She pushed herself upright.
She had her proof, now, that magic was real. All that was left was to make it cohere.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SHE WOULD PICK up where she had left off the night before. The rituals, the mathematics, the circles—all necessary steps that she must take with thorough care. And when night fell, Renton might return to her. Or Elodie might appear again, ready to divulge wisdom once more. Even if they came in opposition, Jane might still glean some new meaning, some new fragment.
All she had to do was work and keep from sleeping.
She set herself up in the library, sitting against the far glass wall, the chill there keeping her alert as she dove once more into her mathematical treatise. What could she learn there, with her new, more worldly context?
She read through philosophical musings, poetic flourishes that the Jane of a week ago had been irritated by, had skimmed over except where she failed to understand the next proof, and had to go back and untangle the logic. Now, those same esoteric passages held special meaning, seeming to vibrate on the page. The author paired zero with an empty nothingness, but a nothingness that went on forever, for nothing could have no bounds. The infinite and zero were one. Except that the infinite was the greatest thing in the world, and zero was nothing at all. They were opposite.
They were the same.
Surely there was meaning in that?
She watched as the values of equations, plotted as curves, approached zero, and watched, too, as their component parts shot off into infinity. Another curve, complex and oscillating, seemed to go mad as it approached zero, swinging through every value on the chart on its way. She followed along as the mathematician inscribed triangles beneath an arc, until there was no empty space left. The answer, of course, was that it would take an endless number of triangles to reach zero, even though the space beneath the curve was fixed.
Impossible. Impossible.
And yet, there it was. She could find no flaw in the logic.
Far too soon she felt the sharp edge the cocaine had given her begin to ebb. She tried to wait it out, doing small geometric proofs on paper to produce new ideas and test her awareness, but her vision blurred. Her head drooped. She dropped her pen on more than one occasion.
The second injection was easier than the first, though she had to use a different spot along her vein; the original hurt too much to try. When it was done, Jane wrote Augustine in ink beside the pinprick hole, the better to keep him always in the forefront of her mind, keep herself fixed upon her purpose and her goal. Her mind was apt to wander now, and her field of study was too deep. The lack of sleep would only make it worse.
She returned to the library, alert once more. Her mind full to bursting with mathematical contortions, Jane took up her pen and returned to the previous night’s testing.
She soon ran out of floor space in the library, drawing out circles and testing variations. She began drawing her circles down the hallways. She inscribed one on the wall, carving through the wallpaper when the pen blurred and skipped. Her back pressed against the plaster behind her, she visualized the circle growing out and away from her, a tube that stretched to the opposite wall. It took and held steady, but felt no different from the other circles she had built.
More tests: she measured them carefully so that when she stretched out all her limbs, her fingertips and toes touched the inside of the line exactly—and then again so that she was curled up tight, and again where the diameter of the circle was three times the length of herself. She varied her method of visualizing the wall, digging moats instead, or wrapping herself in sheets of metal. She walked the inner perimeter and sat stock-still in the exact center. She lit candles and burned herbs and screamed and threw her notebook across the second-floor hallway.
Nothing she did produced any difference, inside her or around her. But she held on to hope. The circles—perhaps they were static. But there had been other figures in the ring inscribed in her vision, in the floor of the crypt beneath Lindridge Hall. What of those?
Dusk came. She laid a three-fold circle in concentric rings and raised the walls, and they came in a heady rush. Something new, something different! She could have danced if she hadn’t been so exhausted. She used the remaining moss and loam as sparingly as she could, fearing some dulling potency, but the flow of power within her was familiar, strong. Stronger than before.
Progress. She was making progress.
She stepped away from her work only to eat the ritual meal, pulling the sea grass from the icebox. It tangled around her fingers. She swallowed down each bite even though every motion of her throat produced pain.