You Are to Address Me as Lady Zero

With no sound, the dark ended the way it had begun. One moment I lay on a blanket inside a box, and the next there was gray daylight across my knees and a fourth wall again that I could have walked through.

I did not move. Kou was on my chest, awake, with his eyes open a slit and his ears turned toward the field. I kept my own eyes nearly shut and looked where he was listening.

Some distance off, Kathi-5 had unfolded another room. It was a play room, with a rug and a toy chest, and she sat on the rug in her sleeping robe with her knees drawn up, moving things with her mind. Dolls, mostly, and a heap of plush animals, a bear and a rabbit and a goose with a bent beak. They stood up and fought.

She gave the dolls voices. She gave the bear another, gruffer, and the rabbit a squeak. Three of the black familiars had come down to play, one with the dolls and two with the plush, flapping and tumbling. They had no faces to show which side they preferred.

I looked at the dolls. One wore a tiny lab coat. One had silver painted into its hair. One was tall and had cropped yarn hair and a book sewn onto its hand. I kept looking at them, and then at the bear.

The dolls lost. It took a while. Then the bear and the rabbit marched the losers one at a time to a row of small boxes at the side of the rug, each a little copy of a room with the lid shut, and locked them in, and the plush animals and the familiars all cheered. Kathi-5 clapped. She clapped, and when she was finished she stopped, and her hands stayed together a breath longer than they needed to.

I tapped Kou’s chest. He understood. I had slept enough for one small thing: a window no bigger than a coin, off to the side where the blanket hid it, aimed past her world. He sent a pulse through it, a single high note.

Kathi-5’s head came up.

“So you’re awake,” she called, without turning. “Don’t bother with the plus one, you know. There’s never anything useful there. Minus one is much more interesting.”

The plus one was the world past hers. Minus one was Kathi-4.

She flicked a hand, and a window hung in the air above the rug, wide and clear. Behind it, Kathi-4 and Kathi-1 were having breakfast.

It was a good breakfast. There was a cloth, and silver, and a plate of pastries, and Kathi-4 had a cup in one hand and was talking, brightly, a shade too brightly, and her eyes did not once rest on the girl across from her. Kathi-1 sat across from her without a staff. Ryu was in her arms, and she was not eating, and she looked like someone who had been sitting at that table since the night before.

My hand opened on the blanket. I had not known it was closed.

Kathi-4 noticed the window first. She lifted her hand, late, and her smile came up a moment after it, as if from a long way down. Kathi-1 followed her eyes and saw me, and saw Kathi-5, and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

“They’re having fun,” said Kathi-5, and closed the window with a clap of her hands. “Maybe we should, too.”

She folded the play room into the ground and unfolded another by my bed, and in it were a long table and a great many shelves. One wall had a black seam in the plaster, running floor to ceiling, and nobody had bothered to mend it. The shelves held bread. They held dry biscuits and hard cheese in wax, jars of something dark, and sacks that rustled. It was food chosen by someone who had decided what food was for.

Two of the black familiars set the table for two. Kathi-5 sat down at the head and beckoned me, and I got up and went through the open side of the room, because there was no other way to the next thing.

The familiars pulled out a chair for me at the far end. It was a long table.

I took the chair and carried it down the length of the room and put it down next to Kathi-5’s.

She moved her own away a handsbreadth. I moved mine closer. She moved hers again, and I understood that this was a negotiation and that I was winning. Toward her sleeve I put out my hand, and in a second I was on my back in the corner with the air gone out of me, and a wind was still going around the room.

“Stop playing games,” said Kathi-5, “and sit down already.”

“You’re on the floor,” said Kou, from the table.

I got up. I walked to the far end, and sat. Kou settled on the table beside my plate. The bread was stale and the water was flat, and I ate and he drank, and over the rim of his cup he met my eyes.

I had slept through half of Kou’s plan. The other half I had worked out myself over the stale bread, which is what a prodigy is for.

“Now,” said Kathi-5, with her mouth full of biscuit, “tell me how you slid. We can test it on minus one. We’ll have a tea party.”

I let a silence build, and I looked at Kou. He looked back.

“Hey, Kathi-5,” I said.

“You are to address me as Lady Zero.”

“Okay. Lady Zero.” I set my bread down. “Do you know about emotional resonance theory? The one that says a window might open more easily if you anchor it to a feeling?”

“That load of garbage?” She rolled her eyes, which was almost a relief to see. “Of course. Why bring it up?”

“Because it gave me an idea for something more logical. The math is n-dimensional differential equations and general relativity and string theory, all braided together, and nobody has fully solved it. I have a working version.” As if I had all day, I picked the bread up again. “But it’d go faster if you showed me around while I explained. Your timeline, I mean.”

Kathi-5’s lips thinned. She looked at the long table and the shelves and the black shapes hanging by the walls, and then at me, down the length of the table.

She sighed. She waved a hand at the floor, and a flat gray building peeled itself off the ground and hung there, humming faintly.

“Step on,” she said.