Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(58)
Or sleeping.
Morning brought light and warmth, but not much in the way of reassurance; the cops came and took statements, looked over the damage to the house, and photographed the slashes on Eve’s arms (which, upon inspection at the hospital, fortunately turned out not to be as deep as they’d looked).
The police declined to include the destruction of her vintage robe as a separate charge of vandalism. They also played dumb about who Pennyfeather was, or even that vampires existed at all, even though both men were plainly wearing Protection bracelets in full view. Typical. Once upon a time, Claire could have called on some Morganville police detectives who had reputations for impartiality…but they were all gone now. Richard Morrell had been police chief before he’d been mayor, and he’d been fair about it; Hannah had been great in the same role, but now Richard was dead, and Hannah was helpless to act.
Done by Order of the Founder. That said…everything, really. It meant that whatever tenuous claim the four of them had to safety in Morganville was officially cancelled.
Claire stayed with Eve as long as she could, but classes were calling, and so was her in-jeopardy grade point average; she grabbed her book bag, kissed Shane quickly, and dashed off at a jog to Texas Prairie University. Nothing was going to happen during the day, at least from the vamp quarter. Morning was well advanced over the horizon, and she had to skip her normal stop for coffee and flat-out race the last few hundred yards to make it into the science building, up the stairs, and down the long, featureless hall to her small-group advanced study class. Today was thermodynamics, a subject she normally loved, but she wasn’t in the mood for theory today.
It was more of an applied sciences day—such as the amount of fuel required to burn down a house. Claire slipped into her classroom seat, earning a dirty look from Professor Carlyle, who didn’t pause in his opening remarks.
Pennyfeather had been the one who’d attacked them, but that didn’t mean he’d been acting alone; he could have thrown the Molotov cocktails at the front of the house and then jumped up on the roof to wait for them to exit the back, but somehow, Claire thought there was more to it. Someone in the front, and Pennyfeather waiting for Eve, specifically. And while it was a little bit of a relief not to be the main target, it was unsettling. Eve wasn’t helpless, but somehow she was more vulnerable. Maybe it was just that Claire wanted desperately for Michael and Eve to somehow work out, and for the town to stop hating them, and…
“Danvers?”
She looked up from consideration of her closed textbook; she didn’t even remember getting it out of her bag. She’d lost track of time, she guessed, and now Professor Carlyle—a severe older man with a close-cropped brush of gray hair and eyes the color of steel—was staring at her with a displeased expression, clearly waiting for something.
“Sorry?” she said blankly.
“Please provide the equation for the subject on the board.”
She focused behind him. On the chalkboard, he’d written Harmonic Oscillator Partition Function.
“On the board?”
“Unless you’d like to perform it in interpretive dance.”
There was a stir of laughter and smirking from the ten other students, most of whom were master’s candidates; they were at least five years older than she was, every one of them, and she wasn’t popular.
Even here, nobody liked a smart-ass.
Claire reluctantly rose from her desk, went to the chalkboard, and wrote zHO = 1/(1-e-a/T).
“Where?” he asked, without a trace of satisfaction.
Claire dutifully wrote down where a=hv/k.
Carlyle stared at her in silence for a moment, then nodded. Apparently, that was supposed to make her feel insecure. It didn’t. She knew she was right; she knew he’d have to accept it, and she waited for that to happen. Once he’d given her the signal, she put down the chalk and walked back to her desk.
But Carlyle wasn’t done with her quite yet. “Since you did so well with that, Danvers, why don’t you predict the following for me?” And he scribbled on the board another equation: Kp=Pb/Pa-[B]/[A]. “What happens if T is infinitely large?” T was completely missing from that equation, but it didn’t really matter. T was an implied variable, but that was misleading. It was a trick question, and Claire saw many of the others open their books and begin flipping, but she didn’t bother. She met Carlyle’s eyes and said, “Kp equals two.”
“Your reasoning?”
“If T is infinitely large, all the states of energy are equal and occupied. So there are twice as many states in B as A. Kp equals two. It’s not really a calculation. It’s just a logic exercise.”
She was taking advanced thermodynamics purely to help her understand some of what Myrnin had accomplished in building his portal systems in Morganville…. They were doorways that warped space, and she knew there had to be some explanation for it in physics, but so far, she’d found only pieces here and there. Thermodynamics was a necessary component, because the energy produced in the transfer had to go somewhere. She just hadn’t figured out where.
Carlyle raised his eyebrows and smiled at her thinly. “Someone ate her breakfast this morning,” he said, and turned his laser focus on another hapless student. “Gregory. Explain to me the calculation if T equals zero.”
“Uh—” Gregory was a page flipper, and Carlyle waited patiently while he looked for the answer. It was blindingly obvious, but Claire bit her tongue.