In the fifth hour of the game, as every student watched with a mix of tension and anticipation, all of the vending machines in the library dissolved into particles of light. The glowing fragments converged in the center of the atrium and formed a single enormous number visible from every floor—2.
Two?!
After five hours of grinding, Rita had collected a total of 421 numbers. She reverted to her human form, sat down cross-legged in the shadow world, and began doing math problems.
So did everyone else. All across the library, students ducked into corners and behind shelves, huddling in silence as they scribbled equations.
Not only did they need to reach the final number using equal counts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, they also had to make sure they had the highest number count in hand.
Rita had eleven negative numbers.
