Pale and pallid fluorescent light leaked from buzzing, flickering fixtures on the ceiling of the office-labyrinth, leeching the life from the scratchy blue carpet, bleaching the cubicle dividers to a bloodless grey, turning the white plaster of the wall into mist-wreathed bone; dull arcs of stained illumination reflected from the chrome housing of the keypad, trembling and twitching beneath the shadows of my stalled hands.
The longer I hesitated, crouched on the floor before the glass-and-metal door and its attendant keypad of mathematical symbols, the more alien and wrong this sheltered cove became, like an illusion wavering into solidity in my peripheral vision.
I blinked away the gathering sweat in my eyes, tried to wet my lips with a dry and raspy tongue, and forced a swallow down my empty throat.
Tiny raindrops pattered on the windows far to the right, casting the dreamlike office vault deep into a static haze. My breath came in nervous gulps. Sweat beaded in my hairline. The day-old wound on my left shin throbbed with every drum-like heartbeat. My yellow blanket felt thin and threadbare across my shivering shoulders. We were on a time limit; a nurse or an office worker or some other unknown staff member might interrupt us at any second. Three pairs of eyes — Raine, Evelyn, and the Saye Fox — watched me expectantly, waiting for me to open the barred portal to the office of Professor Wilson Stout.
Seconds ticked by, but I made no moves.
Eventually Raine hissed my name. “Heather? Heather, what’s wrong?”
I swallowed a sigh and lowered my hands. I hadn’t even touched the ridiculous fifty-button keypad, not even to punch keys at random. I must have looked totally gormless, staring at the thing for over a minute, eyes wide and mouth hanging open like a cave-woman examining an internal combustion engine.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It turns out I have no idea what I’m looking at. Um. Oops, I suppose?”
“What!?” Evelyn snapped.
Raine gently tapped on the arm of Evee’s wheelchair. “Shhhh. Voice low, magic lady. I can’t see over these cubicle dividers, and they absorb all the small noises. Somebody walks in here and we might not know until they’re right on top of us.”
Evelyn tutted and rolled her eyes, but she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Heather, what do you mean, you have no idea what you’re looking at? You’re the one who insisted we open the bloody door!”
I tore my eyes away from the numbers and symbols and magical sigils on the keypad. My chest burned inside with shame and awkward guilt.
Raine was crouched at my side, directly in front of the glass-and-chrome door; she was poised to spring forward or leap back as soon as the door swished open — as I imagined it would, like an automatic door in a silly science fiction television show, complete with a swoosh sound and a little ding. She clutched her naked machete in one fist, one ear cocked toward the ceiling, listening for any feet which might approach through the maze-like tangle of office cubicles. The Saye Fox waited at her heels, facing the opposite way, doing her best to watch our backs. Evelyn was sat in her wheelchair, clutching the Praem Plushie to her abdomen, scowling at me with incredulous incomprehension. We were hemmed in behind by the modular wall of cubicle dividers, but open on our flanks by the narrow corridor between the dividers and the real wall. We were hidden in the back of the office room, yet equally exposed. All it took was one person around a corner and we’d be fleeing for our freedom and our lives.
“I’m sorry!” I hissed. “I assumed the symbols would make sense to me, subconsciously, or instinctively, like brain-math always does, but they’re just … meaningless.” I shrugged, feeling helpless. “They must be an abstract representation of brain-math, but I don’t have any brain-math in my head right now. I don’t have anything. I’m sorry, Evee.”
Raine whispered: “It’s alright, sweet thing. If we can’t do it, we can’t do it. We move on. Ready to go?”
Evelyn clenched her teeth and hissed, “Heather, for fuck’s sake. Just press the buttons at random! Follow your heart!”
I winced, the shame growing sharper. “Evee, this isn’t one of your magical girl animes. It’s brain-math, it—”
“Then follow your liver, or your bowels! Or do an eeny meeny miny moe! Roll a dice!”
“But—”
“This is a dream and a story, Heather, for pity’s sake! Press the buttons!” Evee jabbed her free hand toward the keypad. “Get on with it before something blunders in here!”
“But you said—”
Evelyn’s eyes blazed at me. “Heather, you are the only one of us fully awake and partially in charge of this narrative. Press. The. Buttons.”
I bit my lower lip, nodded, and turned back to the keypad.
Lacking my tentacles and my bioreactor was an offense to the body and soul, like being crammed back into a form that I had surpassed a dozen times over; the dysphoria was a creeping sensation of physical wrongness, spreading over my skin like cold tar every time I dared approach the mere thought, every time I felt the absence of my other six limbs, my other six selves, and the pumping, glugging, glowing bio-mechanical engine which should have been nestled deep in my guts.
But the absence of brain-math was a far stranger sensation. All my knowledge of hyperdimensional mathematics had always been an imposition, an intrusion, even a violation. Brain-math was pressed into me from outside — from Outside, by the Eye, a form of nightly torture I had never wanted and never asked for. Even with all seven of me working in concert to pull the dripping levers of reality, brain-math still hurt. If I was placed in some kind of metaphysical dilemma and forced to choose between the knowledge and the biology, I would choose the biology every time. I did not need the knowledge or the power, only that which had resulted from them.
But now, staring at a cluster of meaningless buttons, I felt a lack I had never realised before. Like losing a limb I hadn’t known I possessed.
Part of me was empty of information, as if I had forgotten how to walk.
Half in shame and despair, half to satisfy Evelyn’s hunch, I jabbed buttons at random — some numbers, a few mathematical symbols, a string of the weird esoteric signs. I mixed them up and followed pure chance.
The little LCD screen at the top of the keypad filled with a row of black Xs, then went blank again, waiting for the next attempted input.
The door stayed shut.
“Tch,” Evelyn tutted. “Try again!”
“My darling lady Saye,” Raine purred. “You were so against this a moment ago. Why the change of heart?”
“Heather convinced me. And she needs to see it through, her decisions in this place have been vindicated so far. Heather, try again! Keep going!”
I choked down a cold slug of self-disgust. This was almost as bad as being forced to strip naked in front of Evelyn without my tentacles, so she could peer at what was missing. I felt stunted, cut off at the knees. I began to understand what Evelyn felt like, confined to that wheelchair, unable to do something which had seemed so simple all my life.
“Evee,” I hissed, looking away from the keypad again. “I don’t even … know … what … ”
I trailed off, blinking at our forgotten fifth companion.
“Heather?” Evelyn whispered. “What? What is it now?”
The Praem Plushie was staring at me — but no, that was impossible. Those blank eyes were made of fabric and stitches, they couldn’t move. She was constructed of cloth of stuffing, no matter how delicate and detailed her little maid dress seemed. Even if she meant something more within this dream, she could not move, let alone look at me.
But still, she stared.
“Evee,” I said slowly. “May I please borrow Praem for a moment?”
Evelyn’s eyebrows drew together in a craggy frown. Perhaps subconsciously, her grip tightened on the plush toy. “What?! Why?”
“Evee, I promise you, I love Praem almost as much as you do. I won’t go anywhere with her and I’m certainly not going to hurt her. I just think … well, it’s going to sound crazy, which I’m painfully used to by this point in my life, thank you very much, but I would like her help with this.” I lowered my eyes back to the Praem Plushie. “Will you lend me your aid, Praem?”
The Plushie did not answer, for her mouth was a short, straight line of narrow black fabric.
Evelyn frowned at me like I was mad — which was fair, because in reality such a request would have been the height of insanity. But Evee also trusted me, with both her life and her heart.
She held out the Praem Plushie. “Don’t you dare drop her! This floor is probably filthy. Offices are always unhygienic.”
“I would not dream of treating her with anything but the utmost care,” I said, and accepted Praem with both hands.
The Plushie weighed very little, just felt and fuzz. I held her upright, as if I was cradling a tiny person, supporting her underside with one hand. Then I faced her toward the keypad, held one of her blunt little arms in my other hand, and used Praem to press the buttons.
I didn’t think, I just went with whatever felt right, guided by the plush fabric in my hands. Praem’s stubby little arm needed additional pressure from my fingertips to help click the glossy metal buttons. I held my breath as the LCD screen filled with numbers and symbols. Evelyn looked on with a scrunch-eyed frown. Raine stayed perfectly tense, ready to move. The Saye Fox did not bother to watch.
The symbols completed an equation, then flashed into a line of little check-marks.
Before I could lower Praem or let out a sigh of relief, the glass-and-chrome door opened with a soft swish-swish and little mechanical ‘bing!’ Exactly as I had expected.
The halves of the shiny metal door parted and slid aside, retracting into the frame.
Beneath them lay another door.
I almost sighed and rolled my eyes in exasperation. The dream was mocking us, playing stupid games.
A regular old wooden door, made of stout, thick, dark wood, stained with age and cigarette smoke. A little metal handle stood at one side, above a keyhole. The door was set in an oddly familiar frame. I frowned with buried recognition, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I was looking at.
Evelyn said it just before I realised. “That’s the door to the Medieval Metaphysics room,” she hissed. “Fuck me.”
“Not here,” Raine whispered back, totally deadpan. “Floor’s too scratchy.”
“Oh, shut up!” Evelyn hissed. “I cannot believe that worked. Here, Heather, give Praem back to me, please.”
I held up the Praem Plushie briefly, facing me, and said, “Thank you for your assistance, Praem.” Then I pressed her back into Evelyn’s lap. Evee tucked an arm around Praem’s middle, securing her back in place.
“Well,” I said. “Maids can go anywhere.”
Evelyn squinted at me. “What?”
“Just something Praem said to me once, that’s all.”
“Shhhhh,” Raine hushed us. She reached up and tried the handle of this second, covert door. The door parted from the frame. Unlocked. “Both of you be ready. We might have to run. Heather, grab Evee’s wheelchair. Evee, hold on tight.”
“R-right!”
Evelyn tutted. “Yes, thank you for the reminder. As if I didn’t know.”
I scrambled back over to Evelyn and took hold of the handles on her chair. The Saye Fox nosed up to the door, as if suddenly curious. Raine eased the door away from the frame until she could peer through the gap with one eye, then flung it wide and scrambled over the threshold.
“Clear!” she hissed a moment later. “Get in here!”
I followed, pushing Evelyn’s wheelchair ahead of myself, trying not to hobble on my aching left leg. The Saye Fox darted past us, plunging inside. As soon as I got Evelyn through the door and safely into the room beyond, Raine slipped the door shut behind us, sheltering us from the maze of office cubicles.
“Oh,” I said, straightening up at last, back and thighs aching after our crouched scurry through the offices. I took in the room, wide-eyed. “This is … different. Not what I expected.”
“Familiar enough,” Evelyn grunted. She was trying to play down the sense of creeping wrongness. A rough swallow betrayed her bravado.
“We know this place?” Raine asked. She wrinkled her nose.
“We do,” Evelyn said. “Though not like this.”
“Very well, in fact,” I added. “Like a home away from home.”
“Though I suppose we haven’t been here in a while,” said Evelyn. “And this isn’t real. Right. Have to keep that in mind. None of this is real. Just a nightmare, a play. Yes. Right.”
We were standing in the Medieval Metaphysics room, as it must have looked long before any of us had been born.
Bookcases lined the walls to our left and right, towering sentinels of dark and glossy wood, their shelves unbowed by time and weight, though I recognised their shape and colour and feel from their real-life counterparts, aged and worn as they were by an additional forty five years. They sported a very different catalogue in this dream-wrought memory, not a single occult tome or witchy volume in sight. Mathematics textbooks and papers lined the shelves from floor to ceiling, organised by some system my literary experience could not unpick at a mere glance. One side of the room boasted a low sofa — in awful tacky orange, a wisely abandoned relic of the 1960s — around which gathered many piles of additional books, most of them stuffed with bookmarks, some of them dog-eared or propped open in careless abuse of their fragile spines. A sleeping bag was unrolled on the sofa, topped with a rather unclean looking pillow, surrounded by used tissues, dirty eating utensils, and a discarded toothbrush in a filthy glass.
The back of the room was dominated by a large, archaic wooden desk, exactly the kind I would expect to see in the office of a mid-century academic. More books littered the desktop, mostly serving as paperweights for loose sheets covered in handwritten mathematical notation. A few mugs held pens and pencils and other such stationery, while others held the mouldy remnants of forgotten coffee and ancient tea stains. A plate with a half-eaten meal of chicken pie stood on one corner of the desk, stone cold and congealed. Empty alcohol bottles lined the floor to the left of the desk — mostly whisky and vodka, all dry.
A large leather chair stood behind the desk, lined and cracked with age. Three comfortable armchairs formed a little semi-circle in front, a welcoming place for students and visitors to sit.
The back wall was broken by a line of windows, exactly as with the real Medieval Metaphysics room. The windows showed a fog-shrouded view of Sharrowford University, all spires and concrete rooftops and the looming giant of the library, spread out many floors below us, as if we had suddenly ascended to the tip of the building. All the structures were hazy in the mist, half-seen and blurred, as if in a dream.
Below that window stood an iron radiator, painted with peeling white.
Despite the defamiliarisation of such a beloved refuge, seeing the Medieval Metaphysics room in the guise of a slightly archaic academic office was not the source of our shared discomfort.
The air was hot and humid, reeking of meat, as if the heat was turned up all the way and something had died inside the wall cavity. A low rumble seemed to come and go, just below the level of human hearing, a slow and steady rasp with long pauses between strokes. Every surface looked somehow rubbery, but only when seen in one’s peripheral vision.
“So,” Raine said eventually.
“Yes,” I replied.
“This room.”
“Yes.”
“It feels like we’re standing inside something’s mouth.”
“Yes.”
Evelyn whispered: “Fucking hell. You think that tapping was a trap?”
“Not sure,” Raine answered. She held her machete low and loose, one hand still on the door. “Doubt it. Wouldn’t it have sprung already? And where’s the Professor?”
“Maybe … maybe he goes home during the day?” I ventured.
Evelyn snorted. “Maybe this is the Professor.”
“Heather,” Raine said, soft and unsmiling. “Your call. You’re in charge. Do we investigate or go back?”
“I … I can’t … um … ”
Before I could make a decision, the Saye Fox padded forward on her silent paws. She trotted right down the middle of the room, without a care, and started sniffing at the sofa, the little piles of books, then on to the desk, winding her way around the wooden legs. She seemed completely unafraid.
Raine and Evee and I shared a series of uncomfortable glances. But when reality failed to snap shut around our vulpine friend, Raine nodded, and said, “Alright. Let me go first.”
“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. “I want a look through those windows. Wheel me over there, please. That can’t be Sharrowford out there, it’s not possible.”
We did as suggested, spreading out and investigating Professor Stout’s office, the room that would one day become the last remnant of the Medieval Metaphysics Department. Raine went first, true to her word, making a quick circuit of the space and peeking under the desk, machete held at the ready, in case anything or anybody was lurking in some unseen hidey-hole. But she turned up nothing. The room really was deserted. I pushed Evelyn toward the back window, taking it slowly, trying to breathe through my mouth to block out the foul, meaty smell in the air; I examined the titles of the books, making sure they didn’t spell out some secret message or code. But they were perfectly mundane. Unlike the worrying titles of the novels back in the main office, the mathematics textbooks looked real enough. We even paused briefly to remove one from the shelf and flick it open. The cover did not feel like warm flesh or rotting meat. Inside, the book was legitimate, nothing spooky, nothing untoward.
“Maybe they’re his,” I suggested. “Maybe that’s what he’s been clinging to this whole time. Mathematics.”
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“I’d prefer to cling to a pair of tits,” Raine said, without smiling. “But hey, whatever’s kept him sane.”
Evee and I passed the desk; I glanced at the papers with the mathematical equations, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them.
When we reached the windows, I just stared at Sharrowford, trapped behind the glass. I went up on tiptoes, trying to peer down at the ground, but the fog outdoors was too thick, and seemed to be clouding the perspective. I could make out little except the outlines of the buildings, standing like silent towers in the murk. Up close, the fog seemed greasy and dark, like fetid breath.
Evelyn leaned forward, scratched at the corner of one window, and peeled away the paper.
The illusion was broken instantly — the ‘windows’ were just a paper background over a sheet of moist plywood. The vista of Sharrowford University was fake.
My head swam with a strange reverse vertigo. Sweat prickled beneath my yellow blanket, and I had to flap the sides for some fresh air. Raine joined us quickly and put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Heather?”
“It wasn’t real,” Evelyn muttered, lifting the sheet of paper. “Just a fake. A print out or something. To remind him of home? Ugh, this plywood smells like dog food.”
“But it looked so real!” I protested, peering at the paper covering from different angles. The illusion moved with my perspective. “Oh, that is too much for me. That is very weird. I hate it, thank you.”
“So do I,” Raine muttered. Sweat was beading on her exposed arms and shoulders, drawn out by the humid heat. “There’s nothing here for us, unless the maths on the desk makes any sense. This place is wrong. Feels like something sleeping. Let’s get out of here.”
“Agreed,” Evelyn said. “I am not above admitting that this room is giving me the creeps. Heather, you—”
A voice suddenly spoke, from right behind us.
“Two and two and two and seven. Seven sevens. That all makes one. No … no, that’s not correct. Damn. Damn it all.”
We scrambled back, away from the windows. Raine’s machete came up. I pulled Evelyn away, toward the bookshelves.
But the source of the voice did not look up, nor pay us the slightest bit of attention.
A man was sitting in the leather chair behind the desk, as if he’d been there all along.
Tall and thick, solidly built, with muscle beginning to run to fat, like an ageing rugby player. Dark hair and a matching beard had gone ragged, much in need of a trim and a cut, both speckled with too much grey for his apparent age; the man looked to be in his forties or early fifties, but prematurely withered and worn by stress and strain. A large nose was flanked by sunken green eyes, deep in pools of dark-ringed skin and sagging bags, their whites shot through with bloody veins, turned pink with sleepless effort. He wore an almost stereotypical outfit — smart trousers, a simple button-up shirt, and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. His tie was loose, pulled away from an open collar. His clothes were rumpled and greasy, as if he’d slept in them for months; a ripe smell rose from him — human body odour mixed with carnivore breath and wet dog. He was hunched over the notes and equations on the desk, his forehead resting in one meaty hand, staring at the numbers as if they were a diagnosis of terminal cancer. His other hand held a pair of large wire-frame glasses, limp and forgotten, as if he was about to drop them.
He didn’t acknowledge us at all.
Raine had leapt to the opposite side of the room. I shared a glance with her and she nodded me sideways. Evelyn swallowed, gripping the armrests of her wheelchair. Slowly we all edged around to the front of the desk, so the semi-circle of three chairs were safely between us and the sudden new appearance.
Raine squeezed my arm, perhaps to reassure both of us. She whispered: “Is this him?”
“Probably!” I hissed back.
“Wait,” Evelyn said. “Where’s the— ah!”
She pointed.
The Saye Fox was perched in one of the chairs meant for students and visitors, directly across from the man at the desk. She was sitting on her haunches, watching his sad, drawn, exhausted face with her amber eyes. Her bushy tail was swishing back and forth.
“She knows what she’s doing,” Raine whispered. “She’s safe. Not led us astray yet.”
Evelyn clenched her teeth, but said nothing.
“Should we … ?” I let the question hang.
“You want me to call out to him?” said Raine.
I shook my head. “I’d rather do it myself. I suppose I am a fan of his book, technically. Maybe that’ll help. Um, be ready though, I suppose?”
Raine nodded and raised her machete, ready to move. I winced at the implication of impending violence, but put it from my mind for now. We truly had no idea what we were looking at, not really. If this was the real Wilson Stout, then he’d been Outside — or trapped within the Eye — for almost half a century.
“Excuse me?” I said, purging the tremor from my voice. “Professor Stout?”
His eyes continued tracking back and forth across the equations. He placed his glasses down and reached for a pencil; something about the motion of his arm made my stomach turn over, like his limb was moving at the wrong angle.
“Wilson Stout?” I said. “You were calling for help? Professor? Professor!”
“Mm,” he grunted, but still did not look up. He frowned harder, as if the numbers were torture. He drew the pencil back toward the page, then hesitated, lead tip trembling above the paper.
Evelyn whispered, “What the hell is wrong with his arm?”
“Like it’s broken,” Raine murmured. “Weird.”
“Professor,” I repeated. “Didn’t you need help?”
“My apologies, young lady,” he muttered, his voice a deep and broken baritone, like cracked granite. “But I’m not seeing students at current. My office hours are cancelled. It seems I must throw myself upon the mercies of the so-called ‘private sector’. Barbarians and philistines. If only I could … ” He moved to write something with the pencil at last, then stopped and winced before he could commit to the page. He rubbed at his forehead, as if trying to smooth out the furrows. The motion of his hand was wrong as well, like meat rubbing on meat.
“Oi!” Raine said. “Wilson. Eyes up.”
He shook his head, eyes scrunched hard, still staring at the page, almost on the verge of tears; his head moved on his neck like rubber. “I can’t, I can’t, I’m simply out of time. I’ve been out of time for so long, these moments are too precious to—”
“Yip!” went the Saye Fox.
Wilson Stout looked up.
I recoiled. Evelyn flinched in her wheelchair. Raine, to her credit, held her ground with only a tightness of her muscles.
Wilson Stout had been pretty believable when he was hunched over his work; but when he sat up, his body moved like a single boneless mass, meaty and floppy.
He was a tongue, attached to the root of the mouth in which we stood.
He squinted at his vulpine visitor, then scrambled for his glasses and fumbled them onto his face; the motion of his arms was stomach-churning, no elbows or wrists, just flapping, muscular meat. He blinked several times, widening his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His expression hesitated, then twitched with a fragile, bruised smile. A spark of forgotten happiness spread to his exhausted eyes. He blinked, and suddenly seemed a little less glassy.
“You know you’re not supposed to be here, Laurissa,” he said to the Fox, softly and gently, as if whispering a familiar flirtatious line to an old flame. “You’re barred from the campus, let alone my office. I’m pretty certain your husband will turn me into something unnatural if he thinks you came here willingly. Your reassurances are going to fall on deaf ears eventually.”
Evelyn raised a hand to her own mouth, stifling a gasp. I peered down and saw she had gone pale and wide-eyed.
“Evee?” I whispered.
She looked up, shaken but rapidly pulling herself together. “Laurissa!” she hissed. “That was my grandmother’s name!”
“Oh!” I hissed. “Oh my gosh! The handwritten dedication in the front of his pamphlet. It was to her. I remember.”
I’d read that line so many times, every time I’d opened the Notes. ‘To Miss Laurissa Saye, I hope you will find this illuminating.’
Evelyn swallowed. “I … I suppose I knew it had to be true, who else could the Fox be, but … ” She trailed off, shaking her head and staring at the Saye Fox — at Laurissa Saye, her own grandmother, somehow — with something akin to awe.
The Fox replied to Wilson with a soft ‘Murrrr-rrrup.’ She clacked her teeth and swished her tail to one side.
The Professor almost laughed, pushing his glasses up his nose with one finger. For just a moment the exhaustion and the care and the weight of terror seemed to lift from his shoulders. He seemed like a young man, too embarrassed to flirt back.
“Not as if I could have stopped you, even if I wanted to,” he said, glancing at the Fox over the rim of his glasses. “You always did have a habit of getting in anywhere you liked, whenever you liked. Always the smartest person in any room. You were wasted on that man. Did you read my book? Ah, who am I kidding, of course you did, you probably just didn’t consider it worth commenting on. A poor little screed, really, with not much to say that you hadn’t already deduced. I would be flattered though, by even a simple acknowledgement. Just tell me you read it?”
Evelyn’s shock turned to a grimace. “Oh. Great.”
Raine whispered: “Are we watching your grandmother flirt with her side-piece?”
Evelyn tutted. “I think so.”
“Ah,” I said, feeling my cheeks grow warm. “Oh. Well. Um.”
Wilson Stout frowned, but not at us. “Wait, no. But how could you have gotten in here, Laurissa? This isn’t … I mean, this isn’t my … my real office, my … ”
The weight of years settled back onto the Professor’s shoulders as he stumbled over his words. His eyes darkened once again with that thousand-yard stare, his gaze drifting downward, toward the mathematics on the desk. The Fox went ‘Yip!’ but Wilson just shook his head and swallowed, his mind consumed by the equation before him.
“Oh no,” I hissed. “We’re losing him again.”
“Could go shake his shoulder?” Raine suggested. “I’d rather not touch him though.”
“Allow me,” Evelyn said, then cleared her throat, and spoke with a full measure of steel in her spine, as Evelyn Saye, The Mage of Sharrowford’s Occult Underworld. “Then she really is my grandmother? Do I have you to thank for this confirmation, Professor Stout?”
The Professor’s head jerked back up, drawn by the ropes of authority, like a gigantic wet tongue flopping free. He blinked at Evelyn a few times, then sat up straighter, squinting through his glasses.
“And who are you, young lady?” he asked.
“Evelyn Saye,” said Evee. “Daughter of Loretta Julianna Saye, granddaughter of Laurissa Saye. You knew my grandmother. I believe you may have been closer than I originally thought. Or perhaps I should say you’re still close, as she is apparently sitting right there. Forgive me if I am rather curt, because we are in a hurry and this is an emergency. Pay attention, Professor. Concentrate.”
Wilson Stout just stared, lips parted, as if having trouble processing Evee’s words. “I … Laurissa’s grandchild? And you’re grown up. You’re an adult. I … I see. I … see.”
I spoke up. “You’ve been in here a long time.”
Wilson looked at me, eyes sunken pits of exhaustion, so deep and dark that they might run down his face in thick tears of pitch-black tar.
“Mate,” Raine said. “You were tapping. Calling for help, right?”
Stout shrugged. He seemed distracted suddenly, glancing at his books on the shelves. “Yes. Well, that’s hardly relevant now.”
“Why not?” Raine asked. “We’re here. We’re help. What’s wrong with that?”
Stout sighed. “You’re not the right kind of help.”
“Do you know where you are?” I asked. “Where here is?”
“Here?” he echoed, glancing at me.
“Inside the Eye,” I said. “Do you understand that we’re all inside the Eye, right now?”
He squinted, adjusting his glasses. “The what? Pardon, I’m … I must … I must get back to the equation. It’s the only way, you see, the only way.”
Raine shook her head. “Poor bastard doesn’t even know where he is. No different to me in my cell.”
“Wait,” Evelyn snapped. “Stout. The equation is the only way to what? What are you trying to achieve?”
Stout blinked several times, focused on Evee, as if struggling to clear his vision. “I know I am trapped in a whirlpool. Going around and around, all of me scattered every which way. Did you know you can map whirlpools with mathematics? Tornadoes, twisters, hurricanes, all the most violent and dangerous meteorological phenomena, you can actually predict every blade of grass they will touch, if you only had enough information.” He touched the notes on the table. “If only I could compile all the information, I could pull myself back together. But there’s very few pieces left. It’s only her presence that is allowing me to remember myself.” He nodded at the Saye Fox. “And this is but a moment of clarity before the madness takes hold again. I have been mad for such a very long time. In fact, I’m uncertain if I still exist at all, independently of external observation. I think I have been replaced by something that was once my echo, but is now simply all this.” He tightened his grip, creasing the notes on the table before him. “My life’s work has supplanted me. My mind is just another line of this unfinished proof.”
“You do know where you are,” I said. “You do! Professor, please look at me.”
“What is the point?” he said, casting his eyes downward. “My work will never amount to anything, never affect a single atom of the world, never achieve escape velocity to—”
“I read your book.”
Professor Stout looked up. He frowned at me, first with disbelief, as if I had tried to wound him with a backhanded insult. But then his expression cleared. He scratched at his beard. “Did you? Did you now?”
“Notes Toward a Unified Cosmology, yes. And it helped me, a lot. Most of it made sense. Not all of it was correct, of course, I doubt any single work ever can be. But it helped me, more than any other book I’ve ever read. I would like to thank you for that, even if you’re not real anymore.”
“Really? Well. Well, that’s wonderful. I’m glad my work could make some difference. I left something behind, then? An anchor in the real world. Mm, yes. A legacy. Good, good, that’s something, that’s something.” His eyes wandered away from us, back to the Fox, then to his desk.
“We’re not going to leave you behind,” I said. “Professor, we can get you out of here, the same as everybody else.”
Raine hissed: “Are we sure about that, Heather?”
I replied in a whisper. “We have to be sure! He’s been here longer than Maisie, and I don’t think there’s much of him left, but he is still here!”
But Professor Stout was already waving down my suggestion of help. “Oh, it’s far too late for that,” he said. “I’ve got a meeting at nine today, then three seminars from ten, on through lunchtime, and an afternoon class to teach. It’s all go go go here.” Suddenly he looked back up and clicked his fingers. “Did you get my memo?”
“Memo?” I echoed. “Sorry?”
Evelyn sighed. “He’s partially in and out of the dream. Keeps forgetting where and what he is.”
“Yes, yes!” Stout said, suddenly animated, almost agitated. “I sent a memo, tucked away with the new contract agreement for the staff. I could get away with that, since I’m properly tenured and all. Not as if the administration can do anything to get rid of me, I’m here for the duration. Haha.” He smiled and chuckled. “That is how you ended up here, yes? You got my memo. You must have gotten it. It contained a serious portion of my work here.” He tapped his notes. “Enough to key in any interested soul.”
Evelyn and Raine and I shared a glance. Raine shrugged. Evelyn frowned. I chewed on my bottom lip.
Stout sighed and grew more annoyed. “It was vital! It contained vital components of local analysis and measurement. You couldn’t have simply walked in here without it, one of you must have read my memo and comprehended it, which— oh.” He stopped and blinked. “Which means one of you is a fellow mathematician, of course. Which of you would it be?” His eyes lowered to the Fox for a moment. “Not you, Laurissa, you were always a genius, but you never could understand the fundamentals of my discipline. You were a good listener, though. Very encouraging.”
“Me,” I said. “I’m the mathematician. Or I was, I suppose.”
Professor Stout squinted at me. “Then you must have gotten my memo. Did you read the whole thing? You must have done.”
I wracked my brains, trying to figure out what Professor Stout could mean. A message in a bottle, ejected from within the Eye? There were only so many possible candidates for that. Maisie had sent a message and a physical object with the Messenger Demon, almost a year ago, and that could not possibly have been Stout’s work. But there was one other.
“Evee,” I said slowly, “I think he’s talking about Mister Squiddy. A memo, full of mathematics. It’s the only thing which fits. Is that right?”
Evelyn snorted. “Great. If you’re correct, his ‘memo’ almost killed me.”
“And it taught me a lot of things,” I added quickly. “But, wait, Professor. That ‘memo’, that was clearly crafted by somebody who understood hyperdimensional mathematics, on my sort of level. I thought it was sent by my sister, Maisie. Have you … worked with her, somehow? Have you seen her?”
Stout frowned and smacked his lips. “I work with a lot of postgraduate students, and I always make sure to credit them on paper, but I can’t recall them all off the top of my head. I’d have to check my notes. And those are at home. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.”
“Maisie,” I repeated. “My twin. She looks exactly like me. Oh,” I sighed. “Or maybe she doesn’t, in this place. You don’t recognise me, not at all?”
Wilson Stout paused and frowned. “Twins.”
“Ah?”
“Twins. Twins!” he repeated, growing agitated again. “Twins, yes, that’s who I was trying to contact, who I was trying to call for. How did you know?”
“We … we didn’t, we—”
Wilson tapped the table. “You need to find the twins, if you’re looking for a way out of here. They almost helped me, once. But they’re not really here, you see. They have to slip in and out. Stay beneath notice. They’ve very good at that. They’ve had to be, lest they get in too much trouble with the administration.”
“The administration?” Evelyn snapped. “You mean the Eye?”
“No, I mean the administration,” Stout almost laughed. “The non-teaching staff, the ‘bosses’. The … oh, what do they call themselves? Director? Governor? Anyway, they don’t even know about the twins. That’s the trick. If you want to survive, remain unseen.”
“I’m one of the twins,” I said, sighing with exasperation. “You mean me and Maisie.”
“Are you certain of that?” Stout asked, with an odd little frown.
“ … yes? I … do you not mean myself and Maisie?”
Stout sighed and waved me away. Then he seemed to realise something, and quickly pulled up the edge of his left sleeve to check his watch. “My seven o’clock is almost here,” he said quickly. “You young ladies will not want to be around when they arrive, unless you want to meet the Director and the Governor for yourselves, up close. And you don’t, they’re terribly boring and long-winded, and they often come with an escort. If you’re on the shit-list then I would hurry on out of here before you’re trapped. There’s nowhere to hide in this room except under the desk, and I don’t think your wheelchair would fit.”
A cold hand crept up my spine. “Excuse me?”
“Aw shit,” said Raine.
“They’re coming here?” Evee snapped. “The head of this ‘administration’ is coming right here?”
Raine said, “In about sixty seconds, by the looks of that watch! It’s six fifty nine. Heather, grab Evee’s wheelchair, we need to move, right now!”
The Saye Fox was already leaping off the chair and darting back toward the door, pausing to share a final lingering glance with Professor Stout. Wilson nodded at the Fox, his strange rubbery face creased with a melancholy smile of acceptance and loss. Raine followed quickly, grabbing the door handle and preparing to flee.
But I hesitated.
“Heather! Now!” Raine snapped.
“Professor,” I said. “Wilson. We can get you out of here, the same as everybody else. There’s no need for self-sacrifice. Come with us. Please!”
Evelyn twisted around in her chair to run me through with her eyes. “Heather! Heather, do not fucking strand me here! Move!”
Stout just shook his head, leaned back in his chair, and spread his hands across his stomach. He looked almost pleased with himself. “There’s no need for that. I’ve become quite adept at leading the administration around in circles. It’s terribly boring, an utter waste of a mind, but it stops them from bothering other people for a few hours. I’m quite safe here, thank you.”
“But you’re—”
“Also I don’t think I can move. And I will cease to be coherent soon. Don’t remind me of that, please. It’s a horrible thought. You best get going before your friends get angry with you.” He nodded to Evee. “And good luck, Evelyn Saye. I hope one day we can meet and chat under less pressured circumstances. It would be nice to tell you about your grandmother sometime.”
“R-right … right,” I said. “Thank you, Professor Stout. And, well, good luck.”
The Professor smiled through his thick and ragged beard. Then he called out: “Next time, Laurissa, you old fox!”
I grabbed the handles of Evelyn’s wheelchair and raced back to the door. Evee held on tight, and held her tongue, silently fuming at our delay.
Raine was crouched, holding the handle, one ear pressed to the door. She gestured for me to crouch as well, then hissed: “We have company.”
“Shit!” Evelyn snapped.
“Footsteps, lots of them, coming this way,” Raine said. “Heather, you stay as low as you can while still pushing the chair, but be ready to get up and sprint. If we have to move, I’m gonna grab Evee and run, and dump the chair. Whatever happens, stick close to me. You understand?”
I nodded, heart racing behind my ribs. Sweat broke out down my back and on my palms. The throbbing wound in my left shin seemed suddenly far away.
Evelyn hissed: “Do not leave me—”
Raine whipped her head around and stared right into Evee’s eyes. “I will carry you naked over burning coals if I have to. Be ready to get carried.” She didn’t wait for a response, just reached out and grabbed my wrist. “Heather. Three, two, one — go!”
Raine threw the door wide and burst back into the office, back into the narrow corridor between the wall and the cubicle dividers, staying low. I scurried after her, pushing Evee’s wheelchair ahead of me. The Saye Fox darted past my heels; I caught a glimpse of something white held between her vulpine teeth, but she was moving too fast for me to see what it was. Had she stolen some of Wilson’s notes?
Raine paused with one shoulder against the office partitions opposite Stout’s door. I drew up behind her. The Fox leapt on ahead.
The sound of booted feet was thumping against the blue carpet, coming from all directions, jumbled into muted echoes by the maze of cubicles. Thump thump thump went the marching boots.
Raine nodded toward the waiting wall of windows, still wet with tiny droplets of rain.
“Go!” she hissed. “Exit, now!”
We scurried down the narrow passageway between the wall and the cubicles. I did my best to keep my head low, but my left leg was screaming with pain at every awkward crouch-walk step. Evelyn shrank into her wheelchair, terrified into silence. Raine hurried on, machete gripped in one fist, muscles rolling in her back.
But then she halted.
We’d barely made it twenty feet. Raine looked back, then forward, then back again.
Her eyes were wide — not with fear, but with the onrush of inevitable violence, bright and focused. She began to straighten up, rolling her shoulders, raising the naked blade of her machete. Her lips twitched with a smile.
I skidded to a halt, Evee’s wheelchair stopping along with me.
“Raine?!” I hissed.
Evelyn joined in. “What the fuck are you doing, you rabid hound?! Move! Go!”
Raine grinned. Her eyes flickered down to me and Evee, then back up the way we’d come.
“We’re cornered,” she said, and made it sound like ‘God, yes’. “They’re in front and behind. Two groups. Listen to that. They’ve pinned us, cut us off. Like they knew we’d be here.” She showed her teeth. “Time for a fight. You two can still run, I’ll punch a hole to the door.”
“Raine, no!” I hissed. “No, we can’t! We can’t win, not as we are now! We can’t risk it! We—”
“No choice, sweet thing.” Raine blew out a long breath and stood all the way up, eyes looking out across the cubicles. She was exposed, in full view. “Time for a last stand.”
In the corner of my eye, the Saye Fox hopped up into Evee’s lap. One of Evee’s hands flashed, accepting something hard and white from within the Fox’s mouth, then tucking it against her own chest.
“Bullshit!” Evelyn snapped. “Heather, get me against the cubicle wall, right now! And grab Raine! Get her head down, for pity’s sake!”
“Eh?” Raine looked down. I peered around Evee’s front.
In one white-knuckled fist, Evelyn was clutching a lump of very familiar white quartz.
The Fadestone.
Where had she gotten it? From her grandmother, the Saye Fox. Where had the Fox acquired such a thing? From within Wilson’s office? How? Well, that could wait.
I didn’t waste a second explaining to Raine what was going on or how any of this worked. I just pulled Evee’s wheelchair flush against the wall of cubicle dividers, crushed myself next to her as tight as I could, then grabbed the side of Raine’s tank top and hissed: “Down! Now, down girl! Down!”
Raine obeyed. She hit the floor almost without a sound, cramming herself in tight. Absolute trust, not a moment’s hesitation, despite the hint of disappointment on her face.
“Good girl,” I hissed. “You can fight stuff later! Right now, we hide!”
“Fair,” Raine purred.
The booted footsteps were almost upon us — heavy, marching, moving in time, closing on us from left and right. They sounded as if they were right on the other side of the cubicle dividers. The two groups would turn opposite corners any moment, and we would be trapped in the middle.
Evelyn stuck out the fist that held the Fadestone. “Hold my wrist,” she hissed, voice shaking. “I’ll do the thinking and the concentrating to hide us, just do not let go, try not to move, and don’t break my concentration. Grab on, now, for fuck’s sake, do I have to say everything twice?!”
Raine and I did as Evee said — Raine wrapped a hand around Evee’s arm, while I used both of mine to support and hold her wrist in case her arm got tired. The Saye Fox peeked over the arm of Evelyn’s wheelchair too, her head wedged against Evee’s side.
Then Evelyn went absolutely still and silent, as if she had instantly slipped into deep meditation. Her soft blue eyes locked onto the Fadestone.
Thump thump thump went the approaching boots, shaking the cubicle dividers, drumming through the floor.
“Whatever you do,” Evelyn whispered, “do not break my concentration. Do. Not. Break. My. Concentration. Or we’re all dead.”
Thump thump thump.
Raine put a hand over her own mouth. I clamped my lips shut.
“We are simply not here,” Evelyn whispered, chanting a mantra to herself to hold our invisibility strong. “We are not here. We are not here. Not here. Not here. Not. Here. Not.”