Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

She’s not going to bleed for long. She doesn’t, no pun intended, have it in her.

Dinosaurs are okay, but in the grand scheme of things, she wears the shirt in honor of Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional mathematician slash rock star and focus of more than a few confusing teenage dreams.

All she had to do was rotate the numbers until they slotted together the way she wanted them to. It’s not like it was hard.)

We’ve been here before, he thinks, almost deliriously, and then: We got it wrong.

Three creations of terrible alchemy sit crammed into a booth in the all-night Denny’s, pressed against the red vinyl seats, looking at their menus.