Page 101 of The Bargain

Faraday Cage

Elias

The police searched my room on Sunday morning. My first exam is Monday afternoon. They’ll have found Birnam’s phone easily—it’s the only one of my things I didn’t remove from my room before they came. They had an entire day to make their arrest, if they wanted.

But of course, they don’t.

They wait for my first exam instead.

It’s the most important one, too: my first physics exam. If I miss this one, I automatically lose fifty percent of my overall physics grade, ensuring I fail my condition for the Harvard scholarship programme.

That’s alright. I always knew it was too good to be true, anyway.

Before I came to Spearcrest, it never occurred to me that somebody like Desdemona could even exist.

It’s sort of the same with the cosmos, right?

An infinity of stars, galaxies splattered over incomprehensibly vast expanses, ancient planets and black holes still in their infancy—things that have existed long before we ever did, things that will carry on existing long after us. We know they exist, but they never quite feel as though they’re in the same universe as the rest of us mucky mortals.

So picture this: peeling wallpaper, mouldy ceiling corners, toddlers crying, a damp school uniform, slightly too large (and, later, slightly too small), grabbed off a tepid, creaky radiator and shrugged hastily on. Stale toast on plastic plates and slimy chewing gum stuck under desks and the squeaky linoleum floor of an underfunded state school and quasars and Desdemona.

See?

Those things just don’t belong in the same world.

A Harvard scholarship. A warm, sprawling home full of people that love you because they want to, people that would do anything to keep you safe and happy. A family. An education. A future.

Desdemona.

In the end, they remain as floating concepts, something only glimpsed from afar.

The cold distant light of something you were never meant to hold.

And yet.

I walk into my exam with my fists clenched and my heart set. If I manage to at least pass this exam, I’ll at least leave with a qualification, even with a shit grade. So I’ll never go to Harvard, so the Pearsons will destroy my life like they promised they would. So my future is a pile of ashes before I ever get to it.

But I refuse to leave Spearcrest empty-handed.

The exam starts, and my mind is crystal clear. Desdemona is at my shoulder, a ghost of what I could have, a reminder of how fleeting everything is in my life. Every defeat has only ever made me stronger.

This one will kill me if I let it.

So I can’t let it.

I fly through the paper, scrawling answers. The irony of it all is that, in a room full of smart, secure rich kids, I’m the only one writing without hesitation. Even Benjamin Montgomery, the cleverest person in our school, apparently, is sitting with his head in his hands, his lips ashen. They’re all flipping back and forth between pages, hesitating, double-guessing themselves.

But this is the only thing I’ve never doubted myself about. The answers come easily, a vault of knowledge in my brain—which is really the only thing that was ever mine to own and control and deploy.

Question 13: A positively charged particle is placed near a thin conducting shell. Explain how the charges on the shell rearrange themselves, then explain the effect this has on the electric field inside the shell.

I pause, my pen hovering above the black lines of the answer section.

When an external charge approaches a conductor, the conductor rearranges its own charges so that the side nearest the field becomes negatively charged and the far side positive. This redistribution cancels the external field within the conductor and the hollow space enclosed within.

The conductor, in essence, takes the impact so that whatever lies within it feels nothing. The efficiency of the shielding, though, depends on how easily the conductor can move its charges: the better it conducts, the less the field leaks through.

A perfect conductor can take everything, hold it at the surface while the metal underneath hums with stored damage. A perfect conductor will look unmoved and unscathed, while being full of displaced charge.