“Don’t forget your coordinates!” Dr. Fitzie sang.
“Shh,” Dr. Piccowitz said. Though Zanna could have sworn she saw him mouth, “And your carbon too.”
“So, first up,” Dr. Cheever said, consulting something in his Iron, “Adam Reughel.”
Zanna sighed as a stocky boy from the Netherlands stepped up to the fishbowl. Alphabetical order was the bane of her existence. There had been a year in elementary school when she had shared a class with a boy named Zebediah, and for once, she hadn’t been the one always bringing up the rear. But then Zebediah had moved away, and her vacation was over.
“This place is like a museum of mad science,” Libby muttered.
At the urging of Dr. Fitzie, the class broke into small knots of threes and fours to cram on the functions of a graphite cube. The girls formed a circle from a few folding metal chairs Dr. Cheever had scattered around the room. “What do they need all this equipment for anyways? I mean, that’s obviously a vacuum pump.” Libby pointed at the fishbowl. “Why bother? It’s not like air is super complicated. Why not just manipulate it out of the chamber instead of having a machine do it?”
“Because we’re thieves, babe,” Amir said, swaggering over and draping his arms over Libby, who seemed less than thrilled at seeing him. “And we’re lazy. Why build anything when we can just take what we want from the CG?”
Nora took off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, but before she could put together a reply, Dr. Cheever called out, “Amir Al-Remmul? It’s your turn.”
Zanna had only half been watching Adam at the fishbowl, but from the dejected way he walked back to his friends, she knew that he had failed.
“Kiss for good luck?” Amir asked, leaning over. Libby smashed an open hand into his face.
“Do me a favor and don’t invite him to your party,” she muttered to Zanna as they watched Amir walk up to the fishbowl and put his hands on the glass. “It’s not going to last. I’m going to break up with him later today. He’s way too clingy.”
“Finally,” Nora sighed.
“My party?” Zanna asked, whipping around to Nora. “Wait a minute! I never agreed to that!”
“There’s no need. I have everything figured out,” Nora said, her calm voice a vast contrast to Zanna’s sharp shriek. “It will be the first weekend of Christmas break. I’ll tell my parents to pick everyone up and drop them off at your house. Though, if Amir’s not coming, we’ll have to leave a bit earlier in order to get Beatrice. I had counted on her getting a ride—”
“That’s not what I mean!” Zanna said, growing frenzied. “I told you I had to think about it! You can’t just go telling people—”
“Excuse me!”
They all jumped at the sound of Beatrice’s voice. The normally quiet girl glared up at them, her Chemistry book open on her lap.
“I am trying to study here,” she snapped. Her words were polite, but the tone was anything but. “So if you please, be quiet or go somewhere else.”
The girls were speechless. Beatrice went back to her studying, and ashamed, they pulled out their books, as well. Zanna opened her Chemistry book to refresh her memory on hexagonal lattice structures, but as she flipped through the pages, her focus wandered. Nora’s idea was a good one. It would be really nice to have the other girls around when she confronted her father. Nora could explain everything about the Scientific world, Libby could give a practical demonstration, and Beatrice could be moral support. And Pops would agree to host the party in an instant. He had been asking about Zanna’s new friends almost every day since she’d started school.
“Beatrice Scotti,” Dr. Cheever said. “Your turn.”
Beatrice closed her book, straightened her skirt, and strode purposefully across the open floor of the Laboratory. She went right up to the vacuum chamber, put her hands on her hips, and focused on the graphite cube with a stare so intense that Zanna was surprised it didn’t catch fire.
That simple action pulled something at the bottom of Zanna’s brain, and the last two weeks unraveled. If Beatrice, who rarely said more than three sentences in a row, could be that fearless, then so could Zanna. For fourteen years Zanna had made excuses for her father. It was time to set things straight.
She scooted her chair over an inch toward Nora. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It is a good idea.”
“Of course it is. I made sure of it,” Nora said with a tinge of haughtiness. But she smiled as she said it. “So that’s a yes?”
“I have to check with my grandfather,” Zanna said. “But I’m sure he won’t mind.”
“Splendid,” Nora said. The excitement came back into her brown eyes. “So I have a couple of different options for the menu.”
“Benito Torres?” Dr. Cheever called out. “It’s your turn.”
Zanna and Nora looked up. “Wait!” Zanna said. “I missed it! Did she—”
But the way Beatrice walked back to them answered her question. The girl’s shoulders slumped, and she sank into her chair with a heavy sigh. “I had everything,” she said. She didn’t sound sad about it. More like puzzled. “The coordinates and composition and gravity. I had it.”
“You’ll get it next time,” Nora said. “I know you will.”
“Sorry for yelling at you guys earlier,” she murmured. “But you were really loud.”
“Yeah, I bet we were,” Libby said with a little self-deprecating smirk. “Come over here and explain how these coordinates work again. You know how I feel about math.”
The next couple of students all failed to move the block, and then Cedwick’s name was called. He stood in front of the vacuum chamber with his hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on the dull black cube inside like he had done all this before.
“You think he’s going to move it?” Zanna asked, leaning over to Nora.
The girl took off her glasses and polished them with a cloth, even though they were already spotless. “I hypothesize he’s got the best chance of moving it.”
“Don’t tell me you changed your mind about him,” Libby said, picking up on their conversation. Zanna didn’t answer. There was still part of her that wanted to see snippy, arrogant Cedwick get put in his place. But the rest of her remembered the limousine and his outburst in Self and the way the rest of the class ignored him. And that part wanted the universe to cut him a break.
Cedwick focused on the cube, and nothing happened. Zanna strained her eyes, afraid that the moment she blinked would be the moment the graphite moved. Had that been something? It seemed to flicker a little through the thick glass. Or perhaps her eyes were playing tricks.
He shifted his stance, taking his hands out of his pockets and curling them into fists. The corners of his lips snarled. All the other students who had been chatting and preparing for their own trial stopped one by one, looking up to see why the air had gone so cold. The only sound in the Laboratory was the vacuum pump and the low, strained, animal growl of Cedwick.
But the graphite refused to budge.
“That’s enough, Mr. Hemmington,” Dr. Piccowitz said after six minutes, when it became apparent that nothing was going to happen. “Let’s move along.”
“No.” Cedwick didn’t even break his gaze. “I can do this. Give me more time.”
“There are many after you who deserve a shot, too,” Dr. Fitzie said. “You will get another chance.”
She took a step toward him.
“No!” Cedwick roared. “I can do this!”
The Splutter was soundless, and yet Zanna felt it clearly—like someone had drilled a hole right into her brain. It was the pain of seeing something completely wrong, something contradictory and paradoxical and only held apart by Cedwick’s stubborn will. He grabbed hold of the carbon atoms and their hexagonal lattice and moved them, but the coordinates remained the same, the block still resting on the floor of the vacuum chamber. It wa
s an ugly shift of impossible flickering, the graphite torn between its natural function and Cedwick, and in the end the natural functions won.
Cedwick screamed a raw, animal scream and fell to the floor, hands over his eyes, feet kicking. Zanna felt it, as well, as a pain in her temples—like she had gotten an eyeful of direct sunlight. The whole class groaned in dull agony, the Splutter having hit everyone watching, but no one seemed that worse for wear. Cedwick, however, could not stop whimpering. Blood leaked from his ear.
“I’ll take him,” Dr. Fitzie said softly to the other teachers. She gently lifted the boy from the Laboratory floor and helped him get to his feet. “You’ll be fine.” Wordlessly, the class shifted to make an aisle, and she took him out of the Laboratory.
The rest of the experiment continued in a more subdued fashion. Libby and Nora had their chance at the vacuum chamber, and they both failed to make the graphite block move. Libby came back furious and swearing up a blue streak. Dr. Fitzie returned halfway through Nora’s attempt and announced that Cedwick would be fine. “Just a little headache, that’s all,” she said brightly. “He’ll be back in time for lunch, I should think!”
But the rest of the class didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. The exercise had gone from a difficult but enjoyable challenge to a serious danger. Zanna saw fear in every student who followed Cedwick. She saw it in her own hands.
“Zanna Mayfield?” Dr. Cheever said. “And I believe that will be everybody.”
She stood. Close up, the vacuum chamber was bigger than she had expected. She felt the eyes of the entire class on her as she wiped a patch clean on the dusty glass with the sleeve of her black sweater. After all, there was no reason for the rest of the class to keep studying. They had had their chance. All there was to do now was to watch those saps stuck at the end of the alphabet.
Zanna stared down at the graphite cube, and its functions began to come to her. Coordinates—a perfect cube measuring one foot on all sides. No way was this a natural object. Her eyes lifted to Dr. Piccowitz. Had he made this? Her disheveled, harried, babbling Chemistry teacher had made this perfect cube?
No time to worry about that now. She dug into its other functions. Its gravity was complex, as she had expected. She started sorting through it as Owin had shown her, discarding the negligible parts. Then came the carbon atoms that made up the hexagonal lattice sheets of graphite. What else was there? The force as the weight of the graphite block pressed down on the bottom of the vacuum chamber and the chamber pressed back. No air pressure, because all the air had been pumped out. Friction from its resting position on the bottom of the chamber—
but they hadn’t covered friction yet. Did that mean she could safely ignore it? What if she did and ended up Spluttering? And what about magnetism, light, heat? That was all advanced stuff. Zanna couldn’t even find those functions, even though she knew they had to be in there somewhere.
She shook her head and let her fingers flex a little. Her teachers wouldn’t set her up for failure. Everything she needed to move this graphite block had already been given to her. A one-foot-by-one-foot-by-one-foot cube. Earth’s gravitational pull a little less due to the school being high in the atmosphere. Carbon had six electrons, six protons, and six neutrons. Graphite was carbon arranged in hexagonal sheets stacked one atop another.
But something still held it. Some function glued it to its natural state, and Zanna couldn’t make it budge, no matter how hard she tried. Could Dr. Piccowitz have put in a few carbon isotopes—carbon atoms with more than the usual number of neutrons? No, he wouldn’t do that. They hadn’t covered isotopes yet. She only really knew about them because Nora had explained them to her.
Then it came to her. What Owin had told her as he looked over her frying pan about how each of the pan’s owners had bestowed a little personality to it. Whether they knew it or not—and Zanna doubted they did—everyone from her great-great-grandmother on down to herself had dipped into their Self function and shared a little with the frying pan. And her class had done the same to the graphite.
She saw it now. Not as strong as the function Owin had pulled out of her frying pan but definitely there, covering all the other functions like a thin slick of oil. Anger, certainly. Frustration and embarrassment. Fear after seeing what had happened to Cedwick. It was a stubborn block of graphite who laughed at their attempts to move it. It was a joke by the teachers. It was a danger.
Now Zanna added in the functions she already knew. Mass, gravity, chemical composition, coordinates. All of them swam in her head, and she tried to see them not as separate functions but as a complete whole. Not as different aspects of a graphite cube but as the cube itself. Its entire existence. Its function.
She would make it work.
The bell rang loud and clear and broke her concentration. A dejected sigh ran through the class as they began to pack up. “Good work today, all of you!” Dr. Cheever said, joining the other teachers in a round of applause that nobody else picked up. “No homework tonight! We’ll see you all tomorrow!”
“Wait!” Zanna cried as Dr. Fitzie waved her hand at the vacuum chamber, making the air return and opening a hole in the glass so Dr. Piccowitz could retrieve his graphite. “Give me more time. I can do it! I know I can!”
“There’ll be more chances, don’t worry,” Dr. Fitzie said. As the graphite block slipped through the hole in the glass, she closed the chamber up and slid it back among the other machinery. “Between you and me, it’s quite okay to not get it the first time. Why, it took me nearly three months to get so much as a twitch!”
“No, I had it!” Zanna pleaded. “The function—the story. That’s what the problem was, right? That’s why no one else could move it.”
“We fail for all sorts of different reasons,” Dr. Fitzie said. The vacuum was back in its place now, and she turned her full attention to Zanna. “But you’ve learned, haven’t you? You’re smarter now than this morning.”
“That’s not the same! Just give me another minute!”
Dr. Fitzie clucked her tongue. “I think you’ll find it’s quite the same. You’ll get your ‘another minute’ soon. Be ready for that one.”
Chapter Ten
The failure of the morning hung over them for the rest of the school day. At lunch the girls spoke little, except for Libby, who was still complaining about blowing her chance at real manipulation. Occasionally, she stopped to complain about Amir, and then went back to their morning in the Laboratory.
It was cold and blustery as Zanna stared blankly out over the rippling grass toward one of St. Pommeroy’s many clock towers. It was short and made out of graceful copper wiring, the pale-green rust making it look like an arrogant growth of ivy rising above its fellow plants. A clever Scientist had installed a magnifying illusion on its clock face at some point in the past so that even though it stood a fair distance away, Zanna could read it without squinting. It told her it would be a long time before the bell rang.
“I’ll see you guys in Self,” she said suddenly, collecting her trash and getting up from the table.
“Where are you off to?” Libby demanded.
“Just the library.”
“ ‘Just the library’?” Libby repeated, her eyes narrow.
“Can’t you tell that she wants to be alone?” Beatrice said. Then, to Zanna, “We’ll see you in Self.”
Zanna ducked her head and hurried away. Because Libby was right. She wasn’t going to the library. As soon as she left the cafeteria, she took a left through the center of the school. As she kept going west, she entered the castle wing and glanced at the suits of armor and sconces on the walls. She was half-expecting to hear Mrs. Appernathy’s gruff Scottish voice from one of them, telling Zanna that she wasn’t supposed to be wandering the halls during lunch. But no one stopped her.
“Mrs. Appernathy?” Zanna asked one of the wall sconces.
It came to life a fe
w seconds later, separating from the wall and floating down to her. “What is it?” the illusionary torch asked. “Lost?”
“I’m looking for the nurse,” Zanna said.
“Ah. Feeling sick?” The sconce looked her over. At least, that’s what Zanna thought it did. It was hard to tell. “Come on, girlie. I’ll show you the way.”
Mrs. Appernathy led Zanna through the castle wing and toward the administration tower. Unlike that morning, when Dr. Fitzie had taken them to the Laboratory, they turned northward instead of south at the English garden and into a small plaza with a statue of a man with a staff holding a hand out, as if offering assistance. Beyond that was a small, humble building and then sky.
Zanna gulped. In the central Greek classrooms, it was easy to forget that St. Pommeroy’s was actually floating high above the ocean in a giant iron bowl. The nurse’s cottage, however, sat at the very edge. Only a small yard with cherry trees and a pair of teatime chairs stood between the small house and the maw of a cold December sea.
“There you go,” Mrs. Appernathy said. Even when she was trying to be comforting, her voice rumbled like a mama bear. “Mrs. Turnbuckle will fix you right up.”
A cheery voice called out when she knocked on the cottage door. Inside was warm and cozy, with a thick wool rug spread across the floor and a fire crackling in the hearth. The chairs around the waiting room were rustic and solid, inviting her to sink into their cushions and put her feet up.
“Yes, my dear?” the nurse said in a pleasant British countryside accent. She was plump in a comforting, grandmotherly way, with hair to rival Dr. Fitzie’s in volume. As Zanna opened her mouth to speak, a silver and orange cat poked its head out from behind the woman’s white curls. It regarded Zanna with placid black eyes before climbing across the desk in a silky, unhurried walk to get a better look at the girl who had wandered into its house.
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