It’s two in the morning—the landscape of the soft matter lab unstable beneath the fluorescents—when Anisa hears a sharp, bright sound. For a moment she smells mud and ice again, feels the wind put its hands under her coat and shove. She freezes, half-turned, her mind stranded somewhere between her workbench and the black shore of Rowville Pond, the air around her ringing with the sound of ice giving way. What, she thinks, could have broken?

Throat dry, Anisa checks the ground around her feet for glass, then walks a path through the workbenches, left to right, pulling stools away from the counters and squinting behind drying racks. Her vision is soft at the edges, exhaustion so habitual that when light does come—a sharp fragment at the edge of her vision—it takes her two passes to register it. Anisa hunches to get a better view and there, just under the edge of the counter near the hazardous materials cabinet, is an ordinary glass microscope slide. Her heart tips, then steadies.

Fumbling a pair of tweezers off the counter, Anisa bends to pick it up. The slide peels off the floor in a single pane of glassy polymer, its surface misted with hairline fractures. She sets it very gently back on the counter. It’s undeniably the broken thing. Still, it seems much too trivial to have rung so much sound out of the sealed rubber flooring. 

Something about the shape of the cracks is wrong. They don’t seem to follow familiar patterns of breakage: the clean branching of a Cantor set or a randomly accumulating DLA cluster—shapes that are predictable within the bounds of semi-randomness and partial symmetry. Instead, there’s something almost planned about the breakage. 

What is science? A lifetime of paranoia training, her mother used to say. Always looking for something, and if it’s there you don’t trust it; if it isn’t, well, you don’t trust that, either! A warning-shaped joke that neither of her children found amusing. The base of Anisa’s skull prickles. Security cameras crouch on the rafters, green lights indicating ON and WATCHING. She angles her back to them, casual. The slide disappears, somewhere between checking for shards and stuffing a paper towel in the SHARPS container. 

Three months into her PhD, Anisa realized that surprise was something that required time. It took another five months to become certain her life had been purged of it, and an additional two weeks to understand that this was a relief. Groceries every two weeks. Laundry on the final Saturday of each month; the place on the corner of Southland and Park that still takes quarters. Twice a year, enough saved (starving herself in increments of a hundred dollars per pay cycle) to fly to Baltimore to listen to the Symphony. Once it was over and Bridgett’s viola was back in velvet, to lie with her head in her sister’s lap and watch the bright movement of light around them. 

What she fails to explain to her supervisor is that these trips are as necessary as the groceries, the laundry. The world, undiluted, sometimes chafes at Anisa’s skin; certain ordinary things—time, light, gravity—in completely ordinary magnitudes, becoming suddenly unbearable, forcing her to remain in the house for several days until the effects fade. Bridgett helps. 

If she can just throw the slide out, it will all be over. Easy. It should be easy—one hand and seven steps: two along the short side of the resin-topped work table and five to the trash can at the wall. She tries to stand but can’t. Without instruction, her body remains frozen, waiting, refusing to follow instructions from a mind unable to make itself up. Imagining the path she will take through space,the glass almost weightless, vanishing beneath drifts of crumpled lens cloth, Anisa closes her eyes, reaches for the slide. 

Before committing to grad school, she studied Pseudomonas aeruginosa for two years; stayed up until four in the morning for weeks to watch the bacteria’s slow, corrosive crawl. Tracing Bode plots and Tafel slopes, she reconstructed the bacteria’s progress: the blue dots populating her laptop screen proof that its biofilm had repelled yet another antibiotic sent to destroy it.      

Anisa tried to imagine what was occurring in the glassy innards of each cell: the bacteria’s release of Exotoxin A, its diffusion into the cell’s body interrupting the chain of protein synthesis, destroying the mechanism which allowed the cell to be classified as alive. Deprived of energy, the cell would collapse inward, its DNA disintegrating along with its body, its surfaces transforming into a chemical signpost: Integrity Lost (dying); Available for Reclamation (consume me). Anisa pictured this process repeating millions of times—cells imploding or bursting, the infection tearing through lung tissue and burn wounds. Biology was supposed to be the science of living, but for Anisa—who watched the reactions play out, pixel by pixel, hours later—it remained separate, wished for, and, in that way, no different from the rest of life.

She leaves the lights off in the storage closet as she wraps the slide in lens tissue, then plastic, then a scarf. She’s taking it home with her. Better to return it tomorrow, safe, then leave it out all night. She gives her coat to the slide, swaddling it like a dead animal, suddenly and irrationally afraid the thing might snap from cold or fumbling fingers. It's already broken, she reminds herself. Still. 

Outside, she finds an unexpected dusting of snow on her Buick. It must have fallen sometime after her dinner break, its silent drift undetectable from her temperature-controlled workspace. In the driver's seat, her arms burning with cold, Anisa turns the ignition, turns and turns.  She should get the engine looked at. When it sputters to life, she swings through a red into an empty intersection. 

You don’t need a microscope at home, Bridgett complained when Anisa called to say she wouldn’t be visiting for Thanksgiving. Anisa hadn’t listened. She couldn’t afford the Stellar Scientific, although the purchase page was still bookmarked somewhere on her laptop. But she could scrape together enough for a Koehler B690, up to 1000X magnification, abbe light condenser, halogen lamp, and a Siedentopf mechanism. Before she saw it for the first time, she thought she would have liked to build her own microscope: grind the lenses, measure the focal lengths, set them in their casings. But when she saw her B690, ugly and utilitarian in the shreds of wrapping, she knew nothing would ever be so perfect. 

Under the lit eye of her Koehler, the slide’s body is riddled with hairline paths and glowing chambers. From the center they peel back, mesh, eat one another’s ends and beginnings. At this scale, their purpose is unmistakable: a maze. Not the square mazes from her books as a child: too easy, too easy. Instead, burrows like the ones her ants dug in their glowing nutrient gel: their direction dictated by a force more desperate than scientific. 

Under the scope light, the maze has 450 countable pathways, edged with neon. Anisa counts and categorizes by hand. Then, looking back, she finds more. She discards her list, imperfect, and categorizes them again. She adds tab after tab on her laptop, searching for fingerprints, ridge crossings, reservoirs, the pages multiplying too fast to read more than a few words at a time. Bifurcation theory, tunnels, grid and walled passages, loop branches and No Choice pathways. But no answer to what it is, what it's for.

There is a beginning and an end. Following the course between them with a finger, Anisa's line doubles endlessly. The path somehow avoids recursion, twisting and layering; each turn, unbelievably, makes a new pattern. She draws a rough sketch. Digging for a marker (Violet II), she tries to find the path through, tracing over the map of turns again and again to connect the points of entry. Eventually, the net of twisting possibilities becomes so dense that violet ink obliterates the maze entirely. She redraws it and begins again. Outside the window, snow is falling again, knitting lace over the sidewalk. Anisa shifts her focus to function—papers on microfluidics, solution analysis, fabrication journals, mechanically-guided assembly. 

In a filmed segment for lab instruction at FSU, a girl in a white coat and scratched goggles reads (eyes flickering) in the glare of a teleprompter. She speaks the lines, cut together with images of the engraver, needle package, polymer films, narrating an exploration of the confines of laminar flow. 

One of the benefits of microchannels is their ability to control the quantity of mixing on a nearly molecular level, the teleprompter girl explains. According to her script, the scale of micro passages almost completely eliminates chaos. At the microscale, gravity is too weak to move anything. Instead, an electric net of surface tension draws fluid toward itself and away from solid walls, the resulting repulsion propelling droplets through a glass house of engraved pathways.

There’s every possibility that Anisa has found the residue of the same sort of experiment. A slide prepared for single cell analysis, solution blending. Something left accidentally by another grad student. But the microfluidics chip that the girl on the screen holds up to show the camera—its channels sparse and linear—looks nothing like Anisa’s. 

After watching the video again, Anisa examines the maze for other entrances. There aren’t any. An experiment is meant to synthesize a single output. Without the correct ingredients, it will do nothing for her. Still, after reviewing the lab instructions for the Florida State experiment, she gathers an insulin needle. A cup of filtered water. Balancing the needlepoint at entrance, Anisa inserts it into the maze and slowly deploys the plunger.

The water barely makes it a millimeter before stopping. She shakes the slide. Instead of flowing, the beads of water remain motionless in their channels, electrostatically sticky. Anisa puts the chip down, then her hands next to it, then her forehead—hot and damp against them. 

Why can’t you just leave them alone? Bridgett had asked, when she broke open their ant farm to sacrifice its dead tenants to a local living colony. She’d arranged their bodies in perfect lines on a home-grown agar gel and left it out on the driveway. Only ants, she reasoned, knew the correct rituals for burying ants. For days, Bridgett refused to use the back door. Wild ants came and ate the sugar but wouldn’t touch the corpses. Anisa grew another gel and tried again. 

Why do you do it if it makes you feel worse? Bridgett asked. It was the wrong question.

Hand shaking, Anisa takes another needle, fills it with air and inserts the tip back into the mouth of the maze. For a moment, nothing happens. Drops tremble against the gale of injected wind. Then, slowly, ever so slowly, they begin to move. Sliding one by one through the tunnels, they become lens characters in a glass city, splitting into reservoirs then recombining, or finding new paths entirely. The exit spits—one drop. Another. Anisa fills the syringe again, needing to purge the last traces of fluid. A quiet rush of air enters the maze and whispers out the other side as music, a single tone sharp, sweet, swelling. 

This time, the sound doesn’t break. Doesn’t stop. Her mind pulls up bucket after bucket of darkness. Again, her cousin pushes her from the edge of the bridge and into the dark water. Out of control, her chin slams, ringing, into the ice and the note it makes is the note of the music. It doesn’t hurt yet but another note echoes above it, an overtone: how much it will hurt later, once she crawls back to the house and under the covers—the prickling sting of feeling returning, bruises expanding like ink over her warming skin. And above the other two notes she hears a third: the imperceptible ache of a needle moving into her wrist, the drip of epinephrine unable to restart her heart.

Anisa is sitting on the floor of her bedroom. The syringe is empty. The slide, the instrument, is digging into her palm. Releasing it, she shakes her wrist hard, still feeling the IV beneath her skin. Dirty light leaks in from the street, thickening the shadows beneath her desk. She never went to the hospital. She knows that. It would have brought up too many questions. But still the scene is there, just beneath the surface of the real one, pressing up against the skin of it. 

Does every memory have a note? A tone so exact it could recreate the past with only air and the correct path through space. An instrument just a maze for trapping that air, building that path. Was it possible her parents had known? Had hospitalized her without telling her? But Anisa knew they hadn’t. 

In college, she’d read about the Feynman integral: a path summing formulation of particle behavior. To predict a particle’s motion, physicists considered every possible path it might take through space—even the ones that doubled back through time. Sum them all and from that totality, the most probable trajectory would emerge. That, the textbooks said, was how reality behaved. She hadn’t believed it. But here it was again: a theoretical path of sound, a memory from the life of a different Anisa, one who had been found, and hadn’t survived it. 

You need to focus on the facts, the university therapist told her. You could have died—but the truth is that you didn’t. You’re a scientist. It doesn’t matter what might happen; it matters what does. But no matter how old she was or how far along she got in life, Anisa’s past was always so much larger than the present or future. Pressing two fingers to her wrist, she feels the false memory pressing back—a grace note, floating high over the original. 

The thing about music, Bridgett explained to her once, is that it lets everyone live their own story at the same time, without getting in anybody else’s way. Anisa rolls up her sleeve. The skin of her wrist is silver and untouched. Could time work that way: not a single thread, but a braid of all the possibilities that might have become, cohering just enough to push time forward through the maze of everything else? And if she could hear all those paths at once—if the past wasn’t a sequence, but a structure built only partially from what had happened—would she finally be able to hear, not just the dissonance of individual notes, but the entire piece? Music, as it wanted to be heard?