had spikes and grooves and jutting angles that let them fit together the way gears do. The man bent near the tube again and showed him how by manipulating a control ball near his hand, Evan could change the images on the screen. He could move them.
“These are three-dimensional puzzles, Evan,” the man said. “Your teachers tell us that you are very good at puzzles. Is that true?”
“I’m pretty good,” Evan said, but he’d never seen puzzles like this before.
He experimented, moving one image toward another, turning it so their grooves lined up. The images merged, and a chime sounded.
“Good job, Evan,” the man said, and walked back to his computer. “Now we’ll try some harder ones.”
New, complex shapes appeared on the screen. Evan had to rotate each one completely to get a good look, because all the sides were different. He moved them together. He found where they fit. The machine chimed.
“Good, Evan.”
The solutions came easily. The complexity of the spatial configurations pulled him in, focused him to a fine point of concentration. Something was happening in his head; he felt it, as if some hidden green part of him was warming in the sunshine. The world around him retreated, became remote, irrelevant.
He no longer noticed the tube, or the computer, or the room with its four white walls and four white coats. There were only the puzzles, one after another, in a blur of shapes he manipulated with the controls at his fingertips.
He worked puzzle after puzzle, listening for the chime when he got them right.
Then the screen was empty, jarringly empty, all at once. It took him a moment to come back to himself enough to speak.
“More,” he said.
“There are no more, Evan,” the man said. “You’ve solved them all.”
Evan glanced out of the tube, but the white coats weren’t looking at him. They stared at their computer terminal.
The man with a tie was the first to look up from the glowing screen. He wore an expression Evan had never seen pointed at him before. Evan’s stomach turned to ice.
HOSPITALS ALWAYS stank. There was something strange and sickly about the air in the building, and the breeze coming through the screen window hardly improved it. Evan could smell the garbage that lay heaped in the alley several floors below. Still, he moved closer to the window, pretending interest in the view because looking out the window was easier than looking at his mother. She sat at the big, glossy table. She was crying, though she did it silently—one of the tricks she’d picked up during her time with her last boyfriend.
They’d been in this room for a while now, waiting.
When the door finally opened, Evan flinched. Three men walked in. He’d never seen any of them before, but their coats were dark, and all of them wore ties. It was bad. Men with ties always meant something bad. Evan’s mother sat up quickly and wiped the corners of her eyes with a napkin she kept in her purse.
The men smiled at Evan and shook his mother’s hand in turns, introducing themselves. The one who called himself Walden got right to the point. “Evan’s tests were abnormal,” he said.
He was a big man with a face like a square block, and he wore little wire glasses perched across his nose. Evan hadn’t seen anyone with glasses like that in a long time; he tried not to stare.
“Where’s the doctor?” Evan’s mother asked.
“Evan’s case has been transferred to me.”
“But they told me Dr. Martin was going to be Evan’s doctor. I thought that’s why they brought him in.”
“Dr. Martin himself felt that Evan’s case required special attention that he could not provide.”
“But I thought he was supposed to be a specialist.”
“Oh, I assure you that he is. But we all feel Evan’s case requires … a more systematized process of inquiry.”
Evan’s mother stared at the man. “The teacher died, didn’t he?”
“Tim Jacobs? No, he’ll survive.”
“Then I want to leave.”
“Miss Chandler, we feel—”
“Right now, with my son, I want to leave.”
“It’s not as simple as that anymore.” He pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. Instead, he stepped his foot on the seat and leaned an arm casually across his extended knee. He towered over the sitting woman. “The man didn’t die, but he’s still having some motor coordination problems. We’re not sure how your son managed to access the game’s protocols the way he did. Those VR tutorials are hardwired and aren’t meant to be altered from the inside.”
“There must have been a glitch.”
“There was no glitch. Your son did something. He changed something. A man almost died because of that.”
“It was an accident.”
“Was it?”
“Yes.” His mother’s voice was soft.
“I hear that teacher was hard on Evan. I hear he mocked him in front of other students.”
His mother was silent.
“Miss Chandler, we’re very concerned about Evan.” The man who called himself Walden finally sank into the chair he’d been using as a footrest, and now his two silent companions pulled out chairs and sat. Walden laced his hands together in front of him on the table. “He’s a special child with special needs.”
He waited for Evan’s mother to respond, and when she didn’t, he continued. “We’ve tested many children here at these facilities in the last seven years. Many children. And we’ve never come across anyone with your son’s particular mixture of gifts and disabilities.”
“Gifts?” His mother’s voice was harsh. “You call what happened a gift?”
“It could be. We need time to do more tests. Your son appears to have a very unusual form of synesthesia in addition to several other neurological abnormalities.”
“Syna-what?”
“An abnormal cross-activation between brain regions. Often caused by structural malformations in the fusiform gyrus, but to be honest, in Evan’s case, we’re not sure. Some individuals conflate colors with shapes, or experience smells with certain sounds. But Evan’s situation is more complex than that. His perception of numbers is somehow involved.”
“But he doesn’t understand numbers.”
“He tested off the scale for numbers utility.”
“He knows what numbers look like, and he can tell you the name of a number if you write it, but numbers don’t mean anything to him.”
“On some level, they do.”
“He can’t even tell you when one number is bigger than another. They’re just words to him.”
“Those spatial puzzles he solved were more than just puzzles. Some of them were also tricks. Some of them would have required complex calculus to solve correctly.”
“Calculus? He can’t count to twenty.”
“Something in him can. Individuals with one form of synesthesia are often found to have another. We’re not sure how Evan does what he does. And in that VR game, we’re not even sure what it is that he did, let alone how. Evan needs special attention. He’s going to need a special school.”
“He’s already in a special school,” she said, but her voice was resigned.
“Yes, I’ve looked over his records. Miss Chandler, I have the authority to alter his public tracking. There is no reason why your boy should end up mopping floors somewhere.”
“You can change his track? You can do that?”
The man nodded. “I have the authority.”
“But why, after what happened?”
“Because we’ve never seen another boy like him. We’re going to have to make up a new track. The Evan
