The Lock of Alarith: Entering the Kingdom of Numbers

The Lock of Alarith: Entering the Kingdom of Numbers

The compass had been waiting for her for nineteen years, and on the afternoon of Maya Olufemi's sixteenth birthday, it finally chose to speak.

The attic smelled of cedar and forgotten things. Dust motes drifted through a single slanted window like lazy constellations. Maya was looking for her grandfather's old telescope—she had been looking for it for three weeks now—because her mother had promised that on her birthday, she could finally point it at the rings of Saturn from the rooftop. But instead of the telescope, her fingers closed around the edges of a leather case buried beneath a stack of yellowed *National Geographics* and a broken metronome.

The case was the size of a paperback novel, dark green, with a brass clasp shaped like two interlocking rings. There was a word stamped into the leather in gold leaf that had nearly worn away. Maya had to tilt it toward the light to read it.

*ALARITH.*

She had never seen the word before. It was not in any of the books on her shelf, not in any language she recognized. It felt heavy on her tongue when she whispered it: *Ah-lah-rith.* Three syllables that seemed to press against something behind her eyes, like a door that had been waiting to be knocked.

Inside the case, wrapped in a cloth that had once been indigo but had faded to the color of a thundercloud, lay the compass.

It was not like any compass she had ever seen. The casing was brass so tarnished it looked almost black, etched with spiraling patterns that seemed to shift when she moved the object in her hands. There was no glass face. Instead, where the needle should have been, there was a small, perfectly circular depression about the size of a thumbprint. Inside the depression, instead of a needle, there was nothing at all. A small empty circle, dark as a pupil, patient as a well.

And resting in the crease of the cloth, beside the compass, was a note in her grandfather's cramped, hurried hand.

*Maya—if you are reading this, then you have finally found it. I have been waiting to give this to you since the day you were born, but the time was never right. There is a tradition in our family. We do not give the compass away. We wait for the compass to choose. If it has chosen you, you will know what to do with it. If it has not, put it back. Do not try. Do not draw. Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again.*

*Draw a perfect circle, my love, and the compass will show you what I spent my whole life trying to show the world.*

*—Grandfather Adetokunbo, Lagos, 2007*

Maya read the note twice. Then she read it a third time, because her grandfather had died four years ago and she still expected, sometimes, to find new things he had left for her. The note did not change. The compass did not move. The dust kept drifting through the attic window, indifferent to mysteries.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from her best friend, Priya: *happy bday!! cake at 6, don't be late or i'm eating your slice*

Maya smiled, but she did not put the compass down. There was something about the small empty circle in its center, that patient darkness, that made her feel as if she had been holding her breath for sixteen years and was only now beginning to exhale.

She had a piece of chalk in her pocket. She always did. It was a habit from geometry class, where she had learned that a chalk mark could sometimes clarify a thought better than a sentence. She did not really think about what she was doing. She knelt on the dusty floor of the attic, set the compass down in front of her, and with the chalk, she drew a circle on the wood.

Not a quick circle. Not a careless one. She took her time. She thought about the way her grandfather had taught her to draw when she was seven, holding her wrist steady, saying *slow down, Maya, slow down, the curve will teach you if you let it.* She let the chalk curve through the wood in one continuous motion, a single line that closed upon itself so perfectly that the beginning and the end were indistinguishable.

When she lifted the chalk, the circle she had drawn was flawless. So flawless that for a moment she thought it must be an optical illusion, because no human hand could possibly draw that precisely on a rough wooden floor. But the chalk dust was real, and the line was continuous, and the curve was mathematically, undeniably, *exactly* round.

The compass hummed.

It was a small sound, almost more felt than heard, like the vibration of a tuning fork pressed against the jaw. The empty circle in the center of the compass began to glow—not brightly, not dramatically, but with the steady, soft light of a single candle seen through amber glass. The brass casing warmed under her fingers. The spiraling etchings on its surface caught the glow and began to shimmer, and Maya realized with a small jolt that the patterns were not spirals at all. They were numbers. Hundreds of them, etched so finely they had looked like decoration. They began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, like the numbers on a clock that had begun to count something other than hours.

The chalk circle on the floor began to glow too.

Then the floor opened, and Maya fell into the Kingdom of Numbers.

---

1.1 The Long Fall and the First Lesson

Falling, Maya discovered, was not what she had expected. There was no wind. There was no rushing of air past her ears. There was only a soft, sustained *unfalling*, as if the world had quietly decided to remove the ground from beneath her feet without bothering to put anything else in its place. The attic dissolved above her like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. The dust motes became specks of light. The slanted window became a pale rectangle that shrank, slowly, until it was no larger than a coin, and then a fingernail, and then a memory.

The compass stayed in her hand. It was warm now, almost hot, and the glow from its center had grown strong enough to illuminate her other palm. The numbers etched into its casing were still moving, but she could read some of them now, the way you can sometimes read the numbers on a clock in a dark room by the faint afterimage they leave in your vision: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55...

The sequence meant nothing to her. It was just numbers, falling like everything else.

Around her, the long fall began to acquire features. First came sound—the distant sound of what might have been wind chimes, or might have been the higher harmonics of a cello. Then came color: a deep, layered blue that was not the blue of any sky she had ever seen, a blue that seemed to have a *texture* to it, like velvet, like the inside of a peach, like the moment between waking and dreaming. Then came objects. They drifted past her in the falling: a spiral of silver wire, a perfect cube of green glass, a sphere of red light the size of a marble, a triangle that was also somehow a circle, a series of points connected by lines that formed a shape she did not have a name for.

She reached out, instinctively, to touch the cube of green glass. Her fingers passed through it as if it were smoke. It did not feel like smoke. It felt like the *idea* of smoke—the impression of something that should have been solid but had decided not to bother.

"Curious," said a voice beside her ear.

Maya screamed, or would have screamed if she had had any breath to spare, which she did not, because she was falling through the blue velvet nothing. She turned her head and saw, floating beside her as calmly as a book resting on a shelf, a small creature about the size of a housecat. It was made of light the color of warm honey, and it had too many edges. Not like a sharp thing—like a *folded* thing, like a paper crane that had been folded by someone who understood origami the way most people understand breathing. Its edges shifted gently as it moved, and its eyes, if they were eyes, were two small dark points that radiated a faint, amused curiosity.

"Don't worry,