“Yeah,” she said. “If you want to get into multidimensional space then you have to get there somehow. So you make a circle that’s more closed than a regular circle and that gives you an in, right? It can be theoretical if you want but obviously this is one of a hundred ways I can start pushing the boundaries.”

“Uh huh.”

She drew on the paper with her pen, drawing out a perfect circle and then scribbling out extra lines and numbers.

“You’re aware you can’t hand that in now, right?” I said.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Kenzie said. “Once you’re there you can start thinking about lenses positioned to use the excess space you’ve given yourself and play that out. I heard somewhere that images that hit the back of your eye get flipped upside-down, and the brain turns it back upright. So we write something down that lets us toy with that concept…”

Her pen moved as she wrote out a mathematical formula.

“…And from there we get the reflected extra space on the other side of the lens constant. In brief, we start talking about hyper-hyper-perigon angles.”

“Hyper is right,” Chris muttered.

“Shh, leave her alone,” Sveta said.

Kenzie looked up at me, “This is where I have to leave you behind, Victoria, because I get stuff that’s hyper-hyper but I can’t help you get it.”

“Frankly, you left me behind a minute ago,” I said. “What are the hearts, stars, and apples you’re writing down?”

“It’s algebra, duh. You don’t have to use X and Y or A and B. You can use anything to represent the variable. I like hearts and stars and apples.”

“I feel like if you autopsied Kenzie, she’d have a bowl of breakfast cereal instead of gray matter.”

Kenzie spun around, sticking out a hand to grab the desk so she didn’t keep spinning. She stared at Chris, “I feel like if we autopsied you, Chris, we’d find you have one of those tumors with teeth, eyes and hair in it instead of a brain.”

“There’s a good chance you actually would,” Chris said. “That’d be cool.”

“Yes it would,” Kenzie said, very seriously. She spun herself around, grabbing the desk, now facing her defaced homework.

Sveta walked over from the whiteboard, where she’d finished tracing the faces that had once been projected onto it. An artist’s sketch of the players we’d seen and been involved with. Another part of the whiteboard had some name ideas.

“You can’t hand that in,” Sveta said.

“I said that already,” I said.

Kenzie looked up at me. “People often ask how the tinkering stuff works. It’s real easy. All it takes is closing a circle extra closed and having the right lens to use the wrinkles and bulges that result.”

“Easy,” I said, smiling a little.