The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  Then the pain came. It was dark and swallowing and worse with every breath. Something had cracked in her chest, and blood sponged through her lungs. The pressure felt like someone was trying to squeeze her to death.

  “Ow—” she started, but the exertion of speaking doubled the pain of her splintered ribs. Instead, she focused on untying herself from the tangled bedsheet. With grimy and blood-soaked fingers, she undid the knots that tied the parachute around her shoulders and slowly extricated herself, every movement filled with fresh pain. She was still high up in the tree, and just looking at the climb down made her chest ache.

  Her first thought was to make a cushion of nitrogen she could lower herself down on, but as she tried to pack the nitrogen together, the functions twisted into something she didn’t recognize. Fluid dynamics. Gas pressure. Zanna made a sound that was half-whimper and half-curse at her lack of schooling. She would have to try something else.

  If she made a wind strong enough, it could counteract her gravity. Like those indoor skydiving places that used a huge fan in the floor to simulate flight. But it would take a lot of nitrogen moving at high speed, and Zanna’s focus kept slipping back to her ribs that she was now sure had been broken in the crash.

  There wasn’t any other way down, though. Better to fall now, on purpose, than later, by accident, while trying to climb down the pine tree. Zanna swallowed and began to manipulate the nitrogen beneath her. As she willed it to go faster and faster, it picked up snow and fallen needles, making a whirlwind of forest debris. Her head spun with frantic math. She couldn’t keep this tornado together for much longer, not in her condition. Zanna stared down into the center, into the flying pinecones and rocks and branches, cursed her luck, and fell without a word.

  For a moment her stomach was weightless, a feeling she was becoming far more familiar with than she ever wanted. But her math was solid. The fountain of nitrogen buoyed her up, countering her downward acceleration perfectly. She took a breath of accomplishment, and her lungs burst in suffocation. At once, the function died, and she fell to the snow, gulping for air. Of course, she thought as she writhed with fresh agony. It was just nitrogen, after all. Of course she wouldn’t have been able to breathe inside it.

  Hot, blinding pain filled her chest. She had only fallen a foot or so, but Zanna laid there for a long time, trying to make her eyes work again as debris rained down all around her. Her ribs were in too much pain to sit up, so Zanna summoned another handful of nitrogen, making it sneak underneath her body and push her up onto her feet. Her balance was terrible, and she had to stabilize herself with a few more gusts. The entire forest swam drunkenly, but at least she was up on her feet. Slowly, relentlessly, Zanna put one foot in front of the other.

  It was a long march through the forest, and Zanna tottered with every step. The snow made things treacherous, so she kept a wind of nitrogen ahead of her to expose rocks and tree stumps in the way. Her course was roughly southward, thanks to the rising sun in the east. She tried not to think of the possibility that what she had spotted from the sky was not a city. That she was walking toward an ice-covered lake or some other stray bit of reflective surface that had happened to catch the sunlight.

  Her ribs were broken. There was no denying it now. She needed a hospital or at least someone with medical knowledge and supplies, and fast. Or else she would pass out and then . . . Zanna didn’t want to consider it. She used the grinding pain in her chest to block it out.

  At last she stumbled down a gradual slope and found herself on a rough logging road. The sliver of civilization—the first bit of hope she had gotten in a long while—hit her hard, and she collapsed against a nearby tree while her body shook with maniacal, animal sobs. How glad she was that no one else was there to see her at that moment—a torn and bloody girl beside a muddy road, crying and laughing and nearly vomiting all at the same time. Roads had to lead somewhere. It was the last push she needed. All the other possibilities of what that glint of light had been were swept aside as she started with renewed energy. She had a road to follow now. She would make it through this.

  There was light in the distance.

  It trickled through the back of her hazy senses. A feeling of early sun that told her that the pines had been cleared out ahead. The logging road came around, and there was civilization.

  It was small and still a fair distance off, but it was a city. Roofs peeked over rolling hills, and trucks made their way up and down the streets. There were even a few modest office buildings near the town center, their windows pink and gold with dawn. And at a curve in the logging road, she spotted people.

  Zanna had come to a workmen’s lot, with a couple of idle trucks and machines and people in blaze-orange milling around with cups of coffee in their hands. Her hand lifted to call out to them, but before she could open her mouth, a thought stopped her in her tracks. What will happen if I call out to the workers?

  They would gasp and shout and pick her up from the ground and take her to a hospital. They would rub their heads and ask where she had come from and how she had gotten so injured. The doctors would give her anesthetics and make her sleep, and when she woke, there would be hundreds of questions and police and too much to explain. That all sounded fine to Zanna. But what they wouldn’t do is defend her from the Variable. What they wouldn’t do is alert the Scientists that she was alive.

  She needed Lord Hemmington and the Primers. No, Zanna corrected herself. The Primers had been no help so far. What she needed was her grandfather, and for that, she had to keep going. So, with a longing sigh, she lowered her hand and skirted around the lot, keeping far away so none of the workers would spot her. The road swayed and dipped, all the buildings and houses along it swaying to a beat that matched Zanna’s bobbing head. Her chest was getting worse. An audible crunch of grinding bone sounded with every other step.

  Then she saw exactly what she needed. A grungy gas station stood at the intersection, its lights still burning away the morning dark, an ancient pay phone on the wall. It was so old it even had one of those yellow books of phone numbers hanging beneath it. Other than an old woman at the pumps and her dog sticking its nose out the window of her pickup truck, the place was empty. Zanna hugged the slat fence that ran around the edge of the lot, only glancing over at the old woman once to check out her license plate. Canada. She was in Canada.

  The phone hummed a dial tone when she picked it up, and Zanna thanked her lucky stars for that. But making a call required money. Nothing came out when she jiggled the coin return, and nothing was on the pavement, either, save a candy

  wrapper and a few errantly tossed cigarette butts.

  Breathing was nearly impossible now. All the walking since her crash had torn farther into her chest. Zanna steadied herself as a wave of dizziness washed over her. She had made it this far. Only a little farther to go.

  Her focus was a trembling string, but she grasped it and reached out for the nitrogen around her. It didn’t want to cooperate, and Zanna really couldn’t blame it. Pain made it nearly impossible, even though she knew the nitrogen function backward and forward by now. She bit down on her tongue, hoping it would distract her a little from the enveloping pain of her chest, and grabbed a fistful of nitrogen. Carefully, with the precision of a safecracker, she fed it into the coin slot of the pay phone.

  It was a bit like fumbling around to find something that has rolled too far under the bed. The nitrogen felt around the levers and scales and internal movements of the phone, and then, without warning, the phone sprang into life, just as if she had fed it a coin, the dial tone changing as a connection was made.

  Zanna dialed, but the machine did nothing. Long distance, she thought. Of course. She tried to repeat what she had done the first time, but the exact movements had already slipped from memory. The nitrogen kept dissipating, and she had to gather it back up again and again. Her eyes closed—not in concentration but out of exhaustion—and the
dial tone had still not changed. She bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood, if she had had any blood left in her.

  A click, and the phone began to ring. Five times and no answer. Ten . . .

  “Hello?”

  The sweet, sandpapery voice of Pops crackled over the phone line. It broke Zanna, but she was out of tears, so she just choked and rasped into the receiver. “Pops?”

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  Zanna swallowed the blood in her mouth. Speaking made her ribs feel as if they were being snapped like a bunch of twigs, but she raised her voice as loud as she could. “Pops, it’s me. It’s Zanna.”

  Silence. And then her grandfather whispered in a broken voice, “Oh, my sweet gracious.”

  “Pops, listen,” Zanna said. The world spun. It wasn’t a question now of if she would collapse, only a question of when. “I . . . I’m hurt. I don’t have much time. Tell them . . .” She glanced down at the yellow book and the address on its cover, using the last of her strength to read the printed letters. “Canada. Yellowknife, Canada. It’s north.” Her vision went black, but she kept talking, not even sure if her words made sense. “Yellowknife, Canada. I’m here. Hospital. Tell . . . Cedwick. All of them. Yellow . . .”

  She didn’t hear what Pops said in reply. The phone slipped out of her fingers, and she went down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Zanna wanted to sleep. She was comfortable and warm, and the air smelled of clean linen. But she also wasn’t really safe yet, and so, with a grueling, complaining strength, she opened her eyes.

  Her predictions had been correct. Someone had spotted the bloody, ratty girl who had collapsed outside a gas station, and brought her to the hospital. They had taken her shabby blanket and grimy clothes and had given her a thin hospital gown, cleaning and wrapping her wounds in gauze. An IV drip had been inserted into the crook of her elbow, the solution in the bag too molecularly complex for Zanna to figure out. Whatever it was, it did wonders for her broken ribs. The clock on the wall across from her bed told Zanna it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  She lifted the sheets, dreading but unable to stop herself from taking a peek. The doctors had wrapped her chest in a constrictive bandage to keep her ribs from moving around, but a bruise the color of an overripe plum had spread out from underneath the bandage, reaching all the way up to her collarbone. Her skin was tight and shiny, and Zanna dropped the sheet, thoroughly unsettled.

  The room was small but comfortable, with a window that looked out at the sunset. Fake flowers stood in a little vase by her side table, along with a tear-away calendar that said it was Thursday, March 24, and a small intercom speaker to let her call the nurses’ station. The proper thing to do would be to let them know she had woken up. No doubt there was a pile of questions they wanted to ask her, like how a girl from Virginia had come to end up in the Canadian wilderness with just a couple of bedsheets and several broken ribs. But she held off on that for just a moment, collecting her thoughts out of the haze of sleep and painkillers.

  The last thing she remembered was the phone call. Seeing as she was in the hospital, the Primers had not found her yet. But neither had the Variable. The hunt was presumably still on—and with the tattered bedsheet she had left in the pines and the blood she had smeared all over the forest, Zanna had made it exceptionally easy.

  “Happy now, Dr. Trout?” Zanna muttered to herself as her fists bunched up the blankets of her hospital cot. “There. It feels terrible to be a failure.”

  She had been doing so well, and then she screwed everything up in the final stretch. Typical. It was just her style to finally figure out an escape route and then ruin it with her own ineptitude. Like the furnace and the mansion basement all over again. A lump of graphite could track her down now. For the Variable, it would be simple.

  Zanna’s mind was foggy, but it still worked well enough. If the Primers couldn’t find her in time—she was sure that Pops had passed her message on, but there was no way of knowing—Zanna would have to fend for herself. What she needed was a weapon. She looked around again, and her eyes settled on the set of cabinets across the room from her. Linens and spare towels were stacked atop it, along with a few glass jars filled with cotton swabs and tongue depressors. With a glance at the door to make sure it was closed, she gathered up some nitrogen and opened the upper-left cabinet with a strong gust. Bandages of all shapes and sizes spilled out. The next one had boxes of tissues. The next, face masks and latex gloves. Frustrated, she went through all the cabinets, but she found nothing to defend herself with. No scalpels or spare hypodermic needles or razors. It was all just bandages and papers and pencils and a jar of old, crusty lollipops.

  She frowned. It always worked in the movies. But apparently, hospitals didn’t actually keep dangerous objects like scalpels freely accessible to their patients. With a fair bit of effort and some careful gusts of nitrogen, Zanna managed to pick up a box of pencils and carry it over to her, only to see that they were all unsharpened. She threw it against the wall with a muffled curse. No, if she wanted a weapon, she would have to build it herself.

  She returned to the cabinet of medical supplies, going over its contents more carefully than before. One by one she inspected each spilled box and open cabinet until she found an old bundle of thermometers hiding under a pile of smocks. With her eyes closed, she cast her mind back to Chemistry and all the memorization Dr. Piccowitz had forced upon them. Mercury was a heavy metal with an atomic number of 80. It would be liquid at room temperature, meaning that its atoms were still bouncing off each other but not as quickly and violently as a gas like nitrogen. Zanna calculated the gravity and forces, slight as they were, and combined everything into a grand function. It took a couple of tries, since mercury was a far more complicated atom than nitrogen, but she persisted until she felt it click. The thermometers rustled, and then one slipped from the bundle, dragged across the room by its bulb. Zanna reached out and snatched it from the air with a grin.

  Unfortunately, that was the easy part. She knew she could manipulate the nitrogen around her into a storm that would push away any would-be attackers. But that required a lot of focus. What she needed was a way to do that without relying on her brainpower, which was woozy and exhausted. That meant writing out a function—and Zanna had never done that before.

  Her teachers had made the distinction clear multiple times. It was the difference between just knowing the answer and writing out the pages and pages of work needed to arrive at it. Rough spots could be smoothed over in a hands-on manipulation, but a written function did exactly what it said and nothing more. It was that quality, Zanna remembered dryly, that let her escape from the mansion in the first place.

  To make nitrogen move meant manipulating its derivative—the function that described how something changed. This was Beatrice’s specialty, not hers, but Zanna did her best to remember what the quiet Italian girl had said. She picked out four corners in the air, like she was placing down stakes to mark out a garden plot, and added in all the chemical and physical functions until she held the square of nitrogen in her mind.

  She could have manipulated it directly then, but instead, she turned the whole thing over and peeled off the derivative, just as she had seen Beatrice do with theoretical cubes. It seemed like such a fragile, intangible thing, but when Zanna moved her square of nitrogen around, she saw the derivative flicker into life, describing every change she made.

  “I owe you, Beatrice,” Zanna said, imagining her little friend standing beside her, smiling at the mathematics.

  It was tempting to crank up the derivative as high as it would go, but then Zanna imagined a hurricane-force square of nitrogen erupting in her hospital room, flattening the wall and whatever else was behind it, and common sense prevailed. After all, this was a last resort. Hopefully, she wouldn’t even have to use it. Hopefully, the Primers would get here first. Hopefully.

  She summoned up the
mercury function, picked up the inert derivative, and slipped it in among the liquid coordinates and heavy-metal atoms. Then she let go of everything.

  Nothing happened. No roar of nitrogen shook the room. No Splutter split her head in two. Zanna peeked out of one eye and saw the thermometer still on her lap, reading a pleasant 24 degrees Celsius. When she reached her mind out to it, she found the derivative at once, hidden among the other functions, just waiting for Zanna to trigger it. She smiled and tucked the thermometer under her pillow. It made her feel a bit safer—but only a bit.

  There was one more thing she could do, and it involved the heavy blue curtain beside her bed. Zanna couldn’t build a wall of air pressure, but she could make another kind of barrier. With a little bit of work and clever nitrogen manipulation, she managed to close the curtain around her, shutting out the last rays of sunset that were filtering through her window. It was less a formidable barrier and more an early warning system, but Zanna would take everything she could get. In the calm darkness, Zanna sank back into her pillows, the pain in her ribs beginning to lessen for the first time since she had woken up.

  Sleep was the best thing she could do right now—a light and wary sleep to get back lost energy and be ready in case the Variable found her first. But Zanna’s brain refused to shut down, even though her body ached and wanted nothing more than to lie still for about the next decade. How long she lay there among her troubling thoughts, she had no way of knowing. It seemed like hours. Then the sound of metal rings slipping over the bar cut through her wandering thoughts and brought her back to the hospital room in an instant. Cautiously, she put her hand underneath her pillow and pulled out the thermometer, keeping it hidden among the sheets as she sat up as best her ribs would allow. It may not be the Variable, she told herself, even as her skin prickled at the nearby danger. The Primers were looking for her. It might even just be the nurse making his rounds.