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The apartment was huge and beautiful, with polished wood floors and massive windows letting in lots of natural light, and there was a gorgeous scent in the air, like peaches and cream. One wall was covered in chalkboards, the huge green kind you get in colleges, where you can roll them down like a roller towel to get to unused space. They were filled with equations. But why were they mounted so low? You’d have to stoop to write near the bottom. In fact—I looked around—everything was too low, even the sink and oven in the kitchen.
“They’re here,” Calahan called.
“Just a minute,” called a female voice. “I’m just— Okay.”
A beautiful, dark-haired woman shot out of a doorway in a wheelchair. She took her hands off the wheels to resume frantically toweling her wet hair, then grabbed them again just in time to stop herself crashing into us. She looked Colton up and down. “I’ve only ever seen you on a screen. You’re bigger, in real life.” Then she looked meaningfully at me. “And this is…?”
“Tanya,” I told her, and showed her a big white box. “We brought pastries!” The pastries had been my idea. I’d had to stop Colton from ‘testing’ them in the elevator.
Colton nodded solemnly to Yolanda. “Thanks for doing this.”
“We don’t turn down someone in need,” Yolanda told him, and straightened her shoulders, proudly. “That’s not the Sisters of Invidia way.”
Calahan stared at her. “Not the—Since when did you three have a moral code? You just want a new math puzzle!”
Yolanda flushed, sheepish. “Let me see these equations.”
I pointed Yolanda to where I’d stashed the stockbroker’s files in the cloud and she downloaded them. For the first few minutes, she sat at her computer, her eyes flicking over her towering wall of monitors. “It’s an algorithm,” she said slowly. “Looks like it’s designed to tap into some stream of data, looking for a certain pattern...”
She went quiet. And very, very still. With one hand, she was twisting her long, black hair around her fingers. But then even that stopped and she was like a statue.
We waited. And waited. I looked at Calahan, who was making coffee. I saw now that the kitchen counters were on a ratchet system, so they could be at his height or Yolanda’s. “Is she okay?” I asked.
Calahan nodded. “She does this,” he said knowingly. He looked across at Yolanda and as soon as his gaze touched her, he got this look in his eyes, a look that made my throat close up. He looked at her as if she was the only thing in the world. Like he’d kill anyone who tried to hurt her. Even with Lev, our feelings had always been...ordered, like a river that was deep and powerful but that flowed quietly. Calahan and Yolanda, that was lightning and volcanoes. I wondered what it must be like, to have someone feel that way about you.
Then I saw Colton’s reflection in one of the huge windows and...Chyort. Something expanded inside me, a bubble of warm, giddy starlight. He was looking at me in exactly the same way.
What do I do now?
Yolanda suddenly exploded out from behind her computer and tore across the room so fast I had to leap out of the way. She skidded to a stop in front of a chalkboard, grabbed hold of it and hauled it down to reveal fresh, empty space. She lifted one hand in the air and caught a piece of chalk tossed to her by Calahan. Then she was writing.
It was as if, the whole time she’d been sitting silently, she’d been coiling up like a clockwork spring and now all the energy was being released. The chalk moved so fast, it didn’t squeak and scrape on the board, it went tak tak tak, like a machine gun. She filled up one board, then shot across to the next and filled that up, too. She wheeled back and forth neatening things and then finally pushed herself back and looked up at the boards, drained and breathless. Calahan handed her a mug of coffee and she nodded to him gratefully. She glugged down half the coffee, then turned to us. “I think it’s for trading stocks. You said you got it from a stockbroker’s computer, right? But it’s...weird. Backwards.”
Calahan dragged some chairs into the middle of the room and we arranged ourselves in a circle. Calahan passed out coffee, then sat in a chair next to Yolanda and slipped his arm around her.
Colton opened up the box of pastries we’d brought and we passed it round. “Backwards?”
“It tracks the price of one particular stock—I haven’t figured out which one, yet—waiting until everyone sells it and the price is rock-bottom—”
“And then it snaps it up for a bargain price?” asked Calahan.
“No,” said Yolanda, taking a Danish. “That’s just it, it sells, which would push the price even lower. And it does it millions of times. Whoever runs this thing is going to lose billions. It makes no sense.” She bit her lip and started twirling her hair around her finger again. Her big, green eyes stared right at me, but I got the impression she wasn’t really seeing me, anymore. “Unless…” she mumbled, “...they’re not trying to make money…”
