Reamde

Zero was a circle. One, two, and three were represented by the appropriate number of horizontal lines. Four could be remembered because it was a square with some extra stuff inside of it. Beyond that, however, the numerals were nonobvious. With a bit of help from Yuxia, she had been trying to learn them. In some contexts, where numbers were arranged in a predictable order, this was easy. Reading random numbers would have been impossible for her. The situation with this fuse box was somewhere between those extremes. At the top of the box she was seeing some labels that weren’t numbers at all—she guessed that they must say things like “cellar” or “laundry room.” Below that she began to see numbers that began with a single horizontal line, meaning 1, and after several of those she saw some with two horizontal lines, and after that a bunch with three lines, and so on. So it seemed that the fuses were laid out in a somewhat logical fashion according to floor and apartment number. But all of this was more in the nature of general trends than absolute rules; it was obvious that the building had been rewired several times and that available fuse sockets had been put to use willy-nilly. She had to carry out a kind of archaeological dig in her head to reconstruct how it had come to be this way. Toward the bottom of the panel she began to see the squarish character that meant four, and below that, the less obvious glyph that she was pretty sure meant five. So the fuse that would kill the Atheron signal was probably in the bottom half-dozen or so rows of the grid. But this was the part of the box that had been most heavily exploited by opportunistic rewirers in more recent decades and so there was a lot more noise and misdirection for her to sift through here.

“They are ready,” Csongor said. “You can begin pulling fuses.”

“Explain to them that the box is a mess, and it’s just going to take me a little bit longer to make sense of it.”

Csongor looked as if he really didn’t want to be the bearer of that message.

“If I just start pulling fuses indiscriminately,” Zula pointed out, “tenants are going to start coming down here to find out what’s wrong.”

Csongor went up the stairs and relayed that to Sokolov.

Zula was noticing that the newer circuits all had fuses in them but that several of the sockets for what she took to be fifth-floor apartments were vacant. She reckoned that empty sockets were probably a marker for vacant apartments. To discourage squatters and to prevent other tenants from pirating electricity, they would pull the fuse, thereby shutting off the power, to any unit that was not occupied. Scanning the whole panel, she saw that every floor had at least one or two vacant units but that they were most common on the fifth floor: not surprising since, in a building with no elevator, those were the least desirable apartments.

Her eye fell on a socket labeled with the character for 5, then 0, then the 5 character again; 505 was one of the two most likely candidates, the other being 405. But this socket didn’t have a fuse plugged into it.

She scanned up the panel until she found the sequence of characters that, she was fairly certain, represented 405. It had a fuse.

She reached out and unscrewed the fuse, then turned to Csongor and held the fuse up in the air. He gave a hand signal to Sokolov, who apparently relayed it up the steps.

But none of this was even necessary. Peter and Ivanov were already on their way down.

Zula screwed the fuse back in as they descended, restoring power to 405.

“Got it on the first try!” Peter announced, wiggling the PDA in the air in a triumphant style that Zula found a little chilling. “We found the Troll!”

“Zula,” said Ivanov, “nicely done.” As if she had removed a brain tumor. Then Ivanov drew up short, in a way that was almost funny. “Which apartment?” For he had realized that this information was still lacking. Only Zula knew the answer.

It had been a while since that many people had looked at her that raptly.

“It’s 505,” she said.

Sokolov spoke to Ivanov in Russian, raising some kind of objection. Or perhaps that was too strong a word. He was mentioning an interesting point.

Ivanov considered it and discussed it with Sokolov, but he had his eye on Zula the whole time.

He knew. She had done something wrong—given herself away somehow.

“Sokolov worries,” explained Csongor, “that the procedure is imperfect. Some additional scouting is recommended. But Ivanov counters that if we are too obvious, we may give warning to the Troll who might escape.”

Ivanov nodded, though, as if he had taken Sokolov’s point. He then spoke in Russian to the security consultants.