The Physics of Limping
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 5: The Investigation of Forces
Adrian Voss, who could recite the derivation of Bernoulli’s equation from memory, now faced a new theorem: Given: One injured classmate, one absurd rumor, and one genius under suspicion.
Prove: That said genius is innocent without accidentally looking guiltier in the process.
It was, he admitted, a nontrivial problem.
He started, naturally, with data. He borrowed the incident report from the campus security office “for academic reasons” — a phrase that had once gotten him access to the chemistry building after midnight and now earned him a frown from the officer in charge. The report described a “complex mechanical hazard involving leverage, tension, and counterweight systems.”
Adrian’s eyebrows rose.
“That’s not a trap,” he muttered. “That’s engineering.”
Unfortunately, that observation didn’t help. Engineering, to everyone else, sounded suspiciously like something he would build.
Next, he inspected the site — a sunken section of the sculpture garden still cordoned off with bright tape and bureaucratic dread. The soil bore faint impressions of footprints. The mechanism had already been dismantled, but Adrian could still trace the logic of it: the alignment of pulleys, the tension of ropes, the elegant inevitability of failure.
“Whoever did this,” he murmured, “was either a mechanical prodigy or a sociopath with a compass.”
“Or both,” said a voice behind him.
It was Dr. Feldman, head of the physics department — small, spectacled, and permanently exasperated. “Adrian, for the love of Maxwell, please tell me you didn’t do this.”
“I didn’t,” Adrian said. “But it’s ... impressive work.”
“That’s not the defense you think it is.”
Feldman sighed, looking at him the way one might look at a lightning storm — beautiful in theory, disastrous in practice. “You’ve been under the microscope lately, Voss. Everyone knows you were—let’s say—enthusiastic about Miss Morales’s recovery.”
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