The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Read Free Book Online

Daneshvar, had taken her to her desk once to consult an old university textbook, to settle a point on which they'd both been unsure.
    Latifa found her way back to that desk. The keys were hanging exactly where she remembered them, on labelled pegs. She took the one for the chemistry lab and headed for the teachers' entrance.
    As she turned the key in the lock her stomach convulsed. To be expelled would be disastrous enough, but if the school pressed criminal charges she could be imprisoned and deported. She closed her eyes for a moment, summoning up an image of the beautiful lattice that the ChemFactor simulation had shown her. For a week she'd thought of nothing else. The software had reached its conclusion, but in the end the only test that mattered was whether the substance could be made in real life.
    Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, glinting off the tubular legs of the stools standing upside-down on the black-painted benches. All the ingredients Latifa needed – salts of copper, barium and calcium – sat on the alphabetised shelves that ran along the eastern wall; none were of sufficient value or toxicity to be kept locked away, and she wouldn't need much of any of them for a proof of principle.
    She took down the jars and weighed out a few grams of each, quantities too small to be missed. She'd written down the masses that would yield the right stoichiometry, the right proportions of atoms in the final product, but having spent the whole day repeating the calculations in her head she didn't waste time now consulting the slip of paper.
    Latifa mixed the brightly coloured granules in a ceramic crucible and crushed them with a pestle. Then she placed the crucible in the electric furnace. The heating profile she'd need was complicated, but though she'd only ever seen the furnace operated manually in class, she'd looked up the model number on the net and found the precise requirements for scripting it. When she pushed the memory stick into the USB port, the green light above flickered for a moment, then the first temperature of the sequence appeared on the display.
    The whole thing would take nine hours. Latifa quickly re-shelved the jars, binned the filter paper she'd used on the scales, then retreated, locking the door behind her.
    On her way past the toilets she remembered to stage a creaking exit. She slowed her pace as she approached the detention room, and felt cold beads of sweat on her face. Ms Shirazi offered her a sympathetic frown before turning back to the magazine she'd been reading.
    L atifa dreamt that the school was on fire. The blaze was visible from the balcony of her apartment, and her grandfather stood and watched, wheezing alarmingly from the toxic fumes that were billowing out across Mashhad. When he switched on the radio, a newsreader reported that the police had found a memory stick beside the point of ignition and were checking all the students for a fingerprint match.
    Latifa woke before dawn and ate breakfast, then prepared lunch for the two of them. She'd thought she'd been moving silently, but her grandfather surprised her as she was opening the front door.
    "Why are you leaving so early?" he demanded.
    "There's a study group."
    "What do you mean?"
    "A few of us get together before classes start and go over the lessons from the day before," she said.
    "So you're running your own classes now? Do the teachers know about this?"
    "The teachers approve," Latifa assured him. "It's their lessons that we're revising; we're not just making things up."
    "You're not talking politics?" he asked sternly.
    Latifa understood: he was thinking of the discussion group her mother had joined at Kabul University, its agenda excitedly recounted in one of the letters she'd sent him. He'd allowed Latifa to read the whole trove of letters when she'd turned fourteen – the age her mother had been when he'd gone into exile.
    "You know me," Latifa said. "Politics is over my head."
    "All right." He was