Alison wrinkles her nose at him. “Are you kidding? We get to see a whole new game. We’re so lucky!”
Then she hugs his arm, and there’s no way Roger would even dream of disagreeing.
The attendants prep the table before vanishing, clearing the way for the next set of players. One is a white man about the age of their teacher, gawky in his corduroy pants and red bow tie. Order of play must have been decided at the beginning of the event: he sits at the black side of the board.
His opponent is a teenage girl with skin the color of bone china, hair cut in a pageboy bob that frames her face without getting in her eyes. She looks like she hasn’t seen the sun in a year. She wears what looks like the uniform of some unnamed private school: a gray pleated skirt, a white blouse, a short blue tie. Her shoes are patent leather, and squeak when she walks.
Roger is aware that he’s staring, aware that he shouldn’t be, but he can’t stop himself. He knows her. He watches Dodger—the girl he turned his back on five years ago—take her seat on the white side of the board. She hits the clock and moves her first piece, and the match begins.
He knows Alison is talking, but for the first time since he realized she was beautiful, he doesn’t hear a word she’s saying. All his attention is on the girl, her hands moving too fast to follow whenever it’s her turn. He’d be an inch or so taller than her if they were both standing (when did that happen, he thinks wildly, remembering a perspective that switched to a dizzying height when he looked at the world through her eyes; the thought is followed by another, despairing: how much did I miss), and his shoulders are broader than hers, but they still look surprisingly alike. They have the same eyes. He doesn’t know much about chess, but he knows enough to see that she’s good, she’s genuinely good; this exhibition game is for masters, and she’s playing a man more than twice her age into a corner, her pieces chasing his relentlessly across the board. She plays like her life depends on it, remorseless and cold, and her expression never changes. She never smiles, not even when she stops playing and starts winning.
Their game takes half the time of the other three. When Dodger’s opponent cedes and stands to offer his hand, she takes it, shaking with her eyes still trained on the board, like she’s looking for the mistakes she knows are there, the ones that will let her play the game faster, clearer, more flawlessly. She never looks at the audience.
Roger is suddenly aware of Alison’s hand on his elbow. He glances toward her, and sees that she’s staring at Dodger, cold venom in her eyes.
“Like the game?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says, and offers a smile, hoping it looks sincere enough to be believed, not sure what else he’s supposed to do. Dodger isn’t real. Dodger was never real. He knows that, just like he knows thinking anything else could ruin everything. “You want to teach me to play?”
And Alison is suddenly all smiles again, and everything is going to be all right.
When he glances back to the arena, Dodger is gone.
That’s for the best, all things considered. It’s time for him to get on with his life.
They had been walking for some time—long enough for Avery’s shoes to become scuffed at the toes, and for Zib to have climbed and fallen out of three different trees—when Quartz waved them to a halt. The crystal man’s formerly jocular face was set into a scowl.
“What,” he asked, “do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re walking to the Impossible City, so the Queen of Wands will send us home,” said Avery, and frowned, because that sentence should have made no sense at all.
“No, you’re not,” said Quartz. “To get to the Impossible City, you need to walk the improbable road.”
“But we are!” protested Zib.
“You’re not,” said Quartz. “Everything you’ve done has been completely plain and probable. If you want to walk the improbable road, you need to find it.”
Avery and Zib exchanged a look. This was going to be more difficult than they had expected . . .