“Hang on, hang on, stand over here,” said Daphne. She crouched down. “From this angle, does it look like I’m skiing?”
From the vantage point Daphne had indicated, most of the dots near Daphne formed something like a very jagged diagonal line upward.
“Wait.” Zada shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Daphne dropped her imaginary ski poles, or whatever they were called. Nobody skiied because New Ionia was pretty flat for a city built on a mountaintop and—Zada’s mind was skittering in every direction at once.
“It shouldn’t be anything like a line,” Zada explained. “It should be like a scattered cloud.” She gestured at the sloping array of dots. “These results only happen if a major predictor of who marries who is their student number, and that can’t be it. I must’ve screwed up somewhere.”
Daphne had gone very still. “Unless you didn’t,” she said.
“What?” said Zada, because Daphne was almost never still.
“Okay,” said Daphne. She pushed herself off the bed and began to pace the room. “You didn’t hear this from me. Your student number is the order you were admitted to a finishing school.”
“It is?” said Zada.
“Yeah.” In the dim room, Daphne’s eyes were very wide. “Zada, the order you’re let into finishing school is determined by—I don’t know, it’s some complicated algorithm, but it’s a little bit your grades and your behavior score, and a whole shit ton who your family is, how rich they are, their reputation—I mean, it’s basically ‘how good of a match will you be?’ How beneficial will your marriage be to the other family?”
“That can’t be it.” Zada shook her head. “If that was true—”
“Yeah,” said Daphne. “You see what this means, right?”
“No,” said Zada. “Because if that’s it—” She swallowedhard. “If what you’re saying is true—” And this much, at least, was true: Daphne never lied to her. That was one fixed point in a shifting star storm in her mind. “It must be something else,” she said quickly. “The student numbers aren’t a reflection of how marriageable we are, it’s just a rumor.”
“I overheard it straight from Grandfather,” said Daphne.
“Do you think maybe this is what soulmates are?” said Zada. “The person perfect for you is the one who can see and understand your social status—”
Daphne shook her head. “Isn’t it supposed to be true love? Look me in the eye and tell me you believe that the only thing that could possibly set your heart on fire is meeting your close-to-exact social equal.”
There had to be some other explanation. Zada bit the inside of her cheek. “I screwed up the program,” she said at last. “I coded it wrong.”
“Please,” said Daphne with a snort. “You’re amazing at that kind of thing and you know it.” She took a step back, regarding the distribution of the points. “You know, it starts off pretty cloudlike,” she said. “It only really concentrates into diagonals abouthere—”
“Which would indicate the problem began about twenty years ago,” said Zada numbly.
“Hold up,” said Daphne. “How did you and Buford match, then? He’s completely—”
“Out of my league, I know.”
“I was going to say mind-numbingly boring, but his family is well-off,’” Daphne said.
Zada hummed, pulling up her code to double-check. As long as she could find an issue within it, everything could stillbe all right. She’d have to marry Buford, but the world as she knew it could continue turning. “If I thought your theory wasn’t nonsense—”
“Yeah?” Daphne raised her eyebrows. “If?”
“Buford’s family is attempting to outrun a scandal.” She scanned her inputs line by line. Everything was built on what came before. Any malfunction and the system shouldn’t have been able to graph points at all.
“Really? I thought he was upright as a flagpole,” said Daphne.
“He is,” said Zada absently. “But he has an older brother—”
“Christopher Arnoth,” said Daphne, nodding. “We attended a number of the same very boring social functions. Made no less boring by the Arnoth sons, I assure you.”
“Well, Christopher gambles.” Heart sinking, Zada still could not find an error.
Daphne tilted her head to one side. “How do you know?”
