He looked at where it had fallen on the floor — the folded page facing him like a small door on the ground. He picked it up with fingers that were not trembling — but they were cold. They had gone cold suddenly, as though the blood had retreated inward.

  He continued reading.

  “The rest — what follows now — is equations. Your father designed them, and I wrote them in my hand so no one would forget them. They will seem difficult, but they will not be difficult for you. You are the one your father taught himself.”

  “Solve them. You’ll find what you need.”

  “And Zaid — whatever you find, do not be afraid. What frightens others is that it is rge. But you have always loved rge things.”

  “Your mother. Who still loves you from wherever she is.”

  He sat.

  He did not move for a duration he could not measure. A minute. Five minutes. He did not know.

  The golden light on the eastern shelves was slowly turning white as the first sun climbed. The hall filled with quiet sounds: footsteps, paper, a distant cough, the sound of an elevator. Life moving at the same time as it stopped.

  He thought about his mother.

  He had not thought about his mother often. Not because he did not grieve — but because he had learned early that grief for a person with no body, no grave, no headstone was grief that moved in circles. No point at which it began and no point at which it ended. A circle that could only be broken by the decision to close it. He had closed it at twelve when he fled his uncle’s house. He believed he had succeeded.

  But grief that is sealed does not die. It waits.

  Like the word.

  Scene Eight: The Second Equation and What It Yields

  In the second part of the letter — after his mother’s words — came the equation.

  A full page of numbers and letters. The system was simple once understood and difficult before: each Arabic letter in the letter had a value according to its position in the alphabet. The sentences, when calcuted, produced numerical groups. The even-numbered groups represented lines of titude. The odd-numbered groups, multiplied by 66, represented lines of longitude.

  Zaid took the small tablet from his pocket. He began to work.

  The work returned him to calm — not the calm of acceptance, but the calm of concentration. This was the second truth about him that he never announced: numbers steadied him. When he was in the middle of an equation, there was no past and no future — only the equation. Only the next step. Only the number waiting.

  He worked for fifteen minutes. Then he arrived.

  Geographic coordinates. He converted them to a point on Nadim’s map on his small device.

  He stopped.

  He looked at the point.

  He looked a second time, as though willing it to change.

  It did not change.

  The coordinates pointed to one location on the pnet: the Southern White Continent. The por observation station — destroyed in the explosion twenty years ago, never rebuilt.

  The pce where his parents had “died.”

  Or — according to what his mother had written — the pce they had not died but had disappeared from.

  Below the coordinates in the letter, his mother had written:

  “The answer is not in the pce. The answer is in the number you saw the day you were born.”

  His birth number. 06/06. The sixth day of the sixth month.

  The number. 66.

  Always the same.

  Scene Nine: Who Is Watching Whom?

  When he left the library at mid-morning, he did not notice the woman sitting at the pavement café across the street. She had been there for forty minutes.

  A woman of thirty-one. Her face held features that belonged to no single region — the lines of her cheekbones carried something Asian, the depth of her eyes something from the Gulf. She held a coffee she had not drunk. Before her was a tablet she pretended to read. But her eyes had been tracing his movements since he entered.

  Lujain Al-Subaihi.

  An investigator in the Department of Technological Crimes. Assigned two days ago to the open file under the internal code: “Source of Unknown Transmission.” A transmission that had reached an unknown css of device using technology not found in any registry. Three simir cases in three different countries this month. All to devices belonging to selected individuals. No clear pattern between them — except one thing she had yet to expin.

  Zaid Al-Zaher’s file had been before her for two days. She had read it five times. Nothing in it pointed to a clear crime — but the surveilnce systems indicated that his device had been the source of an unusual data flow exactly at midnight st night. A data flow using technology resembling encrypted military holography.

  Why would that be in the device of a visual effects designer who worked in cinema?

  That was what she wanted to know.

  She watched him emerge from the library carrying a book. His face was different from his photographs in the file — the photos showed a confident man with calm eyes striking with success. The face she saw now held something else. Something she had seen before in the faces of people for whom doors had been opened that they had not expected.

  She wrote in her notebook: “Zaid Al-Zaher — found something in the library. Carrying paper in addition to the book — saw it inside the book, not in a bag. Did not look around him when he left. Absorbed in thought.”

  She closed the notebook. Took a sip of cold coffee.

  She thought: a man who doesn’t look around him when leaving an unknown location is either very confident or very preoccupied. In either case, a risk.

  Then she reconsidered: or perhaps — and this was what worried her more — a victim who did not know he was one.

  Scene Ten: What the House Holds

  Zaid returned to his pace in the te-morning hour carrying the book and the page and the questions that had not stopped.

  When he opened the heavy wooden door, he found Hay sitting on the step of the inner courtyard reading a book herself. She looked at him with the eyes of a child who hid nothing of what she saw.

  “Your eyes are red.”

  “I didn’t sleep.”

  “Why?”

  “Work.”

  “A lie.”

  He stopped. Looked at her. “What are you reading?”

  She held up the book: its title was “Numbers and the Universe: A Guide for Children.” A popur science book for primary school. She had it open to a page with a drawing of prime numbers arranged in a visual pattern.

  “I liked the picture,” Hay said. “The numbers look like creatures talking to each other.”

  Zaid sat on the step beside her. He had not decided to sit — he sat, again without deciding. As though his body was making the choices before him today.

  “Prime numbers,” he said, “can only be divided by themselves and by one. They remain themselves no matter how many times you multiply or divide them.”

  “Like some people.”

  Silence. Then: “Yes. Like some people.”

  Hay looked at him with the particur seriousness that belonged to her alone. “Zaid. You found something today.”

  “How —”

  “Your eyes don’t look like this just when you’re tired. They look like this when you find something you know will change many things.”

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  Nine years old. Or ten. An orphan, quiet, reading books about prime numbers like stories. And saying in ten words what others might need a whole paragraph to avoid saying.

  He thought: perhaps it was because children who had seen too much at an early age became more able to see the truth than adults who had learned to hide it.

  He stood.

  “Yes. I found something.”

  “Does it frighten you?”

  He thought. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Good.” And she returned to her book with a complete calm, as though this conversation had been an ordinary exchange on an ordinary day.

  ???

  Zaid climbed to his room. He pced the book on the table and the page beside it. He turned on his three rge screens. He stood before them for a moment, then turned them off.

  He took out his old notebook — the paper notebook he only used for things he did not want stored digitally.

  And he began to write. Not an equation. He wrote what he knew:

  “My mother was alive after the explosion. She wrote this letter and hid it. My father told her I would find it. My father knew this would happen.”

  “The first night’s puzzle led me to the book that held my mother’s letter. A puzzle no one could have known but my father.”

  “The coordinates point to the por station. ‘The answer is not in the pce. The answer is in the number you saw the day you were born.’ 06/06.”

  “Time remaining for the second puzzle: less than 18 hours.”

  “What comes next?”

  He closed the notebook.

  He looked from the window to the alleyway. In the building opposite, Hay’s window was open and the faint sound of children’s music drifted from it. In the sky, the second sun had begun to rise and the air was warming.

  Another day on the pnet Nadim. A day that would not resemble the one before it.

  Somewhere in the city — in a building he did not know — a man of seventy-one was drinking his tea and leafing through a bck notebook, knowing that Zaid was now sitting with questions and no answers.

  And knowing that this was precisely as it should be.

  Questions mattered more than answers at the beginning. Questions were what defined a person — not answers.

  And at a pavement café across from a now-empty library, an investigator had paid for her cold coffee, risen quietly, returned her chair, and begun walking toward her office with measured steps — the steps of a woman carrying incomplete information who knew how to gather what was missing.

  And all the threads were moving.

  Slowly.

  Toward one thing.