Roger.

Erin’s smile is more a grimace, baring all her teeth. “You got everything else, and you got her. Now will you give me the damn keys and get in the car? This Hand of Glory isn’t going to last forever, and I don’t have time to make another one. Once it runs out, we’re going to be a beacon for anyone who’s looking for reality distortion. I’d rather not be here when that happens.”

The wax of the dead woman’s hand has run down, taking her fingers with it; three of them are merely stumps, and one has guttered out completely. Her thumb still burns steadily, but it’s only a matter of time before that runs down as well. As they watch, the flame on her pointer finger goes out.

“Here,” says Roger, tossing Erin the keys.

She snatches them out of the air with a sarcastic “Thank you” and climbs into the driver’s seat, setting her Hand of Glory in the passenger’s place. Roger and Dodger exchange a look before getting into the back. She’s right about one thing: they need to get tangled up in each other again, the way they used to be, the way they’ve been running away from since they were children.

Dodger waits until Erin starts the engine before asking, voice low, “Do you really think she’s telling the truth?”

“I called you,” says Roger. “I mean, I picked up the phone and called you before the earthquake happened. I called you in the past. I talked to you. I hadn’t heard your voice in seven years, and I called you, and I talked to you.”

“I think you also called me from an alternate timeline,” says Dodger.

He looks at her blankly.

“It was the day of the earthquake. I was back at the apartment, trying to figure out how much could be saved and how much I was going to leave behind—I didn’t know about Candace yet—when my phone rang, and it was you, from the future. But not this future, because this version of you wouldn’t need to say the things that version of you said. When we touch the past, we change it. We revise ourselves. And it’s not something we can take back. I can’t refuse the changes you made when you called me from the future, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I was on the verge of giving up on you until you told me not to.”

She smiles beatifically, and Roger fights the urge to squirm. She got numbers: she got time. The one commonality in all the instances of phone calls across time is Dodger, and he knows without being told that he’d get nothing but dead air or a stranger’s voice if he tried to call his childhood home and speak to his adolescent self. Time doesn’t bend for him the way it does for her. Reality bends for him. When he asks for something, he usually gets it, because the world listens when given commands.

Time rewrites itself, but words are what trigger the transformations in people. It’s a bigger responsibility than he could ever have asked for. “Erin, you keep saying you want us to manifest,” he says, turning toward the front seat. “Is there any way to do the opposite? Is there a way for us to refuse the Doctrine, to just give it up and let them have it back?”

“You can die,” she says. “Remember what I said earlier: if you make this choice, you’re making it for both of you. You can’t survive without each other. You’re too tangled up inside.”

Roger, remembering the seizures he experienced when Dodger attempted suicide, says nothing. Dodger, on the other hand, shakes her head.

“We can’t give this up,” she says. “Even if that were somehow an option—and I’m glad it’s not—we can’t. Who would you even be without the words, Roger? Who would I be, if you took my numbers away? I’ve needed sleeping pills for years, because my head’s too empty. We’re not supposed to be apart. She’s right. And remember the earthquake.”

Roger will never forget the earthquake. Part of him will be going through the earthquake forever.

“Do you want the sort of people who would send someone like Dr. Peters to kill me to have the sort of power that it took to make the earthquake?” Dodger’s voice is earnest, accompanied by her hand, offered to him across the backseat. “They don’t deserve what we have, and we don’t deserve to die. We have to make this right.”

“We have to try,” Roger agrees, and puts his hand in hers, skin touching skin for the first time in so damn long. Their eyes widen in tandem before they collapse in their seats, bodies going limp, heads lolling to the sides.

Erin watches all this in the rearview mirror, waiting until she’s sure they’ve lost consciousness before she rolls her eyes and guns the engine.

“Amateurs,” she mutters, and drives on.

Everything is darkness and everything is light. There is a flash of pink in the distance, at the contradictory edge between the two states, and Roger knows that he is, at least on some level, sharing headspace with Dodger: his memory of the colors he can’t normally distinguish from one another has been getting fuzzy as the years slipped by, the distinct shades beginning to blend together into something beautiful but indistinct.