Page 57 of Thorne
JULIANNA
The floorof the safe room is a heat sink, sucking the warmth from my body. It's been hours of silence, the kind that makes you start counting the microscopic pits in the cinder block just to keep your brain from cannibalizing itself.
I sit against the door, my back to the steel, running Trachtenberg sequences in the dark. Thirty-four times eleven. Three seventy-four. The numbers stay where I put them. They don't revise. They don't ask anything of me except accuracy, and accuracy is the one thing I have left.
I know the building by its sounds now. Halo's keyboard going quiet after midnight. Ghost's footsteps in the corridor at two, measured, taking only the space required. The grandfather's radio, low, from the residential wing. Thorne's footsteps, left foot fractionally heavier; the asymmetry I cataloged by the second night and have tracked without choosing to ever since.
By the end of the first week, I know when everyone has gone to sleep.
Then, a metallic scrape, and the light beneath my door changes.
It's not the heavy, rhythmic thud of Thorne's combat boots. It's light. Skittering. I drop my gaze to the very bottom of the door, where the narrow trade slot sits at floor level. A pair of scuffed light-up sneakers, pink and silver, stops right in front of the vent.
I don't move.
Thorne's rules are not complicated. No contact with the residential wing. No contact with staff beyond sanctioned briefings. And one rule stated separately, in a register so flat it left no room for negotiation.
His daughter is off-limits.
Not a suggestion. Not a line item. The only thing he said twice.
I stay very still, and I do not speak.
"I know you're in there." The small, certain voice filters through the slot at the floor. "The light changes when someone moves."
I don't move again.
"I'm Lily," she offers, as though an introduction will resolve my silence. "I'm not supposed to be here. Daddy says you're off-limits. But I listened to you doing math, and I'm bad at math, and I figured maybe the two things were connected."
A pause. She waits. I give her nothing.
"I'm not bothering you," she adds. "I'm just sitting here. You don't have to talk. I can do the talking."
She does do the talking. For three full minutes, she describes her math worksheet, her father's forehead crinkle, the way numbers feel slippery, mean, and wrong. But how my numbers through the door sounded like they worked, like they went somewhere, and she wanted to know how that was possible.
I say nothing.
A small, pale hand slides a crumpled piece of notebook paper through the slot.
I look at it on my side of the floor. Don't touch it.
"I'm bad at numbers." I hear a soft scuff of fabric against the other side of the wood. "Daddy gets a crinkle right here." A faint tapping sound reaches me. "When I do my sums. He tries to be nice about it, but he's sad because I keep getting them wrong."
I pull the worksheet toward me. One finger. Just to look.
Basic first-grade arithmetic. Addition: 7 + 5, 8 + 4. The answers are wild, panicked guesses. Whatever her hand reached for when the real answer wouldn't come. The eraser damage is worse than the wrong answers. She's been trying. Over and over, she's been trying.
She's not bad at numbers. She's been given a broken system and blamed for its failure.
Thefixerin me, the part of my brain that sees broken logic loops and physically cannot leave them broken, fires before anything else can.
I know I shouldn't. I know exactly where this line is and exactly what it costs to cross it. I pull the pencil from my jacket pocket.
"You're not bad at numbers, Lily." My voice comes out lower than I expect. Rougher from disuse.
The sneakers go very still.
"How do you know?"
