like you’re questioning me, Leigh. You know what happens when you question me.”
Leigh scowls, radiating frustration. “These are children, Reed. Messy. Unpredictable. They need to be brought to heel.” She was never a child. The individual women who are her foundations were, but their childhoods are the filmy memories of ghosts, and carry little weight with the creature they have been combined to become. “You want to have sway over my children. Why can’t I have some input on yours?”
“You have only what I allow you to have, Leigh. No more and no less.” Reed’s voice is cool. “Those children were never yours in anything but name.”
“I—” Leigh takes a step back. She recognizes danger when she blunders into it. “My mistake. I misspoke.”
“Good girl.” He smiles, quick as a knife. “As to my cuckoos: right now, they’re too real. We need them to cross the border into fiction. We need them to become more than they are. Only then will they find the improbable road and lead us to the Impossible City. Don’t you want to go to the Impossible City?”
Leigh looks hurt. “Of course I do.”
“The Impossible City will only become manifest if we restore Baker’s definitions,” says Reed. His tone is patient. His eyes are not. “She told this country what to be in alchemical terms when there was no one strong enough to argue with her, and she roused the whole damn Council against her. Baum, Lovecraft, Twain, they broke themselves against the tide to rewrite her definitions, but they did it. We can’t go against that much belief. The world won’t change unless we have a bigger lever.”
“We could do this without—”
“No.” The word is a wall. She runs against it and can go no further. Reed walks toward her. “We can’t do this without the Impossible City. It is the key. We take it, we make it our own, or we take the country knowing there’s a weakness in our defenses the size of a canyon. We must hold the City, or all this is for naught, and to take the City, we must change the rules. We need the Doctrine. Everything else we’ve done . . . we can be rich, we can be powerful, we can be immortal, but without the Impossible City, we can never be gods. Don’t you want to be a god?”
Leigh Barrow—perhaps the last person in creation who should have a divinity’s power, who should be allowed to set reality’s rules—sighs. “Yes.”
“Then leave them. Trust me.”
“I need to hurt something.”
Reed cocks his head. “Then hurt something.”
Leigh smiles.
CHECKMATE
Timeline: 16:35 EST, June 19, 2000 (five years in isolation).
It was supposed to be a big deal when the Academic Decathlon team got tickets to watch a bunch of grandmasters play chess. It was presented like a real treat, a sporting event for smart people, and skipping it was out of the question. Roger doesn’t even like chess—too many numbers, too much focus on pattern-recognition—but he likes his teammates, and he really likes Alison O’Neil, who does science and plays chess and sometimes smiles at him out of one corner of her mouth with her eyes dipped low, like she has a secret. Alison has been excited about the exhibition since their advisor said they might get to go, and if Alison’s excited about it, he supposes he can find a little enthusiasm.
Roger Middleton is fourteen years old—will be in two weeks, anyway, and that’s basically the same thing—and sometime in the past eighteen months, girls have changed. Or maybe he’s changed. He knows the words, puberty, hormones, metamorphosis, but the words can’t contain the raw excitement he feels when Alison touches the back of his hand, or when he catches the scent of her shampoo. Everything is changing. He guesses he’s okay with that.
Their seats are near the front, in an area set aside for local middle school and high school geniuses who might be inspired by watching a bunch of people push pieces around a chessboard for a couple of hours. It’s a circular arena, like a football stadium but smaller, and the organizers have wisely put up four matches at a time, each with their own sector of the arena and their own announcers to explain the game. A game is wrapping up as they sit, an older Chinese man against a younger Latino boy. The man moves a piece. The announcer calls “checkmate,” and the two shake hands before they vacate, leaving their board to be reset by