Flickerstate

Chapter One

Eight months before they feed me to the machine, I visit the Academy for the first time.

After a long drive through lush woods, the shuttle drops us outside a granite mansion, pearl gray with arched windows.

A sign reading THE ACADEMY OF NAVIGATION—ADMISSIONS & ADMINISTRATION stands on the mansion’s lawn.

To the left and right loom stone buildings with turrets, gargoyles, and wrought iron curling everywhere like vines.

Mom adjusts the handbag strap cutting into her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Sure I do,” I say. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

Actually, we’re going to be three minutes early, my favorite arrival time. Arriving three minutes early says that you’re punctual but not neurotic, eager but not desperate.

I mean, I am desperate.

But that’s just another reason to wear my game face.

“One second.” Mom smooths the wrinkles on her dress.

The faded rose print looks like someone flayed Grandma’s sofa.

Earlier, in the dark before the airport, I had suggested more flattering options.

But Mom said the dress would be comfortable for travel, and she looked so tired that, for once, I didn’t feel like arguing.

Since Dad, she’s been sleepless.

Inside Admissions, a thick emerald carpet sucks the sound from our footsteps. Office doors line the gleaming wood-paneled walls. On the atrium’s far side, a staircase ascends to the balcony level.

The nearest door bears a shiny plaque: DR. MARISSA LANGMORE—NAVIGATION PROGRAM DIRECTOR.

I check my phone: 10:57 a.m. Three minutes early, as predicted.

I knock.

No response.

I hesitate. If there’s a waiting room behind the closed door, I should enter and introduce myself to the administrative assistant. If there’s only Dr. Langmore’s office, I should wait till 11:00 a.m. sharp and knock again.

I want to believe that if I commit a minor faux pas, it won’t tank my chances.

But the Academy accepts just ten senior transfers a year, even though most navigators don’t manifest their abilities until at least sixteen.

The Academy has the oldest high school navigation program in the world, and it’s tuition-free.

Thousands of would-be transfers are clamoring to fill those ten spots.

Who can say how the Academy chooses among the finalists?

Maybe an ugly haircut or an annoying voice sends your application straight to the incinerator.

God knows I can’t rely on my luck.

“What’s the holdup?” Mom asks.

I check my phone—10:58 a.m.—and knock harder.

“For goodness’ sake.” Mom steps around me and flings open the door.

Inside the office, Dr. Langmore sits behind a sleek desk.

Framed pictures adorn her cream walls: ink drawings of the campus, a North Carolina Symphony poster, and a huge photo of the Academy’s groundbreaking ceremony.

In the photo, Dr. Langmore cuts a green ribbon with giant scissors.

Famous donors—a tech billionaire, a media mogul, a retired senator, just to name a few—bare whitened teeth behind her.

Dr. Langmore must be over sixty, but the French twist pulling her forehead taut makes her look younger.

She wears a double-strand pearl necklace and an elegant oatmeal pantsuit.

Across from her sits a square-jawed man.

Another donor, probably. I don’t recognize him, but every shiny detail announces his importance, from the distinguished silver at his blond temples to his two-tone gold watch, which must have cost more than Mom’s Corolla.

Dr. Langmore and the man stare at us.

Mom draws herself up to her full height (so, five feet flat). “We’re here for the interview. For Norah Sullivan? At eleven?”

Dr. Langmore checks her watch—thin, tasteful, only cost half a Corolla. “Could you wait outside for…two more minutes?”

“Sure thing!” I say from the threshold. “Sorry we bothered you.”

As soon as Mom retreats, I shut the door and stalk deeper into the building.

“It’s not a big deal, Norah,” Mom says too loudly.

My jaw tightens. I keep walking.

Mom catches my arm, and I recoil like she’s a toddler grabbing for a loaded gun. I don’t want her to feel the bandage under my sleeve. She doesn’t know about the bite. And she can’t find out. No one can.

She lets go. “What?”

“Nothing. I—you have a forceful grip, you know that?”

“No need to be dramatic.”

“I’m not dramatic. You squeeze like a nutcracker.”

While she rolls her eyes, I sneak a glance at my bicep. My sleeve is dry. No blood. No evidence of the bite I’ve been hiding from everyone beneath maxi Band-Aids and unseasonable sweatshirts. Thank God.

I swerve past Mom into a pool of light. A stained glass window over the staircase drops a mosaic of color across the carpet.

It looks like something from a chapel, except the woman it depicts is no robed martyr.

She wears a crown of turreted houses instead of a halo, she balances a wheel on her palm, and—despite the retro iconography—her features are modern, a haughty nose and narrow eyes beneath swirling platinum hair.

It’s Victoria Highwall, celebrity scientist, first U.S.

secretary of navigation, and the Academy’s founder.

I examine the glass woman, wondering whether Highwall commissioned the window herself and, if so, whether she requested the artist give her the armor-piercing bullet nipples tenting her toga.

I also search for ruby tooth marks on her glass arms.

Yeah, I know. She straight up denied having possibility wounds in that one Barbara Walters interview back in the ’90s. Why put them in her own fake-saintly portrait? But in the footage from her Nobel lecture—

“Excuse me?” a male voice asks.

I jolt.

A guy appears through a door beneath the staircase. “Have you seen a student come through here? Short guy. Dark hair.”

I’ve always been intrigued by boys outside my parochial-school social circuit: boys I haven’t known since toddlerhood, boys I’ve never witnessed eating bugs or boogers, boys who don’t conform to a hideous dress code of hand-me-down polos and ill-fitting khakis.

Ugh. Khakis. Where hotness goes to die.

Meaning, under other circumstances, I’d find this guy at least curiosity-inducing. Granted, he looks wrecked. His black hair is flat on one side, wild up top, and his Academy hoodie’s so wrinkled he must’ve slept in it. But he’s also—ahem.

Wiry, broad-shouldered. That face. Eyes so dark they’re like ink.

Right now, though, his eyes feel like an attack. Today of all days I cannot afford the bat-to-the-head sensation they give me.

He takes my silence for hesitation. “He might’ve been limping. And wearing a red shirt.”

“Sorry,” I say shortly. “Haven’t seen him.”

“Me neither,” Mom says behind me. I’d forgotten she was there.

“Thanks anyway.” He frowns and ducks back through the door.

A second later Dr. Langmore pops from her office and strides toward us in nude pumps. “Norah. So nice to meet you. And you must be…?”

Mom and I don’t look alike. When six-five, freckly redhead Connor Sullivan married tiny, olive-skinned brunette Steff Marino, it was anybody’s guess which one the kids would take after.

In my case, the answer’s neither. My one inheritance from either side of the family is Grandma Sullivan’s creepy blue eyes.

Iditarod eyes, Jo calls them, because they’d look more natural on a snarling sled dog.

Still, it shouldn’t be a head-scratcher who the middle-aged woman chaperoning me to my interview is.

Mom seems to agree the question is silly. “Her mother,” she says flatly.

“The Academy asks both parents to attend candidate interviews, if possible,” Dr. Langmore says. “Where’s Mr. Sullivan this weekend?”

I can’t tell Dr. Langmore the truth about Dad. But I can’t lie in front of Mom. Mom hates lying. So I try misdirection: “My sister Jo has a softball tournament. And the twins—they’re eight—they have a chapter-book reading marathon for school. Dad’s at home with them.”

Dr. Langmore looks Mom up and down. “Four kids. That must be a handful.”

“It’s enough,” Mom says.

“Hmm,” Dr. Langmore says. “And can you tell me about your interest in the Academy, Norah?”

Mom thinks I applied to the Academy because it’s tuition-free.

Now that Dad’s too sick to work, we can’t afford to send both me and Jo to Saint Cat’s.

But I can’t just say I’m interested in money.

That doesn’t sound like a self-doubting yet supertalented main-character girl who gets the coveted spot at the school for special people.

“Well, the Academy…you guys have the best navigation program in the world.”

“True enough,” Dr. Langmore says. “Is there anything on campus you’d like to see before your navigation demo? Any questions you’d like to ask?”

I’d like to ask why she’s interviewing me in the hallway, but I shouldn’t piss this woman off. I take a breath. “Actually, I was wondering… Could we visit the Highwall Archive?”

I’m not delusional. No one’s going to let a lowly interviewee riffle through Highwall’s precious papers. But I want to see the Archive—touch the walls, sniff the air—so I can hope. I need to believe there’s a chance I can find a cure for Dad.

And myself.

“Only senior Archive assistants are allowed in the Archive,” Dr. Langmore says in a tone that discourages follow-up questions.

I swallow. Ever since Highwall bequeathed her papers to the Academy, journalists, navigation researchers, and conspiracy theorists have been complaining about her will, which forbids anyone unaffiliated with the Academy from nosing through her stuff for fifty years after her death.

What’s she hiding? they ask. Which is what I want to know.

I’d been assuming students got access. Students are, after all, affiliated with the Academy.

“How do you become an assistant?” I ask, faux casual.

“There’s a…rigorous selection process,” Dr. Langmore says, waving a hand and dismissing the subject. “Shall we proceed to your demo?”

***