Chapter Two
Mom and I don’t talk about what happened until we board the flight home. I’m in the window seat, oval glass separating me from gray tarmac and pure blue sky. When I pull out the safety information card, Mom says quietly, “I won’t apologize for trying to protect you.”
I stare at the card, where a cartoon woman is putting on her oxygen mask before helping the kid beside her. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“I can’t believe Dr. Langmore would hold it against you.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “I’ll transfer to a public school. And get a job.”
“Saint Cat’s financial aid—”
“Isn’t good enough. It’s not like a year of public school will kill me. After that, a state school will give me a full ride, or an Ivy will cough up enough need-based aid. I’ll be fine.”
“Why does it have to be you? Why not Jo?”
If I can’t find a cure for my possibility wound, I’ll be dead in ten years at the outside.
We should invest in Jo’s future, not mine, because mine may not exist. But I can’t tell Mom that.
She’d lose it, right when Jo and the twins need her strong and steady.
That’s why I’ve hidden my bite from everyone: One more blow, and my family will shatter completely.
The plane jolts under us. I focus on the lumbering beneath me and blink down tears prickling my eyes. “Remember when you brought Jo home from the hospital? You told me I had a baby sister now, so I had to be a big girl and take care of her. Here I am, being a big girl. Let me.”
Mom sighs, weary and sad. “Norah.”
I turn to the window in silence.
***
At home, I avoid Mom. I need a parent to sign my transfer paperwork, but I’m worried that if I push her, she’ll refuse, trying to “protect” me again, and we’ll be back at square one—that is, screwed.
And I don’t want to bother Dad. I can barely look at him.
If I’d wowed Dr. Langmore, if I’d had the chance to search Highwall’s Archive, maybe I could’ve cured us, but now…
Adding insult to injury, the Academy won’t put me out of my misery and reject me. A week passes with no word from them. Eight days, nine, ten eleven twelve.
The call comes on the thirteenth day.
It’s my turn to bring Dad dinner. I’m perched on his bed, breathing stuffy sickroom air, while he picks at a chicken salad sandwich.
I made the sandwich how he likes it: black rye bread, tomato, mustard, and Grandma Sullivan’s famous chicken salad.
Personally, I find salad sandwiches vile.
Chicken, tuna, egg—blech, blech, blech. Last year, if I had to watch Dad chew that mess, I’d have faked retching noises. Now I just wish he’d take another bite.
Since flickerbeasts swarmed him earlier this year, Dad’s belly has deflated and his orange hair has gone gray. Under his blankets, his long legs look brittle. Blood constellates the bandages over his bites.
Unlike normal injuries, possibility wounds almost always get worse over time, not better. At first, they phase in and out. Then they scab. When the scabs slough off, they reveal bleeding punctures. Slowly, the punctures deepen—until one day, someway, you die.
Almost always.
On a very few occasions, like the beasts that cause them, possibility wounds flicker out of reality on their own.
But when I say it’s rare, I mean rare: eleven confirmed cases of wound demanifestation in the forty years since the CDC started tracking beast data.
In theory, we should be able to cure wounds with navigation—if a wound can demanifest, then a possible future must exist where it does—but in practice, we’re talking about a possibility so tiny that no one can find it in flickerstate.
The best navigators in the world, people who can force the most wildly improbable futures to come true, have tried to cure wounds. Every one of them has failed.
That didn’t stop me from dropping into flickerstate after Dad and I were bitten, searching for a cure.
All I saw was death.
He has nine bites. With my one bite, I can walk around just dandy—for now—but nobody walks around just dandy with nine bites.
“Try to eat more, Dad.” I hate how pleading my voice sounds.
“You’re not the boss of me. You can’t tell me what to do.”
He’s joking. It’s good that he can joke, though his sense of humor is pathetic. But I worry he also means it. He’s exhausted, in pain, sick of Mom and me pressuring him to stay as well as possible. He wants us to leave him alone so he can turn off the lights and drift away.
It puts me on edge. “If I were the boss of you, you’d be eating leafy greens and antioxidants, not old-man deli sandwiches.”
“Everyone was healthier back in Grandma Sullivan’s day when they drank raw-egg milkshakes and never counted calories.”
“Until they got polio.”
“At least they didn’t have to worry about…”
Dad used to discuss what he wanted, when he wanted, and damn the niceties. But since the beasts swarmed him, he’s been timid.
“Actually,” I say in my most deliberately provoking know-it-all tone, “the first beast manifestation was during World War II, so Grandma Sullivan did have to worry about—”
“Shh.” Dad’s eyes are bloodshot, like the wounds themselves.
“They’re not the Candyman; they don’t appear when—“
“Stop that or get out.”
I weigh those options.
No one really understands beasts. Their first recorded manifestation was during World War II—the date of the Trinity test, the original nuclear detonation.
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud fireballed the Jornada del Muerto desert.
And at 5:39 a.m., about thirty miles away, in sleepy Socorro, New Mexico, a housewife named Martha Highwall was pulling rain-soaked slips, suspender belts, cone bras, and other period-appropriate underthings from her backyard clothesline when flickerbeasts tore into reality and mauled her.
Thirty-two bites. Seconds later, a lightning bolt struck her dead—even though the early morning thunderstorms that had delayed the Trinity test had cleared.
Young Victoria Highwall, watching in terror from her bedroom window, saw her mother die. Decades later, she became the first person to prove she could alter probability with the power of her mind.
So, yeah. People speculate that the combination of a momentous human choice and a nuclear detonation—the intentional splitting of atomic nuclei—altered the relationship between flickerstate and the real, bringing them closer together, allowing beasts to spill through and creating the first navigators.
But beyond that?
We don’t even know what beasts look like, not really.
They have no stable form until they manifest in the real.
In flickerstate and during manifestation, they churn through different creature-feature bodies like absolute goddamn nightmare fuel.
The form they eventually take depends on who’s observing them—and it’s not like we’ll ever see them when we’re not observing them.
We do know, from statistical analysis, that they’re more likely to manifest when someone navigates, but there’s no evidence for the superstition that they manifest when people discuss them.
Just like there’s no evidence that the bittens’ increased risk of death catches bystanders in the crossfire causing mall shootings, roof collapses, and other mass-fatality disasters that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
Despite the lack of evidence, our friends and neighbors are acting like medieval peasants who see a red plague cross marking our door.
They think getting near us means risking their lives.
A couple of Dad’s coworkers have phoned with condolences, but nobody’s come to see him.
Last year, when a drunk driver T-boned Tara O’Malley’s mom and shattered her ribs, families from Saint Cat’s organized a rotating schedule of car pools and casseroles so Mrs. O’Malley wouldn’t have to drive or cook while she recovered.
After Dad was swarmed? Not one frozen lasagna.
And my ex–best friend, Anna Mayer from three blocks down, who used to study on my and Jo’s bedroom floor every afternoon, hasn’t responded to my texts, let alone shown her face.
I wouldn’t describe myself as bitter, per se, about everyone ghosting us.
I’m more…so furious I may bite the next person who looks at me sideways.
I won’t bow to their superstitions. Dad shouldn’t either.
And maybe if I walk out on him, I can wake up his fighting spirit—make him want to get stronger, if only so he can win arguments again.
I’ve hopped off the bed, about to storm away, when my phone vibrates in my jeans.
Caller ID blocked.
The last time a caller with a blocked ID popped up on my phone, it was a prerecorded message claiming to possess urgent information about a problem with my auto insurance. But what the hell. If it’s a scam, I can hang up. Right now, I’d enjoy hanging up on an annoying call mid-sentence. “Hello?”
“Norah Sullivan?” It’s a woman. She sounds familiar.
“Yes?”
“This is Dr. Langmore. I’m sorry we kept you waiting. You must have been on tenterhooks.”
More like a meat hook. “Oh, no problem.”
“The thing is, you were on our wait-list, and there was a slim chance a few transfers we’d accepted would choose a navigation school closer to home.”
Is this woman for real, rubbing it in that I wasn’t a first choice? That Plan A was to string me along and reject me?
But.
Hasn’t this conversation already lasted too long to end in a rejection?
Dr. Langmore clears her throat. “The applicants we accepted plan to enroll, but one of our current juniors…he won’t be returning next year. We have an extra spot in the senior class, which we’re offering to you.”
The Academy covers room and board as well as tuition. It’ll save Mom and Dad more than what they’ve been paying Saint Cat’s. Jo won’t have to switch schools, and I—
“Norah?” Dr. Langmore sounds confused by my silence. “Are you there?”
“Yes.” I grab my throat. Blood pounds up my neck into my head. “I accept the spot.”