Page 65 of Thorne
"A secret trick is more potent when it's yours." I pause. "And your father …"
"Daddy doesn't have to know." The words carry a six-year-old's breezy confidence in her own ability to manage information.
The cold finger presses harder.
"Go." I tap the metal slot once. "Quietly."
She goes. I lie on the floor long after the sneakers disappear, my cheek against the concrete, tracking the building back to stillness.
She said, "our secret" last night. Tonight, she said her father doesn't have to know. She is six years old, and she is already managing the geometry of this situation.
That's the thing that stays with me past two in the morning, past three, into the gray edge of four. Not that I did it, but that I'll do it again. I know I will. She'll come back tomorrow night, and I'll be on the floor before I decide to move. The broken logic loop will win, and I'll tell myself it's thefixerin me, and not examine what else it might be.
The following day is different in ways I can't fully account for.
Thorne runs the morning briefing. Mid-session, he pauses, just once, mid-sentence, and looks at me with something behind his eyes that isn't quite suspicion. More like a man reviewing a calculation he's already run and finding the answer unchanged but somehow insufficient.
I look back, hold very still, and give him nothing.
He continues. The moment passes.
That afternoon, footsteps stop outside my door. Left foot fractionally heavier. Thorne. He stands there for eleven seconds. I count every one of them, flat against the wall beside the door, not breathing.
He walks away without entering.
I wait until his footsteps reach the residential wing. Then I breathe.
I know what I should do. The calculation is not complicated. I have run it enough times to trust the result.
By midnight, I'm on the floor, jacket under my head.
The sneakers appear before twelve-thirty, and with them, before she says a word, a folded sheet of paper comes through the slot.
I unfold it.
Not a worksheet. Her handwriting, uneven and crowded, the letters tilting like they can't agree on which way is up. Not aproblem. A question, written down like it was too important to trust to a whisper.
What is the trick for 12? Also 11?
I look at it for a moment. She's been thinking since she left.
"Who told you there was a trick for eleven?"
"You said math has patterns everywhere. And eleven comes right after ten. So?"
"So."
"Is there one?"
"Yes." I trace the edge of the paper in the dark. "Start with the easy one."
"What's ten times four?"
"Forty." The answer comes without hesitation.
"What's one times four?"
A suspicious pause. "Four."
