The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

He drew his hands down over his face. “Can’t really go back, can we?” he muttered. “All right. Buckle up.”

  He dropped back down into the driver’s seat, and the limousine shuddered with a rough start. Apparently, Cedwick had yet to figure out the proper finesse for operating the machine, but he seemed to know enough. With another acceleration that the girls were better prepared for this time, the car leapt forward.

  As they traveled, Zanna rested with her head back on the fine upholstered seats, preparing herself as best she could. Truth be told, she didn’t like the plan any more than the other girls did. They were right, as always. It was foolish and dangerous and would put her face-to-face with the Variable again, with only the vaguest hope of backup. But there was no other way to get her grandfather back. Of that, she was sure.

  “Psst.” Zanna opened her eyes and saw Libby wiggling her eyebrows at her, the whisper sneaking out between her barely pursed lips. The girl shot a meaningful look at the front of the limousine.

  “What?” Zanna mouthed. But Libby just shot another look, and then Zanna understood. Cedwick. Go and talk to Cedwick.

  Zanna shook her head, but Libby was insistent. A little begrudgingly, Zanna slid all the way down the sofa to the front. Cedwick looked up from the controls with a little jump of surprise.

  “Hey,” she started, fumbling for a topic. “So where are we going?”

  Cedwick pointed to a screen. It was a map of the United States with three blips of light on it. Two were nearly on top of each other, with the third on an interception course. “In case we ever got lost,” he said to explain the tracking system.

  “So the Variable’s out in Kentucky?” Zanna asked, peering at the two blips of light that represented Lord Hemmington and Owin. “Why?”

  Cedwick shrugged. “You’re the one with the answers.”

  “Hardly.” She looked back at Libby for help, but the girl shook her head and pointed back toward Cedwick. Zanna twisted her mouth around, thinking. “And I guess . . . I wanted to say thanks?”

  He just grunted. “I didn’t really have much of a choice about it, did I? Kind of got dragged along.”

  “You could have left us back at school,” Zanna said. “You didn’t have to come along. So thanks.”

  “Like I said,” he muttered as he reached for something on the dashboard that changed nothing about how the limousine flew, “I didn’t really have a choice.”

  Zanna tried to find a good place to rest her eyes, but everything made her stomach squirm. She couldn’t look back at Libby, who just scowled back at her. She couldn’t look out the windshield at the colorful clouds passing by, or else she’d remember how high up in the air they were. She couldn’t look at her hands, since they looked more like the Variable’s with each passing minute. So she looked at Cedwick. It was the first time she had seen Cedwick since the party. He had never visited her in the nurse’s cottage. He had missed a lot of school over the winter, the girls had told her when she mentioned his absence—something about battling a nasty case of pneumonia. It certainly looked like it. His features were a little sharper than she remembered, his cheeks a shade more hollow, his eyes darker and more sunken. Or perhaps that was the effect of the lighting in the limousine.

  “I wrote that paper for Dr. Trout,” Zanna said quietly. “But I kind of lost it when I was escaping. It’s probably part of some eagle’s nest now.”

  Cedwick shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m better now. I figured some things out.” As if to prove it, he held up something she had missed in the chaos of their flight from St. Pommeroy’s. Draped over his shoulders like a clunky scarf was a length of heavy iron chain—the kind she would expect to find in a medieval dungeon.

  “You found your Iron!” she said.

  “Yeah. Did you?”

  “No.” She didn’t feel like burdening him with the story of Dr. Trout’s visit and the threat of flunking out of Self. Somehow, in the quiet travel of the limousine, it felt inappropriate, and Cedwick was carrying enough on his shoulders already.

  “It was strange,” he said suddenly, as if answering a question she hadn’t asked. “Finding it. Because some part of me always knew. Scientists say they ‘found’ their Iron—like it’s some kind of major discovery. But in the end, I always knew what my Iron would be. I always knew I wasn’t going to join the Primers like dad and Owin. The hard part was admitting it. Admitting who I was.”

  He had said the entire thing without looking back at her, but something about his tone made her sure that the words had been only for her. Zanna dropped her head a little closer and whispered, as if they were the only two in the limousine at that moment, “I guess I have a lot to admit about myself.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it works,” he muttered, suddenly looking ashamed of the conversation. She could hear the note of closure in his voice and see it in the way he jabbed something on the dashboard, this time slowing the limousine with a slight bump of deceleration.

  Zanna huffed in frustration—not with him but with herself. One day, she thought, I will actually say something helpful instead of making everything worse.

  “Go wake your friends,” Cedwick said briskly, clicking a few more functions in the limousine as it came to a stop. “We’re here.”

  Dusk covered the ground below them. Cedwick had parked the car several hundred feet in the air over rolling farmland that was divided into plots by a crisscross of scruffy trees and sagging barbed wire. At the top of a hill in the largest field sat the mansion, commanding the view in all directions. Harsh white light picked it out of the twilight. Two Primer camps had been established a fair distance off, each with its own giant spotlight. The entire scene made Zanna breathe carefully, as if she had just stepped into a very strict library and had become aware of how loudly her heart was thudding in her chest.

  “There’s a Weierstrass down there,” Beatrice said as the girls looked out the limousine’s windows. “An enormous one. Radius at least two hundred meters.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Libby said.

  “That’s hardly a surprise,” Nora muttered. “How’d she manage to write a Weierstrass that big? I’ve never seen one used like that.”

  “She’s expecting the Primers to use an illusion, remember?” Zanna said. “That’s why she’s got a Weierstrass.”

  “But that size!” Nora said, her voice filled with awe. “It circles the entire house.”

  The tips of Zanna’s ears tingled with a strange elation, as if she had just overheard someone talking about her. “I told you, the Primers have underestimated her. There’s a bubble of air pressure underneath that Weierstrass. And inside that is completely primelocked. That mansion is a fortress.”

  “If that’s so,” Nora said, her eyes still glued to the scene below them, “then you can forget about smashing and grabbing. The minute we drive this limousine into that Weierstrass, all of the manipulated functions are going to fail. Unless we rewrite everything in discrete calculus.”

  They looked at their Mathematics expert, but Beatrice shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said sadly. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “We don’t have to drive it through the Weierstrass,” Libby said, gesturing with her hands to sketch out her idea. “We can drop in. Let gravity do the work for us. As for the barrier, just hit it with enough force, and it’ll burst like a balloon. Air pressure’s only useful across a wide surface area. Concentrate enough force in one spot, and the function won’t hold.”

  Nora didn’t share the girl’s enthusiasm. She fixed Libby with a death stare. “So, you want to crash us into the ground.”

  “Into the barrier of air pressure,” Libby corrected her. “It’s basically a giant pillow, y’know.”

  “And how are we going to get out?”

  Libby shrugged. “The Primers will cover us. I mean, this thing’s got reinforcements on it, right? Lord Hemmin
gton wouldn’t send his sons off to school in a limousine made out of just metal.” She looked over to Cedwick, and he nodded in confirmation.

  “It’s an alloy,” he said, looking over the metal parts of the limousine. “Not really inherited, but it means something to Sophie. Should be strong enough.”

  “So we jump out, grab Zanna and Pops, and jump back in,” Libby said with a smile. As if to prove her point, she rapped the tip of her fire poker none-too-gently on the limousine’s window. The glass made a dull and thick sound, far from the fragile tinkling Zanna might have expected. “Perfect.”

  It wasn’t enough to wipe the frown from Nora’s face. “I just want to say again that this is a terrible plan.”

  “Consider it noted,” Libby said haughtily, glancing out the window at the Primer camps. Her Southern accent grew more pronounced the longer they waited. “They ain’t going to stand around forever.”

  Zanna looked down with her at the scene below. The face of the stolen mansion was impassive and bleached, like a collection of bones left to burn in the sunlight. It had no deliciously creepy shadows, no atmospheric cobwebs. Only pale, unpainted shutters closed up tight and a tower without a staircase, waiting for Zanna’s return.

  “Set me down at the edge of the Weierstrass,” she whispered. “And get ready.”

  Chapter Twenty

  On the field, the wind was strong and cold. Only the most daring of flowers were beginning to lift their heads. Zanna put a hand to her chest, checking that her ribs were still holding together, and took a quick look around. She had lost sight of the limousine as soon as she had stepped out of it, but whether it was hovering behind her or Cedwick had already taken it up into the sky, Zanna had no way of knowing. At the thought of the car spinning in free fall, a wave of sickness washed over her, and she was thankful that her role involved staying on the ground. Even if it was more dangerous down there.

  Her hands wished for something to hold on to, something iron to reassure her and keep her steady, but there was nothing. As if she needed another reminder of how much of a failure at Self she was. Instead, she just opened and closed her fists, pumping blood through them, and looked back over her shoulder. The limousine had complicated illusions to keep it cloaked, but she had nothing, and the Primers were sure to notice a girl suddenly appearing in the no-man’s-land between their camps and the mansion. She had to get moving quickly.

  Zanna took a deep breath and stepped into the Weierstrass.

  It wasn’t her first time inside the transforming function, but this time something about it was different. When she had brandished the key given to her by Dr. Fitzie and chased the Variable out of her bedroom, the way the Weierstrass broke the functions around her into a slideshow almost seemed ticklish, like someone was gently massaging her head. Now, with almost a year of Scientist schooling behind her, it was sickening. Zanna glanced at the nitrogen and oxygen that swirled around her, and it was like staring wide-eyed into a strobe light. Even though she knew these functions backward and forward, there was nothing to grab. Everything blinked like stop-motion and threatened to split her head apart.

  She stopped trying to pin down anything in the Weierstrass, and the ache in her temples dulled a little. It wouldn’t help to go into this with a sledgehammer pounding away at her brain. There was already one working on her heart. Voices shouted from behind her, pushing through the wind and Weierstrass. The Primers had finally spotted her. One of the spotlights swiveled a bit, sweeping down from the mansion to catch her and her lonely walk up the field. There wasn’t any hiding now. A tiny voice had been telling her that she could still back out if she just turned and ran, but now the Variable had certainly noticed her. So Zanna kept walking.

  This was the far edge of the Weierstrass, and it felt like the edge of a canyon. The silence ahead of her was palpable, and she reached out a hand to the barrier of air pressure to test whether she could still pass through it. But of course, she met with no resistance. After all, it had been constructed with the Variable’s Self function as its key. With Zanna’s Self function.

  One of the Primers had found a megaphone and was shouting into it, telling her to turn around and return to camp. Zanna ignored him and pushed her hand through the barrier until she felt the primelock on the other side, like the icy water beneath a frozen lake. There was no obvious marking, no visual difference to the patchy Kentucky farmland, but Zanna knew the next step would take her into the woman’s domain. Outside in the Weierstrass, there was still a chance she would manage to escape, if it came down to it, but inside the bubble of air pressure, there would be no backup until Cedwick and the rest came down with the limousine. If that even worked.

  Pops wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

  She crossed.

  There was no wind inside. No sound of the Primers shouting at her to turn around. No sound at all from the outside. She cupped her hands around her mouth and exhaled, balling up the nitrogen and tucking it behind her back. It wasn’t much, but it felt good in her hands as she looked up at the crumbling mansion. Without an Iron, it was the best she could do.

  “Hey!”

  The mansion was silent.

  “Hey! Give me back my grandfather!”

  Zanna tossed the nitrogen from one hand to the other as the mansion remained unmoved by her shouting. Everything that had to go right in order for her to make it back out of here seemed like a list of impossibilities. But then, before fear got the better of her and she turned back down the hill, the front door opened, and the Variable stepped out onto the porch. She put a hand up to shield herself from the harsh light of the spotlights and then made a gesture, causing the light to dim considerably. Not so much that Zanna couldn’t see, but enough to give them a little privacy.

  “Welcome back,” the woman said. If the Primers had been trying to wear her down by drawing out the situation, it obviously hadn’t worked. The Variable was immaculate. She had even shaped her long black hair into a cascade of loose curls that any movie star would have killed for, and Zanna felt something ruffle her own hack-cut mop of black hair, even though there was no wind inside the bubble.

  There really was no going back now, and Zanna dug for the courage that had been leaking out of her with every step up the hill. “Where’s my grandfather?” she said as fiercely as she could manage. On the word my she stumbled a little, her tongue first trying and then discarding our. “If you’ve hurt him—”

  “Relax,” the Variable said, and she triggered a function in the house. The tower room that had been Zanna’s prison separated as easily as someone removing the lid from a jar, and it drifted over the rooftop and down into the front yard, settling gently with a creak of timber. Light from the single circular window spilled across the farmland. Another bit of function from the Variable rolled the wall up like a window shade, and there was Pops.

  He sat at the writing desk with a book in his hands, peering around at his new surroundings. “Pops!” Zanna shouted. Every inch of her wanted to run across the yard and wrap her arms around him, but she held her ground. There was no sign of the limousine, and she couldn’t glance up in the sky to check, fearing the woman would notice and the element of surprise would be ruined. Zanna had to stall. “Are you okay?” she shouted.

  “Zanna?” Pops squinted over the desk. Another surge of emotion tore through her and nearly swept her from her spot and into his arms. There was something in Pops’s voice that she had never heard before—fear. Fear that Zanna was doing exactly what it looked like she was doing. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s going to be all right, Pops,” she said, turning away because she couldn’t blatantly lie to his face. She faced the Variable instead. “Release him. You have me. Let him go.”

  The woman nodded, and the tower room began to reshape. Floorboards split and stacked up on top of each other. The desk slid off to a side, and the chair Pops sat on lowered until its four legs
rested on the bare earth. A pillow of air brought over the puzzle book he had been working on and deposited it in his lap. Then the room reassembled itself, unrolled the wall, and flew back up to its spot atop the tower, reattaching without so much as a crack in the shingles.

  “He’s free,” the Variable said.

  Pops turned his head one direction and then the other, taking in the mansion and the spotlights and tasting the primelocked air with a dubious expression. He got up from the chair clutching his puzzle book, and for the first time, Zanna was thankful at how slow he could sometimes move.

  “Zanna?” he asked again, with that same sound of uncharacteristic fear.

  “It’s fine, Pops,” she said, still unable to look at him. Fractures cracked across her heart, and she knew if she turned her head—if she let herself look at him—everything would break. She swallowed and thrust an arm back toward where she had come, back toward the Primer camps.

  “He walks,” she said. The only hostage exchanges she had ever seen were in movies, and Zanna wasn’t sure what the protocol was supposed to be in the real world. But then again, she figured wryly, neither does the Variable.

  “And you come here,” the woman said, pointing to a spot next to her on the porch. “Quickly now.”

  More time. Zanna walked as slowly as she could without being obvious about it. As if she were savoring the last few steps of freedom. Where was Cedwick and his limousine? Calculations of falling bodies clicked through her head. How high up had they gone? Zanna touched the nitrogen that she had slipped up her sleeve, reassuring herself it was still there and under her control. If the limousine didn’t arrive in the next few seconds, it was all she had left.

  Her shoes stopped at the base of the porch steps, not daring to climb. Something like a live rabbit twitched in her chest. “Don’t you want to confirm my function?” Zanna said, remembering the plan they had decided on and shifting her feet to stand a little wider. That will buy Cedwick time, she thought. It would also occupy the Variable’s attention. “I could be an illusion.”