us if the bishop had stayed lost.” She finally looks up. They really do have the same eyes. He wears glasses and she doesn’t, but their irises are the same. It’s like finding someone who shares his fingerprints. “I would have had a return address. I could’ve written you letters. Made you talk to me.”
“Dodger, we were nine.”
“Nine-year-olds are still people and can still feel pain. That’s a scientific fact.” She drops her eyes back to the chessboard. “Your move, Roger.”
So he moves, and she moves, and for a few minutes, all is silence: their focus is on the game. He takes his time with his choices, shifting the pieces in a defensive pattern he’s hoping will keep him on the board for at least a while.
Dodger doesn’t play defensively. Dodger plays so offensively that it’s almost profane, and it’s almost poetry, and there’s no contradiction in those things—no contradiction at all. She was good when she was a teenager, playing masters and grandmasters all over the country in her black and white schoolgirl outfits, but she also played like a teenager; she understood the game innately enough to be a workman. She hadn’t been possessed of the kind of experience that would make her an artist. She has that experience now. Her every move is ruthless, designed to end the game as quickly as possible. They’re not just playing different sides: they’re playing different games, him to last, her to end.
“You’re good,” he says.
“I always was,” she says.
Roger pauses in the act of reaching for a pawn, hesitates, and pulls his hand back, letting it rest in his lap. He waits.
As he’d expected, Dodger is still not built for patience: stillness is anathema to her. She can stop when she has to, can transmute physical motion into mental; anyone who’s ever seen her doing math knows she can go without moving for hours if she has the right kind of problem to occupy her mind. But this is not a problem she can solve. This is an interaction, one person answering the other, and he is refusing to give her the satisfaction of progress.
Seconds tick by, forming minutes, until she can’t take it anymore. Her head comes up, her eyes narrowing. Blood is rising in her cheeks, and for the first time since their game began, she is present: she is engaged. “I know you’re not this bad,” she says. “Move your piece.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then forfeit, and call the game in my favor.”
“What if I don’t want to do that either?” Roger shows her his empty hands before letting them rest on the table. “I want to talk to you. I came here because I wanted to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
“I tried that. You didn’t answer me. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, Dodger. I saved your life. You owe me at least a conversation.”
Dodger blinks, the blood draining out of her face a drop at a time, until she’s as pale as ever, a wax figure of a mathematician. Then, with a shake of her head, she laughs. “Really?” she asks, syllables distorted by her amusement but comprehensible for all of that. “That’s what you’re going to go with? ‘I saved your life’? I didn’t ask you to, Roger. I went out of my way to make sure I’d be able to go down to the gully and do what needed to be done while you weren’t looking. You were never supposed to know.”
“If you hadn’t been so damn determined to shut me out, you’d be asking yourself how I knew.” Roger glares. He’s been trying to keep himself from getting angry, but there’s only so much he can take before enough is enough. “Quantum entanglement, remember? That whole ‘I say it and you hear it on the other side of the country’ gig? Turns out it’s good for more than just giving you the answers on a pop quiz.”
Dodger frowns at him. Unlike her smiles, her frowns engage her whole mouth, making her look utterly perplexed. “What do you mean? You felt me cut myself? You never felt anything I did to myself before.”
(Thank God for that. Both of them had been terrified, after they restored contact, that the other would somehow pick up on certain things. Certain personal things. Roger liked girls, but the idea of a girl—any girl, but especially this girl—coming along for the ride when he was alone under the covers was enough to darken even the teenage