The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  The sitting room smelled of charcoal and mothballs and that stupid stuffed moose head. Zanna waited in the doorway until her eyes adjusted, since there weren’t any windows here to let the moonlight in. When at last she could see the fireplace at the far end, she made her way to it—and the lever in the wall that opened and closed the ash grate. It heaved open with a complaint of old metal, and Zanna winced at how the sound split open the quiet night.

  She poked her head into the fireplace and suddenly reconsidered her plan. The inside of the chimney was even darker than the sitting room and scratched with the promise of spiders and centipedes and other crawly things that lived in old, shadowy brickwork. Zanna told herself that she had climbed up there before and had been just fine, but the other half of her brain said that the climb had been during the day and that she hadn’t been toting a lumpy sack of bedsheets with her. But time was running out—the kitchen had to be finishing her order by now, and the tray would begin looking for her soon. With a grimace, she tied one end of her parachute bedsheet to the lever of the ash grate and climbed into the fireplace.

  It was a far tighter fit than before. Zanna pushed the rucksack with her clothes up first, then braced her legs on either side of the chimney, shimmying her way up. The blanket caught on everything and rubbed the soot off the walls, making her eyes water and her nose tickle. When she had climbed up a couple of feet, she gave her parachute a tug. It pulled the ash grate closed with a screech of rusty pieces, and the chimney plunged into complete darkness.

  Claustrophobia rose instantly in her throat, and Zanna forced herself to take a long and calming breath, even though it brought more ash than air. She had to climb up. That was enough to focus on. It distracted her from the dark and the spiders and the tight space. Just as she had done when manipulating the nitrogen, she wiped everything else from her mind except moving her arms and legs. One foot and then one hand, slowly inching higher and higher.

  It took ages, but eventually, she felt her rucksack bump against something solid and refuse to go any higher. She locked her knees and leaned back against the chimney wall as best she could. Even though the air was freezing, she was out of breath from the exertion of her strange acrobatics. Zanna waited for her heart to stop thumping so wildly, and then she put her ear to the chimney wall.

  But there was only the scritch of her shoes knocking bits of brick free and the echoing ping as they hit the closed ash grate below. Zanna did a rough calculation of how long it would take the kitchen to make five sandwiches and a mug of hot cider. If she was too hasty in climbing back down, the tray would still be inside the house, and she would have wasted her chance. She strained her ears, listening for anything like a door opening or the tray knocking on the other side of the chimney, but the mansion was silent.

  Claustrophobia crept back. Without anything else to occupy her mind, Zanna felt every quiver in her legs. Every slip of her shoes. Invisible things with many legs scurrying down her neck. Her knees and elbows yearning for open space. She couldn’t stay like this. But she had to give the tray more time.

  So she took a deep breath and dove into her Self function.

  Her claustrophobia ebbed away when she felt the enormity of the function that made her who she was, but it also brought fresh, new fears she had been trying to forget about. There was no pushing away uncomfortable thoughts in here, not when it was all spelled out in unflinching mathematics.

  She and the Variable were the same person.

  Now that she had put it into words, the evidence was piling up. Who else would know how to forge a letter from her father? Who else would know how to build a mansion and a library that were the manifestation of Zanna’s dreams? Who else wrote Mine! on the inside cover of their books in Zanna’s handwriting? The more she turned it over, the better it fit. The very first day of school, Dr. Mumble had promised her mastery over space and time. Zanna had seen every other law of the universe manipulated at St. Pommeroy’s—was it that impossible to believe in time travel? It would explain how there had come to be a young Zanna and an old Zanna. It would explain the speech the Variable had given the first night about the “dark times coming.” It would explain everything.

  Zanna twisted away from the thought. The Variable had attacked her friends, had attacked Pops. That alone was enough to convince Zanna they weren’t the same person.

  But the woman had also asked Pops to not hate her too much.

  Zanna scrubbed that last thought from her mind. They weren’t the same person, and that was that. Anything telling her otherwise got squeezed until it shut up. She had killed enough time. Her legs quivered with exertion, and she felt as if she was going to be cleaning soot out of her skin for years. As carefully and quietly as she could manage, she began climbing back down the chimney.

  “I’m never making fun of Santa Claus again,” she muttered, tugging her blanket free of a bit of rough brick. The bedsheet she had used for a parachute was still down at the bottom of the chimney, one end fed through the closed ash grate and tied around the handle. She found the nitrogen she had put back in her shampoo bottle and fed it through the ash grate in a wispy tendril, telling it to pool in the slack bedsheet. Then she pushed it away from her, moving the bedsheet and the handle with it.

  A shriek of rusty hinges, and Zanna was free. She wallowed around in the fireplace for a moment, her legs refusing to work properly. Soot billowed around her, and she sucked in a lungful, spitting out a loud, riotous cough before she could clap her hands over her mouth.

  It echoed all the way down the hallway. Zanna froze. Something thumped dully around her, like footsteps hurrying toward the sound, and Zanna braced for the Variable to come flying into the room. But it was only her heart in her ears. The house turned over and went back to sleep.

  Time was of the essence now. Zanna saw no serving tray in the sitting room and imagined it up on the roof, its pathfinding function noticing that she had appeared back inside the house. It would make a beeline for the door and Zanna had to meet it there. Her legs still cramped and shaking, she forced herself to hurry. In the morning there would be a trail of chimney soot and grime as obvious as a blundering elephant, but Zanna would be gone by then. She had to be.

  Every step forced blood into her stiff legs and sent showers of needles up through her knees. Scratches she had suffered while climbing the chimney complained one by one, stinging with the soot and dust rubbed into the wounds. Her breaths were raspy, and her mouth, parched. But step by agonizing step, she made it to the front door.

  Everything was silent. There was just Zanna’s panting and pounding heart. She stared at the front door and that impossible lock: the one that looked so simple, yet which she had failed to break open after spending days upon days trying. There are other doors to the outside, she thought with a sudden fear. The back door in the greenhouse. The servants’ entrance. The tray could come in from one of those. Or a window. Or it could never have made it outside in the first place. Zanna had heard no doors open or close, but then again, she had been stuffed inside a chimney for probably the last half hour.

  “Come on,” she muttered. The words tasted like ash. “Come on, tray.”

  The door remained closed.

  “Come on,” she tried again. “Just this once, and you’ll be free of me. I promise. Come on.”

  It was still closed.

  Zanna wavered. She calculated how long it should take the tray to make it from the roof to the front door, and she didn’t like the number she came up with. “Come on,” she whispered. Tears came to her eyes, and it wasn’t because of the fireplace soot. It had been such a good plan too. “Please. Let me out.”

  A click, then sharp, bitter air blew in from the mountains. Snow on pine trees and frozen streams. The outside.

  It was so immediate and stunning that she nearly missed her opportunity. The tray was almost next to her when Zanna snapped back to life. She ducked underneath the tra
y, pulling her sack after her. With another click, the front door locked, sealing the Variable’s terrible mansion again, but this time Zanna was quicker than it. This time, she got out.

  The tray spun around and presented itself, pleased that it was finally delivering its meal, and Zanna gave it an affectionate pat. “I knew we’d get along eventually,” she said before kneeling to unknot her sack. She stuffed the sandwiches and apples into it and took the butter knife from beside the dinner roll and tucked it up one of her sleeves so she could access it easily. Braving the wilderness with a dull butter knife wasn’t exactly her ideal scenario, but it was better than having no weapon at all. She took a few bites of the roll, not wanting to waste it, and washed it down with the cider. It was ice-cold from being outside for so long, but as Zanna stood on the porch of the mansion and looked out at the forest, it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

  She drained the cider and put the mug back on the tray. “Take care of yourself now,” she said, picking up her rucksack and tying it around her shoulders. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”

  The serving tray didn’t seem insulted by Zanna’s remark. It just gave a little bow, as it always did, and headed back into the house, the door snapping open and shut with a final locking click.

  And with that, Zanna was free.

  It was time to get moving. She had to be as far away from the mansion as possible by the time the Variable woke up and realized she was gone. But for a moment, Zanna was content just standing there on the porch, looking up at the stars.

  “Okay, Zanna,” she said after indulging herself long enough. “Let’s get moving.” She adjusted the sack on her back. “And you’re going to have to stop talking to yourself when you make it back to civilization.”

  The air out on the porch was still primelocked, but as she headed away from the house and crossed the little stream at the edge of the meadow, it all changed. This was more than a simple barrier of air pressure. A step one way, and there was a shambling, displaced Victorian mansion in the middle of a meadow. A step the other way, and there was just snow and wild grass and the open forest. No wonder the Primers had been useless in finding her. The entire mansion and its grounds were hidden behind an illusion barrier.

  This last fact stopped her dead in her tracks. Living in the house for so long, she had almost forgotten what air—real and free air—felt like. She closed her eyes and pulled a handful of nitrogen right down to her, laughing at the ease of it. Then another, just like that. She threw them up into the sky like a magician releasing doves. There was so much around her—snow and stones and trees and air—that her head buzzed with possibilities. All of it could be manipulated. All of it was hers.

  But only if she got away from the Variable first.

  This part of her plan had been less rigorously thought out, but she was buoyed by her success so far. The crisp, cold air gave her a second wind, her legs no longer complaining about their cramped time in the chimney, her scratches easier to ignore. She looked up into the sky and found the North Star. She had been taken somewhere much farther north than Virginia—that much was obvious. Therefore, her best bet was to travel south, and fast.

  Zanna gathered up more nitrogen, far more than the stolen breath she had been working with, and pumped it into her parachute. It was an awkward system of travel to say the least, but it was faster than traveling by foot. With her teeth gritted, she told the nitrogen to rise, and after a bit of a rocky start that dragged her feet over the snow, she rose up over the pines in a perilous and janky flight.

  At first she went slowly, afraid to force her nitrogen any faster than what would be a brisk jog if she were on the ground. But as the night went on and she grew more confident in her abilities, she slowly ramped it up until she was cruising at a decent sprint. Beneath her, the land rolled and rippled. Pine valleys with lakes covered in sheets of snow and ice spread out in all directions, endless and untouched, and as the sky began to go rosy with sunrise, Zanna wondered if she was ever going to see another human. The Variable had brought her here from Virginia in the space of a few hours—how could she have traveled for the better part of a night and still not be out of the wilderness?

  Her focus started slipping. Elation and adrenaline only carried her so far, and soaring through the night air of the northern wilderness was a bone-numbing experience, even with all her extra clothes and the blanket wrapped around her. She spotted a bare patch of granite on the side of a mountain and landed to consider her options.

  There was perhaps another hour or so until the Variable would wake up and realize that Zanna was gone. An hour to either continue on or find a place to hide. There was no guarantee that she would find civilization soon, but there was also no guarantee she would be safe if she tried to hide. What functions the woman had at her disposal Zanna could only guess at, but she was sure one of them could easily track down a girl in the forest. If she was going to be found, it wouldn’t be cowering in a cave somewhere. She looked to the horizon again. If only she could see beyond this ridge of mountains. If only she were higher.

  She took a long breath and gripped the knots of her bedsheet parachute. Her stomach clawed and churned against the idea, but deep down she knew it was the only way, even though her sense of self-preservation disagreed vehemently. One last ascent to see if she could spot any sign of civilization. She gathered up the nitrogen, which felt like an old friend now, and filled her parachute, climbing up into the crisp and bright air of morning.

  Twenty, fifty, a hundred feet up. Calculations of gravity and terminal velocity and impact forces splattered across her mind, and she did her best to sweep them away. But the higher she went, the less she could ignore, until the clamor in her mind threatened to paralyze her entirely with fear. Strange howling winds twisted around her, tearing out wisps of nitrogen from her parachute. She sucked in breath after breath, the air getting thinner the higher she rose.

  This was a terrible idea. Her eyes screwed up tight, desperately clinging to the nitrogen function that was keeping her aloft. Even with the northern chill, cold sweat beaded on her forehead and upper lip, and she felt the sweet black softness of a faint tugging at her brain. At this height, she would smash over the mountain like a water balloon.

  “Just one look,” she whispered to herself. “And then you can go back down.”

  Summoning every ounce of willpower left in her tired body, Zanna cracked her eyes open. In all honesty, she was not that high up—a few hundred feet, perhaps—but to Zanna, it felt as if she was on the wing of a plane. Beneath her, the wilderness had no end. It just rolled on and on—but there! A flash like light bouncing off a polished mirror caught her eye, somewhere down over a long mountain back. Zanna rubbed her eyes and focused on the spot far to the south, but there was nothing else. Just smudges of forest and snow hidden with the haze of distance.

  It was certainly more than an hour’s travel. If anything was there at all. It could be a city. It could be an abandoned radio dish. It could be a patch of still water. But it was all she had to go on. The Variable would be awake soon, and she would catch up with Zanna quickly.

  “Don’t do it,” she muttered as her vision began to fade. It was like diving into icy water. Every piece of her fought and howled and told her this was a terrible idea. Every piece wanted to feel stone beneath her feet. Every piece wanted to sleep for a week. Zanna ignored all of that. She gathered her nitrogen in a solid punch, braced herself, and told it to go as fast as it could. With a yank in her armpits like she had been caught up by a passing bullet train, her parachute filled with hurricane wind and sped off.

  Wind screamed and ripped around her. It rattled the parachute like she was a doll and it was trying to snap her head off. She bobbled, nearly lost control, got it back by the skin of her teeth, and had almost found equilibrium when everything gave in a horrific instant. Her rucksack came open, and the air was full of flutterin
g clothes and papers and reports and roast-beef sandwiches. A sound of wordless dismay tore out of Zanna’s throat as she saw her provisions scatter into the forest, and her concentration went with them. The nitrogen snapped back into its natural function, and she fell in a tumbling, plummeting trajectory.

  This wasn’t like when she had fallen down the tower. This time she was end over end, unable to even figure out what was sky and what was earth. The wind was too fast and too loud. She couldn’t even make calculations in her head. Terror gripped her so firmly and completely that there was no space for anything but an endless scream. A flash of pines and pink sky, and the ground was close now. It had to be close. She glimpsed treetops and branches and a bird’s nest with a very concerned eagle screeching at the incoming girl. Three final words raced through her mind. Told you so.

  Then she hit and broke. Zanna instinctively brought her arms up to protect her face as she smashed through the nest and the pine trees. Needles whipped against the blanket, and her parachute caught the branches in a knot, suddenly yanking her around like a wrecking ball at the end of its chain. There was not even time to think about deceleration and momentum before she smashed brutally into the trunk of the pine tree with a sickening crunching sound.

  Her first thought was that she was still alive. She lowered her arms, opened her eyes, and saw that she dangled a good twenty feet above the ground, her parachute having snared a fistful of branches. The blanket had done a decent job of protecting her as she crashed through the tree—but not decent enough. Nasty new cuts crisscrossed her knuckles and forearms and legs. High above her, the eagle cried to the open sky about its ruined nest.