Face of Death

Zoe watched them eat for a moment, wondering if they wished they had another human to look after them. Living alone meant that they were fed when she got home, no matter what time that might turn out to be. Doubtless, they would have appreciated a more regular schedule—but there were always the neighborhood mice to track down if they got hungry. And looking at them now, Pythagoras had put on a couple of pounds lately. He could do to diet.

It wasn’t as if Zoe was about to get married anyway—for the cats or for any other reason. She’d never even had a properly serious relationship. After the upbringing she’d had, she had almost resigned herself to the fact that she was destined to die alone.

Her mother had been strictly religious, and that meant intolerant. Zoe had never been able to find anywhere in the Bible where it said you had to communicate like everyone else and think in linguistic riddles instead of mathematical formulae, but her mother had read it there all the same. She had been convinced that something was wrong with her daughter, something sinful.

Zoe’s hand strayed to her collarbone, traced the line where a silver crucifix had once hung on a silver chain. For many long years of her childhood and adolescence, she hadn’t been able to take the thing off without being accused of blasphemy—not even to shower or sleep.

Not that there had been much she could do, without getting accused of being the devil’s child.

“Zoe,” her mother would say, shaking a finger and pursing her lips. “You just quit that demon logic now. The devil is in you, child. You’ve got to cast him right out.”

Demon logic, apparently, was mathematics, especially when present in a child of six years old.

Over and over again, her mother would bring up how different she was. When Zoe didn’t socialize with the children her own age in kindergarten, or school. When she didn’t take up any after-school clubs except for extra study in math and science, and even then didn’t form groups or make friends. When she understood ratios in cooking after watching her mother bake things just once.

Very quickly, Zoe had learned to suppress her natural instinct for numbers. When she knew the answers to the questions people asked without having to even work them out, she kept quiet. When she figured out which of the kids in her class had stolen the teacher’s keys and hidden them, and where they must have been hidden, all through proximity and the clues left behind, she didn’t say a word.

In many ways, not much had changed since that scared little six-year-old, desperate to please her mother, had stopped saying every little weird thing that came into her mind and started pretending to be normal.

Zoe shook her head, bringing her attention back to the present. That was more than twenty-five years ago. No use dwelling on it now.

She glanced out of her window at the Bethesda skyline, looking as she always did in the precise direction of Washington, DC. She had figured out the right way to look the day she had signed the lease, noting several local landmarks which lined up to show her a compass direction. It wasn’t anything political or patriotic; she just liked the way they matched up, creating that perfect line on the map.

It was dark out, and even the lights of the other buildings around hers were being extinguished, one by one. It was late; late enough that she should be getting on with things and going to bed.

Zoe fired up her laptop and quickly tapped in her password, opening her email inbox to check for any updates. The last task of her day. There were a few she could quickly delete—junk mail, mostly messages about sales for brands she had never shopped for and scams from supposed Nigerian princes.

Clearing the junk left her with a few more she could read and then discard, missives that needed no reply. Updates from social media, which she rarely visited, and newsletters from websites that she followed.

One was a little more interesting. A ping through from her online dating profile. A short but sweet message—some guy asking for a date. Zoe clicked through to his page and examined his images, considering them. She quickly assessed his actual height, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it matched up with what he had written in his details. Maybe someone with a little honesty about him.

The next was yet more intriguing, but even so, Zoe felt an urge to put off reading it. It was from her mentor and former professor, Dr. Francesca Applewhite. She could predict what the doctor was going to ask before she read it, and she wasn’t going to like it.