“There’s plenty I could do to stop you,” the darkness warned, pulling the blade back. “This is a compromise. A peace offering. Sign the contract and forget all about St. Pommeroy’s. With your clever brain, you can get into any private school you’d like. Just not St. Pommeroy’s.”
Two iron hands drifted out of the darkness. One unzipped her backpack and found the contract while the other searched through the pens on her desk. A third blob of metal flew across the room and made a little table over her lap, like it was serving her breakfast in bed.
Zanna touched her throat where the blade had stuck, and her fingers came away with a dot of blood. The iron hands spread out the contract on her lap table and offered her the pen. Still panting a little from her near-asphyxiation, she lifted her eyes to the other side of the room. “Why are you doing this?”
There was no answer from the darkness. Then, in a voice that almost sounded hurt: “Just sign.”
Zanna took the pen. There wasn’t anything else she could do. The iron hands hovered near her, silently threatening. The pen jabbed her thumb, and at the top of the contract, she printed her name in that eerie red ink. I, Zanna Mayfield, decline my acceptance to St. Pommeroy’s. Then her eyes dropped to the bottom and the dotted line, and she thought of what it had felt like without air pressure—and what it had felt like with a blade at her throat.
She raised the pen and threw it into the darkness.
A shield of iron bloomed out of nowhere, and the pen dinged harmlessly off it. But Zanna had already jumped for her nightstand, her fingers closing around the key Dr. Fitzie had sent her. With a yelp and a desperate hope that this would work, she thrust the key toward the darkness and unlocked the illusion.
It was instantaneous. The world shook, as if it were clearing its head, and then everything returned in bright, sharp focus. Where the darkness had been now stood a bewildered and wide-eyed woman. She had been pretty once, but something in the past had twisted up and crumpled and stomped on her beauty. Wild black hair drifted around her scarred face, giving the impression that she had just stepped out of a hurricane. Her eyes were watery blue and huge like a blind cave animal. One single word escaped her mouth—“How?”—and then she was gone in a rush. Zanna’s wall jumped out of the way, and a blast of cold air rocked through the bedroom as the woman disappeared into the night. All that was left was a snap as the wall closed up again, as unbroken as a pool of water.
Zanna screamed as something touched her foot, but it was just the pen rolling across the floor. Relieved, she picked it up and put it back on her desk. There was no sign of the woman out the window, but Zanna hadn’t really expected anything else. She remembered how easily Dr. Mumble had disappeared that afternoon.
Noisy feet pounded down the hallway, and Zanna spun around, readying the key again in preparation for the woman’s second attack. But it was Pops who burst into her bedroom, pajama-clad with bony fists raised in alarm. When he saw she was alone and standing at the window, he lowered his arms. “Are you all right? I heard you scream.”
“It’s just nightmares,” she said, trying to steady her breathing. “I’m fine.”
“I thought—” He couldn’t seem to put his thoughts into words. “After what happened today—”
She crossed the room and let him pull her close. “I’m fine, really,” she said after a hushed moment. “I’m just going to read for a bit.”
“If you say so.” He paused in the doorway. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Sure.”
She slumped on the edge of her bed, listening to his shuffling footsteps return to his bedroom. The contract had been blown into a corner with other papers from her desk. She wandered over and picked it up, rereading it while fidgeting absently with the iron key until all the adrenaline finally left her. Even then, it took a long time to fall asleep.
When the alarm went off, her head throbbed. With a groan that sounded more like it came from her Pops than a teenage girl, she got to her feet and slunk to the bathroom. She had almost convinced herself that the encounter last night was nothing more than a particularly vivid dream until she looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the dried blood on her neck. She touched it, as if somehow it could be another one of those illusions, and then furiously washed it away.
“How’s my scamper doing this morning?” Pops asked when she came into the kitchen.
Zanna just grunted in reply and plopped down at the table with her cereal. She couldn’t get the words of the strange woman out of her head—I wanted to save you from St. Pommeroy’s—as if she were doing Zanna a favor. She dressed and slipped the iron key into an outside pocket of her backpack, where she could easily reach it if the need arose again.
Pops had made her lunch again. “This is a one-time deal,” he said, handing her the brown paper bag.
“A one-time deal,” she repeated, and for the first time that morning, she cracked a smile. Pops saw it and pinched at her cheek, like he knew she hated.
“Atta girl,” he said. “Be safe now. I can’t take any more worrying phone calls at my age.”
The morning was cold with September mist, and Zanna crossed her arms tight to her body in an attempt to keep warm. At the end of the road, the public school bus came and went. She took the key from its pocket and twisted it compulsively to reassure herself that the world was still real.
In the time it took her to twist the key one way and then the other, the bus for St. Pommeroy’s appeared right in front of her.
It was so sudden that Zanna jumped back with a shriek. One second the street had been empty, and the next the bus had materialized with a screech of tires and a blast of heat. Unlike the one that had come for her yesterday, this bus looked brand-new. It was made out of copper and steel and gold that caught all the rich light of the sunrise. There was no door she could see, but then part of the side opened up like an alien spacecraft, and a set of steps unfolded at her feet.
A soft, doughy man with an equally soft and doughy cap on his head sat in the driver’s seat. “Zanna Mayfield?”
She didn’t move. Grimly, cautiously, she lifted her iron key and turned it. The world buzzed and refocused. But the bus remained as it was.
“It’s okay.” The driver grinned and beckoned her aboard. “You’re in the right place.”
As if she were stepping onto thin ice, Zanna climbed the stairs into the bus. But when she saw the inside, her mouth dropped. It was like she had stepped into the royal train car of the Orient Express. All the seats sported thick, deep golden cushions with accents of stunning purple. Little cubes of silver metal, no bigger than sets of dice, scurried around the floor, scrubbing up the dirt and debris passengers had trekked in. Zanna fumbled for her key to make absolutely sure it wasn’t an illusion.
“Don’t you worry,” the driver said as the stairs seamlessly folded themselves back up. “They told me about what happened yesterday. My name’s Mr. Gunney, by the way.”
He sat in front of the strangest dashboard Zanna had ever seen. It looked more like something belonging to an old church organ than a high school bus. Dozens of stoppers and plugs and buttons and levers curved around him, most of them unmarked. On a screen in the center was a map of her neighborhood, with a point of light holding steady outside her house.
“Take your seat, please,” he said. “And if you wouldn’t mind, keep that Weierstrass to yourself. Wouldn’t want to get picked up on radar, now, would we?”
“A what?”
“A Why-er-strass,” Mr. Gunney pronounced, pointing to the iron key. “Fancy thing for a freshman to be toting around.”
She hugged the key protectively. “Dr. Fitzie sent it to me.”
“She did? Heh. Starting early.” Mr. Gunney chuckled at some joke Zanna didn’t understand. “Well, it’s messing with my radio waves. Not a problem now, but once we’re underway, I’m going to need them. Unless you want t
o get shot down by the government for being a UFO.”
“Oh,” Zanna said, looking down at the iron key. “I didn’t know. I don’t even know what it really does.”
“You feel that buzz when you turn it?” he asked, drawing out the last letters of buzz. “A Weierstrass changes the area around it to something like trying to watch a movie frame by frame, instead of letting the film run. What we call nondifferential. I can work around it, but it’s mighty difficult, and this here’s only my second cup of coffee.” He raised a chunky red mug that curled steam into the air.
“Sorry,” Zanna muttered.
“It’s no problem!” Mr. Gunney said. “Just don’t turn your key while we’re in the air, and everything’ll be right as rain.”
A lump formed in her throat. “In the air?”
“Only way to travel!” Mr. Gunney shooed her farther into the bus. “Places to go! People to see! Hup hup!”
“I—” Her breakfast moved around restlessly. She must have looked very green, for Mr. Gunney softened his tone, lowering his voice so the rest of the students couldn’t hear him.
“Don’t you worry. I’ve been flying this old girl for over twenty years now. You won’t even feel a bump.”
Zanna wanted to tell him that she had gotten sick on airplanes flying in the middle of a dead calm and doubted his bus would be any different, but instead she kicked her fear until it stopped complaining. None of this puzzle would be solved—why the strange woman had warned her away from St. Pommeroy’s, how the impossible things she had seen yesterday worked, and what Dr. Mumble might have meant by her “abilities”—if she stayed here on Three Pines Drive. She had to see for herself. She could brave nausea for that.
In an effort to distract herself, she turned over the events of last night. Should she go to the police? A scene formed in her mind of being dragged out of the local precinct, howling that a strange, evil woman who could bend iron and light had visited her in the night and told her that she couldn’t go to school. Perhaps she should tell someone who was more apt to believe her. Dr. Mumble? Her other professors? Was there a police station at St. Pommeroy’s?
“Excuse me? Are you okay?”
A prim girl had slipped into the seat next to Zanna while she had been deep in thought. Silky black hair that curled at the tips spilled out from beneath her velvet bonnet. Her dark skin smelled of carefully applied perfume. The thick-rimmed glasses on her button nose were black and more for fashion than any sort of vision problem. Everything about her seemed to have been freshly unwrapped. “I have some dimenhydrinate, if you’d like it.”
Zanna eyed her warily. “Some what?”
“Dimenhydrinate,” the girl repeated, her tongue clicking on every syllable of the chemical compound. She touched a button on the seatback in front of them, and a lap table folded out. Carefully, she searched through her backpack, sorting her books and notes into neat piles and lining up the pencils until she found a little clutch that rattled with medicine. “I take it for seasickness. But airsickness is pretty much the same, you know.”
Zanna looked over the contents of the girl’s backpack and tried not to be envious. Everything from the textbooks to the lunch tin to the pencils was brand-new and pristine. It was a far cry from her own supplies, which had been trampled and kicked around yesterday. “Is it that obvious?”
“Cold sweat. Dilated pupils, no doubt caused by dizziness. Sure signs of motion sickness,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “Plus, it’s been statistically proven that 60% of all former CGs feel sick or disoriented their first time on the bus.”
Zanna blinked. “What did you call me?”
“A former CG. The control group. You know, the part of an experiment that stays the same and lets nature take its course.” She waved a hand toward the window. The bus had touched down again, this time somewhere up in the flinty Appalachians. “Everyone and everything that’s not a Scientist. You’re Zanna Mayfield, right? The one everyone was looking for yesterday?”
If her stomach was complaining before, it doubled now, and Zanna had to take a moment with her eyes closed to let the feeling pass. “Yeah,” she said, not even bothering to defend herself. “That’s me.”
“I’m Nora. Nora Elmsley.” She frowned and pressed two tablets into Zanna’s hand. “You really don’t look well. Seriously, it’ll help. Here.”
Zanna cracked open her eyes. Nora had put a cup in front of her and pulled out a small glass rod—the kind a chemist would use to stir solutions. She swirled it around inside the cup, and as she did so, water appeared. “Dehumidifier,” she said, pushing the cup, now brimming with clean water, toward Zanna. “Condenses the water vapor from the air. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.”
Zanna’s stomach was nearly inconsolable now. She swallowed the pills and gulped down Nora’s water. Almost immediately, the bubbling in her stomach began to subside, and the cold sweat that had been beading on her forehead started to dry up. Her vision finally corrected itself, and she took a deep, easy breath.
“There,” Nora said, beginning the involved process of repacking all her belongings. “Feel better?”
Zanna nodded. She felt surprisingly good. “What did you give me?”
Nora chuckled. “It’s just dimenhydrinate. You can buy it in any CG drugstore. You can’t directly manipulate the body anyways. It’s protected by the Self function.” Then she realized that Zanna hadn’t understood a word she had said and smiled. “You’ll understand it soon enough. You’re one of the Scientists now, and we learn really quickly.”
“How did you know about this?” Zanna said. “I mean, I just got this letter in the mail—”
Nora shrugged. “My parents are Scientists. Mathematicians, actually. So I’ve always known about it.”
Zanna gestured around helplessly. “What do they do? I mean—” All the plans she had about high school and colleges and post-graduate studies had been thrown out the window with Dr. Mumble’s promise of power over time and space. “What does anyone do after this?”
“Oh, there’s all sorts of options,” Nora said brightly. “Most just slip back into the control group. You can basically waltz into any laboratory or engineering shop or university after St. Pommeroy’s. Or start your own.”
“Is that what your parents do?”
“No, they work for the Learned Society. They’re the ambassadors to the United States.”
Zanna goggled at the word. Ambassadors. That explained why everything in Nora’s backpack—as well as Nora herself—looked so clean. “Is that what Scientists call themselves?” Zanna asked. “The Learned Society?”
Nora crinkled her mouth. “Depends on who you ask. But I suppose that’s good enough.”
“Is there like—” Zanna thought about how to best phrase her question. “Police?”
“Of course,” Nora said in a tone that made Zanna feel like she had asked the world’s dumbest question. “The Primers. But they’re really, really selective about who gets in.”
“I don’t want to join them,” Zanna said. “I was just wondering.”
“Oh, because of what happened yesterday?” Nora said, quickly making the connection. “You made The Constant, you know!”
For the second time that morning, Nora went through the ritual of unpacking her backpack. This time, instead of her pills, she pulled out a newspaper. Like every other newspaper Zanna had seen, The Constant was in black-and-white and printed on cheap newsprint. But unlike the others, it was constantly updating itself, the stories getting pushed down the page like posts on a website. Nora pointed to an article that was still above the fold.
KIDNAPPING ATTEMPT CHILLS ST. POMMEROY START.
“Oh geez,” Zanna muttered. Her stomach began acting up again, and she pushed the newspaper away, unable to read past the headline.
“Everyone’s talking about it,” Nora said. At the touch of her finger, th
e newspaper displayed a panoramic shot of the empty lot the illusionary school had been built on. “I mean, it’s just so strange!” she prattled on as she flipped through more photographs. “Why would someone want to kidnap you? In such an elaborate way?”
Zanna took a couple of deep breaths. “I don’t know.” She couldn’t look out the window, but she couldn’t look over at Nora and the newspaper, either, so she just looked down at her hands. “I really don’t know.”
“I bet I could ask my parents to check the probabilities for you,” Nora said, opening the comments section with a stroke of her finger. Conjectures from Scientists around the globe streamed in, updating minute by minute. “They’re absolute geniuses at—Oh, we’re almost there!” She dropped the newspaper and pointed at the window. “Look!”
Zanna wanted to tell her that the last thing she should do at this moment was look out the window, but her head turned before she could tell it not to. Clouds and large sea birds drifted past, touched by the rising sun. It looked like the view out the window of any cruising airplane. Zanna had nearly turned away when the bus dropped through the clouds and into St. Pommeroy’s.
It was so sudden, Zanna had the feeling they had passed through a bubble. One moment there had been just sky and birds and a glimmering ocean some thousands of feet below them, and the next they were looking down on St. Pommeroy’s.
The school was built on a chunk of floating rock, with nine smaller islands orbiting it. One of these outer islands passed overhead as the bus descended, and the chill of its shadow swept through Zanna. She craned her neck to watch it pass and saw that the underside of the island was an enormous iron bowl, as if some giant had set his potted plants adrift in the sky.
It was too dizzying to follow all the outer islands, so Zanna turned her attention to the central one. An impossible mess of architecture sprawled over it, a building continually added on to throughout history. The part at the center of the island that Mr. Gunney headed toward had been lifted straight out of ancient Greece, with rectangular courtyards connected by colonnades and angular roofs. But Zanna saw everything from medieval castles to mosques to an entire Gothic cathedral all squashed together in the school below. Clock towers rose out of the rooftops in no discernible order. Some ornate and leering with gargoyles, some austere brick; and some chrome and glass. A quarter of the island to the east had been reserved for the gardens, with a greenhouse of dazzling glass set among the hedges and flowerbeds. It was mad and scatterbrained and completely breathtaking.
The Zanna Function Page 4