Page 97 of Middlegame

The air in the car changes, becoming thick and electric. It’s like the charge they made between them when they summoned the earthquake, but subtly different: it’s brighter, cleaner, more aware of itself. Dodger sits up straight, eyes going wide and glassy for a count of ten. Roger isn’t even sure she’s breathing. She looks like she’s somewhere else, somewhere better.

When she blinks, crashing back into the present, he feels almost bad for her. Then she shoots a glare in his direction, poisonously mad, and his feelings shift into an odd mixture of self-pity and guilt. He didn’t know it would work. He hadn’t been sure. How can she blame him when he wasn’t sure?

“Dodge—” he begins.

She cuts him off. “Take the next exit, and turn left at the bottom of the off-ramp,” she says. “We need to leave the car.”

Erin smiles to herself and hits the gas.

They leave the car in a Fremont Park-and-Ride, stuffing bills into the machine until it produces a parking ticket good for twenty-four hours. Dodger snatches it from Erin’s hand, darting off into the maze of vehicles and returning a few minutes later with a different ticket clutched in her hand. This one is good for only eight hours. She sticks it to the windshield, glancing at Erin and saying, “Anyone who looks at this car will think it’s been here for more than half the day already. It can’t be how we got here.”

She’s not just describing physical concepts anymore, although she may not realize that: she’s in shock. They both are. This is the sort of thing that should be presented gradually, a little bit at a time, easing the subjects into their new reality. Instead, Erin has shoved them into the deep end of the pool and is counting on them to figure out how to swim.

And they are. Dodger is right about the tag, about the car. There are ways for someone like Leigh to track them to this parking lot, even after they leave the vehicle behind. The Hand of Glory guttered out somewhere on the freeway, leaving them visible to both mundane and metaphysical surveillance. They’re going to be found. But when Leigh gets here, she’ll find a trail that’s been cold for sixteen hours, because all that time has been shunted somewhere else. All that time has been moved.

Dodger doesn’t know what she’s doing. That isn’t going to stop her from doing it. Once they get moving, the children of the improbable road act on instinct, and their instincts are rarely wrong.

“All right,” says Erin. “Let’s go. We need to figure out where we are, and then we need to get wherever it is we’re going.”

They’re in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area; all of them know that, and all of them know it doesn’t matter. Where they really are is the Up-and-Under, and in the Up-and-Under, sometimes the hardest thing to find is the road that takes you home.

The woman was impossibly beautiful. She looked like sunshine on a Saturday, like chocolate cake and afternoons with no homework. She had a smile like a mother’s praise, all sugar and softness, and Zib stared at her, wanting nothing more than to throw herself into those welcoming, unfamiliar arms.

If you trust her, you’ll never get home, whispered a voice in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded so much like the Crow Girl that Zib nearly looked over her shoulder to see if she’d been followed. That was silly. The Crow Girl was with Avery, looking for a lock to fit their skeleton key. Avery couldn’t be left alone. He was delicate.

Zib had never been allowed to be delicate. From the day she was born, she had been told to be tough, to be bold, to pick herself up and dust herself off and keep running. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, to be allowed to fall down and stay fallen.

“Hello, little girl,” said the incredible woman. “What’s your name?”

“Zib,” said Zib.

“They call me the Queen of Swords. I would very much like to be your friend . . .

—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

Book VI

Up-and-Under

Forgive me, my children, but I will never know you.

—A. Deborah Baker

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

—Edgar Allen Poe

COAL DUST

Timeline: 00:01 PDT, June 17, 2016 (at last, a new day).

Midnight greets Leigh Barrow as she steps off the plane and onto Californian earth for the first time. (But not for the first time, never for the first time; there are so few first times for someone like her, a mosaic, a palimpsest of a woman; there are too many souls woven into the depths of her. Somewhere deep, a woman she once was rolls over and cries in restless slumber, remembering the scent of eucalyptus on the wind, the taste of sea air, the cries of the gulls that flew, white-winged and bright, above the California coast.)

She shivers away the feeling of the ghosts at her foundation stirring and strides toward the car sent to do her bidding. The man behind the wheel is an alchemist, a student of Reed’s art who realized long ago that his survival would be more certain if he was well outside his master’s ever-questing grasp. The other man, the one who opens the door for her without a word, is a construct, mud and frogs and clever science. Leigh spares a smile for him, poisonous and sweet.

“How long ago did you make him?” she asks, once she’s settled in the back seat, belt buckled across her waist, pistol resting in her lap. On the tarmac, the private jet which brought her here is taxiing away, heading toward the hangar where it will wait for her return.

“Six years, ma’am.”