Liquid Fire (19 page)

“I don’t wants to go back over there,” Cinnamon said, crying. “Fuck! I don’t.”

“No one’s going to make you,” I said, disappointed that I’d let it get this far.

“But you thinks I should, don’t you?” Her eyes were really wet now, she was snuffling, and I was really steamed. She said, “I means, fuck, Mom, it’s bad enough I talks—
eff!
—like a toilet, but I don’t wants to call them names! They
hates
me, I
knows
it—”

I bit my lip; Cinnamon had interpreted my disappointment in myself as disappointment in her. I couldn’t let that stand . . . but then something mean quirked up in me, not evil precisely, but . . . heartless. I didn’t like this new thread in me. But I had to use this to help her.

“They don’t hate you, Cinnamon,” I said quietly. “But I won’t be disappointed if you don’t finish your talk—and I certainly won’t make you. Still . . . won’t you be disappointed in yourself if you come all this way, and run away? And won’t you be proud if you finish?”

Cinnamon bit her lip, just like I did—then accidentally drew blood. She laughed, wiping her chin with the back of her tufted hand. I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her hand down, planning to wash it later; it wasn’t good to have werekin blood floating around.

“OK, Mom,” Cinnamon said, staring back at the lectern, at the glimpse of the patient but increasingly restless crowd. Then she grabbed her switching tail and pulled it up in front of her, like a snaky teddy bear. “Fuck, I means—I means, I can do this.”

And then she went back out there . . . and finished her talk.

Cinnamon cussed again. More than once; I lost count. But she let go of her tail, the podium once again became a werekin metronome, and she lost herself explaining her home-grown theory of numbers—how her “splittables” were even numbers, but her “lonelies” weren’t quite primes, and how her “tilty slants” were something new entirely. Then she pulled out her ball of string and showed off her cat’s cradle figures, revealing how she’d discovered that her numbered tangles of string mapped onto combinations of primes.

Then she got to that line which had prompted Vladimir to call up Professor ZQ. “So the cradle mappin’ is why I wants to know whether the twisty snake folds over itself forever—findin’ the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta is—
faah
—the key to cracking the Goldbach Conjecture. I—uh, that’s it. That’s what they gots me workin’ on now. Thanks, I guess.”

And then? Thunderous applause and a standing ovation. I thought Cinnamon might wilt—but no, she clearly enjoyed it. The chair of the number theory group said “we only have time for five questions,” but Cinnamon replied, “do six, it’s a pretty perfect little number,” and the crowd inexplicably went wild again. When the questions—far more than six—ground to halt, Cinnamon was mobbed by graduate students, and I watched from a distance with Zlatko Quaeschning, AKA Professor ZQ, a cheery, white-haired German with a walrus moustache who hovered like he was
also
a proud parent.

“Pleased to meet you, Professor,” I said, scowling as he shook my hand absently. “When we spoke on the phone, you said this would be a small presentation in a conference room, but when I arrived, I find a packed
auditorium
—”

“We can thank the number theory club,” Professor ZQ said, in a thick but surprisingly understandable accent. “When I shared CSF’s draft paper with my research group, it spread over like wildfire, first across the department, then on the Internet—”

“You
what?
” I said, stunned. “It
what?
”

“Went viral,” Professor ZQ said. He caught my glare. “Mrs. Frost, with something this radical, you have to vet it. Simply stunning work for an amateur. CSF’s cradles open entire new avenues of attack. I’m so grateful that Doctor Vladimir shared it with me.”

“It’s
Miss
Frost,” I said coldly, “and I’m not grateful you put my—” and here I lowered my voice, even though Cinnamon was fifty feet away and talking “—my
Tourette’s-challenged daughter
in front of a room filled with three hundred people with
no warning!
”

Professor ZQ opened his mouth. “Ah,” he said. “Well, Ms. Frost, all of us at Berkeley are adults, and adult language is no barrier. I’m sure most of the people in that hall realized what was going on minutes into CSF’s talk. Tourette’s is an awful disease, especially in the young.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes it is.”

“One of my graduate students still drops f-bombs from time to time . . . though that might just be a side effect of grad school,” Professor ZQ said. “Though that’s a bit unusual for coprolalia to persist that long. I suppose CSF was a real terror in her teens—”

“
Cinnamon
is just getting into her teens,” I said. “Just how old do you think she is?”

Professor ZQ stared at me, then whirled and looked at Cinnamon.

“When Vlad nominated her for the Young Investigator award, I knew she had to be under twenty-five,” Professor ZQ stammered. “Of course, we worked with her, but given her level, I just . . . assumed she was already in college, that she was near finishing, say twenty-one—”

“She wishes,” I said. “Lower.”

“But those lines around her eyes . . . nineteen?” he said, turning to look at me, looking me up and down. “With a hovering mother? No. But she knows so much math . . . seventeen? No?
Younger?
And she’s so small. Ms. Frost, please don’t tell me she’s
fifteen—
”

“She hasn’t even turned fourteen yet,” I said. “At least, we don’t think she has.”

“You think, meaning you don’t know, meaning she’s adopted, orphaned—and spent time on the streets, out of the system,” Professor ZQ said. “A thirteen-year-old genius, struggling with Tourette’s . . . and I walked her into a complete ambush. Oh, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know,” I said. The man was clearly very smart and sensitive; he wouldn’t have let this happen, or would have at least given us a heads up, had he fully known Cinnamon’s situation. “Sorry. Maybe my strong words should be for Vlad—”

“Not his fault. He said she was young and I never pressed,” Professor ZQ snapped, but his eye acquired a twinkle. “So, Ms. Frost, your daughter’s done amazing work, but I’ll defer my pitch to have CSF . . . to have
Cinnamon
apply to Berkeley’s doctoral mathematics program.”

“
Doctoral
program?” I said, laughing. “Let’s not get the cart ahead of the horse. She looks older than she is because she came off some hard streets. I
just
got her into school six months ago. Let’s let her finish middle school, at
least
, before we start talking PhD—”

“
Middle
school?” Professor ZQ said, eyes bulging. “And here I was thinking she’d skip-graded up into high school. I’m sorry, Ms. Frost, but I take back my ‘advanced for an amateur’ comment. To progress that far in
six months
is great progress even for a
genius
.”

“Yeah, we know that,” I said. I turned to watch Cinnamon chatting brightly amidst the graduate students, showing off another of her cat’s cradles. They clearly
loved
her, from the top of her cat ears to the tips of her tail. It was
such
a good sign. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

“But surely, Ms. Frost, given the level of work she’s doing—”

“Nine months ago, she was functionally illiterate. She
is
a learning machine, and has made huge strides, but . . . she learns what she wants to in order to solve the problems she’s interested in.” I scowled. “I still catch her doing assignments in crayon.”

“So what?” Professor ZQ said, a twinkle in his eye. “That’s probably more fun.”

“Ha! Maybe so,” I said, “but . . . she’s still learning how to be a student. And struggling with severe dyslexia on top of the Tourette’s.
And
dealing with being a werekin who can’t quite transform all the way back to human. And recovering from . . . well, frankly, child abuse.”

Professor ZQ’s eyes had widened at the word “werekin,” but when I hit “child abuse,” his face grew tender. “Oh, my,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

“Let’s not take her childhood away just yet,” I said. “She
just
got started on it.”

“Hey, Mom!” Cinnamon said, bouncing up to me. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“Don’t you have one of your own?” I asked, patting her on the head.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, spinning around, bending back and looking at me upside down, “but I needs the pictures you took last night of the fire circles. I wants to ask the grads a question about how the magic worked.”

“All right, all right,” I said, pulling my phone out and unlocking it. “One scratch and—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, scooping it up in her long, bony claws. “More dings on yours than on mine. Back in a bit once we’ve cracked the case.”

“I hope you mean the investigation and not the plastic shell,” I said, but she was already bouncing back into the crowd, showing my phone off. I wasn’t sure whether the students were more impressed by the pictures, or the phone.

Professor ZQ said. “You saw some stage magic last night?”

“No,” I said. “Cinnamon’s working with us to help analyze the magic used in that nasty business last night in Union Square.”

“The terrorist incident?” the Professor said. “But what . . . how was magic involved in that? I heard it was explosives and a couple of dragon-themed fireworks—”

“Fire magic,” I said, shaking my head. “Including two very interesting fire circles.”

“You mean, literal magic,” the Professor said, clucking. “Surely you’re not serious—”

“Did you not see Cinnamon disappear just now?” I asked. I know that the human eye doesn’t like to see magic—the changes slip between movements of the eye—but he had to have seen that. “That was literally magic.”

“That was an amazing trick,” ZQ said, “but we shouldn’t call
anything
‘magic.’ Ms. Frost, you may not be trained as a scientist, but you seem like a rational person, so—

Oh, not this again.
“I
am
a rational person,” I said, sliding my arms up so my hands crossed each other, “and I was trained as a scientist, trained to look at evidence, and the evidence says there
is
such a thing as magic—or do you have a better word for
this?
”

I hooked one foot around the other and did a quick 360 degree spin, vestcoat whipping around me in my Michael Jackson move—then threw my arms wide, pouring all the mana built up from my spin into my vine tattoos, which leapt into the air in elaborate, glowing curlicues.

“That is . . . quite an amazing trick,” he said, watching the filaments of my shimmering vines curl around each other as I slowly brought my hands back together, “but I would still not say ‘magic.’ I’m sure there’s a rational explanation—”

“Yes,” I said, fluidly moving my hands to collapse the vines. “The rational explanation is changes effected to space and matter by intentions expressed through the flux of mana, or, as we quaintly called it at Emory University’s Harris School of Magic,
magic.
”

“You can get degrees in many things,” Professor ZQ said. “Divinity and chiropractic and even artificial intelligence, if there were such a thing. But just because alchemists can perform quite a few convincing-looking tricks does not mean that the ideas behind it are real.”

“No offense, Professor, but you’re too educated to be this sheltered,” I said. Maybe that was unfair. When Professor ZQ had likely gone to school, the professors who knew magic kept it secret—and tried to publicly discredit it. Still, there
was
a way to prove magic—evidence. I pulled out my wallet on its chain and showed him my picture of Cinnamon at her most Cinnamon. “You can’t see your daughter turn into a tiger every month and
not
believe in magic.”

“Well,” the Professor said, staring at the picture of Cinnamon-the-Tiger and her cute owlish tiger glasses, pawing at a math book, tail switching—then at Cinnamon-in-the-flesh with
that same tail
thwacking graduate students as she spun and yammered. “Oh my. That tail . . . is remarkable. Forgive my skepticism, but for centuries, man accepted any supernatural explanation for every phenomenon. The scientific method instead demands a mechanism—”

“Just what I demanded of Jewel,” I said. ZQ looked at me funny, and I clarified, “You just quoted me talking to a fire magician. I’ve seen her literally
fly
using magic, but I shut out her ideas because she used different words.
My
magic uses the tools of modern science—the logic of magic is mathematics—but magic
isn’t
mathematics. It’s a natural phenomenon—”

“Don’t you mean ‘supernatural?’ ” ZQ asked, eyes twinkling.

“Bah.
Natural
,
supernatural
. They’re just words,” I said. “What I mean is
magic is real
. It works how it works. You have to open your eyes
before
you understand what you see.”

ZQ’s mouth opened. “So the giant dragon in the Square last night—”

“Was real,” I said, feeling my tattoo slither against my skin. My mouth quirked up.
I want to show him.
But that would be a bit too cruel—and I didn’t want to ruin yet another coat, not till I could get proper slits cut in it. “Real
magic
, at least, off my back.”

ZQ stared at me. “This has been an education, Ms. Frost,” he said.

“Mom,” Cinnamon said, bouncing up. “I gots it, I gots it!”

“What, Cinnamon?” I said. “What did you get?”

“The marks last night,” she said. “I knows why—
fuck
—why the magic looked odd.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” I said, glancing at the Professor. “Tell us what you learned about those magic circles, Cinnamon, and how you deduced it.”

“I deduceded it,” she said proudly, “by followin’ the logic, just like you and Jinx said. The effect of the spell is accounted for by the lines of the magic. And I accounted for all the parts of the spell completely—
except
for the letters.”

“All right,” I said slowly, “but doesn’t that put us back where we started?”

“No,” Cinnamon said. “The spell spins the letters, and lights them, but doesn’t connect to their intent. The Euler circuits don’t add up—so there’s no flux of mana through to the letters’ meaning. They’re not doin’ anything, magic-wise. I means, other than . . . glowin’.”

“It’s a sign,” the Professor said. “What you’re saying is, it’s a lighted sign.”

———

“Yes, but it’s more than just a sign, it’s what’s in it,” Cinnamon said. “It’s a code.”