Page 92 of Middlegame

“Roger?” Her voice is inside and outside his head at the same time, coming from far away and from so close that it’s as much a part of him as his own skin. It’s unnerving. It’s so welcome that it’s almost like a physical ache, a cruel reminder of how alone he’s been these last seven years, even with Erin by his side.

“I’m here,” he says.

“But where’s ‘here’?” Dodger sounds frustrated. “What happened? All I did was touch you—”

“After seven years of not touching me, when we were close enough to whatever it means to manifest that we nearly leveled Berkeley,” he says. It’s amazing how reasonable he can sound when he has someone else to worry about. Maybe that’s the real reason there had to be two of them. So he’d always have someone else to worry about, and couldn’t just run rampant, revising the world to his liking. “I think this is the Doctrine trying to force us back together.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know. How would I? This is as new to me as it is to you.”

“Couldn’t we be the living proof of Euler’s identity? That seems a lot less dangerous.”

“What’s Euler’s identity?”

“It’s basically the prettiest equation in the world. It’s the Helen of Troy of mathematical ideals.” She sounds like she’s getting closer as she speaks, like the math is drawing her to him. He doesn’t interrupt, and she continues, almost dreamily, “It contains three of the basic arithmetic functions, it links five mathematical constants . . .”

He turns and there she is, standing behind him on this endless black-and-white plane. She blinks, and pink and red lines flare around the edge of the horizon. Wherever they are, they’re sharing visual inputs. He can see the color of her hair, the shadings of the freckles on her cheeks, and when she smiles, he sees how pale she is. Nervousness has stolen much of her color, and even its absence is a revelation to him now. He smiles back, matching her anxiety with his own.

“See, I always knew we’d figure out how to find each other again,” he says.

“But is it safe? A lot of people died last time, Roger. No matter what some weirdo mad scientist built us to be, we can’t bring those people back. We can’t change what we’ve done.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.”

Dodger is quiet for a moment. Then, finally, she says, “Posit a timeline in flux.”

“Done.”

“If we can modify our pasts to change our futures, who’s to say we haven’t been doing it all along? That everything that’s happened, good or bad, hasn’t been changed because changing it would result in an even worse overall situation?” She catches her lower lip between her teeth, worries it for a moment, and finally says, “Erin says if either one of us dies, the other dies too.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t call from the future and tell me not to kill myself. I didn’t call from the future and tell me it was going to be okay, we were going to wind up in the same place for grad school, and you wouldn’t be better off without me. What if . . . that’s because we needed to know she was telling the truth? So neither of us would say ‘forget this, you’re on your own’ and refuse to go? We’re taking a lot on faith, but we’re taking it partially because it matches what we already know. She isn’t contradicting the existing numbers, she’s adding to them by putting the equations we have into context. Conservatism bias writ large.”

Roger frowns. “What’s worse than that quake, Dodge? We killed so many people because we didn’t know what we were doing. What could possibly be so bad that letting the quake stand is necessary?”

“Letting the sort of people who’d build biological weapons and put them out into the world to experiment with their powers have control of the fully manifest Doctrine of Ethos,” says Dodger, and there’s sudden steel in her tone, like she’s figuring out the shape of the problem one function at a time. “According to Erin, we’ll be stronger when we’re manifest. Earthquakes will be easy. But we didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean to hurt those people. What happens if someone who doesn’t care that much gets that sort of power? Anyone who would make us is not someone who can be trusted. The earthquake tells us that. The earthquake says ‘this is horrible, now manifest, because otherwise, something even worse is going to happen.’”

Roger is silent. Dodger stays where she is, waiting. She’s the cold one: she’s the one who can reduce everything to numbers, weighing lives now against lives later. It’s not a part of herself that she’s proud of or has ever truly embraced. Here, now, it’s the most important thing she can be.

“Isn’t there a way we could make it not happen?” he asks finally.

“I think we have to see the whole equation before we can decide,” she says. “We’re not there yet. We’re in the middle of the problem. If we get to the end, if we manifest, maybe we can revise more than we can right now.”

And maybe they can’t. She doesn’t say that part, but Roger hears it anyway: it’s implicit in the pause between her sentences, sculpted out of silence and hesitation. He doesn’t want to hear it. The unspoken pieces of language are sometimes the most painful.

“How many people have to die for us?” he asks. “How can we pretend to be important enough to be worth that?”

“How many more would die if we took ourselves out of the equation and let someone else have this sort of power?” she counters. “I know you’re a good person. I hope I’m a good person. We won’t break things for fun, or because someone tells us to. We’re not perfect. We’re the best choice I can see.”

Roger sighs. It only takes one step to close the distance between them, one step before his arms are around her and his face is against her shoulder. She holds him tight, and they are matched in both placement and position, two halves of the same platonically ideal whole. They should never have been separated; they had to be apart, or they would never have been able to become individuals, would never have learnt how to span the missing places in their own souls.

“All right,” says Roger. “We’ll do it.”

They continue holding each other, eyes closed, until the shared mindscape fades away, and they are only two bodies in the back of a car, tangled together like a thorn briar, impossible to separate, dangerous to touch.

Erin, in the front seat, smiles and keeps on driving.