But the woman barely glanced over Zanna. “My dear, I confirmed it when you stepped in here,” she said. As easy as identifying herself in a mirror. She brushed her hair back over her shoulder and beckoned again. “Up here,” she coaxed. “Next to me.”
No time left, and the limousine was not coming. Zanna still had the nitrogen, but that was of little use. If she were closer, she could clamp it over the Variable’s mouth like a rag, but that would mean climbing the steps onto the porch. And every scrap of her said that if she set foot in the mansion, that would be it. To anyone else, it may have been only four steps of battered gray wood, but to Zanna, it was a prison entrance.
She had no choice, though. She had given Cedwick and the girls all the time she could manage. She had tried to keep the woman distracted—and had failed. Her foot rose in its muddy shoe to take the last steps of freedom she would ever have.
Then, with a twist of sky and night, the limousine appeared. It was nose-first and true, and Zanna saw at once why they had been late. Libby’s fire poker was jammed in the front grill, its hardened tip pointed like a lance. It hit with a crunch of metal and glass, and the entire barrier warped, punched down like a heavy weight on a trampoline. The whole thing must have taken only a fraction of a second, but to Zanna, it was forever. The barrier stretched all the way until Libby’s fire poker touched a particularly tall tuft of grass, like a girl bending over to touch her nose to the scent of a blooming flower.
And then it popped.
Wind rushed around Zanna, whirls of dust and debris as the air pressure exploded out of the hole Libby’s fire poker had made. It took only an instant, a horrific and deafening instant. Zanna saw the limousine fall the last foot to the ground, its body battered from its reckless plunge, and then everything roared in a terrific backdraft as the function broke.
She was thrown sideways, crashing into the scraggly flowerbeds beside the mansion’s porch, but she found her feet quickly. In the dust cloud, she could just make out the limousine, its doors open as Libby and Nora ran out to collect Pops and get him back inside the vehicle. Beatrice stood guard, her cannonball ready and hoisted over her head.
The Variable. Zanna’s head whipped around to the porch, but the woman was gone. There was only the limousine and Zanna’s friends helping her grandfather along as fast as he could make it.
“Zanna!” Beatrice stole the nitrogen out of the interior of the limousine and wiped away the dust cloud so she could see better. They spotted each other, and the girl held out a hand. “Come on!”
Zanna stumbled the few feet to Beatrice and clung to her, thankful for the small girl’s steadiness. “She’s gone!”
“Get in!” Beatrice said, shoving her toward the limousine. Libby and Nora were already inside with her grandfather. Upon seeing him, the last bits holding Zanna’s heart together shattered, and she dove into his arms, blubbering. Everyone was shouting at once—Libby was shouting at Cedwick to cloak, and he was shouting something back about primelock, and Beatrice wanted to know where the Primers were. But it was Nora’s voice that caught Zanna’s attention.
“The house!”
Zanna raised her tear-filled eyes to the limousine’s window and gasped. It was like watching a tree getting pulled right out of the ground, roots and all. The field buckled in vicious cracks as the mansion’s foundation began to emerge. Just like the flying islands of St. Pommeroy’s, the house was supported by a bowl of iron, with clods of soil and rock clinging to the tarnished metal. It lifted out of the ground with the gravity of a sleeping monster come to life, rising just enough to look down imperiously at the limousine. The girls clutched each other as if they had awoken a dragon.
Beatrice came to her wits first. “Cedwick! Move!”
“It’s the primelock—” he started, and then a horrifying crunching sound filled the limousine. The entire car tipped up on its front wheels, and the girls slid with a tumble of muddy shoes and screams into a pile. Iron tendrils wrapped around the limousine, picking it up like a toy. Cedwick sprawled awkwardly over the console, hitting buttons left and right, but nothing could stop the house from reeling them in.
“We’re okay,” Nora managed to get out, though it sounded more like she was reassuring herself than anyone else. She had caught Pops when the car had been grabbed, protecting him as best she could. “The protective alloys of the limousine—”
A bright point appeared in the limousine’s roof and unzipped it, peeling back the metal like a tin of sardines to reveal the Variable. She hovered a few inches above the porch, arms open and fingers spread. Her perfect hair whipped in the wind of the burst air-pressure barrier, as wild as the angry, monstrous functions of her mansion. Every metal object on her house had come to life—every gutter and weathervane and balcony railing—and stood ready, like a hand of five hundred fingers about to close into a fist.
“You,” she cawed. Iron shot from her sleeve and grabbed Zanna around the waist. Seeing an opportunity, Beatrice threw her cannonball, but a shield of black iron bloomed from the woman’s other sleeve, and the ball glanced off with a clang.
“Stay,” the woman growled as Nora and Libby tried to jump from the limousine. Bright copper wire sizzled past Zanna’s ear and tangled around the girls, pinning them down like animals in a net. The limousine crunched as the house tightened its grip.
Zanna fought at the iron around her waist, but it was useless. The cold, unstoppable lash of it dragged her from the car and across the yard. As the girls screamed for her, Zanna let the nitrogen leak out of her sleeve and tried not to think about the implications of the words last resort. She waited as the Variable brought her closer, close enough that Zanna could see how the woman’s face twisted with the strain of her manipulations. Her tongue stuck out a little between her teeth, the smooth mask of her face broken as she screwed up her mouth and half-closed her eyes in concentration.
A voice cut through all the mansion iron and wind and boomed deep in Zanna’s bones. “This is Lord Baxter Hemmington,” it said. “We have your house surrounded. Release the children and surrender at once.”
At least twelve men and women appeared inside the perimeter of the Weierstrass, all bundled in long coats and scarves that flapped in the wind. They carried polished wooden boxes on their backs, each no bigger than a picnic basket and made up of at least fifty minuscule drawers. Henry, the one who had debriefed Zanna after her escape, stood to the far right, his letter opener in his hand. Lord Hemmington took point, though Zanna almost didn’t recognize him at first, since he had traded his customary gray suit for full-plate armor, complete with helmet and visor. The thing that gave him away was the sheriff’s badge, still somehow pinned to the medieval breastplate. Beside him and a little behind was Owin, shield drawn and ready. Together, they made a picture of ancient chivalry, of knight and squire, and Zanna swelled with renewed hope.
But then she made the mistake of catching a glimpse of the Variable, and the bravado shortly deserted her. The woman wore the little smirk Zanna knew all too well. It was the one for when she already knew the answer and was just waiting for someone else to catch up with her.
“Baxter,” the woman said with a thick, patronizing tone. The house’s gutters lifted the limousine a couple of feet higher, displaying it to everyone gathered around the yard. “Don’t you recognize your own machine? Don’t you wonder how it found its way from your garage all the way out here?”
A sudden knife of iron from her sleeve cut into the shred of limousine and yanked Cedwick out of the driver’s seat, dangling him like a trophy. “Your boy,” she said. Froth spewed from Cedwick’s lips as he grabbed at the iron around his neck, fighting to breathe. The Variable squeezed a bit tighter. “One step from any of you, and I’ll snap his feeble little neck.”
His feet made a horrific suspended dance, twitching and kicking at nothing, and Zanna moved without thinking about it. As the Variable looked over the Primers, ho
lding them to their positions, Zanna shoved every scrap of nitrogen she had down the woman’s throat. All she needed was a few seconds of weakness while the woman coughed and sucked for air. A few seconds, and the Primers would rush in, and Cedwick would be saved.
But her nitrogen did nothing. She felt it there under her control, clapped like a hand over the woman’s nose and mouth, but the Variable didn’t falter for an instant. Instead, she just turned her head, and Zanna gulped, feeling like a wild predator had caught her scent. There was no perfection left in that face. Awakening her mansion had twisted out ugly features. It made her eyes bulge and her cheeks sink down and her hair go tangled and thick and knotted.
“Don’t,” she growled, and the nitrogen was gone in a flash of primelock.
Zanna gasped at how easily it had gone. At least when Xavier had yanked the gas out of her control, there had been a moment of struggle. A struggle she had quickly lost, but one she had seen how to win if her abilities had been better. The Variable, however, simply took, as if the nitrogen had always belonged to her.
“Release the children and surrender,” Lord Hemmington repeated. “You are surrounded. You have no escape.”
The Variable snapped back at once to the Primers, laughter crackling out of her like discharged electricity. It wasn’t the laughter of a madwoman. Zanna knew that now because the Variable had dropped her perfect pretty face for one with eyes too big for it, a sideways mouth, and a choppy mess of untamable black hair. A face Zanna knew so well.
“I have no escape?” The Variable laughed because she finally got to show off. “I have a mansion.”
Her hands closed into fists, and the mansion unraveled. Glass pulled out of its window panes and reshaped into needles a foot long. Floorboards pried themselves out of beams. Only the porch remained intact—the only proof that the hulking, angry swarm of wood and furniture and knives and books and glass and bricks rising behind them had ever been a house.
It struck without a word.
Zanna had never seen real Scientists fight before, having missed her chance in Yellowknife. In her mind, there was some unwritten honor code to it, like gentlemen at a duel standing thirty paces away and valiantly throwing functions at each other. All that vanished when she saw how the Variable wielded the howling storm of what had been her mansion. It washed over the Primers and beat them down without mercy. Sparks flew as nails and butcher knives stabbed at the protective shells a few Primers had managed to get up in time. It found cracks and pried them apart and tackled the Scientist inside. The air whipped back and forth in thunderclaps that liquefied Zanna’s bones and broke the defenses of the last few stubborn holdouts. The mansion swarmed over the fallen Primers like hungry rats.
Zanna had been right about one thing. The Primers never stood a chance.
The storm pulled up, as fast as it had pounced. Tables and floorboards and library shelves and overstuffed armchairs all hovered in a field of debris ten feet above the grass, looking down at the subjugated Primers. Some were wrapped up in conglomerates of pewter and brick, others were caught by air pressure. Lord Hemmington was being restrained by a mass of polished wood and cushioning that Zanna recognized after a moment as the purple sofa from the sitting room, now squashed and squeezed around him. At his throat was her old friend the serving tray, sharpened to a razor’s edge. Then she saw Owin, and her heart strangled out a cry. He was facedown on the ground, arms and legs pinned by a wrestle of fire-scorched metal that must have once been the fireplace ash grate, and there was blood leaking through his coat. A needle of window glass stuck out of his shoulder at a crude angle.
“Stop it!” Zanna said, even though the storm of mansion had all but frozen in place. Her arms were bound tight against her body, but she still managed to make little rebellious fists, useless as they were. “You can’t—you can’t!”
The first one had been a plea, but the second one surprised her. It was a fact, and the Variable must have heard the difference. She looked down at the girl coiled in iron and tipped her head to the side, as if she had never seen Zanna before and was curious about how she worked. Then the woman grinned, her teeth bloody from biting her tongue too hard.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I can.”
Another constriction of the gutters around the limousine to prove her point, and the girls inside yelped. Cedwick’s feet had stopped kicking. He was still breathing, but barely. Something dangled from his limp form, long and knotted and swaying. His iron length of chain, still held even in unconsciousness.
I always knew what my Iron would be, Cedwick had said. The hard part was admitting it. Admitting who I was.
But hadn’t Zanna already admitted it? First in the tower room while snatching the Variable’s breath and then in the hospital? It was the reason she had asked Dr. Trout about time travel. The mere fact that she was here, having figured out what the Variable’s plan was for her grandfather, meant that she had admitted it. The fact that she and the Variable were the same person.
No, the function inside her whispered back. She never really had. It was at best a curiosity, and at worst a tactic she had employed to try and catch the woman off guard. It had been used and then set aside, not carried with her always like a real Iron should be. Even now, she couldn’t call the Variable by her true name. Zanna took in the scene again, forcing herself to look at it with new eyes. The Primers were helpless, pinned down by morphed furniture and dining room paintings and that horrifying stuffed moose head. Owin was bleeding. Cedwick dangled by his neck. The limousine with the other girls in it was a scrap of its former self, so wrapped up in gutters and copper wire that it looked more like a spider’s prey than an automobile.
All of this was her future. She would do this. Not the woman. Not the Variable. Her.
Beneath her, the porch began to rise, lifting the orbiting cloud of mansion debris that was still menacing the Primers beneath it. She and the woman were leaving, and if she didn’t do something now, there would be no coming back. Zanna took one last look at the Variable—at her future self—and closed her eyes.
The answer had always been there in her function. It was obvious now, jumping out from the other inscrutable complications. Her mind touched the iron that bound her. This was her Iron, this had always been hers, and she knew its name now. Something handed down from generation to generation, something imbued with family and time, something stubborn and clunky and dangerous and endlessly useful. The frying pan Pops had given her. That was her Iron. It always would be.
When she opened her eyes, nothing had changed. The Primers were still at the mercy of the mansion. Her friends were still captive and choking. But Zanna looked at it anew. Maybe that was what caught her future self’s attention. The difference between looking at a stranger and at a reflection.
“I know your name,” Zanna whispered, and it struck louder than anything her future self had bellowed that night. Her voice had changed, as well—from the meek, guessing girl to one who knew, firmly and finally.
Her future self heard it, and her eyes widened just a fraction. Zanna gritted her teeth. She knew exactly what her perfect, clean, and powerful future self would call herself. Something so she would always be first. “Your name is Anna.”
Her mind reached for the Iron that was her grandfather’s frying pan. A heavy, protective function of Self surrounded the metal, stronger and denser than the primelock could ever hope to be, but Zanna knew what she was looking for. The twisting functions of Self were not so alien to her now. And there in its coils, she found what she needed. The story of her frying pan being passed down from generation to generation and everything it had meant to them. Everything it had meant to her grandfather. What it meant when he had given it to her. She understood.
Zanna squeezed her eyes and thought about her friends. About the Primers. About Pops. She didn’t have enough of a grip on the frying pan to control it in any meaningful way, but she understood enou
gh of its story to sink her fingers in. Enough to put all her mental weight behind and scream and pull away.
Enough to Splutter it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Death smelled like flowers and metal polish. Zanna was wrapped in an endless void without a single point of reference anywhere to be seen. She couldn’t even see her limbs or her body. Just a consciousness out in absolute blackness that smelled like a garden crossed with a machine shop.
She frowned. Or, at least, she did something close to it, for she wasn’t sure she still had a mouth to frown with. But if she could smell, that meant she had a nose, and sure enough, when she crossed her eyes, the familiar blurry shape of her nose appeared, rescued from somewhere out in the void. Next, she took a breath and felt the air course into her. Lungs and a chest. Shoulders with two arms and two hands. Hips, two legs, two feet. Like someone searching in a darkened room, she went slowly and felt around, rediscovering all the parts of her body. Everything fit back together, and everything hurt like the dickens.
When she opened her eyes, she was in her bed, in her bedroom, in Virginia. Every inch of her body felt like it had been torn apart and put back together, which seemed only fitting, considering the magnitude of the Splutter she had ripped open. Painfully, she turned her head toward the window and saw her grandfather sitting at her bedside, a pencil tapping against his lips and a puzzle book open on his lap.
“Pops” is what she tried to say, but it came out as something closer to a wounded pig’s squeal. It got his attention, though, and when he lifted his eyes, his face lit up in joy.
“Ha! I knew it!” He clapped his hands together, knocking the pencil from his grasp and sending it skittering off into a corner. “ ‘She might never wake up,’ bah! Bah, I say!”
Zanna tried to say something again, but Pops apparently didn’t catch it, having gotten up from his chair to ramble and fumble through the books and scrap paper on the nearby desk. “Ah, yes,” he said, finding a small shoebox with a piece of floral paper on a ribbon attached to it. Inside was a miniature windup kitten made out of burnished brass. Pops adjusted his glasses to read the instructions. “Place kitten beside open window. Insert key and make one full turn. Stand back.”
The Zanna Function Page 26
