Scene One: The Hologram

  What emerged from the computer was not merely a video.

  It bloomed as a three-dimensional hologram — with a resolution he had never seen, a crity that gave objects weight and depth though they were nothing but light and air. It expanded into the room like a bubble of luminescence, spreading before Zaid a star system: six stars in distinct positions, orbiting in a precise formation, quiet and composed, as though they knew they were being watched.

  He saw it and went still.

  He knew this star system.

  Not from astrophysics texts. Not from his screens. He knew it from somewhere else — from a deep yer of memory that a person visits only in the rge moments. Moments when you see something you believed you had forgotten, and discover you had forgotten nothing.

  Then the voice came.

  A child’s voice. Small, slightly rough in the way of children whose words race ahead of their thoughts, reciting numbers:

  “One… three… seven… twenty-one… twenty-five… thirty-one…”

  Zaid stopped breathing.

  Because he knew this voice.

  This voice was his own. Himself at seven years old. This was his voice at seven, reciting prime numbers like a song — the habit his father had taught him, which had become in ter years an ability no one understood and he never tried to expin.

  “Thirty-three… thirty-seven… forty-one…”

  He looked around as though searching for an exit. There was none. His room was his room, his screens were his screens, the half-full bottle still sweating dense onto the table. And the hologram turned before him as though remembering on his behalf.

  Thirty seconds.

  After exactly thirty seconds, the child’s voice fell silent.

  And Zaid recognized it.

  The memory came to him now. He was seven, sitting between his father and mother on the floor of the por station boratory. The floor was cold and the air smelled of metal and ozone and the coffee that never left his parents’ hands. His father was holding a small device, running a hologram of a star system, saying: “This is our project, Zaid. Six stars. Each one in its exact pce. The universe loves precision, boy. Like you.”

  And he was reciting the numbers. Because he had been calcuting. Even at seven, he calcuted — a habit whose origin he could not trace. He would see the six stars and calcute the distances and angles and convert them to numbers and see the numbers as colors.

  Orange and blue and green.

  And his mother ughing in the background with that loud voice that filled every room.

  ???

  Scene Two: Mathematics in the Veins of the Hands

  He did not sit.

  He did not weep.

  He rose and took the visual drawing board from the side wall — a transparent board, a meter square, which he used for designing effects. He cleared it with one slow sweep of his hand, stood before it, and picked up the digital pen.

  And began to work.

  The six stars in the hologram had positions. Positions had coordinates. Coordinates had values. He began to write:

  N(s) = Σ [ r?θ? + r?θ? + r?θ? + r?θ? + r?θ? + r?θ? ]

  where r = angle of the star retive to center, θ = its distance from center

  He calcuted. With his fingers first, as always — his fingers moving the numbers through the air as though gripping invisible things. Then on the board.

  He did not use a calcutor. He had not needed one since he was thirteen.

  The result came after four minutes and twenty seconds of uninterrupted work.

  6,600,066

  He stood before the number.

  He saw it as a bzing orange.

  Not only because he saw prime numbers as colors — but because this number in particur held a specific color in his mind. Like a fme unextinguished since his father taught him at seven that prime numbers were “the true names of things.” 6,600,066. A prime number. Built from the digit six and the digit six. And the sum of its digits equaled 24, which was twelve multiplied by two, which was… He didn’t finish.

  He stopped.

  He knew this was not coincidence. Coincidences did not build like this. Coincidences did not know how to run a hologram of a star system he had seen at seven and embed within it his own voice from that year and make the calcution lead to a number that carried his father’s shadow.

  Coincidence was zy. This was not its work.

  ???

  Scene Three: The Address

  When he wrote the number 6,600,066 on the board, something he did not expect happened.

  The hologram changed.

  The six stars dissolved slowly like smoke dissolving in air, and in their pce appeared text. Arabic text, handwritten — not printed, but written by a human hand, in handwriting Zaid knew the way he knew the sound of his own heartbeat:

  “The Old Library — Eastern Shelf — Book number 66 from the right.”

  His father’s handwriting.

  No question.

  He knew Dr. Samer Al-Zaher’s script — the handwriting of libraries and numbers, leaning forward at an eighteen-degree angle, the letter ‘r’ written with its particur recoil, the letter ‘n’ shaped like a small wave. He had seen this handwriting only a few times: on his father’s appointment letter hanging in the office of the uncle he had been raised by against his will, and in an old photograph of research papers his father held while expining them. Unmistakable.

  Then below the address, a number appeared:

  “Time remaining: 23 hours.”

  And before Zaid could move, or think, or even swallow:

  The file deleted itself.

  What remained on the screen before him was the “Project 66” folder — completely empty. No trace. No record. No evidence.

  As though nothing had happened.

  ???

  Scene Four: Above the Rooftop

  On the rooftop of the building opposite, Arif Al-Nour gathered his notebook and returned it to his satchel. He looked one st time toward the window with the blue light.

  The light had changed.

  Not gone out — but the screens had all shifted to a different direction. A sign that their owner had stood up and moved. A sign that something had happened.

  Arif rose slowly and made his way to the spiral staircase.

  On the way down, faces passed through his mind: Samer Al-Zaher in his youth, ughing with a voice that had filled the boratory. Amal Nizar writing at a terrifying speed on her tablet, her eyes never leaving the screen. Zaid at nine — silent, staring at something distant during the memorial service that had no body to mourn.

  And Arif Al-Nour thought one single thought as he descended the stairs:

  He hoped — in his deepest secret, the one he would not admit even to himself — that the five days ahead would be lighter than he knew.

  But he knew.

  And he knew they would not be.