Page 94 of Middlegame

Timeline: 20:53 PDT, June 16, 2016 (the unending day).

Roger wakes first. For a horrifying moment, he doesn’t know who he is. His body fits wrong. The moment passes, and then he doesn’t know where he is. There’s a woman in his arms, too tall and lanky to be Erin, who has always been a compact, comforting weight when she curls against him. He realizes the light is coming from all around him as the landscape slides by outside the car windows, and that the woman clinging to his side has red hair. Dodger.

He pauses. Blinks. And in a slightly strangled voice, asks, “Why am I seeing colors?”

“You are? That’s good news.” Erin doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s good news. Erin sounds grim, like the world has been canceled while she drove. “How many colors you don’t normally see are you seeing right now?”

“Red. Um. Purple, pink . . .” Roger swings his head wildly around, looking at everything. “Lots. All? Lots.” They’re faded around the edges, like whatever’s allowing him to see them isn’t fully integrated with his senses yet. “What’s going on?”

“You’re starting to re-entangle, is what’s going on. See if you can get Dodger off you. Don’t push her out of the car, just stop touching her.”

“What?”

“She’s touching you. See if you can make her stop.” Erin’s gaze flicks to the rearview mirror, regarding him with black amusement. “You’re good at letting go. Do it again.”

Roger gapes at her, the woman he thought he loved, the woman he thought loved him. Then, with exquisite care, he turns to the sister he hasn’t seen in years and begins prying her off his arm.

It’s hard. Dodger has an incredibly strong grip for someone who’s never done a day’s physical labor, and he doesn’t want to wake her; he can’t shake her or pull for fear that it will put her over the edge and open her eyes. He’s not ready for that. When he was running from a burning home and into her presence, everything was moving too fast for him to stop and consider what he was doing. Now he’s here, and she’s here, and he doesn’t know how to talk to her. If she wakes up, he’ll have to figure it out. The awkwardness between them will pass—if nothing else, Erin’s still driving like she expects to be attacked at any moment, and somewhere between her producing Smita’s severed, mummified hand and her setting the house on fire, he’s stopped doubting her—but right now, awkwardness still reigns.

Finally, he manages to get untangled from Dodger’s grasp. The new colors fade out of the world. Not all at once: no switch has been flipped, no filter has been removed. They just . . . fade, like someone is adjusting the balance on reality.

“The red’s gone,” he says, resisting the urge to lean over and take Dodger’s hand, to see if the color comes back. Everything seems gray without it, sapped of meaning and potency. He’s been without color for most of his life, and now it feels like he can’t live without it for another moment.

“That’s because you’re not fully manifest. When you are, you probably won’t even need to be touching to see things the way she does—or vice versa. She’ll get depth perception, you’ll get color, it’ll be a wonderland for everybody.” Erin’s voice has gone bitter.

“Erin? What’s wrong?”

She laughs brutally. “Everything. You get her back, okay? Be grateful for that. My other half is gone forever, and what he gave me, he took with him when he went.”

“What . . .”

“I’m the living manifestation of Order, Roger. I see chaos everywhere I look. If it’s out of place, if it doesn’t belong, that’s all I can see. I live in a world that can never be harmonious, because the only person who could describe actual order to me is gone.” Erin’s fingers drum a hard staccato on the steering wheel. “Wake her up. We need to figure out our next move, and she’s a part of that.”

“Why—”

“Just do it. We don’t have much time.”

He could argue. He could try to make her explain. But she’d have to explain again after Dodger was awake, and he doesn’t want to talk to her without his sister to act as a buffer between them. Part of him still insists on looking at her as the woman he’s loved for the last seven years. No amount of telling himself it was never real is going to make the adjustment any faster.

He’ll probably hate her when this is over. He wishes the thought weren’t such a relief.

He turns to Dodger, putting a hand on her shoulder (red rushes back into the world, red; he can’t resist stealing a quick glance at Erin, seeing the strawberry color of her hair for the first time in years, and wishing he didn’t find it quite so beautiful) and shaking gently.

“Hey,” he says. “Dodge. Wake up. You’ve been asleep long enough.”

She makes a small mumbling noise and slaps at his hand.

Roger smiles. So much has changed, about both of them. After seven years, he figures it will take a while before he feels like he knows her. But this, at least, has stayed the same. On the rare occasions when she slows down enough for sleep to catch her, she hates waking up. He shakes again.

“Wake up,” he says. “We need to let my terrifying ex-girlfriend tell us how we’re supposed to manifest a primal force of reality before asshole alchemists set us the fuck on fire.”

As a sentence, it shouldn’t make any sense. It does, though: he’s proud of that.

Dodger opens her eyes. “What,” she says flatly.

“There you are!” He shouldn’t be smiling. This isn’t the situation for smiling. He can’t help himself, because she’s awake, she’s here, and they’re talking again. They’re together again. They can figure everything out from here. “Erin, she’s awake.”

“Fine and dandy,” says Erin. She looks at the rearview mirror, studying the cuckoos in her backseat. Dodger is groggy and disoriented; Roger is smiling like his entire world hasn’t just been turned on its head. She suspects that’s a sign of shock. None of this is real for him yet. “Dodger, where are we going?”