Toronto, Year 38
A knock on the door, followed by it being nudged open. “It’s time,” said Fatima. Like all the others here, she was too young for Allie’s liking but she wasn’t a literal school kid like Kevin. College age, but she wasn’t attending college. From what Allie had picked up, she worked all day every day in her parents’ store, then snuck out at night to join the study group, where a lot of the time it seemed she was teacher as much as student.
Allie rose from the cross-legged position she had adopted. “Already?” She needed more time, to puzzle it all out.
“Uh, it’s been five and a half hours, nearly, Ms Voss.”
“Thank you, Ms Jarrah,” Allie shot back. Then, softer, she added, “I keep telling you, Allie is fine.” The little back and forth helped bring her back to reality even as she struggled to take in how much time had passed. Had she really spent so long in contemplating her actions? Or had she been … elsewhere for some of it?
There were so many variables, so many permutations. Fatima and the others’ plan was risky and quite possibly completely unnecessary, but they were clearly determined enough to try — and so she had given them enough pointers that they might just avoid the twin perils of capture and cognitive burnout.
And then there was the Soph side of the equation, a giant, complex expression that piled unknowns upon unknowns. Let S equal … what, exactly? Foot soldier of the oppressive regime engulfing the world? Or was she working against the system from the inside? The kid had spun that wild story about time stretching out, which she could believe Soph might be able to do, but after all her searching had the answers she wanted lain with her old friend all along?
And what were they to one another, anyway? Just old friends, or the one that got away? And if so, was that mutual? Nestled at the core was the question Allie had never been able to find an answer for: should she have gone back, after that night? She was, ultimately, the one who had got away from all of it. Had she left Soph stranded, with no good options and the EEE her least worst? Or had Soph taken it as a bitter betrayal and joined up without any reservations?
But then again, it hadn’t been Allie who had reopened the lines of communication. Soph had gone straight to what must be her most recent known contact from the EEE’s point of view, and given him a message to pass on to her.
And it had worked, it had brought her here. This was decidedly not a sensible place for her to be, alert as the authorities now were. Things were escalating markedly across the world, far quicker than she had ever expected.
If she cared about herself, she should go deep into hiding, translate away to one of the boltholes she’d created on long hikes deep into rarely travelled territories all over the world, two dozen or so new iterations of her and Soph’s little hut.
If she cared about the cause, she should be out there leading the resistance, or at least putting herself at the disposal of one of the agencies that still had some chance to act against it. Madame K would never go for it but she might be able to persuade that guy in New Zealand.
If she were naive enough, she might even turn herself in. The US administration’s public pronouncements kept using her as the poster child for the potential dangers of the mathematically talented, but she knew that it was only propaganda. One person turning herself in wouldn’t stop the war machine that was already in motion.
So why was she here? And what should she do, now that she was?
Five and a half hours, and she was no closer to anything resembling a solution. All she had was inferences, probabilities, a whole decision tree of different outcomes and precious little prior information to guide her through it.
“Allie,” Fatima said, more firmly than expected. “We really need to go. Are you ready?”
As I’ll ever be, Allie thought, as she gave a curt nod, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel.
The van was one of several rusting in the backyard of the disused auto shop that had become the headquarters for the Toronto group’s operation. Only a careful observer would realise that alone amongst its compatriots, it had been carefully restored to being operational; only someone who knew to look would find what was hidden in the back.
Fatima clambered into the driver’s seat as Allie went round to the other side. In the distance, there was a single flash of lightning. Allie fumbled with the door, which felt as though it was going to come off its hinges. The thunder reached them as she was belting herself in. About ten miles. But they would be driving into the eye of the storm.
She glanced across as Fatima started the van. Either she was saying a little prayer as she turned the ignition, or the van’s return to life relied more on mathematical than mechanical knowhow.
Allie allowed herself a glance into the back, another attempt to project confidence for the sake of the six study group members crammed in there around the sides of the metre-wide metal sphere. Some of them smiled at her, others had a flint-eyed look of pure determination. She found herself glad that Kevin wasn’t among them.
The van rolled slowly out of the yard, engine spluttering, but as they reacted the highway it began to accelerate hard, Fatima gaining in confidence now that it was going — or maybe just trying to make up time after Allie had delayed them with her reverie.
The moment of decision was coming soon; all those different probabilities she’d been trying and failing to weigh would collapse down to Boolean logic. If this, then that. True or false. One or zero. All or nothing.
Over the next eight kilometres, the storm grew sharply in intensity. The lightning strikes grew more frequent and as they drove through the lashing rain, the time between them and the rolls of thunder shortened noticeably each time. It all felt suitably apocalyptic.
Allie had to admit to herself that she was impressed. The weather was such a complex system that she had never even dreamt of trying to manipulate it, but not only had one of this group managed it, at least in the limited sense of provoking a storm, they had also successfully taught the technique to several others.
The storm served two purposes in the plan: as well as the lightning providing raw power on a scale hard to imagine, it was hoped that it would drive as many people inside as possible, to minimise any risk to what Fatima kept insisting on calling “civilians”.
Whether it would work, let alone whether it would have the desired effect, were huge unknowns of their own, but as they got closer Allie found herself focusing more and more on the one that was at best tangential for them: Soph.
She had always known how to find Soph, it was almost one of the first things she’d figured out, long before she could twist her own co-ordinate system into knots to relocate herself. But she’d never been sure whether Soph could tell she was doing it, and so had never dared do it again since the night of her escape.
Now, for the first time in two decades, she sketched the mathematical forms she associated with Soph in her head. For a moment she was filled with an obscure sense of dread: that the invariants she was trying to pin down might turn out not to be preserved by the transformations of all that time apart.
But no, there she was, nearby, detectable. It was difficult as the van kept moving at the high speeds Fatima was maintaining to be precise, but she was no longer in any doubt: Soph was nearby.
She’d honed her abilities in this regard on various others over the years. It had used to take minutes and even some handwritten equations, swiftly destroyed, to find Soph, and she had usually been in one of a small number of predictable locations. But she’d found that anyone she spent enough time with, or felt strongly enough about — positively or negatively — could be tracked down in the same fashion.
If Soph could tell that she was doing this, she wasn’t doing anything to interfere. Did that mean any more or less than her desire to talk in the first place?
A loud crash brought her back to reality with a bump. Some part of her awareness that had stayed rooted in the van as it hurtled along relayed what had happened: a lightning bolt had struck the fire hydrant on the side of the street just as they drove past it, sending it flying. Water spurted high into the air, gushing out under enormous pressure. The jolt Allie had felt had been Fatima swerving to dodge it.
“Somewhere near here,” Allie managed to say. “Left of …” She oriented herself quickly. “North, north-west?”
“We’re heading west, you know that. I can’t take us too far out of the way without compromising the mission.”
“Please. Just a little detour.”
Fatima glanced behind at the others as another lightning bolt lit the sky, the roll of thunder following close behind it. Allie couldn’t see their reaction but from the slightly aggrieved sigh Fatima gave she guessed it wasn’t too far away from the sort of hero worship that seemed to follow her everywhere. Fatima hadn’t been immune to it at first but apparently repeated exposure at close range quickly took the shine off Allie’s allure. “Fine.”
Allie closed her eyes again, for just a moment this time. When she opened them, she pointed. “Up there.”
Fatima pulled the wheel over hard and pulled on the handbrake, swinging them tight around and onto the sloping road Allie had indicated, tyres spinning wildly as they gripped the soaked surface. Allie gripped the side of the door for dear life and she could hear the kids in the back desperately trying to keep the sphere steady.
She tried to shut it all out, zero in on Soph again. “Here!” she said suddenly. Fatima stamped on the brakes, and Allie lurched forward — there was another kerfuffle behind her as the sphere had to be prevented from doing likewise.
“Thank you,” Allie said as she unbuckled herself and climbed out. “Good luck, all of you.”
“You too,” Fatima said grudgingly, before setting off again at an acceleration that didn’t seem possible for the van — maybe she did have ways of encouraging it along beyond its designed parameters.
Allie was alone in the dark, rain whipping against her face, driven hard by the wind so that the hood of the waterproof coat she was wearing may as well not have been there at all. Hardly ideal conditions to search for Soph, but if she’d managed it from the van as it hurtled along, surely she could do the same now.
Then all the lights went out at once.
A power cut wasn’t necessary for the plan, but it had been accounted for as a possibility in the group’s planning. It was hardly an unsurprising consequence, with the massive thunderstorm in progress. But from Allie’s point of view this was particularly bad timing.
Emergency lighting flickered on dimly in the few places that had it. Allie found what shelter she could under the arches of a seedy hotel with pretensions, and tried again.
She focused in, the equations flowing easily now that she was trying for the third time in quick succession. That helped, more so than the conditions hindered — if anything, all other considerations fell away to irrelevance as the location narrowed down from this block to … this specific building, the one she was already outside. Had her subconscious guided her here already?
She straightened up as much as possible, walked through the door trying to look like it was perfectly reasonable for her to be waltzing straight in in the middle of the biggest storm in living memory.
The receptionist was standing behind the desk, lit only by a storm lantern that she’d probably had to find in an emergency kit she’d never expected to use when she was shown it. “I’m sorry, we’re not …”
“I’m expected,” Allie said confidently. She shut her eyes for a moment. “Fourth floor.”
“Uh huh,” the receptionist said. “Well, I guess we all gotta make a living.”
There was a lightning strike that even through the small window in the door lit the whole scene with a monetary actinic brilliance, followed quickly by an almighty crack of thunder, loud enough to shake the keys hanging behind her desk.
It was starting.
The TV behind the receptionist sprang to life despite the power being out. If it was working, every set, every radio receiver, in the city — and possibly much further afield; some of the kids had been talking about being heard in Washington DC — was doing the same, relaying the same message that had been encoded into the now-lightning-powered sphere.
On the screen, it appeared as bright white letters, stark against the black background. A voice that was eerily bland read the message out: “We are here.”
Allie sprinted up the stairs. The TVs in the rooms on the second floor were all doing the same, loud enough so that the voices built to an overwhelming cacophony in the stairwell. “We have always been here.”
Allie made it to the third floor as the final statement was read out: “We will always be here.”
She gave herself a moment to reach out and detect Soph again — not far at all now, one last flight of stairs and then halfway down the corridor.
“Sir, are you seeing this?”
“Not our problem. The mission is Voss.”
The voices were coming from nearby. It was a trap after all. She’d been so intent on finding Soph that her usual precautions had fallen by the wayside.
As she turned and sprinted back down the stairs, taking them two or three at a time, armed, masked agents began to emerge on each landing. How many rooms had they been waiting in?
She could dodge through them, maybe, but she wouldn’t make it through the big heavy door without them catching up to her.
It was time to be elsewhere. As they approached, she closed her eyes, preparing herself to translate to the most out of the way of her safehouses.
The crackle of a radio as the one in front communicated with his superiors. “She’s trying to escape.”
“Deploy countermeasures,” came the reply.
Countermeasures? What the hell did that mean?
Allie tried to slip away but found that she couldn’t. As fast as she could switch between coordinate systems, they were shifting around her.
She could sense them, now that they were active — a half dozen or so Cognoscenti who’d figured out, if not how to mimic her ability, at least how to block it.
“You went to all this effort just for me?” she said to the agent whose gun was pointed right at her. They must have orders to take her alive, or she’d already be riddled with bullet holes.
She made one last herculean effort, switching to a sun-centred frame of reference where she had to manually keep track of the Earth’s orbital motion. One miscalculation and she’d be dead in the vacuum of space. She didn’t know quite how she knew, having never encountered opposition to this ability before, but she could sense that the others were failing to keep up.
“I guess I should take it as a compliment,” she told the agent, just before she vanished.