Two things were fighting for space in Paige’s head.

  What the hell was happening at Gemini-4. And what the hell had happened to her daughter.

  Violence. And some kind of trance, apparently. In that order, according to Mrs. Reese, which meant Hannah had gone somewhere else in her head before she’d punched the kid, which was somehow more arming than the punching. The punching Paige could almost understand. She’d wanted to punch plenty of people in her life and had only ever stopped herself because she had a mortgage and a professional reputation and a daughter who was watching.

  Speaking of.

  She merged onto the 405 and pushed the car to sixty-eight. The drive was thirty minutes if she didn’t think about it too hard, and she was going to spend all thirty of those minutes thinking about it too hard, because that was simply who she was as a person. She’d accepted it years ago.

  Okay. Think. Hannah was fine this morning. Normal Hannah. Slightly dramatic Hannah, which was baseline Hannah. She’d taken the HomeLink to school and apparently used it, which meant she’d been in contact with her dad… perhaps. Well, only his voice notes, and it made her sad, because she still can’t talk to him in person.

  And then there’d been a boy, and then there’d been a trance, and then there had apparently been a punch with enough force to produce both a bck eye and a bloody nose, which, frankly, was a lot of output for a nine-year-old.

  And Gemini-4 was doing something on her sensors that her entire database of three hundred and fourteen comparable events couldn’t expin.

  These two things were not reted.

  They were absolutely not reted.

  She accelerated to seventy-two and changed nes.

  Gdstone Middle School smelled like someone’s forgotten lunch. Seemed to smell that way every time she arrived. Why? Because it was middle school, and who knew how many young kids dropped food on the tile flooring after lunch. Here. There. Freakin’ everywhere.

  Paige followed the main corridor to the administrative wing at a pace technically not considered running if one was a fast walker in the Olympics.

  The principal’s office had the usual geography. A wide reception area with pstic chairs in a row against the wall, a front desk with a woman behind it who looked utterly unimpressed with anything, and beyond, a gss-walled inner office where three adults were clustered around a bench near the window.

  Hannah sat on the bench.

  She was small against the wall behind her, shoulders rounded, both feet ft on the floor. Her face had gone the color of old chalk. On the bench beside her sat a piece of paper covered in pencil drawings.

  Hannah was rocking. Faint, rhythmic, slightly forward and back. Her lips were moving.

  The school nurse, a compact woman with short gray hair whose nyard read ROBIN LYNN, RN, was crouched in front of Hannah with two fingers on her wrist. Mrs. Reese stood to the left with her arms crossed, and beside her, a tall man with reading gsses pushed up on his forehead. The principal, Bob Brenner. Who stood akin to someone who managed other people’s emergencies for a living.

  Paige went straight to Hannah.

  Mrs. Reese looked up, lips in a ft line. “We don’t know what’s going on with her. I think you should take her to a doctor. Or do something for this child.”

  Robin Lynn looked up from Hannah’s wrist. “I concur. Pulse is elevated, she’s been non-responsive to direct questions for about fifty minutes. She needs to see someone.”

  “Yeah.” Paige was already sitting down on the bench. “Yeah.”

  She picked up the paper, moved it to her p without looking at it, and wrapped her arm around Hannah, pulling her daughter against her side. Hannah was warm and damp with sweat and she smelled like the strawberry shampoo they’d used since she was four.

  “Hannah. Love. I’m here. Mom’s here.”

  Nothing changed. Hannah kept rocking, kept moving her lips. The principal traded a look with Mrs. Reese. Paige caught the gnce out the corner of her eye and chose not to address it right now.

  Paige’s stomach pained. Actually cramped for a millisecond. She kept her face neutral, but her mind screamed, what’s wrong with my daughter?

  “She was completely coherent immediately after the incident,” Mr. Brenner said. “It was about twenty minutes ter that she became, ah, unresponsive.”

  “What was she doing in those twenty minutes?” Paige asked.

  “Drawing,” Mrs. Reese said. She gestured at the paper in Paige’s p.

  Paige gestured with her free arm, sweeping it wide. “Drawing? Why would she be drawing after she got in trouble? I’m assuming she’s in trouble?”

  “She cried, so we allowed her the paper and pencil,” Mrs. Reese replied. “Don’t you read up on childhood development? I mean you should, having a child and all.”

  Squinting at the vice principal, Paige merely shook her head, then looked down at the drawing.

  The page was dense with pencil marks. Symbols in horizontal rows, each one distinct, some of them looking pulled from a history book she couldn’t immediately name. And in the center of the page, a double tetrahedron. A merkaba, her brain supplied, because she’d seen the shape in enough ancient history references to recognize it, though she couldn’t have told you why that word surfaced so quickly. The same geometric shape Hannah drew this morning. This time, however, it was drawn with a ruler’s precision without a ruler, Paige assumed, because none were around at the moment. Hannah drew well, always had, but this was something else, even better than her morning sketch. This looked like a study made by someone who knew exactly what they were drawing and had drawn it for eons.

  The same shape Hannah had drawn at breakfast this morning with her colored markers. The same two interlocking triangles, one red, one blue, the overp gone purple. That had been strange enough. This was something else entirely.

  Hannah was nine. She hadn’t drawn even a cat for eons, and the girl loved cats. A little too much. Chased them around because she was excited. You’d think one would learn that running after an animal to hug and pet them pushed them farther away. Especially after the fiftieth time. Even the hundredth.

  Paige set the paper face-down on her knee.

  “Hannah.” She kept her voice even, the voice she used when Hannah had nightmares and needed someone to be steadier than the situation. “I’m right here. You’re okay.”

  Hannah’s rocking slowed.

  A second ter, it stopped.

  She let out a breath like she’d been holding it since st Christmas, and she turned her head and looked at Paige, and whatever had been somewhere else behind her eyes came back.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes.” Paige kissed the top of her head.

  Thank the heavens and all that’s holy you’re back.

  “I’m right here,” Paige said. “You’re okay.”

  Hannah blinked. Looked around the office, at the adults, at the overhead lights, at the tile floor.

  “What happened?” Hannah asked.

  Mrs. Reese straightened. “What happened, young dy, is that you struck Tyler Gill hard enough to give him a bck eye and a bloody nose, which is something we take extremely seriously at this school, and which will require a formal conversation about consequences.”

  “I’m sure she remembers that part,” Paige said.

  Hannah’s jaw set. It was Logan’s jaw. Paige had always found that unfair.

  “He was trying to take the HomeLink,” Hannah said. “I told him no and he grabbed my arm.”

  “Hannah,” Mr. Brenner said. “Tyler says he simply asked you to share the device.”

  “Tyler grabbed my arm,” Hannah said again, ftly. “And I needed it. I needed to call my dad. He wouldn’t let me call my dad.”

  Hannah looked at her mother with an expression that was too old for her face. “He hasn’t responded yet. Not even a short one. He always responds. He’s in trouble. I can feel it. I know it, Mom. He needs to hear my voice.” She pressed her hand ft against her sternum. “Something’s happening where he is and he needs to know I’m okay and I need to know he’s okay and Tyler kept grabbing at it and I just…” She stopped. “I’m sorry about his nose. I didn’t know it would bleed.”

  The room was quiet for a second.

  The nurse stood, both knees popping. She was diplomatic about it.

  Mr. Brenner cleared his throat. “We’ll need to discuss next steps regarding the incident with Tyler, but given the circumstances, and given Hannah’s current state, perhaps today isn’t the day for that conversation.”

  “No,” Paige agreed. “It’s not.”

  It took ten more minutes to sign Hannah out, collect her bag, receive a printout about the school’s conflict resolution policy that she folded once and put in her pocket, and navigate back through the industrial-cleaner corridor to the parking lot. Hannah walked beside her, close enough that their arms touched with every step but not holding her hand, because she was nine and there were other kids around, which Paige respected.

  At the car, Hannah climbed into the passenger seat.

  Paige opened the driver’s door, then hesitated.

  She was still holding the drawing.

  She looked at it again in the ft gray Oregon daylight. The symbols in their horizontal rows. The perfectly rendered merkaba in the center. And along the bottom of the page, almost like a border or a footer, a tight spiral winding inward from the outer edge to a single center point.

  She’d seen a signature like that this morning. Not a spiral, not exactly, but the same quality of it. The EM point source MARCO had been tracking at Gemini-4 rendered in the interface as a single converging node, tightening inward toward one origin point the way this spiral tightened toward its center.

  She stood at the car door for a moment with the drawing in her hand and the wind pulling at the corner of the page.

  She got in, started the car, and set the drawing on the dashboard where she could see it.