The Zanna Function
Page 17
Zanna looked around for something to lower herself down with. The curtains might work, but she knew that once she tore them down, she wouldn’t be able to put them back up properly. Her eyes fell on the bell rope in the corner, but then she nixed the idea. That was so old, it would probably snap as soon as she put any weight on it.
“Stairs,” she muttered, peering into the inky depths of the cellar. “Why must you be so difficult?”
Setting the meat cleaver off to the side, she hurried back into the dining room. The curtains had given her an idea. In a small closet off to the side that housed the table settings, Zanna found a stack of spare tablecloths. She took one. She also took a candlestick, but there were no matches in the small closet. No doubt the woman had rounded them up and stashed them somewhere safe, as if Zanna was a toddler in danger of setting the house on fire.
“Hey, you!” she barked at the silver serving tray. “Make me a grilled-cheese sandwich.”
The tray roused at the command, almost a little gruff at the tone Zanna had taken. As her request spread, the kitchen whipped into action. An oven mitt detached itself and went to the refrigerator, pulling out bread, cheese, and butter. It carried the ingredients to the cutting board, where a knife and frying pan were waiting. The knife put half the butter in the frying pan and scraped the other half over the bread. Meanwhile, the frying pan went to the stove, which had turned itself on, and began to melt the butter.
This was what Zanna had been waiting for. There were locks on the stove—whether to prevent children from burning themselves or to keep her from blowing the house apart—that Zanna had tried to get around but failed. Everything was controlled with functions inside the stove, and Zanna couldn’t get in there, not while it was primelocked. But she could tell it to cook something for her.
As the oven mitt brought her sandwich over to the sizzling pan, Zanna reached up with her candle and poked it into the burner. It melted a good bit of the wax, which splattered over the stove, but the wick was lit. With her light and makeshift rope, Zanna headed back to the office.
The descent wasn’t quite as easy as she had imagined. Tablecloths didn’t make good ropes on the best of days, and this was further complicated by having to juggle a lit candle. But at least it was a short drop, and after a few minutes of trouble and kicking more bricks out of the way, she was down.
The candle barely distinguished the brick arches five feet in front of her, and Zanna wished she knew how to manipulate light. If only she knew that, she could make the light from the candle fill the entire room with a golden glow like midday. Instead, she picked her way carefully over the fallen bricks, shuffling through the dark and dust with one hand out.
“Stairs,” she muttered to herself. “Stairs and lights. I’m never taking you for granted again.”
A grid of brick columns with arches stretching between them supported the ceiling, making Zanna feel as if she had wandered into a catacomb. The spiders didn’t help much, either. A few odds and ends were stashed down here—shovels and spades and barrels and an empty wine rack. Zanna made a note of the earthmoving equipment. The brick wall didn’t look as solid as it used to be, and she might be able to tunnel through it and out of the primelock. It would take a while, but she had all the time in the world.
The whuff-whuff sound was close. She stepped around a brick column and saw a massive iron furnace set in the wall beside a dusty pile of coal. Pipes twisted and grew out of the top, disappearing into the ceiling. Zanna knelt down at the open grill and stuck her candle in. Only dust and ash and spiders. Then she noticed how her candle flame flickered back and forth. So that explained the whuff-whuff. The furnace was pumping air around. She circled until she found a rusted valve on the side that looked like it had been used to drain water. Propping the candle against the wall and gritting her teeth, Zanna wrenched on the valve until the rust and corrosion broke and it opened.
Cold mountain air flowed out, its scent of pine forests fresh and unmistakable in the dank squalor of the cellar. Zanna nearly let out a cry of delight. Air from the outside! But then she got a better look at its functions, and her heart sank. The air that blew over her hands and tickled at her face had been primelocked. It was just as useless as everything else in here.
Above her, the cellar door unlocked.
Zanna froze, her hands still cupped beneath the open valve. The woman was back already. How had Zanna not heard the front door? She had been so focused on exploring the cellar and figuring out the furnace that she had forgotten how precarious a situation she was in. The office was a wreck. There were splintered boards and dust and a meat cleaver and a tablecloth tied around the desk that led down into the cellar. Zanna stood very still, listening for the woman’s footsteps.
Something touched her in the dark.
Zanna screamed. She flailed, and her knuckles connected with something metal and rang with a burst of pain, sending whatever had snuck up behind her skittering back into the dark. Then her ankle twisted on a piece of loose coal, and she fell back against the furnace with a single, echoing clang.
Silence returned to the cellar. Zanna had kicked the candle in her panic, but it was still lit, the flame faintly illuminating the side of a bucket. She picked it up. If that had been her kidnapper, the woman wasn’t making any sound now. Perhaps she had knocked her head. If so, Zanna wouldn’t get another chance to get the primelock keys from her.
Carefully, her heart thundering, Zanna crept through the dark until she stepped on something that was soft and yielding and squished under her shoe.
It was her grilled-cheese sandwich.
The silver serving tray floated out of the shadows, evidently having collected itself from where Zanna had knocked it. It made a small bow, pleased at having delivered Zanna’s meal.
“Just you wait,” Zanna muttered to the fleeing serving tray. She scraped the ruined sandwich off her shoe and kicked it into the corner. “This isn’t over yet, tray.”
The incident had rattled her, though, and she brushed herself off, having seen all there was to see in the cellar. But at the stairs, she paused and rubbed her chin, smearing her face with coal ash. The door at the top of the stairs was open. Had it opened for the serving tray? It must have, for as the tray bobbled through the open door, it began to close, and Zanna hurried to slip through. It shut and locked itself behind her, tight as before.
There was a lot to think about. After Zanna had cleaned up her mess in the office by pushing everything down the hole and covering it with the rug, she went to the library. On a fresh piece of paper, she drew a crude floor plan of the house—she had the entire place memorized by now. The serving tray resided in the kitchen, so she marked that. How did it know where she was in the house? She had ordered food before and then wandered off, and each time the tray had managed to track her down and complete its delivery.
Her Self function. That’s what the tray had to be looking for. The house had her Self catalogued. It had noticed she was down in the basement and told the tray to take the sandwich straight to her. Which would have meant opening a door that should have stayed locked. Zanna puzzled over this bit of newfound knowledge until she heard the front door. A little while later, the door to the library opened, and her kidnapper walked in.
“Have a good day?” the woman asked. An odor of diesel and dirty smoke hung around her, as if she had doused herself in exhaust before coming back. Zanna barely lifted her eyes from the book she had picked up at random, pretending to be deeply engrossed in it.
“Suppose,” she grumbled. She turned a page and stared at the words, not reading them at all. The woman was still standing by the library door, waiting.
“Come have a snack with me,” she said at last. “I want to talk to you.”
Fear tightened in Zanna’s gut, and she looked up sharply, trying her best to hide the guilt in her stomach. “About what?” she asked, as innocently as possible.
Her captor took a long drink, taking in the old and ripped portraits before speaking. “Zanna, I’m not your mother. I let you have free rein of my house while I am away because I want you to be comfortable. I want you to enjoy your time here.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, as if the conversation had given her a headache, and let out a disappointed sigh. Zanna braced.
“But,” the woman said, flicking an invisible speck from her fingertips, “it seems that I have been too lenient. You have been taking advantage of my hospitality.”
Zanna shoved the resurgence of guilt down with a handful of pretzel sticks, keeping her gaze level. “I don’t call keeping me prisoner very hospitable,” she said. Snark kept the fear from creeping into her voice.
“What? You thought I would let you run about unsupervised?” The woman laughed. “I’m not that foolish. My house has been watching.”
An illusion snapped into existence on the table between them. It was like looking into a dollhouse room that was decorated just like the empty office. A small Zanna, no taller than a pen, hacked away at the floorboards with a meat cleaver. Her kidnapper flipped through the action, impatient to get to the good part where Zanna broke through and kicked at the bricks of the cellar. Then it cut to her tying the tablecloth around the desk and descending into the hole.
One of the woman’s eyebrows arched imperiously, daring Zanna to say anything.
“I’m supposed to be escaping,” she said, surprising herself with how haughty she sounded. Not that the situation could get much worse. “That’s what people do when you lock them up for no good reason.”
The woman smiled, but it quickly disappeared. “Well then, by that line of reasoning, I’m supposed to be upset about property damage. I have been overlooking your attempts on my windows and doors, but this—” She gestured to the dollhouse illusion. “I can’t overlook this one. You will be locked in your room tomorrow and in the days to come, until you can prove to me that you’re not going to tear up my floorboards. This is a historic house, you know. It deserves some respect.”
“You and your stupid house can rot, for all I care,” Zanna spat.
The woman froze with a strange, stricken look on her face, like someone had shoved a needle in her heart.
Instinctively, Zanna opened her mouth to apologize, but then she remembered who it was she was talking to and shut her mouth again, almost pleased that she had managed to land a hit.
“Very well,” the woman said, a little quieter than before. “If you’re done, I’ll take you up to your room now. The tray will bring you dinner.”
Zanna nodded and pushed away her lemonade and the bowl of pretzel sticks. “Fine. I’m done anyways.”
The woman’s Iron took Zanna by the wrist. She led Zanna to the tower, with its missing staircase, and deposited her gently but unceremoniously on the landing. Then, without a word of parting, the woman dropped out of sight.
In her room, Zanna crawled up on top of her desk so she could better see out of the large, solitary window. It wasn’t even as if she had discovered anything worthwhile in the basement. Running a hand over the nearby radiator, she felt the air seeping out and circulating. Was the woman upset because Zanna had discovered the furnace? It didn’t seem like any sort of great earthshaking secret. So the air circulation was handled by an old coal furnace stuffed full of functions. No, it had to be the possibility of Zanna tunneling through the basement walls and out of the primelock. The woman was probably down there right now, getting rid of the shovels and reinforcing the crumbling brick walls.
The lights went out without a word of warning and left Zanna in the starlight. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers around her, but there was too much going through her mind to fall asleep. It didn’t sit right. Digging out of the basement would have taken forever. Even with the shovels down there, they were so far north the ground would be frozen solid. There was some other reason her kidnapper was worried. Something Zanna was overlooking.
Where did the tray get my Self function from? The thought was so sudden and unexpected, Zanna’s eyes shot open. If the
tray had used her Self function to find and deliver her sandwich, it had to have gotten the function from somewhere. But Zanna had never given the woman a drop of blood. She had only done that twice—once for St. Pommeroy’s registration and once for the I-beam down in her basement.
There was another way, though. It made too much sense to ignore. Her captor knew a lot about Zanna. She knew that Zanna was supposed to be attending St. Pommeroy’s on the first day of school. She knew where Zanna lived. She knew that Zanna’s father was a pilot, that he sent letters with foreign money in them, that his handwriting was messy and sad, and that he always signed with just his name. She knew Zanna liked hot cider and scrambled eggs covered in ketchup and warmly lit libraries. She signed her books just like Zanna did.
The tray hadn’t needed to get Zanna’s Self function from anywhere. The woman had given it herself.
“No,” Zanna whispered to the dark bedroom. Her fists knotted up the bedsheets so tightly the fabric ripped. “You can’t be. You can’t be . . . me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Being locked up in her room was torture. If Zanna let her mind wander for any length of time, it always went back to the idea that she and her kidnapper were the same person. When she tried to distract herself by thinking about Pops and how he was dealing with her absence, she heard his voice telling her to follow where the evidence led, no matter how impossible. When she thought of her friends, she saw them in the wreckage of her hallway, bloodied and unconscious and trapped in cages of air pressure that she had made. Zanna couldn’t even read any of the books on the shelves without seeing Mine! written in her own handwriting on the inside covers.
So she made paper airplanes and origami cranes and created sock puppets to distract herself. But even then, the boredom gnawed off parts of her brain. Every day she looked out at the snowy landscape, the urge to claw at the windows got stronger. What saved her, oddly enough, was Dr. Trout. Zanna couldn’t do any of her schoolwork for Mathematics, Chemistry, or Physics without the proper books and notes, but she didn’t need any of that to work on Self. And while thoughts about Irons and specializations or meditation exercises made a beeline to painful questions about who she really was, there was one assignment for Dr. Trout that had nothing to do with whether or not the strange woman keeping Zanna prisoner was just a version of herself from the future. The paper on Cedwick.
Zanna wrote and rewrote that paper until her pen was out of ink and she had to request a new one. In a way, she was thankful for the opportunity to focus on nothing else but getting the words right. The more she worked on it, the more she wanted it to be perfect. The plan that Nora had given all of them in Pops’s guest bathroom hadn’t stopped just because the party was over. Zanna had a second chance to fix everything.
It was all her fault. With the distance and time to look back on it, Zanna realized she had never even given Cedwick a chance. Everything that she had thought was just him being an arrogant English twerp—him always correcting her, showing off in class—had been his way of trying to get out from under the shadow of Owin and Lord Hemmington. And Zanna had been trying to put him back in his proper place with every chance she got. No wonder he had lashed out in the nurse’s cottage that day after the Laboratory.
Eventually, though, even her report on Cedwick came back to the Variable, as Zanna decided to call the woman. Zanna certainly wasn’t going to call her by her name. It was the Variable who had told Cedwick that he was the only one at her father’s pa
rty who had made the right decision. Everyone else—including Owin—had lost. The more Zanna rewrote her report, the more she heard that voice creeping in, reassuring Cedwick that he was not useless. She crumpled up the graph paper with a frustrated growl and threw it into the far corner.
She then resorted to drawing the floor plan of the mansion over and over. It was mindless work, but it gave her hands something to do that wasn’t tearing out her hair. The Variable had primelocked the entire house, which meant that she had gone through and hidden every single function behind an impenetrable wall of numbers, like translating every book in a library into unbreakable code. She had been thorough, even primelocking the grounds around the mansion. There were keys, but Zanna doubted they were tangible things that could be stolen—
Zanna stopped, her pen pressed against the page. She had drawn sketches of the first floor and the air-pressure barrier around it many times before, but something was wrong. What had Owin said when he had set up the air-pressure barrier at her house? It needed to breathe. Air had to come in somehow. Otherwise, everyone inside would suffocate.
Hesitantly, controlling her excitement, she drew an arrow that crossed the border and labeled it Air. But the air coming in wasn’t primelocked. That’s what the furnace was for. To primelock the incoming air before pumping it into the rest of the house. It was a gatekeeper.
It was never about Zanna digging out of the basement. It was about the furnace, the weak point in the Variable’s otherwise solid barrier. That’s why Zanna had been locked up in her room—so the Variable could put some new defenses on the basement and make sure that Zanna couldn’t poke around in it again.