Somewhere in the woods of Westsylvania, Year 18
A twig cracked under Soph’s sneaker and she froze, eyes darting around to check for any signs of pursuit.
As the hammering in her chest subsided, she moved on, slowing down cautiously to avoid any further disturbance. She padded on, eyes straining in the moonlight to count the subtle signs they had left on the trees to mark the way to their hideaway once you left the path.
Fifteen, sixteen … She was nearly there now.
Seventeen. Her favourite prime. Wary as she was, Soph allowed herself a small smile.
As she walked on, she became aware of a warm orange glow somewhere in amongst the trees. Firelight. If it was a wildfire it would surely be raging, so it must be human activity.
She would rather run from a wildfire than people. A wildfire couldn’t turn out to know her parents or identify her afterwards in a line up.
Soph slowed down, torn between the instinct that told her to leave now and her curiosity. Curiosity that was overtaken by concern as she thought through the implications – what if whoever’s fire this was already had Allie?
That decided things. She had to know if Allie was all right. Carefully, she moved closer, not directly, but circling in towards the fire, ready to sprint off at a tangent at the slightest sign of danger.
As she got closer, Soph saw that the fire was right in front of the abandoned hut they’d adopted as their secret rendezvous. Fear turned to relief as she made out Allie, crouched down on the far side of it, holding her hands out to its warmth.
Relief turned to anger as she ran round to her. “What the hell? A massive fire isn’t exactly stealthy.”
“Good to see you too,” Allie said. “I got here early, and it’s fricking freezing tonight, in case you hadn’t noticed. So I solved the problem.”
“And gave us the much, much bigger one of being able to be found.”
“Soph, relax, there’s no one here. Even if someone did see it they’d just think we were vagrants sleeping rough or something. It’s no big deal.”
Soph remained unconvinced, but relented at the sight of Allie’s confident grin. “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.” She headed inside the hut, taking off her backpack as she did so. Putting it onto the upturned crate that served as their table, she pulled out the sheaf of paper covered in closely written lines of algebra.
Allie snatched it off her, her eyes scanning it quickly even as she said, “So you tell me off for taking too many risks starting a fire, but then you wander around the place carrying pages of complex workings … using integration by parts, no less–“
“I can’t keep it all in my head the way you can,” Soph said defensively.
Allie ignored her, carrying on reading. Then she gave a low whistle and Soph knew she’d got to the good bit. “Oh, neat, you end up with a negative version of the integral you started with on the other side, so you move it across and then halve everything. Very nice.”
Soph was already removing the loose floorboard and prising out the Book from its hiding place. She brushed the dust off its cover and was struck anew by how mundane it was, for something so extraordinary. The dogeared top corner where generations of students had flipped through it, the rip in the cover that turned it into a textbook of “Advanced Algeb Trigonometry and Calcul”, the way someone who’d gotten bored had filled in all the gaps in the letters of the authors’ names with blue ink, so that Fairchild became a line of people waiting for the bus, the a and d pregnant with inky babies, and the o-s of Snoop a pair of binoculars peeking out at them.
The moment passed; it was a self-indulgent waste of time to stare at the cover when what was inside that was important. Time to get to work. “Can you remember which question it was?” she asked.
“Exercise 9E, question 4, I think?” Allie said.
Soph flicked through the answers section at the back to find the right page. “And what did I get?”
Allie flicked forward a few pages in Soph’s workings. “Three sixteenths pi.”
Soph smiled triumphantly. The Book agreed with her – not that it was infallible, of course, Professor Courts had impressed that upon them at the very beginning. They were pretty sure they’d already found two of the answers in there that didn’t actually work, unless both Soph and Allie had messed up the questions in exactly the same way, which didn’t seem very likely.
“Come on, bring it out here.”
Soph brought it up to the crate-table and Allie switched on the anglepoise lamp that they had agreed was sufficiently unobtrusive that they could work by it – not that such considerations really mattered tonight, with Allie’s little campfire burning away merrily outside the window. “How many copies do you think there are still around?” Soph asked.
“Who knows?” Allie said.
I know there are fewer than there used to be, Soph thought to herself, involuntarily flashing back to the book burnings her mother had dragged her along to, bonfires of knowledge on the quadrangle of the local college. The first few times the majority had been from the college library, but then people had started bringing them from far and wide, PTAs and school boards organising themselves to purge their classrooms of anything deemed insufficiently applicable to real life. Mom had made her carry a stack of these very books and chided her for not looking more cheerful as she threw them into the flames. “It’s better for everyone this way, darling,” she’d said. “One day you’ll understand.”
“Soph?” Allie’s concerned voice, her hand brushing lightly on Soph’s forearm, brought her back to the present. “Are you OK?”
“It’s nothing, I’m fine.” Soph sighed. “It’s just … what if this is the only one left in the state? On the whole eastern seaboard? In the world?”
“OK, now I know you’re just being silly.” Allie tilted her head and smiled encouragingly. “Just because this country’s gone crazy, doesn’t mean everywhere has. Even if they don’t have this specific textbook, they’ll have their equivalents.”
“I’m not so sure about that. On the news–“
“Propaganda,” Allie put in.
“It said that the League of Nations has approved sanctions against any countries still teaching pure mathematics. Apparently two dozen countries voted against, and their ambassadors walked out when the result came. But that means there are a hundred and fifty-whatever–“
“Three,” Allie supplied.
“That have fallen into line. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Of course it does,” Allie said.
“That guy mom likes on the TV says it might be necessary to go to war.”
“That guy says a lot of things, as far as I understand,” Allie said. Soph envied her her life with her grandmother, where the dinner table conversation wasn’t all about how the only thing the government was doing wrong was not going far and fast enough. “But listen, no country has ever invaded another over what’s on the school curriculum.”
“First time for everything,” Soph muttered darkly.
“We need to focus on what we can do here to fight back, that’s why I’m here with you every night we can sneak away.” Allie’s prodigious memory meant that her studies really were a form of fighting back, preserving the knowledge in her own head. Soph knew that try as she might she could never match that, however often Allie insisted that she needed a study partner.
Soph smiled at Allie despite herself. “And here was me thinking it was just that you enjoyed my company.”
“So what shall we work on tonight?” Allie said. Turning to the contents page, her fingers brushed against Soph’s. “I was thinking Taylor series, maybe?”
Soph made a face. “Are we ready for that?”
“Oh come on, you love a good infinite sequence.”
“All right, then,” Soph said.
For the next half hour or so, they devoted themselves to the topic, Soph’s brow furrowed in concentration while Allie’s eyes grew wider and wider with delight as the implications unfolded themselves one after another inside her mind.
“I think I need a break,” Soph said.
Allie nodded, not looking away from the book.
“I might go and enjoy your fire since–” Soph stopped dead as she stood up. “Allie,” she whispered urgently.
“What?” Allie replied, slightly irritably. “I’m–“
“Allie, there are people with guns outside. At least seven.”
Allie was instantly alert, glancing behind her. She swore at the sight of them.
“Move in,” came a voice from out there. They knew that the girls were aware of them now. How long had they been there, watching? Collecting evidence?
“The emergency exit, now,” Allie said.
Soph didn’t hesitate, going to the chimney and shimmying up inside it as they’d practised several times previously. She climbed quickly, emerging into the trees through the hole in the back where some of the stones had fallen away. She paused for a moment, expecting Allie to be right behind her.
Instead, what she heard from within sickened her.
“Down on your knees, hands on your head. Now!”
Allie obviously complied, and the next sound Soph heard was a boot connecting with soft tissue. Probably her belly, Soph thought.
They had always promised one another that if something like this happened, they wouldn’t attempt any sort of heroic rescue. Besides, Allie’s grandma had more than enough money to bail her out … as long as she was put into the system properly. The best way to help Allie was to get back to her house, let the old lady know what was happening.
But every instinct Soph had fought against that logic. She wanted to sprint round and take them by surprise, incapacitating all of them with some incredible blizzard of martial arts moves, rescue Allie and get away together. That’s how it would happen in the movies. But Soph had never once tried to learn any sort of martial art, and there were many of them, carrying guns.
She froze in place, willing her feet to start sprinting away. But they wouldn’t move an inch.
She could hear more, floorboards being yanked up — they had left the hiding place open, so even these meatheads could think to look for more — and Allie being hustled away, her rights being read to her perfunctorily.
“Where’s your accomplice?” the one who seemed to be in charge barked.
“I was here alone,” Allie said. Soph thought that they must know it was a lie, that they’d been able to see both of them as they watched through the broken windows. But then again, perhaps not. Allie had been between the lamp and the door, her silhouette obvious. It seemed unlikely they hadn’t heard the two of them talking, but perhaps, just perhaps …
Run! Soph screamed to herself. Still she stood rooted to the spot, listening desperately for clues as to what was happening.
“Sergeant!” came a new voice. “She’s gone!”
“What the hell do you mean, gone? You had her cuffed and–“
“I don’t know, sir.”
Another voice: “Well, here are the cuffs.” Soph was intrigued despite herself; had Allie been practising escapology without telling her?
“She can’t have gone far. Get after her, now! … And stay in pairs.”
“Yes, sir!” A sudden eruption of noise as they all started running. Soph pressed herself flat against the back wall of the hut, convinced they would find her almost immediately. But they were running so fast in pursuit of Allie, however she had managed to slip their grasp, that they went straight past without a glance in her direction. Maybe they really hadn’t realised there were two of them.
There was only one thing for it, Soph decided – she would have to get back inside the chimney and wait there until the coast was clear. The risks were high, but the idea of making a run for it now with the cops all over the place, searching for a young woman, was a non-starter.
As delicately as she could, willing the stones not to fall or make any sort of sound, she slid herself back into the dark, enclosed environment of the chimney. Her heart was racing, her pulse pounding in her ears like a drumbeat.
As she waited in there, she would have lost track of time entirely were it not for the fact that the sergeant had remained here, and was radioing the search parties for situation reports every five minutes, as a break from his relentless pacing. At first, Soph dreaded the radio crackling unexpectedly, heralding one or other of them triumphantly announcing Allie’s recapture.
But as time went on, Soph began to allow herself to hope that Allie had somehow, miraculously, escaped. She remained silent and still, fighting a desperate urge to sneeze from the decades-old soot tickling her nose.
After the twentieth-third check in, the sergeant called off the search. “Damn waste of time,” he muttered after switching off the radio.
Soph waited until she was sure he was gone, then waited a little longer for good measure. By the time she felt it was definitely safe to emerge, she was pretty sure a spider had started making a cobweb in her armpit.
Dropping back down into the hearth, she was greeted by a scene of devastation. If the hut had been ramshackle and abandoned before, now it was a hollow shell, stripped bare. They had been very thorough in their search.
Soph realised with rising dread that she couldn’t see the Book. Had they taken it as evidence? It seemed extremely likely, but still she searched desperately in case they had left it behind.
It was only when she went back out through the front door that she realised what had happened. The fire Allie had built was now a blazing bonfire, fed by all the torn up floorboards.
They’d burnt it. Of course they had. Peering into the flames, she could still see a fragment of the plastic cover still resisting the flames, for now. But all the pages must have long since gone up in smoke.
Soph stood there for far too long, watching the fire gradually die down as it consumed all its fuel. Someone had to bear witness, she thought, someone had to mourn this utterly pointless destruction of knowledge.
Eventually, the lightening horizon cast the whole scene in wan pre-dawn light. Soph reluctantly began to move, knowing that she couldn’t let herself be missed at home and mom would be up in just a couple of hours to do her exercises.
As she trudged away, Soph spotted a small scrap of paper on the ground, one that must have been wafted away from the fire before it had caught. Picking it up, she wondered which tiny scrap had been saved. As she looked at it, she saw her own writing: 3π/16.
Sighing, she stuffed it deep into the inside pocket of her jacket.
As she did so, she heard Allie calling, “Soph!”
“Allie?” she whispered. “Are you–” She began to search around, but she couldn’t see her anyway. As the light grew brighter, she could see further into the trees — there was no sign. And every moment she wasted increased the risk of being caught getting back inside when she reached home. She shook her head, told herself that she must have been imagining it.
She began to jog, following the marked trees. As she returned to the path, she thought, just for a moment, that she heard Allie’s voice again.
“Soph!”