Page 6

“Sorry,” Cassian said.

“Don’t apologise for being right,” Colin said.

Diwa looked up from his laptop. “Numbers are beautiful.”

Colin and Cassian both turned to look at him. Colin’s lip curled.

“They are.” Diwa closed his laptop lid and laced his fingers together, which was a terrible sign about the length of the lecture that was about to come. “Numbers are the only truly universal language. Every civilisation on earth arrived at them independently. The Mayans, the Babylonians, the Chinese, all of them looked at the world and said, there’s a pattern here, and I can describe it. When we send messages into deep space for extra-terrestrial intelligence, we don’t send English or Mandarin, we send mathematics. It’s the one thing we’re certain any advanced species would recognise. It goes beyond culture, Cassian. It transcends biology. Two plus two equals four on every planet in every galaxy that has ever existed or will ever—”

Colin reached across the island, took Diwa’s face in both hands, and kissed him on the mouth. Diwa’s sentence died between their lips. His hands rose to Colin’s wrists.

“Shut the fuck up, love,” Colin said when he pulled away from his alpha. He turned back to Cassian. “Maths is shit. It was the thing that gave me the most grief when I got my certificate. NVQ Level 3, equivalent of a sixth-form cert, took me three goes at the numeracy module before I scraped through. Three goes, Cass. And I’m not thick.”

“You’re not thick,” Cassian agreed. “You got yourself an alpha like Diwa.”

“Yeah, that’s…a skill, I suppose, Cass. Not the ‘getting of an alpha’, but being able to recognise when one is worth keeping close. I’ll give you that.” Colin’s knuckle tapped the edge of the iPad once. “But I managed buildings before Diwa. Electrics, plumbing, tenants who’d look you dead in the eye and lie about what they’d shoved down the sink. I raised two boys in a two-bed in Barking on a handyman’s wage, and had to do plenty of survival maths to manage that. The cert came after Diwa, but it wasn’t because of him that I got it. I wanted it for myself. We’re not thick. But numbers don’t land for us the way words do, and that’s fine. You don’t have to love it. You just have to keep going at it until the important stuff sticks.”

Cassian looked down at the iPad screen, where a long division problem sat waiting for him in the Notes app. Colin’s neat handwriting was above his own shaky attempts, and the Apple Pencil felt slippery in his grip.

He tried again. Seven into four hundred and thirty-six. Seven went into forty-three six times, which left one, and then you brought the six down, and seven went into sixteen twice with two left over, which meant — no. That wasn’t right either. Six times seven was forty-two, not forty-three, and now the whole thing was wrong and he had to start again.

He wiped his working off the screen.

“Take your time,” Colin said, burping Tala on his shoulder.

Cassian pressed the pencil to the screen. Seven into four. It didn’t go. Seven into forty-three. Six. Six times seven was forty-two, carry the one. He wrote the six above the three and brought the six down to make sixteen. Seven into sixteen was two, remainder two. Sixty-two, remainder two.

He checked it against Colin’s answer in the corner, hidden under a scribbled box.

It was wrong. The answer was supposed to be sixty-two point two eight five seven one four, recurring, and Cassian didn’t understand where all those extra numbers came from, or what recurring meant, or why seven couldn’t just go into four hundred and thirty-six a clean number of times like a decent, well-behaved number.

He tried the next one. Nine into two hundred and fifteen. Nine into twenty-one was two, remainder three. Carry the three down to the five to make thirty-five. Nine into thirty-five was three, remainder eight. Twenty-three, remainder eight. But Colin’s hidden answer said twenty-three point eight, recurring, and there it was again, that word, recurring, like the number just kept going and going.

“I don’t understand recurring,” he said.

Diwa began to answer.

Colin shifted Tala to his other shoulder and came around to stand beside Cassian, looking down at the screen. “Recurring just means the decimal goes on forever. The number never lands clean. Some divisions just don’t.”

“That’s stupid,” Cassian said.

“Won’t argue with you.”

Three more sums waited, and beneath those sat the entire concept of decimals, which sat on top of division, which sat on top of multiplication, which sat on top of a foundation that should have been laid when he was six years old in a classroom with a teacher.

Instead of a classroom, he’d had the prayer hall, where he’d spent hours memorising the Universal Principles. Instead of a teacher, he’d had the senior women, who taught him how to soften his voice so alphas felt comfortable around him, and how to walk so that his body moved the way a Vessel’s body was supposed to move. There were entire lessons going over how he should sit with his knees together, with his hands in his lap and his eyes pointed down to the earth.

He knew how to birth a lamb. He knew which wild berries would make you sick and which ones you could eat straight off the bush. He could milk a goat with his eyes closed, and he could recite all fourteen Principles of Receptivity from memory, including the sub-clauses. The Lumineer had tested him on them personally and told him he was the best student the compound had ever produced.

The numbers on the iPad screen stared up at him: Nine into two hundred and fifteen, and all of the Principles of Receptivity and their sub-clauses couldn’t help him solve a sum that a ten-year-old would be able to do in their head.

“This is pointless!” Cassian shouted, and his arm swept the iPad off the counter before he could bury the anger like he was supposed to.

It hit the kitchen tiles with a loud crack. Tala’s face crumpled at the sound, and the wail that came out of her filled the kitchen from floor to ceiling. Colin’s hand cupped the back of her head, and Diwa was on his feet and heading for his girl instantly.

The iPad lay on the floor. A fine web of cracks now covered the glass.

Cassian looked at his own hand and pulled it back into his lap. “I’m sorry,” Cassian said. His voice came out very small. “I’m sorry, I’ll — I can pay for it, I’ll pay for a new one—”