Chapter 30 #8
"You think prediction is about anticipating every move?" he says. "That’s not intelligence. That’s paranoia." A beat passes. "Intelligence is adaptive. Finding a way out of an impossible situation. Breaking the rule to come back stronger…"
I freeze. Wait, wait, wait.
Did I mishear? Did Blue repeat what Snow said about getting myself out of a hard situation?
Marcel swallows, then steps even closer and leans so low his nose almost touches Blue’s, locking his eyes with him.
The atmosphere in the room is ice cold. The only person staying outside our tense little four-person dynamic is the beta nicknamed Gunman.
He just sways impatiently from one leg to the other.
"You’re not getting out of this, sorry." Marcel’s voice lowers. "No matter what you do. You can only buy yourself a bit of time and a tad less suffering. That’s all I can offer if you play."
Blue’s lips curve faintly.
"You’re very eager to declare the result before you understand the system you’re in," he says. "That’s usually where mistakes happen. And understanding systems is kind of… what I specialize in."
Marcel lets out a harsh laugh.
"You’re waiting for some last-second miracle? Not gonna happen! You don’t have anything left," he snaps. He gestures toward the sheets of thick metal lining the walls. I figure it’s lead, blocking communication with cell towers. "No one’s going to find you here!"
Blue’s gaze shifts, just slightly. Toward me.
"I have a variable you dismissed," he says calmly.
A strange pull moves through my chest. Is he hinting at me? Marcel disregarded me, but Blue believes in me?
Me?
Okay…
Challenge accepted.
I want to save us, I want to do the right thing, the one that will make me feel like I finally DESERVE HIM!
Marcel follows the look, then barks out a laugh.
"Him?" he says. "Are you serious? That’s what you’re betting on?"
"He just has to solve the puzzle that this picture is," Blue says, making a small gesture with his head as if indicating the people standing around.
I clear my throat. What is he implying? What puzzle? What do I need to see? My body almost shakes, feverish with stress.
Marcel shakes his head incredulously, chuckling in disbelief.
"For someone who talks about systems, that’s a weak piece! All that supposed brilliance, and you end up relying on silly little Gabs?"
Damn, his words drip with such contempt for me. I had no idea it went that deep… Well, it’s obvious, those one and a half years I spent being in love with Marcel were simply wasted. The problem is I only have myself to blame.
I shift my gaze to Blue. Fate chose him for me, and I won’t fail him today.
Our eyes meet.
He sends me a small, encouraging smile, almost warm. And I respond with a matching smile.
Then he says,
"You removed Gabriel from your model because you couldn’t quantify him," he says. "Incompetence on your side."
Marcel’s eyes flash.
"You’re crazy."
Blue speaks slowly, almost carefully, "The heart aspect. You were unable to harvest what love could give you because you failed to see its power. And it can give… a lot."
Strange, it almost doesn’t seem to be entirely directed at Marcel…
Marcel snorts, then straightens up, and a deep frown forms on his forehead.
He starts to pace in front of us like he needs the movement to hold himself together, and I keep my eyes on Blue because he doesn’t move at all, like the ropes, the chair, and our entire situation are some kind of chessboard.
Marcel abruptly stops and looks straight at him.
"The puzzle you mentioned. I doubt that silly alpha can solve anything, but you… you’re something else. I have faith in you," he says sarcastically. "Let’s see if your reputation is actually earned."
Blue doesn’t answer, he just looks back at him as if he already knows how this ends.
Marcel pulls out his phone, checks something, then puts it away. Only after that does he start speaking, slower now, like he wants every word to land.
"Let’s start simple," Marcel says, and there’s confidence in it, the kind that sounds like he’s sure he will win. "Something mathematical."
Blue still doesn’t react. Marcel takes a slow step, eyes fixed on him.
"You’re given a function on the positive integers," he says. "Defined recursively. f of one equals one."
I raise a brow when I hear the challenge forming, because it sounds like it goes beyond what Marcel actually studies, but…
who knows. His major is philosophy, sure, but his minor is formal logic.
Marcel has always gravitated toward things that resemble proofs, clean, structured arguments rather than tedious, step-by-step calculations.
He likes problems that reward strategy and pattern recognition without requiring constant practice with numbers.
To his credit, Marcel never needed help with math, not like Edgar did.
He understood it well enough to apply it to more abstract assignments, which makes me curious about what I’m about to see.
Marcel’s brows furrow, and his lips purse slightly as he continues,
"For every n, f of n plus one equals f of n plus the number of divisors of n."
I follow it without losing the thread. I see the structure, the dependency, the way each step builds on the last, but it’s dense in a way that would take some time to unpack, the kind of thing you don’t solve on instinct, especially while being kidnapped and threatened with death by a metal cord…
Marcel keeps going, his tone slightly haughty. "So at each step you add the divisor count. Nothing hidden, no tricks, just accumulation."
He looks at Blue smugly. "My question is simple. Describe the growth. Not numerically, but structurally. What does this converge to, in behavior if not in form?"
There’s something in the way he frames it, like he’s less interested in the answer itself and more in whether Blue can justify one, whether he can produce something that holds up. He squares his shoulders combatively, but Blue just exhales, almost bored.
"It grows on the order of n log n," he says. "More precisely, it behaves like n log n plus a linear correction term, coming from the average order of the divisor function."
Marcel’s jaw sets. "That’s not a description. That’s a claim."
Blue’s gaze doesn’t falter. "It’s the average order of the divisor function," he replies. "You’re summing it."
Marcel tilts his head slightly, probably testing the structure of that answer. "So you’re saying the behavior follows from aggregation?" He clears his throat.
"Yes, the complexity is emergent, not explicit," Blue says.
A short pause, then Marcel presses again, like he’s probing for a weakness.
"And you can justify that without computing it?"
Blue’s mouth curves faintly.
"You don’t need to compute it," he says. "You reframe it. Count divisor contributions as pairs instead of values. Each term corresponds to how often a number divides others. You’re effectively summing a reciprocal structure."
I feel something clear at the edges of that, enough to see the outline. Blue is correct, and Marcel looks even more lost now, like his own challenge might have gotten away from him.
"Which is why the logarithm appears," Blue continues. "You’re integrating over density, not stepping through values."
Marcel is still for a moment, and I can almost see his brain overheating as he measures whether the argument holds. It does, by my judgment, but I’m pretty sure he’s already given up. It just went over his head.
Then he exhales. "Fine," he says. His low-key, resigned tone tells me he didn’t expect this to be that complex.
I’m almost sure he read it on some little website for people obsessed with logic puzzles, but Blue’s answer went too deep, and Marcel lost his footing.
Blue’s mouth curves, barely.
"Fine?" he replies. "You dressed it up to look harder than it is, and in the end you fell short yourself."
A second passes, and Marcel doesn’t answer right away, which is answer enough on its own, but I can see irritation starting to push through his composure.
"That simply was a warm-up for you," he says, suddenly shrugging, changing his tone to something almost light.
Blue tilts his head.
"I don’t need warm-ups," he replies. "If you’re trying to build momentum, you’re wasting it."
Suddenly, a voice comes from beside the wall.
"How much longer is this bullshit going to go on?!"
Gunman is clearly fed up. He would probably prefer actual killing over this ornamental counting, like many other scumbags akin to him, but oh well. He has to listen now to a college activist turned psycho case.
"Shut the fuck up, idiot," Marcel growls, clearly not willing to deprive himself of the pleasure of this twisted game.
He curls his upper lip almost like a growling alpha, fixing Gunman with a heavy stare. In my judgment, Marcel is walking a thin line here. Messing with NFH combatants for his own pleasure seems like a fatal move, but it’s his call. While two dogs fight, a third gets the bone.
Slowly, Marcel turns back toward Blue.
"I can give you that. You know your way around numbers. So let’s make it less pure math and more… my thing."
He takes a deep breath.
"A hundred prisoners. A hundred boxes. Each box contains a number from one to a hundred, placed randomly. Each prisoner can open fifty boxes. They can’t communicate. If every prisoner finds their own number, they all go free. If even one fails, they all die."
I feel the shape of it even if I can’t solve it right away. Something about it sits wrong in my head and refuses to settle.
"What strategy gives them the best chance?" Marcel asks.
I expect Blue to think for at least a moment, to take a breath or shift even slightly, but he doesn’t give Marcel that satisfaction.
"Follow the permutation cycles," Blue says, like he’s correcting something obvious. "Each prisoner starts with their own number and keeps opening the box indicated by what they find, and that gives you a success rate of a little over thirty percent."