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By Root 586 0

pockets, but not with the urgency Rhodes wanted, and this time he said, “Goddammit, find that phone!” as the Sheik watched him with curiosity evolving into concern; by then it wasn’t one phone, but three, and then six, and then he heard a bong of a laptop turning itself on and the tweet of a digital reader, and the tinny chirping of a music player, and by this time there was no mistaking what this was, which was not just one cell phone left on vibrate out of carelessness, but an attack, an all-out attack, for which Rhodes knew there was little defense, and he said, “The batteries! Take out the batteries!” And now it was Rhodes who was doing the dictating as he and the Sheik both fumbled for their phones and then there was a pop and a scream and Rhodes saw the lone female acusmatici and her face was burned and her hand gnarled by acid from an exploded battery.

Rhodes wanted to explain what was happening, that the mathematici were using their phones as transmitters to interfere with everything electronic on the plane, including and especially the cockpit controls and communications, that they had found a cell phone that had never been turned off, just switched to vibrate or silent, and used that one to turn on the others, and Rhodes remembered now the day years ago when the possibility of such a thing had first been raised—“It would be like crashing a plane with a lowered tray table,” somebody had said—and Rhodes had laughed with all the rest of them, and of course he didn’t explain any of that now, but as the plane pitched violently to the right on its way into a roll, as he was hurled painfully against the bubinga wood of the bar, as he heard a champagne bottle smash amid the terrified screams of his colleagues, he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t laughed that day, if he’d taken more of a leadership role. If only he’d had his own vision of what the mathematici could be, he could have used the charisma and persuasive powers that had made him a success in the most charismatic town in America and maybe everything that happened afterward, Butler, Matuszak, all those innocent people on those planes and this one, his pilots—Christ, I know their families, he thought just before passing out—everything might have been different.

57

SHE HADN’T HAD a sleep like this in forever. A deep, penetrating, hallucinatory sleep. Not since the day they’d put the spider inside.

That really was forever ago. Canada Gold’s whole life. The years before that were lived by someone else, that little girl’s memories having been passed along to Nada like a shoe box of old photos.

Sleep had always come easy to her. Just a switch in her head, a twitch in one of her spider’s legs. But sleep rarely transported her into complete unconsciousness. Her spider—a machine, after all—was always awake, even if the rest of her wasn’t.

This sleep, with her spider turned off and with the needle feeding her arm, this was a deep and dreamful something else. She could get used to this.

Life without her spider.

Everything became white. Whiter than this room at its whitest. Or maybe bright was the better word. Light surrounded her. Enveloped her. Warmed her. But the light didn’t seem infinite and terrifying. It was close. Personal. A womb of light.

Then she was high above the old Marshall Field warehouse, looking down from the foreman’s office at the empty space. She was alone. Her tile was on the floor far below. She heard a metronome sound, like water dripping, but loud and reverberating. The office smelled like wet rug. Paint peeled from the moldings. The sliding window was open, creating a double pane of glass opaque with grime. She leaned out the opening.

Her tile had become two, hers and Marlena’s together making the eyes and snout of a wolf.

She imagined a grid set over the concrete, and this second one had been placed three imaginary rows up and fifteen imaginary spaces across. It was too far away to make out anything but a sense of color. Green or blue.

But there weren’t only two tiles. Not anymore. Now there were four. Next eight and