Chapter One #2
We exit Admissions into the April sunshine and cross the lawn onto a paved footpath. “Are you close with your siblings, Norah?” Dr. Langmore asks.
“Sure,” I chirp.
“And you get along with your parents?”
Mom laughs.
Dr. Langmore’s thin lips curve downward. “Is something funny?”
“Well,” Mom says, “it’s funny to ask her in front of me. But yes, we get along. Norah watches her siblings when we need her to, and she’s never once lost her homework. These days, what more can a parent ask for?”
While Mom and Dr. Langmore sigh over the low standards for today’s youth, I survey the campus. The path loops around an oval of ivy-festooned granite buildings. Beyond the footpath are athletic fields—a soccer pitch, basketball courts—and beyond that, forest.
This weekend begins the Academy’s spring break, so I haven’t seen any students except the stunner in Admissions.
But as we’re walking past a Gothic monstrosity toward what I think is the navigation building, a dorm becomes visible between them. A boy sprints around the dorm and disappears. I don’t catch his face, only dark hair and pumping fists.
He was limping. His shirt was red.
Dr. Langmore sees him too. She stops. Her spare profile shows cold, complete shock.
“Excuse me. I’ve remembered I need to make a call.
” She whips out a phone and hurries off the path toward the athletic fields.
Her heels stab the turf. In no time she’s hissing something, too low for me to make out words.
Um. Weird?
Abandoned by our guide, Mom and I wander toward the navigation building, a twelve-sided structure of dark stone. Granite lions guard every door.
Mom rises on tiptoe to pat a lion’s cheek.
My hands are shaking. We’re coming to the interview’s demonstration stage, and I don’t know what I’ll have to do. Disaster scenarios flood my mind: I’ll forget how to navigate at a crucial moment, or Dr. Langmore will ask me to do something impossible, or—
“Good. We’re here,” Dr. Langmore says behind me. “Shall we?”
I startle. I wouldn’t have thought she could move so quietly in those pumps.
We pass between the lions, which eye us unkindly, into the building.
The interior is one massive room, a cross between a lab and a casino, all sterile surfaces and steel tables bearing dice, cards, and roulette wheels.
Over each of its twelve doors, one for every wall, a Roman numeral is carved in the stone, like we’ve stepped inside a geometric clock.
“Your training should have started with straightforward navigation,” Dr. Langmore says, “so we’ll begin there. Define navigation for me.”
I hesitate. I didn’t realize the demo would test my knowledge as well as my abilities, and I don’t know what kind of definition Dr. Langmore wants. OED, Merriam-Webster, Urban Dictionary? Probably not Urban Dictionary. “Navigation is when you enter flickerstate and—”
She holds up a hand. “Define flickerstate.”
Jeez. She’ll have me define definition next. “Flickerstate is where the future comes from. The space between nothingness and the real. Possibility space.”
“If the future comes from flickerstate, where does flickerstate come from?”
I laugh nervously. “That’s like asking where existence comes from.”
“And?”
I’m guessing she doesn’t want a religious credo or philosophical speculation. Her oatmeal pantsuit screams just the facts, ma’am. “No one knows for sure. Anyone who claims to is talking a load of—um, nonsense.”
Mom’s forehead scrunches, but my near miss with cussing doesn’t bother Dr. Langmore. She smiles. “It’s good when students accept the limits of their knowledge. But back to navigation.”
“Navigation is when you enter flickerstate and change the probabilities associated with the possible futures you see,” I rap out. “Like, if I draw a card from that deck, I can use navigation to change the probability of drawing the two of clubs from one in fifty-two to almost one in one.”
“Correct,” Dr. Langmore says. “Now show me.”
I walk to the table and pick up the cards. “I’ll draw the queens. In order. Clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Dr. Langmore’s gaze unfocuses. That’s all an outside observer can see when a navigator enters flickerstate—a vagueness around the navigator’s eyes.
I feel for my navigation. It’s like trying to flex a muscle whose location in your body you can never quite remember.
Until you find it. There. And flex.
Flickerstate rises around me.
Everyone manifests as something in flickerstate. These manifestations express a person’s possible futures, I guess. Like a visual personality test.
Me? I’m fire.
Flames sheathe me. When I look up, they separate into red and orange tongues, every tongue something I might do or be.
Right now, fifty-two Norahs dance in fifty-two flames.
Each Norah flips a card onto the table with a fwip.
When I find the Norah who draws the queen of clubs, I focus on her, perceive another fifty-one Norahs above her, and search for the one that draws the queen of diamonds.
The farther I peer into the future, the more energy it takes to ignore the Norahs I don’t want. There are thousands, no, millions of possibilities. And when I say millions, I’m not counting the flames where I never draw a card, where I drop the deck, vomit, seize…
I rein in my attention. When I’ve found the four-branch journey I need, I navigate it with a hot, internal wrenching. That section of my fire burns brighter, as if splashed with gasoline.
Once I’m back in the real world, a salty metal flavor coats my throat. I swipe my upper lip. My knuckles come away red.
Dr. Langmore looks unbothered. I hope she takes the nosebleed as a normal side effect, not evidence of a weak constitution. I spy tissues on the table, wipe my hand and nose, and drop the reddened wad in a nearby trash can.
There’s a bucket under the table too. In case of puke, I assume. Ew.
I shuffle, cut, shuffle. I draw a card. Fwip. Queen of clubs.
Queen of diamonds.
Queen of hearts.
Queen of spades.
I turn to Dr. Langmore with a triumphant grin.
“Four choice-points achieved.” Dr. Langmore sounds blasé, like what I managed was nothing special, though I’m the only student in my local Navigation Department who can navigate more than one choice-point at a time. “After simple navigation, students usually learn occlusion. Define occlusion.”
“Occlusion is when a navigator in flickerstate hides possible futures,” I say.
“Why might a navigator do that?” Dr. Langmore asks.
“If I pull a card from that deck, I can use navigation to change the probability of drawing particular cards. But if…” I grope for a nonthreatening example.
“If I’m in line with my mom at Sonic, and she’s waffling between a soft-serve cone and a shake…
I can navigate her. I can change the probability of her buying the shake from fifty-fifty to almost one hundred percent. ”
“What do we call navigating other people?”
“Interference.”
Mom purses her lips like she’s knotting a drawstring bag. No one enjoys thinking about how navigators can tamper with other people’s actions.
“Good,” Dr. Langmore says. “What’s the relationship between occlusion and interference?”
“Interfering means pushing people toward specific future choices. If you occlude someone’s futures—hide them—then other navigators can’t interfere with them..”
“Very good.”
I’m not sure why Dr. Langmore is praising my answers.
Everyone knows about interference and occlusion.
Because of interference, navigators scare people.
Because of occlusion, people want navigators’ protection.
Navigators can only mess with the futures in our direct line of sight, and we can only see minutes into the future at most, but even that power can wreak havoc.
Since Highwall proved navigation was possible, all U.S.
presidents have hired at least one navigator to their Secret Service detail to occlude them from any terrorist who might sneak into the Oval Office and interfere with them until they, I don’t know, get frisky with the nuclear codes.
“What’s the second reason to occlude?” Dr. Langmore asks.