Heart of Annihilation by C.R. Asay

crept into her words, and she realized that she was going to ignore his request deliberately. The pure spite of the decision would keep her warm at night in his absence. “Never mind.” she slouched against the bed frame. Her mind circled the track of resentment that their last few moments together had been to talk about something as idiotic as the LRM. Retha’s two laws would prevent the infant faction from ever gaining traction anyway. She hoped Vin wasn’t taking them too seriously.
    After a moment she realized that Xander was still darkening her doorway. He looked exhausted. Sometimes she believed he never slept. When would he have found the time, between fighting to stay in the top five in his academia classes and being a constant buffer between his bickering parents and impulsive sister?
    “What do you have there?” she asked, hoping for something truly spectacular.
    He looked up. A smile lit his face and he waved the silver INFOD, an information disk she had come to crave anytime she saw it in his hands. “Only the latest and greatest problem Mom and Dad haven’t been able to solve.”
    Caz’s heart thumped heavily in her chest. “You mean for the Heart—!”
    “Shhh!”
    She heard a door open and close from deeper in the house, and then their parents’ squabbling voices. Xander shut the door behind him. Their parents wouldn’t check on them. They never did.
    “You mean for the Heart of Annihilation?” Caz whispered, making room for Xander on the bed.
    “What else?”
    “Show me, show me!” It was all she could do not to shout.
    If there was one thing that could take her mind off Vin it was the endless puzzles, broken road maps, and unsolvable problems her parents ran across with their newest and most devastating weapon. This was the one, her mother said, that would allow them to retire. This was the one that would end even the idea of war with the Thirteenth Dimension. But they didn’t know if it could work.
    That was where Caz and Xander came in. Xander had been sneaking information from their parent’s lab for the last several years and feeding it to Caz. Caz would then work the problems in secret, reveling in the emotionless nature of numbers before having Xander send it back. Her parents would then proceed as if they did the work themselves. No one ever spoke of it. Plausible deniability and all that. What Caz needed now was to get the equations right.
    Xander inserted the INFOD into the wall receiver and applied a charge with his hand. The bare wall opposite the bed lit up, revealing lines of numbers that scurried from left to right in tiny, neat rows.
    Caz sighed, losing herself. Occasionally she’d reach out a finger and cast one aside or replace it with a hastily tapped out row. Xander sat beside her on the bed, part of the background.
    She didn’t know how long she worked before Xander startled her.
    “Did you hear about Zak Faras?” he asked.
    Caz paused for a miniscule moment, and then pretended he hadn’t spoken. How could Zak Faras be more important than this problem? She almost had it if she could—
    Xander went on. “He overdosed on Direct Current.”
    Caz ignored him.
    “His parents think he took Azshatath. You know, that drug that helps with voltage asthenia. Nearly took out his entire grid,” Xander paused before continuing, “Except I know Zak, and he wouldn’t.”
    Xander shifted beside her on the bed.
    “There it is!” Caz found the hole in the equation. A few flicks of her fingers rearranged the numbers. This was what she lived for. Making order out of chaos. Filling in that gap. Shuffling the twelve and the three to the power of . . . oh! No, they shouldn’t do that. If they subtracted to allow for the storage of energy, taking into account the covariant formula and electromagnetic force, it would make the quantum mechanical effects negligible thereby stabilizing what remained of the . . . Ah ha! Her fingers flew across the wall, and it all came together.
    There