“It’s very dangerous dear,” the shadow operators said. They picked nervously at their fingernails and handkerchiefs.

The code rushed out of Uncle Zip’s box and merged with the code from the White Cat. Everything—box, giftwrap, and all—dissolved into pixels, streamers, dark lights like non-baryonic matter, and blew past Seria Mau’s upturned face at near-relativistic speeds. In the same instant, she felt the wedding dress catch fire. Her train melted. Her loving cherubs flashed to powder. The shadow operators covered their eyes with their hands and flung themselves about like dried leaves on a cold wind, their voices stretched and garbled by unknown space-time dilation effects. Suddenly everything was out of the box: every idea anyone had ever had about the universe was available, operating and present. The wires were crossed. The descriptive systems had collapsed into some regime prior to them all. The information supersubstance had broken loose. It was a moment of reinvention. It was the moment of maximum vertigo. Mathematics itself was loose, like a magician in a funny hat, and nothing could be the same again.

Soft chimes rang.

“Dr. Haends, please,” said a woman’s gentle, capable voice.

Out he came, emerging from the universal substrate with his white gloves and gold-topped ebony cane. His tailcoat had a velvet collar and five-button cuffs, and down the outside leg of his narrow black pants ran a black satin stripe. His hat was on his head. His shoes, which Seria Mau had never seen, were chisel-toe patent leather dancing pumps. Hat, shoes, suit, gloves and cane, she saw now, were made of numbers, crawling so thick and fast across one another they looked like a solid surface. Was the whole world like that? Or was it only Dr. Haends?

“Seria Mau!” he cried. He held out his hand. “Will you dance?”

Seria Mau flinched away. She thought of the mother, leaving her to face things without a word of help. She thought of the father and the sex things he had wanted her to do. She thought of her brother, refusing to wave to her even though he knew he would never see her again.

“I never learned to dance,” she said.

“Whose fault was that?” Dr. Haends laughed. “If you won’t play the game, how can you win the prize?”