isn’t there for you. Socially, emotionally, you can see it. You had to learn how in order to be happy.” Verity took a step backward, leaning her hip against the chalkboard. “I’m not here.”
“I know.”
“You could make me think I was here, if you wanted to, but you’d know I wasn’t.”
“I would.” I glanced around at the nothingness. “Right now, anyway. If we stayed here long enough, I wouldn’t know it anymore. I could let this be the world. I could imagine more than just you.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Verity’s grayed-out lips. “No red.”
“No red,” I agreed. “But I’d be able to understand faces. That would be a nice change. You have a beautiful smile.”
“You’re remembering other people thinking that I had a beautiful smile,” Verity corrected gently. “You don’t know. Not really.”
I glanced at my computer. Ingrid had apparently noticed that I wasn’t responding to her anymore; she had typed my name so many times that it scrolled the chat client. Gently, I closed the screen and returned my attention to Verity.
“Does it matter what I know?” I asked. “If it’s in here, and it seems real, it is real. Everything here is whatever I want it to be. I think . . . I think I could be happy.”
“Hiding inside your own mind? Really?”
“Do you have a better idea?” I exclaimed, pushing myself out of the chair. I spread my hands, indicating the white nothingness around us. “All this is happening because the cuckoos want me to do the math! They want me to reach my next instar! I don’t know if you were paying attention when Mom tried to teach us about cuckoos, but doing what they want is never the right answer!”
“Neither is running away and hiding, and that’s what you’re trying to do. We’re Prices. We don’t hide.”
“I’m not a Price!”
“You took your last name from a science fiction novel about creepy telepathic children who want to destroy the world,” said Verity. “That may be one of the most Price-like things you could have done. You’re family. We raised you right. You’re a Price, and Prices don’t run, or hide, or refuse to do something because it might be dangerous.”
“But the cuckoos—”
“Want you to do some math. You love math. Math loves you. Do their damn math so you can get the hell out of here and stomp their blue-eyed asses into the floor.” Verity shook her head. “I believe in you. Artie believes in you. It’s time you started to believe in you, too. You can’t fight if you’re in the hole. Get out of the hole, and then come see me for real. I miss you, you big jerk.”
“What if I can’t?” I whispered. The numbers nibbling at the edges of the world felt . . . big. They felt massive in a way I’d never encountered before, like they were the numbers that underpinned the entire universe. Tackling them wouldn’t just be like adding two and two together to see whether I got four. It would be like reinventing calculus, written in starlight and graded by the moon.
“You’re Sarah Zellaby,” she said. “Of course you can.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Verity was gone.
Slowly, I sank back down into the seat I’d conjured and opened my laptop. Ingrid was still filling the screen with my name, over and over again, an unending stream of letters that seemed to lose all meaning as they went on. Words were like that. They were fragile, mutable. Their meanings changed depending on the context. “Sarah” could be me, or someone else, or a pet, or a doll, or a piece of heavy machinery owned by an overly sentimental construction engineer. It wasn’t fixed.
Math, though . . . math never changed. Math always meant exactly what it said, no more and no less, and refused to be written for anyone. Math was always math. If I turned myself into numbers, I would be a wholly unique equation, something so much bigger and wilder and harder to define than “Sarah.” I looked at the screen again. I put my fingers on the keys.
Give me one good reason, I typed. Give me one good reason I should help you after you hurt Artie, and threatened my family, and brought me here against my will. Give me one good reason I should do this math for you, and not for myself.
Because if you do, she replied, we’ll go away forever.