Zanna’s nerves screamed that things weren’t right and there was a whole lot to worry about, but she turned anyway and went back to her room, climbing into bed and batting around an acrylic cube of beryllium as she thought. The Primers did not send top-secret messenger Particles just to chat.
Zanna balanced the cube on her index finger and made it spin like a top, staring blankly at the brittle steel-grey element inside. It had to be an update on the Variable. Maybe Lord Hemmington had managed to corner her somewhere, and the message was just that soon, Zanna would have nothing to worry about ever again. She chuckled humorlessly at her optimism. If the Variable was powerful enough to go back in time, the Primers were out of their league. Plus, there was still the look on Mrs. Turnbuckle’s face to consider—the brave smile trying to hide what seemed like fear. Something had happened with the Variable, but it wasn’t good news.
A brief knock on the door, and Pops walked in, Ferry following at his heels and meowing. Zanna waved and beckoned to the silver-and-orange cat, inviting it to hop up on her bed, but Ferry ignored her, preferring to stay by Pops and head-butt him in the ankles.
“How are you doing today?” Pops asked as he settled into an armchair with a groan and picked up the book he had been working on yesterday.
“Fine,” Zanna said. She glanced over at the cat in the corner—not Ferry, but the metal one that Mrs. Turnbuckle talked through. Right now it was silent, holding its head upright with its blue eyes fixed on the opposite wall, but Zanna knew it was listening.
“Is that Mr. Gunney’s Constant?” she asked, nodding toward the newspaper her grandfather had come in with. He said it was, and she flipped through it, her eyes skimming for any strange occurrences or hidden clues as to what might have prompted Lord Hemmington’s message. But the headline of the day was about a new sorting function a Scientist in Antarctica had written. Zanna found nothing suspicious on any of the other pages, and finally, she handed the paper back, dismayed.
The rest of the day followed in much the same way. Zanna tackled the mystery of the messenger sphere in every way possible, but all her attempts came up short. When the girls came to visit her over lunch, as they always did, Zanna asked Nora if she or her parents had heard any recent rumors in the Scientist community, but the girl just shrugged. Zanna told the group about the high-security Particle—but not about her suspicions, always keeping Mrs. Turnbuckle’s ever-present cat in mind. Nothing appeared in The Constant that afternoon, either, except for more bickering over sorting functions. Zanna stared down at the page of mineral crystallography she was supposed to be memorizing, not absorbing any of it. There was another way for her to figure out what was going on. A question she hadn’t yet asked.
What would she do if she were in the Variable’s place?
Zanna picked up The Constant and turned to the archive. At her touch a selection of back issues appeared. She flipped through them, the illusionary text changing with a sophisticated and elegant function. The last real news of the Variable had been several weeks before, when she’d given the Primers the slip somewhere around Greenland. Zanna read the story intently now, taking in every detail. Then she closed her eyes.
She imagined she stood on a glacial plain dotted with craggy, lichen-covered rocks. Snow-covered mountains rose in the distance. Her hair was long—longer than it had ever been—and the bellowing wind whipped it out behind her. Beneath her slim black dress, Zanna felt iron wrapped around her like a warm embrace, keeping her from freezing in the Greenland wild. She breathed in the pure air. The Primers had finally given up, and she could show herself once again.
Now Zanna imagined she was back at the mansion, but she wouldn’t stay there. The Primers would sweep the forest, and while she had faith in her cloaking functions, it was better not to take the chance. So she uprooted the mansion and took it . . .
Zanna stopped, suddenly back in her bed at St. Pommeroy’s. With the Variable’s powers, the woman could have gone anywhere in the world. It would have been child’s play to hide somewhere out in Siberia, or the middle of the Sahara, or the Mariana Trench. She might not even be on Earth any longer.
But Zanna wouldn’t have hidden. Zanna would have made a plan.
She let her mind sink into the Variable’s world once more.
It would be easy to deduce that the Primers were keeping Zanna at St. Pommeroy’s. It was all over The Constant. The school was heavily fortified, so a full-out attack like the one at her father’s party would be out of the question. But if the Variable could get Zanna to step outside the school, it would be much easier. If the Variable had something Zanna wanted, perhaps.
Zanna came back gasping for breath, a hand to her chest, her head scrambled. The Variable’s world had been so real. She felt as if she had been there on the purple sofa in the mansion just moments ago, fixing the exploits in the tray’s pathfinding functions. Now she was younger again, with short hair and broken ribs. Now she was Zanna once more, but she knew what the Variable had done.
A hostage.
Sickness twisted around in her stomach. The Variable had gone after her friends and was holding them prisoner until Zanna gave herself up. No doubt the message from Lord Hemmington was the instruction to keep Zanna safe and inside the nurse’s cottage at all costs. That was why she had been confined to her bed all day—because the Primers knew exactly what Zanna would do if she found out.
Sweat crept down her neck. She couldn’t sit here while her friends were being held by that woman. The Primers didn’t have a clue about the Variable. And if they couldn’t rescue Zanna before, what use would they be in rescuing her friends now? Zanna eyed the motionless cat in the corner of the room, her mind working on an escape plan. How quickly could it raise an alarm? How quickly would Mrs. Appernathy’s candelabra be on her?
And what about her grandfather? He was still here, sitting in his armchair and steadfastly ignoring Ferry, who had taken a particular interest in him today. Zanna couldn’t just jump up and run out without a word of explanation. But she didn’t have the time to fill him in, either. Maybe if she wrote a note. It wouldn’t explain everything, but at least he wouldn’t be so worried.
“Do you have any scratch paper . . .” she started, pointing to the pile of books and papers on the table beside her grandfather’s chair, but her voice trailed off before she could finish the question. Something about the situation tickled at the back of her mind, something like a loose pebble in her brain, and she tilted her head to free it.
Her grandfather was working on the same puzzle book from that morning.
It had to be the same one. There was an unmistakable picture on the cover, an awful computer graphic of some scatterbrained guy falling into a pink vortex of question marks. Her grandfather hadn’t turned a single page. He had been staring at it all day.
Gears shifted. Names rearranged themselves, and she could have almost smacked herself for her sloppy reasoning. How could the Variable kidnap her friends when the classified message had arrived that morning and she had seen them at lunch? But Pops was different. The house in Virginia only had Owin’s barrier of air pressure for protection, and the Variable had already gotten through that once. And there was no question whether Zanna would come to rescue her grandfather.
“Hey, Pops?” she said slowly.
He looked up. “Yes?”
A mix of fury and apprehension rose within her, and she had to control the shaking in her hand as she pointed at a jar of tongue depressors on a nearby shelf. “Can you hand me those popsicle sticks?”
“What for?” he asked, setting his puzzle book aside. He kept his place with a pencil instead of a slip of paper, she noticed.
“You’ll see.” She shifted a bit and put her Mathematics book on her lap so she had a surface to work on. When he stood up and fetched the jar, it was a little too fast for his age. Zanna held her tongue. She had to be sure.
He handed the
jar over, watching as she laid out nine popsicle sticks in neat parallel rows. Another anomaly. He should know what she was up to by now. He should have known when she asked for the jar. “Now,” she asked when she was finished, “can you turn these nine popsicle sticks into ten?”
He froze. Beneath the bandages, her heart slammed, but she kept still and kept her mouth shut. The evidence grew with each tick of silence.
“I told them you’d figure it out,” her grandfather said at last, and it did not sound like him at all. The voice was cold and roaring like a river tearing down through the mountains. In the blink of an eye, her grandfather was gone. Where he had been sat the man with the silver cane from the Yellowknife hospital. Even though she had only seen him for a moment, Zanna had never forgotten his face. His skin was darker than even Nora’s and well cared for, with only a few faint wrinkles around his eyes. A manicured goatee of hair the same bright silver as his walking cane outlined his mouth. A black, flat-brimmed hat shaded his incongruously green eyes.
“You—”
“Xavier Morrow,” the man said with a touch to the brim of his hat, like they were passing each other on the street. “We have met before, Ms. Mayfield.”
She lunged, scattering the popsicle sticks across the floor as she grabbed him by the lapels of his black suit. “What have you done with my grandfather?”
“I have done nothing,” Xavier said.
His cane came between them and pushed her back in a gentle but firm manner. It was surprisingly strong for such a slender instrument—or perhaps Xavier subtly manipulated its inertia so Zanna had no choice but to release his suit and sit back on the bed. He lowered his cane, and Zanna’s body wanted nothing more than to jump at him again and wrestle out an answer, but she thought better of it. Instead, she gathered up her bedsheets and the crocheted blanket in her fists and growled down in her throat. “She took him, didn’t she?”
Xavier nodded again, his eyes brightening at her logic. “They told me you were clever. Yes, he is being held hostage at the moment. But the situation is under control. I expect it to be resolved by morning, and then you and your grandfather will be reunited.”
Zanna’s fists tightened. “You don’t understand,” she said, trying to make it sound more like a fact and less like the whine of a bratty girl. “She’s after me. That’s all she’s been after. That’s the only way to get my grandfather back.”
Xavier let go of his cane, which remained upright despite nothing supporting it, and took off his hat, inspecting the brim and brushing off a few spots of dust. “We are well aware of her demands. Do not think of us as idiots.” He replaced his hat, and beneath the shadow of its brim, his eyes gleamed like a wild cat. “This is our job.”
“Whatever you’re planning, it’s not going to work. She’s thought of everything.” Desperately, Zanna thought for a moment about explaining everything to Xavier, but her body decided for her. The words got lodged somewhere around her stomach. “She’s more powerful than you can imagine,” Zanna heard herself saying, disgusted by how weak her voice sounded. “I have to go. It’s the only way—”
“You are going nowhere,” Xavier said. His cane pushed Zanna back into her pillows.
It would have to be a fight. This time, when her body asked to lash back at Xavier, she didn’t stop it. With a flash of manipulation, she grabbed all the nitrogen under her sheets and threw it at Xavier, hoping that he would get tangled up in the blankets long enough for her to make a run for the door. But before she could even think about her next step, the air set all around her, as solid as concrete. The blankets had barely moved an inch.
“Don’t,” Xavier said, not even blinking at her attempted escape. He held the air for a moment longer to nail his point home and then released it. Zanna slumped back like a rag doll, her skin tingling as if she had just peeled off a thick layer of dry glue. Not even the Variable’s manipulations of air pressure were that solid. Zanna gulped greedily for oxygen.
“You don’t understand,” she said when she got her voice back, a hand massaging her throat. “You’ve been wrong about her this whole time. She’s not . . .”
Xavier, however, just looked down his nose with the glare of a man stuck babysitting a spoiled child. He had stopped listening to her a long time ago.
That was when the door opened.
Xavier had his back to it, but from the bed, Zanna could see it clearly. It swung open an inch, barely wide enough for someone to peek through—for three someones to peek through. A tall dark-skinned girl, a pale strawberry-blonde, and an Italian.
There was no time to explain the situation. No time to tell them that her grandfather was being held hostage and she was the only one who could rescue him—and that the man at her bedside was trying to prevent that. No time to explain how she knew all of that. She could only move and hope they kept up.
Zanna grabbed the first chemical sample she laid eyes on—lithium. And just as she expected, Xavier snatched it from her, his knowledge of its functions so comprehensive that Zanna felt it slip from her fingers in an instant, just like before. But that was what she was counting on.
“Help me!” she shouted, before Xavier could freeze the air around her. The cube of lithium had momentarily distracted him, an opening of a few seconds, and Zanna hoped it was enough.
A heavy, wet crunch smacked through the room, and Xavier went limp. He pitched forward with a grunt, hat knocked off, as something black and round and the size of a grapefruit bounced off his skull and rolled across the room—a cannonball. It was so unexpected that Zanna just stared at it as the dark trickles of blood worked through Xavier’s cropped silver hair. Then the girls were around her.
“What did you do?” Nora shrieked, but it wasn’t at Zanna. It was at Beatrice, who was retrieving the cannonball from the floor.
“He’s fine,” she said, hoisting the heavy ball of iron up like a shot put.
Libby pulled Zanna from the bed and hugged her tight, away from the fallen Primer.
“That’s Xavier Morrow,” Nora said, still frantic. “You just knocked out a lieutenant Primer.” Her eyes couldn’t decide where to look—at the man with blood oozing from his head, at Beatrice and her cannonball, or at Zanna and Libby in the opposite corner. She at last decided on Zanna. “What’s he doing here?”
Zanna’s head felt light as a feather, and she pinched her eyes shut for a moment. Things were firing off left and right. She had to hold it together, like an unknown function. She could figure this out. “We—”
“Oh Zanna,” the cat behind her said, suddenly springing into animation. “Your friends are here—”
It stopped, and with it, the room went cold. The cat’s electric-
blue eyes did not move in their sockets, but Zanna felt Mrs. Turnbuckle looking through them on the other side, darting from Zanna to her friends to Xavier on the ground, who was trying to get up to his hands and knees. The cat saw everything that had happened, and then from its mouth screamed an air-raid siren that no living animal had ever made.
“Run!”
No one argued. Tumbling and crashing into one another, the girls pounded down the hallway. Alarms were going off all around them, and when Zanna looked back over her shoulder, she saw heavy blast doors of golden alloy snap out of the walls. They sealed each of the cottage rooms, and when they closed, the sound went with them, cut off swiftly and completely.
“What’s going on?” Nora screamed from behind her.
The girls burst through the hallway door and into the waiting room, where Mrs. Turnbuckle looked up from her desk with her mouth in a perfect pink circle of shock. One of her hands was on a gold ingot, the other clutching a half-finished tea cozy she had been knitting. As Zanna skidded in behind Libby and Beatrice, the needles wriggled and slipped out of the loops of yarn, and all the cat figurines rose from the desk, intent on ushering Zanna back to her room.
Zanna sa
id every apology she knew and then bowled her poor nurse over with a gale of wind. Lace tore from the curtains. A shelf of collector’s plates smashed to the floor. Mrs. Turnbuckle toppled off her chair with a soprano cry, one of her floral-print slippers coming loose and flying off in the havoc. The figurines crashed back onto the desk in disarray.
“Keep going!” Zanna said as Beatrice looked back at what had become of the waiting room. Suddenly, there was a crash of metal on metal, and Libby lunged forward, fire poker out. A door slid out to seal the front entrance, but Libby had gotten there first and wedged her fire poker into the gap. One second later, and the girls would have been trapped in the cottage.
“So are you going to explain what’s going on?” Libby said between clenched teeth.
“Not really the time for it,” Zanna answered as she slipped through the gap. Beatrice followed closely behind her. “But I will, I promise. We just have to get out of here first.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Libby grunted. Her fire poker began to bend under the tremendous strength of the door. “Nora, a little leverage would help.”
“But—” the girl started. She pulled out the stainless steel ruler that she had claimed as her Iron on the first day and looked from it to the door that was slowly crushing Libby’s fire poker, eyes white with fear. “My Iron—”
“Nora.” Libby’s voice shook with the effort of keeping the door open. Fire blazed in her eyes as she grabbed the air in the narrow door gap and told it to stay right where it was. “That ruler ain’t your Iron, and you know it.”
The door slipped an inch, and then Nora moved, her mind apparently made up. She jammed the ruler into the gap, reinforcing Libby’s failing fire poker and wedging the doors open enough that she could dart through.
“You three go on. Not going to make it,” Libby said between her teeth. Another inch slipped, and Nora’s ruler buckled under the stress. The manipulation holding the air in place teetered on a Splutter. Zanna could taste the tipping point of paradox in the air.
The Zanna Function Page 23