Page 95 of Middlegame

“What?”

“We’re on the improbable road, and you’re the one with the head full of numbers and the compass where your heart ought to be. Where are we going? If you give me directions, I’ll follow them.”

Roger sits up straighter, suddenly remembering a long-ago night in the fog. One second it’s not there; the next it is, flooding his mind in living color. “You called me Jack Daw.”

“So you remember now. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I guess we’re going to live with it either way. I called you Jackdaw because that’s what you are, and Jack Daw because that’s who you are, or who you’ll become. She”—a nod toward Dodger in the mirror—“is a Crow Girl, but she can mature into a Rook if you help her. If the Page of Frozen Waters isn’t already on her way here, she will be soon.”

“What’s with all the Up-and-Under imagery?” asks Dodger. “We’re not six. You don’t need to turn things into a children’s book.”

“Ah, but see, the Up-and-Under was never about the children. It was always about the symbols, and you both got them, all the way down to your bones. Bones the Page would very much like to get her hands on, by the way. She’ll fold them into herself without a moment’s hesitation, and come away even harder to destroy.” Erin pulls the car onto the shoulder of the freeway, putting on her hazard lights before she twists to face them. “You don’t want to be out in the open when she gets here, kids. She doesn’t play fair.”

Dodger looks at her dubiously as she wipes her eyes, like the motion could somehow chase the fog of sleep away. Then she stops, blinking at her hands. Slowly, she brings them closer to her face before pulling them farther away. “Whoa.”

“Depth perception: gotta love it,” says Erin. “Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist of her age.”

Dodger lowers her hands. “What,” she says. There’s no question there: the word lacks emphasis, intonation, anything but a flat drop into the world.

“She brewed miracles. She found ways to use electricity and modern methods to speed the production of gold and alkahest—she even perfected the elixir of life. She thought alchemy would bring about a paradise on earth, a world where no one would need to work, or age, or die. Everything about life would be a choice, not a predestination. A remarkable amount of her work lapsed into animism, which she thought was a vital part of the alchemical art, one that had been ignored for too long. She pointed to the existence of natural incarnate forces—Winter, Summer, the Sun and Moon, all those notable assholes—as proof that anything could be embodied, if the alchemist working the process wanted it badly enough.”

“Natural incarnate forces?” asks Roger.

“What,” says Dodger again, still flat, still not asking any questions: she’s protesting something unfair and untrue, and her eyes on Erin are like knives, utterly unwilling to forgive.

Erin sighs. “We don’t have time for this. I need directions.”

“I’m not giving them to you until you start making sense,” snaps Dodger.

“Roger, tell her to give me the directions.” Erin switches her attention to him. “This isn’t the time for childish tantrums.”

“Sounds like you’re about to have one.” Roger folds his arms. “Keep going.”

This time, Erin’s sigh is deeply aggravated. “Baker spent some time trying to bring other American alchemists around to her way of thinking. She wanted them to stop warring with each other and guarding their secrets; she thought if they worked together, they’d be able to gain more ground and uncover more of the secrets of the universe. They saw this as a bid for power, since she was—at the time—the only one of them to have harnessed electricity to her whims. They were sexists and traditionalists, and they joined ranks against her. They began poaching or assassinating her students, to keep her ways of thinking from gaining too much credence with the masses. In the end, desperate, she began encoding her teachings in fiction, hiding them in plain sight.”

“The Up-and-Under books are secretly alchemy primers?” asks Dodger.

Erin nods. “They were intended to show the enlightened mind the way to expand its reach and grasp. The Oz books are similar. Baum was trying to suppress Baker with his own alchemical wonderland. He succeeded—his readership was wider—but he also failed.”

Dodger stares at her for a moment before reaching for the handle on her door. “Okay, that’s it,” she says. “I’m out. If you’ll both excuse me, I need to go explain to my insurance adjusters how my house spontaneously caught fire, and why it wasn’t arson.”

“James Reed was Baker’s final creation and only surviving apprentice. James Reed is, in an alchemical sense, your father. He used his own blood and Asphodel’s bones and the body of a living woman, and he crafted you to be his tools in the world to come.”

Dodger stops mid-reach.

“Reed killed his maker, but not before she finished her masterpiece. All the rules of alchemy, all the trials of the student, the process of purification and reconstitution of the universe into whatever form you chose, she preserved them in her books. And in her notes, of course. All the things she hadn’t had time to encode. Reed took those notes and continued where his master had left off. But where Baker dreamt of a world that would belong to all—an Up-and-Under, a paradise, a fairy country where no one would grow old, or get sick, or die—Reed dreamt of power. Of control. That’s why he’s been working for so long to force the Doctrine into flesh. It’s such a big concept, such a big part of the universe, that it didn’t want to come quietly. It didn’t want to come at all. He needed help. He recruited other alchemists, some through flattery, some through force. He let them work at embodying lesser ideals, to give him more and more control over the world. He’s killed and lied and stolen. You’re not the first of your flesh. He’s set Jackdaws and Crow Girls on this road before, let them get almost as far as you have, and then he’s had them killed, for one reason or another. They’ve all been imperfect. You’re imperfect. You entangled too early, and you didn’t develop exactly along the lines he had set for you. He wants you dead. He’s said so, in as many words, because your successors are ready to take the iron shoes and rainbow ribbons and wish you right the fuck out of the Up-and-Under. I don’t know how many ways I can say this. You leave, you die. You stay with me, you listen, maybe you live. Probably not. I don’t think the odds are ever going to be in our favor. But at least with me, you get a maybe.”

“What does any of this have to do with the Up-and-Under?” asks Roger.

Erin groans. “Oh, God, I should have found a way to start teaching you this crap years ago. Look: when Baker created the Up-and-Under, she split it into four countries, representing the four stages of the alchemical path—novice, apprentice, journeyman, and master. Hyacinth, Meadowsweet, Aster, and Crocus. More accurately, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. They match the four Humors that control the body, and the four Temperaments that determine everything we do. For a while, this whole damn country matched her map, because she had that much power. She embodied part of the Doctrine in herself through sheer sympathy with its existence, and she got to set the definitions. When her rivals attacked her, that embodiment was the first thing they sought to undermine. They couldn’t undo it completely, not with the number of children who read and believed in her stories, but they were able to break some of the fundamental laws she’d tried to impose on the world. That’s where Baum came in. His fictional countries changed the orientations. Reversed them, cast them into alchemical flux and moved them into sympathy with Oz. The alignments have been switching uncontrollably ever since.”

“Meaning what?” asks Roger.

“Meaning we don’t know whether we’re currently in the master’s territory of Fire and the Choleric, or the novice’s territory of Water and the Phlegmatic. And that makes all the difference in the goddamn world if we’re trying to beat a hundred-year-old alchemist at his own game!” Erin’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes are overly bright.

Roger and Dodger stare at her, united in their dismay. Finally, Dodger asks, “Why should we believe you?”

“Aren’t you the one who said she talked to her own past?” counters Erin. “You should believe me because if I’m lying, you’re losing your mind. That’s a genuine concern of yours, isn’t it? Little number girl who’s never been able to figure out how humans work, who hears the voice of her brother in her head when she’s scared or lonely. Are you even sure he exists? Maybe he’s something you made up.”

For the first time, Dodger looks alarmed. “Of course he’s real. He’s right here.”