Farooq-Lane knew none of this; she didn’t have time to read news like that. She’d gone to college and found new clubs. Then she’d graduated and found a landlord and Alpine Financial, which was kind of like a club, but for adults.

If she’d been paying attention, would she have noticed it? Her job was patterns, systems, analyzing the past to create better futures. Twenty-three murders was a lot of data.

But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

You want everything to make sense, but things don’t, Nathan had told her once. You fall in love with everything that makes sense and ignore everything that doesn’t.

After her parents’ death, the FBI had shown her the manifesto they’d found tucked in his junior-year yearbook. It was nothing like the crisp, well-spoken brother she thought she knew. Instead, it wandered and fretted and threatened and despaired.

The Open Edge of the Blade

by Nathan Farooq-Lane

Only the open edge of the scissor blade is pure.. Once it has closed it has exhausted its potential.. Purity is apartness.. Purity is potentiality.. So much of the world is dull too dull to ever cut.. Or was once open and is now closed.. The dull scissors were never scissors they were only lawn ornaments.. They are scissor-shaped but they were never going to have a purpose.. They are no better or worse than the closed scissors.. The closed scissors are also no longer scissors because they once could cut but now are closed.. All that is important is the open edge of the blade which is still pure.. These are the blades that have purpose.. Purity is purpose.. Purpose is purity.. There is no room for the shears to open if there are too many closed scissors in the box.. Making room means deletion.. Not cutting because cutting leaves pieces and pieces take room, just different room.. Deletion is erasure which makes space for the open edge of the blade..

And so on for a dozen typed pages.

Had Nathan Farooq-Lane made sense?

She’d asked herself since then if there had been something about his external self that would have allowed her to predict this internal self. She asked herself if her parents would still be alive if she had. But he was one system she’d never been able to fit into a spreadsheet.

Later, the Moderators had found her and told her Nathan was a Zed, someone who could take things out of his dreams, and that all the peculiar explosive devices had actually been dreams.

“I know it can be hard to believe,” Lock had said.

But Nathan had killed twenty-three people starting at age sixteen. She could believe anything about him now. What she’d actually thought then was: The Moderators would have had to kill him at age fifteen to save all those lives.

“Well, this is creepy as hell,” Lock rumbled.