“Oh, I can use it,” he said. “But like I said, I need your help. Stories are big, and you don’t want to push against them. That’s a good way to split your head open with a Splutter.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “So you grab the story, and I’ll grab all the physics and chemistry, and we’ll pull together. Then I’ll put the key inside, and we’ll close it up again. Okay?”
Zanna shook her head. “You lost me.”
“Keep the function at the front of your mind,” Owin said. “Keep your focus on it. Did Dr. Fitzie show you how to make theoretical shapes yet?”
Zanna made a sphere appear in her hand. “Ta-da.”
“Do that,” Owin said. “But instead of shapes, focus on everything you know about this frying pan. Everything it means to you and your grandfather. Think of it like planting a tree. You’ve got to move all the dirt out of the way first. So you scoop and scoop until you get an armful of dirt, and I’ll get an armful, and together we’ll move enough that we can plant our seed. Okay?”
“Okay,” Zanna said. She looked at the mass of story and didn’t understand at all how she was supposed to get her arms around it, metaphorically speaking. It wasn’t as mysterious now as when she had first laid eyes on it, but that didn’t mean she could move it. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Owin gather up his functions, and tried to mimic his actions.
“You’ve got to hold the entire function in your mind,” he said as he picked up the chemical composition. “Understand it completely.”
She stared into the black scribbles that told of what this frying pan had meant to her family. It was a good meal, it was comfort, it was security, it was her heritage. Owin had finished with all the other functions. He was waiting, but at least he wasn’t trying to give her any more advice. He just watched.
With her eyes closed, she felt out the edges of the story. She called on everything Pops had told her about the frying pan. The look in his eyes every time he had used it. The look just now as he gave it to her. Like the theoretical cubes she had drawn earlier that day, she imagined the frying pan moving down through generations, its story growing more complex with each set of hands it passed through. She put her arms around it all and tugged.
The story moved.
“I knew it,” Owin muttered. He smiled at her. “You’re quite the natural.”
Heat flooded her face, and the story slipped, but she quickly got a hold of it once again. “Thanks,” she said.
“Now the key,” Owin said, lifting the small knot of function he had taken from the pewter coin.
Zanna imagined the story of her frying pan as an armful of dirt—like Owin had said—and she pulled it back to make room for the key.
“Okay. Let go now.”
It was a strange feeling to let go of the frying pan’s story. Both enormous and absolutely still. As if she had thrown a boulder into a lake and it had slipped beneath the water without a ripple. Owin picked up the frying pan and looked it over before handing it back to Zanna. “Want to go test it out?” he asked.
“Sure.”
They met Pops at the top of the basement steps. “I was just coming down to say that dinner’s ready,” he said. “And you’re staying, aren’t you, Owin?”
Owin cleared his throat. “Actually, sir, I hadn’t really planned on it—”
“So that’s a yes. Excellent. I’ve already set you a place.”
Owin tried to stammer an explanation, but Pops was already shuffling back to the kitchen.
Zanna gave Owin a nudge in the ribs. “You might as well go along with it. He’s not going to let you leave hungry.”
He sighed, but as they passed the kitchen on the way to the front door, he breathed in the smell of sizzling meatballs and homemade tomato sauce. “Well, I guess I can send a Particle saying that I’ll be a little longer,” he admitted.
In the foyer, Zanna opened the front door and peered out into the darkening neighborhood. Everything looked as it always had, and she tentatively put a hand out, feeling for the wall of air pressure. There was nothing there.
“Good. Looks like it recognizes you,” Owin said. He put his hand out, and it stopped flat on the air. “And not me. Now try the key.”
She lifted the frying pan and twisted it, just as she had done with the Weierstrass key. Owin’s hand passed through.
“Splendid,” he said. “And we check that it’s breathing properly. Close it, please.”
He stared at something inside his shield, calculating, before he nodded. “Good. One of the downsides to this barrier is that there’s a risk of suffocation inside, since it’s basically airtight. So we have to add this system that lets fresh air in and bad air out. But don’t worry, it’s doing just fine. Can you open it again for a moment? I need to send a Particle that I’ll be late.”
He stepped out onto the front porch, taking from his pocket a crumpled gum wrapper. For a moment he just looked at it, and then he folded it into a small paper airplane and threw it high into the sky, where it disappeared. “There. Thanks.”
Something about that simple act, or perhaps Owin’s voice as he turned back to her, made Zanna’s entire day catch up with her. In the whirlwind of finding out there was a strange woman trying to kidnap her, she had somehow forgotten about the entirely new world she had stumbled into. One where impossible things happened everywhere she looked. One where physics and math and chemistry were toys to be played around with. One where there were boys like Owin and Cedwick.
“Zanna?”
“Sorry,” she said, a shiver running through her. “Just thinking.”
Owin followed her line of sight out into the neighborhood and nodded. “It’s okay. We’re not going to let anything happen to you. You’re safe.”
Chapter Eight
In the months that followed, Zanna dug into her new world. Dr. Mumble hadn’t been lying about science taking hard work and dedication—for the rest of September, Zanna did nothing but memorize everything from the periodic table to an endless list of physics formulas. There was a mountain of coursework, but the girls she met on the first day quickly banded together to form a study group.
“No, no, no, the derivative function describes how an object changes,” Beatrice said for what must have been the tenth time that lunch period, showing once again how Dr. Fitzie had turned over a theoretical cube and peeled off the derivative function like a candy wrapper. Unlike the rest of them, Beatrice had the patience to muddle through Dr. Fitzie’s overexcited lectures. “Like this.”
“I don’t see anything,” Libby muttered, completely hopeless at mathematics.
“That’s because the cube isn’t changing right now,” Beatrice said. To demonstrate, she moved the cube around, and the derivative she had peeled from it flickered in reply. “Does that make sense?”
“That makes sense,” Libby said. “But I still don’t see how you got that function in the first place.”
Beatrice showed her for the eleventh time.
Around Halloween, the school brought out very realistic illusions of ghosts that drifted through the ancient Greek architecture and made Nora shiver every time they got close. In Physics, their class moved from memorization to manipulating simple gravity functions, and Libby took to these concrete exercises like a fish to water. The day after their first lesson, she brought a theoretical cube with a gravity function inside it to lunch and made it scoot around the café table and bop Amir on the nose.
The rest of them weren’t as adept. It took Zanna a week of sleepless nights to hold the cube’s coordinates and gravity in her mind at the same time, and it took Nora even longer.
The class that truly challenged everyone, however, was the one taught by Dr. Trout—the class called Self. Before their first class, Zanna had pictured Dr. Trout as a heavy European woman, but in reality she was bony and Middle Eastern, with an elegant head wrap of gold silk, traditional robes, and bushy
silver eyebrows that could crease and lower in the most judgmental stare that Zanna had ever been on the receiving end of. But what really made Zanna sit up the first time she saw Dr. Trout was what the professor had carried with her.
Ever since Nora had explained that the object a Scientist carried around was called an Iron and that one day Zanna would have to pick her own, she had been keeping a mental catalogue. Nora strutted around with her fancy ruler. Owin had his shield. Lord Hemmington had the police badge on his lapel. Mr. Gunney kept a loaf pan atop his bus dashboard. Dr. Fitzie’s was the mariner’s telescope on her belt, Dr. Piccowitz carried a pocket watch, and Dr. Cheever had a horseshoe bent into a bracelet around his wrist.
Dr. Trout carried a baseball bat.
Not an aluminum bat, but an old wooden bat with a stained wrapping around the handle and more scars than a war hero. It looked more like a weapon than a piece of game equipment. This wasn’t the kind of bat you would take out for a pleasant game of ball in the springtime—this was the bat you used to beat someone’s skull in.
“I have no doubt many of you will be uncomfortable with this class,” she said on the first day of Self. Like all the classrooms, Dr. Trout’s was ringed with worn marble columns and open to the sunny sky, yet Zanna always felt it was ten degrees colder than the rest of the school. “It involves no mathematics, no physics, and no chemistry. It will pursue avenues of reason and deduction that you may never have traveled before. It is entirely unlike any other class we offer. We will focus on one function and one function only. The one inside each and every one of you. The Self function.”
Dr. Trout closed her eyes, and the entire classroom waited. She let her bat tap against her open palm with a hard, meaty sound, and then suddenly, spools and spools of theoretical functions began to pour out of her. They filled the entire room and showed no sign of stopping, growing so thick and dense that Zanna couldn’t even see her hands.
“This is but a fraction,” Dr. Trout said when the deluge stopped. “A fraction of my own function. Each of you has this and much more inside. Together, we will explore it. Together, we will learn it.”
Zanna sifted her hands through the black soup that came up to her chest as Dr. Trout continued talking, thinking about Owin’s gold coin that had taken a drop of her blood. Had all of this been in that tiny thumbprint?
Then it was gone. Dr. Trout pulled the function back into herself with a single gulp. For a moment, a glimpse of vulnerability crossed her professor’s face, and then her expression turned to stone once more. “I know how many of my students think,” she said. “So I offer this word of warning before we begin. There is no mastery to be sought here. No one has ever completely and fully understood their Self function, and no one ever will. It is not gravity, nor a derivative, nor a chemical composition that might be manipulated and changed. You are an infinity, and this class is but an approximation. Do not chase for it. You will only find frustration and madness.”
The class was silent. Many of them were still staring at their hands like Zanna, amazed at the function that had been there moments ago. Even Cedwick, who was back to his cocky self today, seemed subdued.
“There is only one true assignment for this class,” Dr. Trout continued. “By the end of the year, I will ask each of you to select an Iron. An object that belongs to you and will become your personal tool.”
Nora raised her hand. “Dr. Trout?” She took out her stainless-steel ruler and held it aloft. “What if we have already selected our Iron?”
Dr. Trout barely spared her a glance. “Put it away, Ms. Elmsley,” she said. “That’s not your Iron.”
“B-but, Dr. Trout,” Nora said, faltering on the words slightly, “I’ve already considered every—”
“You have considered toys,” Dr. Trout came back, her baseball bat swinging in demonstration. “A Scientist’s Iron is not a pretty accessory. A Scientist’s Iron is who she is, and you do not know that yet, Ms. Elmsley. None of you do. Without the proper Iron, you cannot hope to master more complex tasks such as Ironflight. Your knowledge and abilities will always be stunted, for you will always need to work against your improper Iron, instead of alongside it. It is not a light decision, and so I have allotted the entire year for you to search, experiment, and make your choice. I greatly encourage you to take it seriously.”
Libby’s earlier predictions about Self being a blow-off class couldn’t have been further from the truth. While Dr. Trout didn’t give grades and things for Zanna to memorize, she more than made up for it in the quantity and variety of readings she assigned. Some days it was books of poetry, some days it was psychological texts, some days it was dense philosophy, and on the worst days, it was all three. On top of that, there were the strange papers Zanna had to write. None of them were ever graded, but Dr. Trout collected them just the same. They ranged in topic from Zanna’s first memory to the day she got her letter from St. Pommeroy’s to the act of writing that very paper. The assignment made Zanna’s brain turn inside out.
At least she wasn’t alone in her suffering. Dr. Trout’s unorthodox approach to teaching, along with the strange topic of Self, afflicted all the girls equally. Even Nora, who had become their resident guru on the ways of the Scientist world and culture, was at an uncharacteristic loss for explanation. “It’s very important,” she would say when Zanna flopped down in the bus seat next to her. But that was all she would say.
Yet despite all of that, Zanna couldn’t really complain about her new life. For the first time, Zanna felt like she was exactly where she belonged, with friends who understood her and actually challenging schoolwork. And even though she wasn’t getting any closer to figuring out what the strange woman might have wanted with her, or why she had warned her away from St. Pommeroy’s in the first place, at least nobody had broken into her bedroom during the night again.
Then came the day she returned home and found a letter at her spot on the kitchen table. If its foreign stamp and telltale red-and-blue international-bordered envelope didn’t give it away, the handwriting did. It was a letter from her father.
“Better check your spot,” Pops said, even though she had already sat down and picked up the envelope. When she opened it, another purple Philippine banknote fluttered out.
The letter was short and to the point, and Zanna read it so quickly she looped back around and went through it again before she spoke. “He’s coming home for Christmas.”
“Well!” Pops said, looking up from the celery stalks he was chopping into little bits. “That’s exciting. I’m sure he’ll want to know everything that you’ve been up to. You’ve been such a busy mouse this year.”
“Yeah.” The word fell flat, and she stuffed the letter back into its envelope. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do. Let me know when dinner is ready.”
In her room, she flopped onto her bed and groaned. Back when she had been a little girl, a letter like this would have sent her whooping around the house, her Pops catching her and spinning her around in a rollicking polka. But he was too stiff now to dance like that, and she was too old to run around maniacally.
How would she explain everything that had happened since her father had left? The last time she’d seen him had been last spring, when he’d said he would only be doing the Southeast Asia flights for two, three months tops. Since then, she had discovered unknown powers and had enrolled at a school on a hidden floating island out over the Atlantic. She could fiddle with simple gravitational functions, name and theorize every natural and synthesized element on the periodic table, and make a theoretical object’s coordinates change like dough in her hands. She had a pen that wrote in blood, a key that could break metallurgical illusions, and a frying pan that unlocked a wall of air pressure around her house. She had nearly been kidnapped and had a blade held to her throat. The Zanna who had said goodbye to her father only seven months ago was gone forever.
The next day at school, she went
through Dr. Cheever’s lesson on more advanced gravitational functions in silence. They were still using theoretical objects, but now instead of one gravitational function they had two, as if the cube was equidistant from a pair of massive bodies, and she had to hold both functions at the same time in order to properly manipulate it.
“Don’t overthink it,” Libby said. Nora could get her cube to move only in fits and starts, while Libby made hers ping-pong between its two functions like a yo-yo without a string. “You’re trying to include way too much. You only need the important things.”
“Everything is important,” Nora said. Her cube scooted half a centimeter across the ancient marble table. “The tiniest function can change an object’s probability. Everything has to be considered.”
“You’ll be dead before you finish considering everything,” Libby said. She lacked Beatrice’s infinite patience for teaching others and instead amused herself with reshaping her cube while Nora continued to struggle. “Ugh,” Libby complained. “When do we get real objects?”
“In time,” Nora said. “They want to make sure we’re ready for it. It’s a major step from theory to practical. We’ve barely started molecular structure.”
“But I don’t need to know all the molecular structures,” Libby said, tiring of her cube and pushing it away. “Just one. What about hydrogen gas? That’s dead simple.” As if to prove it, she drew the diatomic molecule of hydrogen gas. “There. Two protons, two electrons, covalent bond. Done and done.”
“Hydrogen’s explosive,” Beatrice said. “They probably want to make sure we’re safe.”
“We’re not igniting it,” Libby said. “We’re manipulating it.”
“There is still the risk of ignition,” Nora said testily.
“Then give us helium,” Libby argued, her Southern drawl getting a bit more pronounced as her frustration grew. “That ain’t going to ignite. It’s a noble gas.”
“It is still invisible,” Nora said. She fixed a curl of dark hair that had gotten out of line before she clarified her previous statement. “At least at standard temperature and pressure.”
The Zanna Function Page 10