Calculated

by Nova McBee

  Without replying, I pick the files up and look them over.

  After a few minutes Chan stacks a foot-high pile of papers in front of me. Oh boy. This is going to be a long day.

  He stands and motions for me to follow. I trail behind him, still holding the financial report in my hand. He escorts me to a private office with an oval table.

  “For you.” It is set up with a notepad and pens, a cell phone, a transportation card, a printer, and a computer. A computer! And to my dismay, there’s also a black leather love seat next to a small window reminding me of Madame and King. I wrinkle my nose. Logical or not, I will always be wary of people who own black leather.

  He sets the tall stack of files on the desk. “You can work here. No one will interrupt you. All right, that should be everything you need.” He sighs, then he turns the computer monitor towards me and enters a code for guest users.

  “First familiarize yourself with my corporation. I also expect you to attend the investments meetings every Monday and Wednesday morning until we discover what the problem is.”

  “Can you sum up the problem, so I have an idea what I’m looking for?”

  He takes a deep breath. “I have reason to believe that my company will go bankrupt by the end of the year if I don’t do something,” he says, glancing nervously around the room as if the walls had ears. “I’m not usually superstitious but the same day Bo Gong found me on Red’s behalf, this hit my desk from the accounting department. See the numbers?” Chan breathes deep.

  He hands me what looks like normal financial reports. I glance over the income and cash flow statements and balance sheets. Everything appears in order until something tiny pops out at me. The pages are spotted with numbers dropping from eight percent to four, or eighty to forty…it’s not that often, but it’s present on each report.

  I raise my eyebrows in disbelief. I thought Chan—a highly experienced financial guru—would be a bit more logical. Chinese assign value and belief to many numbers—eight, for example, represents wealth and prosperity, while the number four represents death. Mega corporations like Chan’s do not simply go bankrupt after a bum deal or a few sour investments, but he seems to believe that according to Chinese numerology, it will.

  “Any real proof?” I ask, perhaps a bit condescendingly.

  “My company’s cash flow numbers are dropping like flies in summer. Something’s not right but I can’t locate the source of the problem. My accountant can’t find anything wrong, either. I should be making money like everyone else in this economic climate. There’s a glitch, a mistake somewhere. I want you to find it and fix it before I lose everything. That last financial report was some kind of sign.”

  “Ok. So your numbers are dropping,” I say. “I’ll find the problem. Must be related to the stocks.”

  “I admit, it sounds trivial, a usual business occurrence but I’ve never seen anything like this, especially after the Asia Bank initiative. Have you heard of it?”

  I stop, frozen in the past. Before Madame, I was hired to help Asia Bank. Apparently, everything was solved without me.

  I don’t say any of this. Instead I say, “Of course. Anyone alive knows that Asia Bank initiated a world stabilization with the Chinese yuan.”

  “Fine. You say you can make money, so prove it to me. Get the numbers back up and meanwhile solve the other side of the riddle—figure out where these losses are coming from. Please begin as soon as possible.” The same look of desperation returns to his face. “Let me find the investment folder.” While Chan digs through a filing cabinet for several minutes, I scan the reports.

  When he looks up, I close the quarterly report and set it in front of him. “For starters, you should fire whoever does your bookkeeping. Too many slips in there.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asks.

  “Take the Jiangsu Auto Factory—you are losing 20% a year by paying out injury insurance. Right now, you have them operating ten-hour working shifts, but the report clearly states, all the accidents happen in the last two hours. It’s a classic Ford dilemma. Reduce it to an eight-hour workday. You’ll have fewer accidents and higher production.”

  He looks at me with disbelieving eyes.

  “Secondly,” I go on, “you need to sell the Ji Fu chain store. It’s doing well now but the quarterly numbers tell me that it won’t last.”

  “That is one of our highest profiting ventures!” Chan says strongly.

  “If you don’t believe me, track it on paper. In six months, you’ll be sorry you didn’t listen.” He’s fidgeting. A sign of his nerves? Or is it just the effect I have on him? “And something’s wrong in your C-Suite. Several thousand a week is missing with no reason. Someone’s using company money for personal investment.”

  “This took my accountant weeks to prepare. You expect me to believe you saw all of that in a matter of minutes?” His face is red.

  Oh, he dislikes me, or he’s just like other people and doesn’t know what to make of me. One thing I know for certain, if he wasn’t desperate, I wouldn’t be free right now.

  “That’s why you hired me, right? Just trying to help,” I say, pulling over the other files.

  He stares at me like I’m a magician who has just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. He’s not sure if the rabbit is a fake or I am and by the look on his face, he’s still searching for the hole in the hat. “Hmm, I will look into it,” he mumbles and leaves the room.

  After he leaves, I push the folder away and draw the computer close. I’ll figure out his company’s petty problem later. I’ve got more important things to do, like stopping Madame.

  I’ve made plans like this before—433 times to be exact. Even shared them with Red, but he said I could do better. “Orphans dream of vindication,” he’d whisper. “Sons and daughters dream of destiny.”

  Red believed in my destiny; in the history I could make. But as long as Madame is out there—ruining our world, I can’t do anything. Not until she is stopped. For good.

  Online, my fingers type the name Maxima Moreau into the search. An advertisement for an upcoming expo in Shanghai immediately appears on the screen. There she is front and center. Turns out, I won’t have to wait very long after all.

  My body turns cold as I click on her picture, staring into her icy eyes.

  “I failed to expose you once,” I whisper to her picture. “But I’ve had time to think about how to play your game and I’ve done more than just plan. I’ve calculated.”

  10

  Past: Octavia

  GOLDEN ANGEL HOTEL, SHANGHAI, CHINA

  The hard click of Madame’s heels coming down the hall sounded like a hammer nailing a coffin shut. My insides twisted like a slithering brood of snakes at the thought of seeing her. It had been ten days and I still didn’t know where I was or why I was here or when I could go home or why she called me Octavia.

  The last thing I remembered before waking up was being on her boat. She sprayed me with that mist. It smelled of oranges and bleach. My numbers vanished right before I blacked out and woke up in a luxurious hotel room filled with expensive gifts and clothes.

  The door opened. The woman named Maxima, or Madame, snapped her fingers. “Come with me.”

  I rose, trembling and red-eyed. Never have I felt more like an animal, ripped from its natural habitat, now caged, and expected to perform. She hadn’t answered my questions. She hadn’t responded to my pleas.

  Her icy hand slipped the bracelets around my wrists—restraints, like an electric dog collar—just like she did yesterday. My brain calculated our path as we went—hallways, stairwells, elevators, distances, and dimensions until we came to the same place where she set before me another pile of documents: lists of investments similar to the ones I picked for my dad’s company.

  “Please, I need to call my dad,” I begged. No response.

  “At least let me call PSS,” I tried. “They’re counting on me. I was hired to help solve a critical economic problem. So much could go wrong i
f I don’t help them.” Nothing.

  “Who are you, please?” I asked.

  She repeated what she told me each day, “I’ll tell you everything soon. For now, no questions, only obedience.”

  Trembling, I did everything she asked, not really knowing what it was I was working on. I just wanted to please her so I could call my Dad. The atmosphere weighed on me—her coldness, the equations, the secret nature of the investments.

  I did this, day after day. Fancy food and drink were given to me, but the only thing she said was, “If you want to live, Octavia, no questions. Only obedience.”

  At the end of day eleven, we passed a new door. Escape was the only word bulleting through my mind. The cold metal of the restraints was there but I was past feeling it. I couldn’t think straight anymore. My odds were less than one percent but the urge to flee overtook my need for safety. I bolted for the door and ran with all my might.

  I flew into the stairwell until an electric current shot through me overriding my control. I collapsed, a cold electric seizure taking over my senses.

  A hard yank pulled me back. Two men shoved my face to the floor. Madame’s grip tightened on my neck. There was a click, the smell of gas, then smoke. Something was burning.

  Moments later, a loud scream ripped apart the room. It took me eighteen seconds to realize it was me screaming. Fire etched a straight line across the back of my neck. Burning flesh was the smell in my nose. My flesh.

  The pain was so great my body started fluttering. I was going into shock. I was going to die. She was burning a hole right through me. She lifted the fire and her lips were on my ear.

  “It was mercy that I took you. Your father was accused of insider trading. You did that. You got him arrested but I solved his problem. With your disappearance, he got pity. He could blame it all on you. Do you think he will come to look for you? No. He’s concerned with himself. And your foolish sister is the one who told me all about your PSS trip, so I knew exactly where to meet you,” Madame said, her voice fierce and shaky.

  Mara told her about PSS? It couldn’t be true…she didn’t know what she was doing… My heart, like my flesh, was now burning, scalding, blistering. All I felt was more pain.

  “Don’t you see? They never loved you. They loved only themselves. You deserve more. You should be grateful I took you away from them. I’ll give you everything you will ever need to succeed. You could not live a greater life.”

  “My family loves me,” I choked out, tears streaming down my face.

  The flame came down again on my neck. I lost consciousness as the fire seared my skin, but before I passed out, her next words seared into my mind.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Octavia. So I promise I’ll only do this once—so you know who I am and who you are. And so I know where to cut later if you ever disobey me again.”

  Infinity was a beautiful concept, but any MIT professor would tell you that believing in it would ruin you. I used to think real love was infinite, that it would continue no matter what happened. What a fool I was.

  My hand traveled over the back of my neck. Goosebumps sprouted as I touched the protruding five-inch long scar. Even after 39 days, seven hours and thirty-eight minutes, it was still sore to the touch—though I’d never confess that to Madame.

  I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my sweater tight around them, but it made no difference—the black leather couch was still cold to the touch. Since my flesh stopped burning, everything had iced over. To me, everything in China was cold.

  So far, I’d earned Madame what I was sure was 187 million dollars of dirty money. Problem was, I had no clue who she was or what she did with it. On paper, she was a lady called Maxima Moreau, a successful international businesswoman, trading high quality textiles and silks in China and around the world through her company M’s Textiles. She traveled a lot and always attended the four most important textile expos in the world—Shanghai, London, New York, and Milan.

  I could have used my math gift to dig up the truth, but I was too afraid. If she found out that I knew her secrets, she’d kill me. Each day I struggled with guilt and shame because I knew what I was doing for her was wrong, yet, I did it anyway. I cried 101 hours and spent 39 days in unending calculations only to realize escape was impossible.

  A knock on the door made me leap to my feet. Madame stood in the doorway, a newspaper in her hand.

  “Octavia, I wanted you to see this. Your father’s company is nearly bankrupt, and he blames you for ruining him.”

  Tears slipped from my eyes without permission. I hated to cry in front of her, like I was giving her a victory, but I couldn’t stop. Then, she walked over and touched me, the briefest squeeze of her arm around my shoulders.

  Maybe it was meant to be a hug? It felt more like someone jammed up against me in an elevator and leapt out as soon as the door opened. I jumped back, too.

  Her face unmistakably twisted with pain. A glimmer of something passed across her eyes that made her look like a different woman. She was like a child, frightened and needy, as if she were the one who had heard the bad news.

  That expression, that glimmer of a different Celia, mixed pity in with my hate. Until a second later when she snapped out of it.

  “Forget those traitors. I’m your family now. No one will hurt you under my watch. We’re the same, Octavia. Powerful. And I’ll make you more powerful yet.”

  She left, wobbly on her spiked heels, and spent the rest of the day in her office. The room shrank that day or maybe she grew taller—either way, I felt like a speck of dust could crush me if her words hadn’t already.

  …

  The only thing in my life that I could trust not to lie was numbers. And they showed that Madame wasn’t always watching me. Which meant escape was not impossible. After days of being completely alone, or the deranged dinners I was forced to have with Madame, my borderline insanity had produced lots of calculating, starting with the door to my room.

  It was securely locked with an electronic keypad. This type of keypad had 100,000 possible permutations. Most people would call it a combination lock but technically that was incorrect. In a combination, the order of the numbers didn’t matter. Only in a permutation did the numbers need to be in a particular order, like the keypad on my door. They are counting tools. Extremely helpful to a math genius. They helped me determine the total number of possible outcomes and which ones were likely to be successful.

  So I counted them out, one by one. And finally, I cracked the code on my door.

  A cacophony of horns honking, cymbals clashing, people shouting and fireworks snapping outside reminded me it was the eve of Chinese Spring Festival—8 months, 2 days, 15 hours after I’d arrived. They were celebrating the year of the snake. Go figure. If I looked outside, there might be boats on the river, lanterns sent up into the night sky, and a dragon parading down the road.

  I didn’t look. I’d seen too many snakes since I came here. Besides, there was too much smog to see anything clearly.

  I glanced up at the gold clock hanging on the wall. It was almost time. I slipped off the couch.

  I went to the door and entered 81818, a bit agitated. I was still upset it took me a lot longer than it should have to crack this code, but I hadn’t planned on Maxima choosing something so simple. It was like hiding out in the open; so obvious that no one would realize it was there. My mental calculator friends at PSS would have laughed at me if they knew.

  The door opened to a hallway with brown carpet and cream walls with pictures of angels riding swans.

  My bracelets, I learned, were only triggered beyond the hotel perimeter, and I rigged the video security in my room—my cell—with a glitch, which meant I could roam the hotel, unseen, for an hour. My almost daily slipping out had gone unnoticed for 6 weeks now but I had to be careful. If Madame, or Maxima, or whatever her name was, knew I cracked the code on my door, the scar on my neck would be the least of my problems.

  I slipped out and continued
what I had done for the past six weeks—I calculated. I studied. I saw things. I’d nearly memorized the first sixteen floors of the hotel. I had another sixteen to go.

  The hotel was exceptional. Maxima and I lived on the top floor—the penthouse suite. Gold curtains. Golden-sheeted bed, plush and king-size. There was a bathroom in the corner next to a large armchair. The TV sat on a polished desk, and a plaque on my door read, Octavia.

  “Octavia.” A lump rose in my throat as I read my name. I even answered to it now. I wished I could tell someone the truth of who I was.

  I shivered as I snuck into the stairwell, went down two flights of stairs, and entered an identical hallway. I looked back to make sure no one followed me.

  As I passed the emergency door, I cringed. There was a very small chance I could get out of the hotel down the fire escape if I found a way to remove these bracelets. But the scar on my neck stopped me. Madame promised never to hurt me again. She even looked like she regretted it, but for months I couldn’t wear my hair down. I glanced at the hairband on my wrist—the last piece of evidence belonging to a girl named Josephine. Now, I wore my hair down to hide my scar. Only when my odds were high enough would I try to escape again.

  As I slipped in and out of the hallways, I considered outside networks I could hack into. I needed to find an anonymous way back into Maxima’s accounts. Recently, while working for Madame, a file had appeared on the screen suddenly and then vanished before I could hack it. It was undoubtedly a floating file. Basically, a hidden file designed to float within the network’s cyber-sphere, making it hard to pin down. Floating files usually stored very confidential information. I knew this because PSS used these file types to store much of their sensitive job details.

  There had to be clues or evidence in it, proof to expose her. Maybe there was information I could use to escape. Courage stirred within me. But finding a floating file again would take work, especially with Madame tracking everything I did on her phone.