The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  Others were a bit more bittersweet. Dr. Fitzie bubbled and gushed with excitement, but she also brought with her a stack of missed work and dumped it rather unceremoniously on the table. “I thought you’d like something to occupy your time while you rest up,” she said, not mentioning the two other stacks of papers and lecture notes that Dr. Cheever and Dr. Piccowitz had already left.

  The worst, however, was when the Primer Lieutenant Henry dropped in for a debriefing. Their actual conversation wasn’t that bad—Zanna went slowly through everything that had happened since December, with the omission of her suspicion of the Variable being a version of herself from the future. The friendly Primer who had given Zanna his coat in Yellowknife took her story down with a serious expression.

  But then Pops confronted him. “Thought you folks were supposed to be protecting her,” he said in a voice that Zanna had never heard him use before. She didn’t like it one bit. “Thought that’s what your air-pressure barrier was for. What do you call this, then? You knew that madwoman was after her—”

  “Pops, please,” Zanna said, reaching for him.

  “Zanna,” he said, and it shut her mouth up tight. He jabbed a bony finger at Henry, his whole frame shaking with anger. “Twice now I’ve been told that my granddaughter has gone missing. Twice now I’ve had to wonder if I was ever going to see her again. I can’t take a third.”

  Henry nodded solemnly. “The Primers agree completely, sir,” he said when no one else spoke. “We failed in December, but it won’t happen again. The safety of your granddaughter is our number-one priority. We’ve arranged with St. Pommeroy’s for her to stay here, on campus, until this woman can be caught. It’s the safest place for Zanna.”

  Pops looked around the cozy room, as if appraising its defensive fortifications. “I want to keep an eye on her too.”

  “Pops,” Zanna grumbled.

  “Of course,” Henry said without hesitation. “You’re free to come and go as you please for as long as Zanna remains here. They tell me you’ve been catching a ride with Dennis Gunney? We can keep that arrangement.”

  She could tell her grandfather wasn’t completely sold on the plan, but he shook Henry’s hand anyway. “Hope you’re not paying them,” he grumbled to her after Henry had left. “Bit of a mess, aren’t they?”

  “Pops,” she groaned.

  “I’m just worried about my granddaughter, that’s all,” he said—and didn’t bring it up again.

  Her friends came to visit her during lunch and every other spare moment they had, surrounding her bed and catching her up on everything that had happened since December. They were the same girls Zanna remembered from her father’s welcome-home party, but at the same time, she couldn’t help but notice how each of them had grown while she was gone. In Nora’s case, the growth was quite literal. She had gained at least two inches, though her uniform still fit perfectly. Libby was experimenting with dark purple lipstick and eyeshadow and was back to dating Amir, but what really stood out was that she had chosen her Iron—a blackened fire poker that left ash on her hands. Beatrice hadn’t found an Iron yet, but she had found a boyfriend. “His name is Tomas and he’s a sophomore from Barcelona,” Libby said while the small girl blushed and pushed her fingers together. Zanna smiled as they prattled on about the end of the school year and possible specializations, doing her best to hide her unease. Her friends were blooming, and she was still the awkward and unsure runt of a weed she had been at the beginning of the school year.

  It didn’t help that in the first few days of getting back, Mrs. Turnbuckle’s silver cat slipped into the room and hopped up onto the table. “Zanna,” it said, as it always did when she had a visitor, “Dr. Trout is here to see you.”

  What perfect timing. Zanna groaned. “Fine,” she said, setting aside the table of electronegativity Dr. Piccowitz wanted her to memorize. “Let her in.”

  Moments later, there was a knock on her door. Dr. Trout entered with the solemnity she always carried with her, wearing a blue-patterned robe with a dusty twilight-colored scarf around her head. She glanced over the piles of work the other teachers had brought, her face creased deeply in that permanent frown. With barely a flick of her hand, her baseball bat reshaped itself into a gnarled farmhouse chair, and she sat down, adjusting her robe and spreading her palms over her bony knees.

  “You owe Mr. Hemmington a paper.”

  Zanna apparently did not even merit a “Welcome back.”

  “I lost it,” Zanna said after recovering from the unorthodox greeting. “Somewhere out there in the Canadian wilderness. When I was escaping. From a madwoman. In case you missed it.”

  “I figured you would have an excuse for not doing it,” Dr. Trout said with a bit of melancholy to her voice. “He had one too.”

  “I did write it,” Zanna said stubbornly. “It’s not an excuse. I really did lose it.”

  Dr. Trout rocked ever so slightly in her chair, which set off a choir of squeaks and groans from the old wood. The fact that Zanna actually had written the paper didn’t seem to impress her one bit. “Ms. Mayfield, you are on the verge of failing my class.”

  This time, Zanna’s words worked—fast. “Failing? In case you haven’t heard, I’ve been a little busy recently. You know, getting kidnapped and trying to escape. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for schoolwork. So I’m sorry that I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to your stupid class because I was busy trying to survive. I almost died out there, I almost—”

  Her voice cut off abruptly, her brain finally catching up with her mouth and telling it to shut up. She had never yelled at a teacher before. Back-talked a little, maybe, but never outright yelled. Especially when that teacher was Dr. Trout. Now Zanna was certainly going to fail the class.

  But Dr. Trout just listened, her face a smooth brown stone. When Zanna didn’t say anything more, she gestured to the work Dr. Piccowitz had left on the table. One of the hard acrylic cubes with a small elemental sample trapped inside the transparent polymer floated up from the pile. This one was fluorine, and Dr. Trout contemplated the pale-yellow gas for a moment. “I do not deny that these last few months have been difficult for you,” she said. “The trials you have faced are more than any of your peers. But the study of Self is not schoolwork. Not in the sense that it may be left behind or forgotten in your bedroom or lost somewhere in the bottom of your backpack. All your other professors brought you work that you have missed, but for me, you never left my classroom. The study of Self continues for as long as you live.”

  Zanna didn’t feel like trying to sit upright any longer. Dr. Trout’s words made her sink lower and lower, each one like a weight on her shoulders. “Doesn’t mean that I’m failing,” she said glumly, her bottom lip stuck out in a pout.

  Dr. Trout set the acrylic cube on a small wooden surface that grew out of her chair, the click as she put it down sharply pronounced. “You have been given an opportunity that very few at this school ever receive—an ordeal. Your friends have not had such a luxury. They have had to do their searching and contemplation through study and reading and quiet reflection. They have had no fire-forged moments. No crucibles. No magnificent crises. But even then, they have made great progress. What have you done with that same time? I look at you, and I see the same girl who came to my class in September. I see that nothing has changed inside you.”

  “I changed plenty,” Zanna snapped before she could stop herself.

  Dr. Trout raised one of her bushy eyebrows in response. “Tell me, then,” she said dryly. It was the tone of someone who knew full well what the answer was going to be. “Who is Zanna Mayfield, and what is her Iron?”

  She was a time traveler. She was a Variable. She was a woman with unerring beauty and silky black hair and a Victorian mansion she had stolen right out of the ground. She was cruel and vicious and completely mad . . .

  The words nearly made it out. Zanna felt them
burble like an upset stomach and rise all the way to her tongue. But when she opened her mouth, what came out was something else entirely.

  “I don’t know.”

  To her credit, Dr. Trout didn’t smile at having her point proven so neatly. Instead, she made the smallest tut in her throat and then waved away the fluorine sample, which floated back across the room and put itself away.

  “You have been given a great gift, as odd as that may sound,” she said, only after the cube was back and her gaze was once again upon Zanna. “Many of us do not ever find ourselves tested as you have been. Those of us who do, we are too old for it. We break under the strain. Our functions and our bodies have become brittle and stiff with the years. We have built a life upon its foundation, and when crisis hits, it cracks the very stones. It collapses us. We emerge believing we are stronger, but that is a lie. A pile of rubble is stronger than a house, only because it cannot collapse again. One cannot be destroyed if she never rebuilds.”

  She paused to lick her lips, and the sound was audible in the cottage room. When she spoke again, there was almost a flicker of emotion to it. “You are young and have only just begun to build. What might have broken in an older woman will merely reshape. Take that. Build upon that. You have seen the truest Zanna Mayfield there is—the one that exists when the world around you does not.”

  Zanna looked down at her feet beneath the blankets and wiggled her toes. The sickening urge to tell Dr. Trout everything had receded, but it had left something rotten in her stomach.

  The professor rose, her chair returning to its baseball-bat form, and she swung it over her shoulder. “I do not take pleasure in failing my students,” the steely-eyed woman said, “but I will if need be. Convince me that you have thought about what we have talked about.”

  “Dr. Trout—”

  Zanna clamped her mouth shut before the rest of her sentence escaped—but not before the professor turned back from the door, eyebrows raised in question. “Yes?”

  There was nothing to say. Or, rather, there was too much. The professor’s challenge bored deep in Zanna’s mind: “Convince me.” Zanna could do that and more. She could open the floodgates and drown Dr. Trout and her unwavering gaze with exactly how well she knew herself.

  Instead, she looked down at the bandages wrapped around her ribcage and pushed her fingertips together. “Time . . . time travel,” she squeaked out. “Is it possible?”

  A strange look flitted through Dr. Trout’s eyes. It might have been the memory of another girl who had asked a similar question. Or she was just trying to decrypt Zanna’s question. “That is a strange thing for you to be concerned about.”

  “It’s just—we were talking about it earlier,” Zanna said. Something about Dr. Trout and the presence she carried with her made it so difficult to lie—but it wasn’t really that much of a lie. Zanna had been talking about time travel earlier. As long as Dr. Trout didn’t ask whom Zanna had been talking about it with. “And I was curious,” Zanna added.

  “Curious about what?”

  Zanna gulped. “Whether it was possible. I mean, time’s just a function, right? Probably really complicated but still a function. It has to be; it exists.”

  Her professor turned from the door, and with each step she took Zanna shrank a little more. At the foot of her bed, Dr. Trout leaned in, and there was no space left for Zanna to shrink into. “So what is your question, then? You seem to have answered it already.”

  “But—” Dr. Trout’s ability to cut right through her made Zanna squirm like a worm on the dissecting table. She tried to make it sound like she was stating a fact, but it still came out a question. “But no one’s done it?”

  “Correct.” The professor leaned back, and Zanna gulped. She had been breathing shallowly—and not because of her broken ribs. “To manipulate time, one must manipulate the universe. All its stars and planets and heavenly bodies and the space in between. And those are the simple elements.”

  She then prompted Zanna to finish her implied question with a raised eyebrow.

  “Humanity,” Zanna filled in after a moment of thought.

  “Precisely,” Dr. Trout said. “Stars may be taken apart like the machines they are, and planets can be held in your grasp, but understanding the Self of someone else—just one other person, let alone all of humanity—is impossible. That is why we carry Irons. That is why we study our own function and no one else’s. It is impossible.”

  Of course the professor would bring the conversation back to her class.

  Zanna hung her head. “I see,” she muttered.

  “I hope you do,” Dr. Trout said. “I truly do.” She headed toward the exit again, but at the door she paused, as if a thought had suddenly come to her. Whatever it was that had crossed her mind, she apparently didn’t think it important enough to put into words, and with a soft shush of linen, she left.

  Those last words, however, lingered long after in Zanna’s mind. After the school day was over and Pops had taken the bus back home, she still couldn’t focus on anything but Dr. Trout’s visit. Not about Zanna failing Self—that was hardly a surprise to her. Rather, she thought about what Dr. Trout had said about time travel.

  “To manipulate time, one must manipulate the universe.”

  Zanna knew that the Variable was powerful, but she had always thought there was some upper bound, some limit to what the Variable could do. But as Zanna mulled over Dr. Trout’s words, that small comfort faded away. To come back in time, the Variable had taken apart the universe and put it back together in a younger configuration.

  At that thought, a shiver ran through Zanna, even though she was curled up under Mrs. Turnbuckle’s ever-warm crocheted blanket. Because if the Variable could do that, then there was no limit to her abilities.

  And she was still out there.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Zanna’s recovery flew by, just as Mrs. Turnbuckle had predicted. The days filled with springtime, and the trees outside the cottage bloomed with large white flowers. Soon, Zanna was well enough to leave her room and sit out in the backyard, with its wrought-iron tea table and matching chairs. She took to doing her classwork there, sketching out derivatives for Dr. Fitzie or vector calculations for Dr. Cheever with the endless Atlantic for a backdrop. Occasionally, Mrs. Turnbuckle’s cat—whose name Zanna had learned was Ferry, short for Fahrenheit—wandered out to paw at the acrylic chemical cubes and ignore the studying girl.

  It was on one such outside morning, while Zanna was scooping up the last of her scrambled eggs and ketchup and skimming over friction coefficients, that the Particle arrived. Particles came and went from the cottage all the time, and Zanna paid most of the small silver marbles no mind, accepting them as just another fact of life as a Scientist. But this one was different. It moved faster than any Particle she had seen before. And it was large—almost the size of a bowling ball—and glossy black. Zanna’s head whipped around as it passed, but by the time she turned, it had already found the letter opening in the cottage’s back door, reshaped itself into a long and flat snake, and slipped through.

  Her legs were still a little weak, but Zanna pushed herself up with the help of the tea table, unable to stop her curiosity. She hobbled through the back door and poked her head into the waiting room to ask Mrs. Turnbuckle if she, too, had seen the strange message. But in the doorway, she froze. Behind the desk sat the black sphere, now large enough to swallow a person whole, and her nurse was nowhere in sight.

  A strangled cry slipped out of Zanna. Instantly, she gathered a handful of nitrogen and spun around, expecting to see the Variable swooping in at any second while Mrs. Turnbuckle was restrained. But there was nothing out in the yard except her homework and Ferry.

  Uneasy and unbalanced, she scrambled over to the black sphere. Perhaps the Variable had mistimed her assault, in which case Zanna had to act quickly. The sphere was some kind of alloy, but a
complex function not unlike a primelock kept her from peering any deeper. Zanna knocked on it and heard nothing echo inside. She tried pounding on it with the heel of her hand, and when that didn’t work, she grabbed a particularly thick book. She had just raised it over her head when the sphere sprang into action. As Zanna jumped back, knocking papers and little cat figurines from Mrs. Turnbuckle’s desk, the sphere split open and shrank back to its original size, revealing her nurse once again, who looked entirely unharmed.

  “Heavens!” she cried, a hand over her heart at the sight of Zanna standing over her with a raised book of anatomy. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I thought you were in danger,” Zanna said, feeling thoroughly foolish. The adrenaline sloshed around inside her, not sure where to go now. She handed the book back. “Sorry.”

  “Well, bless you for worrying, but as you can see, I’m perfectly fine,” Mrs. Turnbuckle said, fluffing up her curly brown hair in demonstration.

  “I saw that—” Zanna tried to point to the black globe, but it had already left the cottage. “What was it?”

  The nurse’s mouth wavered a bit, the corners unsure what they were supposed to be doing. Mrs. Turnbuckle had to decide for them, and she smiled. “Nothing you need to worry about. A special message from the Head Primer. The boys do like their security protocols, you know. Anyhoo, I think you’ve gotten quite enough fresh air. Back to bed with you.”

  Zanna didn’t move. “Was it about me?”

  Mrs. Turnbuckle only shooed Zanna back toward her room, already shuffling things around on her desk and cleaning up the mess Zanna had made. “It’s nothing to worry about, my dear. Just a regular checkup. Now move along. Your grandfather should be here very soon.”

  “My homework’s all outside—”

  “I’ll bring it in,” Mrs. Turnbuckle snapped, a little too quickly. “You just tuck yourself back in bed, that’s a good girl.”