She slipped out of her motel room,locking the door behind her, and hesitated, looking at the next room over.Flynn’s room. The lights were out. He was expecting a big day in the morning,and it had been a long few days already; Zoe guessed he was probably asleepalready. She didn’t need to wake him up, did she? It wasn’t as though they werereally partners. Not permanently. And Zoe could handle this on her own.
She refused to address the thoughtlurking in the periphery of all this: that if she investigated this alone whileFlynn stayed behind, she would be the one potentially plunging into danger. Hewould be safe. The door locked, dreams filling his head. He wouldn’t be at riskof dying.
Thankfully, though, they had pickedup two sets of keys for the rental car, so that either of them could drive itat any given time, even if the other one was far away. Which meant that Zoedidn’t have to wake him in order to set off. She got behind the wheel andstarted the engine, setting up the GPS to take her back to Syracuse University.
It was entirely possible thatthere would be no one there at this time of night, but it didn’t particularlymatter. The library would be open twenty-four hours a day to accommodatestudents, who had a time-honored tradition of studying all night long rightbefore a test and spending the whole of the rest of the time not studying atall. Zoe only hoped that she would be able to find the information she neededwithout the help of the staff, who would be tucked up at home themselves atthis hour.
With the roads almost empty in thedarkness, it was easier for Zoe to concentrate. She could see the circumferenceof the twin beams of light that shot out from the car’s headlights, and shecould calculate all sorts of things to do with that, but this time it didn’tstop her from seeing the road itself. She counted her breaths in sets of ten asshe drove, keeping her mind sharp for hazards and other road users, putting thenumbers at bay.
The campus library stretched upover multiple stories, high above Zoe’s head in a modern building that hadclearly been rebuilt some time in the last decade. She ignored the full-lengthglass windows except for the fact that they told her where to locate thecomputer desks as soon as she got inside, rushing past the campus securityguard with a flash of her badge that left him with a bemused look.
The campus library computers werenot just hooked up to the internet, which she could have accessed from the sheriff’sstation or even just her phone. No, what Zoe needed was something only theycould provide: access to the college’s own portal.
This portal opened the door to awealth of resources that would not have been easy to find elsewhere. Some ofthem would only exist here, Zoe knew. There were all kinds of papers, clips,submissions from students and academics at the college, resources for learning,supplementary materials for MA applications, all of the rest of it. She waslooking for a needle in a haystack, but now she had access to the haystack, andshe knew what the needle looked like, and maybe this computer’s search functionwould be powerful enough to act as a magnet.
It was simple enough: she simplysearched for one term “Pi.” Setting the parameters to ignore partial terms andinclude only the word “pi,” with a space afterward rather than as part of alarger word, Zoe watched impatiently as results loaded. The computers emitted alow buzz, an electronic sound that filled the air around her. In the almoststiflingly silent atmosphere of the library, Zoe felt like she could heareverything: a student in a baggy black hoodie pulled up over his head two rowsaway typing furiously on his keyboard, a young woman in what looked likepajamas under a coat at a nearby desk scratching away with her pencil.
Zoe did her best to shut them out,focusing on the screen. Thousands of results had come up, but she didn’t haveenough clues to refine the search any further. She was just going to have tolook.
She began scanning through each ofthe listings, starting by double-clicking on the first result and letting thefirst page fill her screen. She scanned the title—no—it was a learning resourcecreated for students. A click to the right-hand side of the screen, and thefirst page of the next result was loading in. No; this one was a dissertationon something completely unrelated, only referencing pi as part of a calculationrequired to understand the results.
And on and on, Zoe scanned throughpage after page. Her eyes slid over the lines easily, rapidly, only her handmoving to click the mouse as she sat back straight and focused. Paper afterpaper. Report after report. Theory after theory, occasionally diving deeper andscrolling through more pages only to find that the result wasn’t what she wasafter at all.
And then she found something thatcaught her eye. Something very strange indeed. The statistics at the top of thepage told her it had been submitted within the last year, but that it hadhardly any views. No one else was reading this. It wasn’t a student resource,but it wasn’t a full paper either. There was no publication data.
And it was very strange indeed.
It wasn’t a math paper, which waswhat Zoe had instinctively been looking for. A paper including pi had to befrom that department, right? Only, this one wasn’t. And it wasn’t somethingthat had been created by a student, either, something that would have passedthrough peer review channels many times over in search of a final grade. No,this was something written by a professor.
A philosophy professor, of allthings.
Zoe focused on the first fewlines, read them properly instead of scanning. It was being submitted for peerreview, which meant that it hadn’t been published yet but that the professorwas aiming in that direction. The lack of views must have meant that hiscolleagues had refused to read it, for one reason or
