MATHEMATICA

DEREK

Wednesday morning, the day after the disastrous screamer attack, was not proving to be very productive. Akane and Derek were in math class, and the professor was droning on about Pythagoras.

Akane hadn't said anything about how he handled Ling, but Derek knew she approved. She tended to have a sharp and simple approach to problem solving, but that worried him. He didn't like violence, and he absolutely hated it against his friends. The fact that he was good at it was beside the point. He was afraid he had gone too far.

They were both bored, but she was handling it better than him. It took him a few minutes to realize that her doodles were something a little bit more substantial.

Derek frowned. “Is that a schedule?” he whispered.

She nodded and whispered back. “Uh-huh. I got Flynn's from Guland. We're going to try and get him into a trainer position at Necessarius, teaching the kids swordsmanship. That should keep him out of trouble.”

Derek smiled. “You're worried about him.”

She just glared. “Am not.”

He smiled a little wider.

She huffed and turned back to her work.

“Don't forget we have that gargant hunt later,” he said. “Though your boyfriend won't be there.”

She scowled at the implication, but didn't mention it. “Right after class?”

“Not quite. Adam said he wants to come, and he doesn't get off until an hour later.”

She didn't say anything. She didn't have anything else to add.

But Derek got to thinking about schedules. More specifically, the screamer schedule. There was a pattern to everything, even if they couldn't always see it, and surely this was no different. He got out his pad. He wasn't some sort of math whiz, but he had enough simple programs on the device to draw some conclusions.

The first attack was the 24th, a Friday night. The next was the very next morning, twelve hours later. Then two days later, Monday, in the middle of History class. The bats were almost exactly a week later, also interrupting History. The bleeders were three days after that, at one in the morning. And finally, five days after that the skins appeared, also in the morning.

Stolen story; please report.

It was helpful to have it all laid out, but it didn't really tell him much he didn't already know. The Composer avoided the middle of the day for some reason, but otherwise the attacks were completely random.

Maybe that said something about the Composer. Maybe he was a vampire, or even just a night owl. If he was asleep during the day, it would explain a lot. Derek wasn't sure quite how that gelled with the theory about body jumping, but it was something to think about.

There were just too many questions. Why was there only one attack at a time? Did that mean he couldn't do more, or did he just not want to for some other reason? Where did the powers come from in the first place? They still didn't have the slightest idea how they worked.

Ugh. It was all so very tiring. The captured screamers were making it hard to sleep, and the random schedule was hardly helping. Waking up in the middle of the night, or even just getting pulled out of class, was hardly healthy.

Something about that bugged him.

Maybe if he did a more detailed comparison, calculating the actual hours or minutes, he'd have more luck. He didn't quite have enough data for that, so he sent a text to Laura. She had advanced math with Lizzy right now, but she'd be able to shoot it over to him.

Something... what was it?

As expected, he got the info within a minute. He started plotting the times, but it didn't seem any more clear.

But something was teasing at his brain...

The only consistent thing was that the attacks were getting more and more damaging. Did that mean that he was learning, or that he was stepping up his game? They didn't know anything about this guy, other than he existed—probably—and he was inactive during the day.

During the day...

What was that? What was it his subconscious was trying to tell him?

He glanced over at Akane, but she was still absorbed in Flynn's schedule. It was adorable how she tried to pretend she didn't like him when it was so obvious. But that wasn't helping him any, so he turned to the teacher.

She was still droning about the Pythagorean cult and everything. It didn't seem like that was what his brain had latched onto, but you never knew. What was he missing? The Composer didn't attack during the day. Was there some deeper meaning there he couldn't figure out?

Then it came to him.

It wasn't that he was attacking during the day. That was just a side effect.

No, it was that he was attacking during the night. And during classes. Their classes. When they were tired, or busy, or asleep. He was intentionally interrupting their schedules.

He knew who they were.

More importantly, he was someone close.