Page 96 of Middlegame

“So am I, but you seem awfully eager to dismiss everything I’m saying, even though it answers the questions you’ve been asking your entire life,” says Erin. “Baker was an alchemist. Reed follows her teachings, in a twisted way. You’re the product of an alchemist’s desire to control reality, and while I realize this is a lot to dump on you all at once, all you have to do is think about what I’m saying and you’ll understand how true it is. It’s a single equation that explains your entire life. If you don’t want to accept it, there’s not much I can do for you.”

Dodger stares at her. Erin glares back.

Dodger is the first to look away.

“If we’re going to fight them—and we’re going to fight them; we don’t have a choice, unless the two of you want to roll over, show your bellies, and die the sort of death I wouldn’t wish on a dog—we need to figure out whether we’re in Hyacinth or Crocus. There isn’t time to get to one of the stable countries, and the Impossible City is out of the question.”

“Why?” asks Roger.

The look Erin gives him is one he remembers all too well from his childhood, when adults accustomed to dealing with a smart kid would be disappointed by his occasional flashes of childish ignorance, like the word “prodigy” was supposed to have been somehow accompanied by a direct download of the encyclopedia into his brain. His cheeks flare with the ghosts of old embarrassments.

“The Impossible City is Reed’s territory, even if he’s never been inside; he controls the walls,” she says, words slow and careful. “We’re not ready to take it yet. Maybe we never will be. They say you’re going to manifest if you’re not stopped, and I’m banking on that, but that doesn’t mean I know what it means. No one does. Maybe you’ll just become too troublesome to kill, without actually having the power it would take to stop the greatest alchemist of his age. You could be the new Stormcrows, living in exile while you wait for the King of Cups to weaken enough for you to take him down. There’s only one way to find out, so if we could stop fucking around and get moving, I’d be awfully grateful.”

“What do we have to do?” asks Roger. He can see that Dodger will be a while in coping with this information. It’s all words, all piled on top of each other: there’s no clear equation for her to complete. This is on him.

Erin shakes her head. “We need to hide. We need to figure out where we’re going. We need to get there. You need to manifest, and you need to do it fast.”

“You keep saying that but not saying what it means. What do you want us to do?”

“I think the closest you’ve come to manifestation was the earthquake. God, the earthquake.” Erin looks wistful as she focuses on Roger, like she’s thinking about good cake or better sex. “I knew it was coming because it’s happened before. There was so much scar tissue around that moment that the air was like molasses. If you’d kept going, if you’d continued to tell her what to do and she’d continued to feed back the numbers . . . you could have manifested right then and there. I still don’t know why you never do.”

“You can feel the timeline changes?” Dodger shoves her way back into the conversation—literally. She plants one hand on Roger’s chest, pushing him aside to get closer to Erin. “How? Why? I can’t feel them.”

Roger says nothing. He’s too busy staring at the world around him, at the colors that intensified by a factor of ten as soon as she touched him. So many words make sense when things look like this. Color is a kind of magic. He hopes people who have it understand that, and don’t take it for granted.

“Of course not. You cause them.” Erin looks levelly at Dodger. “Every time the timeline has changed, it’s been because your brother told you to make the old world go away. You’re a thermonuclear device on two legs. You’re the flash flood that sweeps people into the Up-and-Under. But him? He’s your trigger. You can’t do most of the things you’re capable of without someone to set you off.”

Dodger blinks, taken aback. “That’s a little misogynistic.”

“Reed didn’t pick which of you got which half of the Doctrine: you did that yourselves, while you were incubating. Don’t ask me how fetuses pick anything. You were little science projects with the same genes, only one chromosome apart, and you decided how those genes would manifest. Firstborn gets language, second gets math. Second also gets all the recessives turned on, because the math kids are the expendable ones: they get to be targets all their lives. As long as there’s breath in a math kid’s body, the language kids can order them to reset the timeline to a point before shit got bad. Of the pairs I know of, it was split about fifty-fifty which kid got language and which got math.” Erin never met any of the other incarnate Doctrines: they were given into the care of other handlers, when they were allowed outside the confines of the lab in the first place. She’s grateful for that, in an abstract sort of way. Just this once, in her entire life, she’s pulled the good card. She got the pair who might make it out alive.

“I think I’ve seen this movie,” says Roger. “I make a lousy Aladdin.”

“Oh, you’ve got your share of party tricks. When you’re fully manifest, no one will be able to go against you. If you ask for something, you’ll get it. You could rule the world if you wanted to. That’s part of why it was so important that I stay with you, guide you toward academia, let you embrace your love of dead languages and not being an asshole. I didn’t switch sides just to replace the old bastard with a new bastard.”

Both of them are gaping at her now.

“I know this is a lot.”

“You think?” demands Dodger.

“I know it’s hard to take in.”

Roger snorts.

“But we’re out of time. We need to hide, and we need to figure out our next move, and the two of you need to decide whether you’re going to believe me, or whether you’re going to die. Choose, because you’re not getting a third option.”

Roger and Dodger exchange a look. It’s still uneasy, the space they make between them, packed with the ghosts of seven years and the shaking of the ground beneath their feet. Dodger finally appears to realize that she’s touching him; she yelps and pulls away, back to her half of the back seat. Some wounds don’t heal in an instant. Some wounds don’t heal at all.

Erin hopes this one isn’t that kind of wound. If it is, they’re all doomed. She twists back around, puts the car back into gear, and pulls off the shoulder. “Tell me where to go.”

“Uh,” says Dodger. “Left?”

“Roger? Activate her.” This is it: this is the real test of how much attention they’ve been paying, how willing they are to follow her under the undertow and into the Up-and-Under. She’s no Niamh, no daughter of the sea, but she’s the best guide they’re going to get, and she’s betting more than they can know on what’s about to happen.

“Don’t you dare,” says Dodger.

“I’m sorry,” says Roger. He sounds like he genuinely means it, which makes it worse, somehow, when he continues: “Dodger, tell us where to go.”