That was why she had come to thelibrary. In the hazy edges of the dream, the people around her faded away, andeven the books, leaving her floating at a table with only her own research. Butit was not just a dream. It was real, her real past. She had sat at that tablefor hours, weeks, months.
It had started as a desire to controlherself. To learn how to stop the devil’s magic from working through her eyes,to turn off the numbers and see the world like everyone else. Zoe wanted to bea normal girl. She wanted to giggle with her friends at the back of the room,stupidly, and know their cues and how to react, and understand their odd slangand their quirky facial expressions. She wanted her mother to smile again andstop yelling at her, stop preaching about the devil, stop forcing her to prayall night long and go to church for long hours every week.
She opened the book, the fateful book.The medical textbook she had dragged out from its heavy place on the shelf and ploppeddown onto the table with a thud, enough to make others around her look up insurprise. She wanted to shrink down small to avoid their vision. In the dreamshe did, her hands in front of her face becoming miniature, until she had tostand on the tabletop and crawl over each gargantuan page of the book to readit.
And there she found it, for the veryfirst time: the word synesthesia.
It grew in the dream, grew so big thatit took up the whole page, swelling in importance and meaning until she had toscramble back and heft the next page up and over to read on. The words werestill carved into her memory, even now:
It has been observed that someindividuals are able to see the world in different ways. As this relates tomathematics, there are multiple ways in which it is possible to experiencenumbers with sensory perception. A subject may regard the number five to berepresented by a shiny yellow color, for example, or perhaps even a set ofphysical and personal characteristics reminiscent of a real person.
Spatial number forms can also occur, inwhich a subject is able to map out numbers in a certain pattern—this may leadto a greater grasp of mental mathematics, as the subject is able to follow saidpattern or form to logical points which give the answers to mathematic problemsin a very quick time.
Synesthetes may also be able tounderstand dimensions and other numerical aspects of the world around them witha seemingly preternatural grasp. They may, for example, be able to determinethe dimensions of a room without measurement, know a person’s precise height,or be able to count the number of marbles spilled out from a jar before theyhit the ground.
She had read it over and over again, thelast paragraph in particular. As she dreamt, the pages of the book curled upand over, encompassing the tiny Zoe in their shape, wrapping around her likegentle blankets, then tighter down until she could not move.
A blaring cut through the peacefulscene, a ringing noise that must have been the fire alarm of the library. Zoefought to get free of the pages, to run, to get away on her tiny feet from the oncomingblaze that surely had to move quicker than she could—
And dimly realized that the blaringnoise was her alarm, and she was not in a Vermont library at all, but a motelin LA with the sheets twisted about her and tangling her legs when she tried tomove.
She reached out and hit her phone,managing to swipe off the alarm, and took a moment to pause before sitting upstraight and untangling herself. It was a new morning, and she had slept allthe way through—quite unusual for her. It was a good sign, even if she had notbeen entirely comfortable in her dreams.
Zoe put thoughts of the night out of herhead, deliberately shelving them as something that could be explored later ifshe felt the need for it. It was a new morning, and there was a case to besolved.
Like a fog that had dissipated in thesunlight, the 23 enigma had lifted entirely from her view. Shelley had beenright, of course. The whole thing had been nothing more than a wild goosechase, her own brain chasing itself in circles. Not only was she wrong inthinking that she had tracked down the killer, but even if she had been right,she would have needed a lot more evidence than she’d had.
Zoe showered dressed quickly, preparingherself for the day ahead with a minimum of fuss. She dried off hershort-cropped hair and barely paused to check her appearance. It did not matterhow she looked. It mattered that she got the case solved—and that was exactlywhat she was going to do today.
***
Zoe rolled up her sleeves, a symbolicgesture as well as a practical one. She was not going to be beaten by thiscase, not today. There was something here, and they would find it. She was notallowing herself another option.
“Does anything stand out?” she asked.She had, so far, been leading her own self down the garden path with her numbertheories. Asking Shelley’s opinion seemed like a more reliable way to begin.
“I don’t know,” Shelley admitted,sighing. “I’ve been thinking about it all night, too. It feels like there mightbe something with this drug connection. Even though Naomi Karling doesn’t yetfit the picture, she might be linked in some way. She could have been workingsecretly as a dealer, or dating a member of the gang like Callie was.”
Zoe nodded, then shook her head. “Itmakes sense, and it also does not. We thought we had our man with Cesar Diaz.He was the glue that made that theory stick. Without him, where do we go?”
“We could consider another member of thegang, acting on his behalf. Or maybe even someone who was affiliated
