Chapter Eleven
All three beasts have manifested. No more flickering between species, fang to mandible, pincer to nail to claw. It’s too late to occlude. According to Academy Handbook protocol, we can only try not to attract their attention until our teachers navigate them out of existence.
The room echoes with panicked breathing and the beasts’ susurrus.
“Students, don’t move,” Dr. Langmore calls, voice hard and strained. “Teachers, to me.”
One beast picks toward our group: large as a pony but spiderlike, with segmented legs attached to an armored thorax and eight yellow eyes stacked above serrated mandibles. Its sharp feet click against the floor. I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop staring.
It’s a nightmare.
Candace breathes hard through her nose. Bree clamps both hands over her mouth.
Heart hammering, I edge in front of my teammates. I already have an active bite. If one of us gets bitten, it should be me.
I remember how my first bite felt. I was finishing a jog, off-season conditioning for basketball.
I love running, always have. I crave it like some people crave chocolate.
It’s an indulgence to escape my crowded house and chase a selfish endorphin high, free from Mom’s judgment and Jo’s prickly neediness and Kev and Irene’s clamor.
That day, I should’ve stuck around the house to help Dad weed the garden or to proofread Jo’s English midterm paper.
But ever since I’d jolted awake before my alarm, weird energy had been simmering under my skin.
Like I was a fire, creeping through underbrush, about to flash up and destroy a forest. I knew that if I stayed home, I’d explode in someone’s face.
So I laced my running shoes and snuck out.
I took the longest of my usual loops, eight miles, hoping the distance would burn me down to lukewarm ash.
But with every pounding step I felt hotter, more powerful, and less in control.
As I turned the final corner and sped down the grass-cracked sidewalk toward my house, I spotted Dad kneeling, weeding our front yard’s tiny tulip plot.
When my foot touched our yard, it happened. The air grew as thick as water. My vision blurred. I fell headlong—for the first time—into flickerstate.
Bright distortions wrinkled the space around my head and Dad’s. Fractals in strange colors swirled from us into the sky, into infinity. The world shone, psychedelic, like I was watching a Miyazaki movie on forty-eight hours of no sleep.
I stumbled to a stop, realizing with a topsy-turvy twist in my stomach what was going on.
We’d learned about it in health class, of course, and I’d heard stories about a few kids from rival schools who’d manifested early.
People gossiped about them at basketball tournaments, in church basements, outside coffee shops—always in hushed voices.
Reverent. Afraid. The things they could do.
This was navigation. I was a navigator.
Seconds later, the sweaty hairs escaping my ponytail prickled upright.
Hot metal and sulfur teased my nose.
Beasts, summoned by my nav flaring into existence, began to flicker in and out of reality around Dad: flashes of silver fur, glittery eyes, the red inside of a mouth. At any moment, the beasts could manifest. And bite.
Terrified, I staggered toward him. I had some vague idea of dragging him to safety.
He threw up a hand, palm out, stop.
I couldn’t stop. In too many futures flaring above us, Dad died.
The beasts bit him till his heart gave out.
A branch from our front yard oak fell and crushed him.
An unknown allergen sent him into anaphylactic shock.
In some futures, I died too. Dad and I crumpled together on the grass.
Mom found our bodies. Jo found our bodies.
Kev and Irene, holding hands, found our bodies.
I should have hunted flickerstate for a few unlikely futures where the beasts vanished without attacking. I should have taken the newfound force surging in me and thrown it at those few. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve saved us then.
But I didn’t. I was a seconds-old navigator with no training. Too scared to think.
I kept staggering toward him. Determined but helpless. Mindless. Weak.
I grabbed for his hand.
Six beasts manifested, like an oversaturated solution crystallizing.
Dad shoved me out of the way, shielding me with his body.
Five beasts fell on him. He screamed, a belly scream I’d only heard before from children.
He was covering his eyes, protecting them from the ferrety creature diving at his face, when the sixth beast—a deepwater eel, pallid white—wriggled past him through the air and kissed my bicep with triangular teeth.
They all winked away.
Blood gushed from my nose. I pulled up the sweatband from my wrist to hide my marked bicep before Dad, whimpering, uncovered his eyes. Then I fell to my knees, fighting a faint.
Fighting a scream.
My vision cut to black.
Back in the nav building, I watch the beast advance on me and think: Banish it, you have to banish it, you have to MAKE IT GO AWAY.
I plunge into flickerstate.
In the nearest, clearest futures, the beast snaps mandibles around my throat. Beyond that thick blaze of probability, the beast bites Candace. It bites Bree. It slashes Vik—
Vik?
Gold filigree shimmers along the room’s edge toward me.
“Mr. Souza,” Dr. Langmore calls, voice faint in flickerstate. “Don’t move.”
He keeps moving.
I spy a high, improbable future that jitters like a guttering candle. In this future, the beast demanifests feet from me. I’m worn-out from the trial. I can’t navigate to that improbable outcome now, not by myself. But if I channel my last nav to Vik, maybe he can.
That must be his plan. Why else would he risk approaching the beast?
Vik passes out of sight, hugging the wall. He’ll approach on my left, from behind.
The beast clicks a clawed foot to the floor and pauses. It sees Vik. Now it doesn’t know who to attack. I think, if it had a neck, it would cock its head.
Footsteps sound behind me. Vik clasps my sweaty hand in his cold one.
Breath arrhythmic, heartbeat frantic, I launch my nav at him without control or technique—but I give him my all, no holding back, like I’m shooting a comet down my arm into our joined hands.
In the same instant, he channels gold to me.
I misunderstood him. He didn’t come to take my power. He came to give me his.
When our navs slam together . . .
I used to have two eyes. Vik and I together should have four.
We have thousands.
An infinite mansion of futures, solid as reality, flames over our heads. Every corridor is a branch of possibility, every room an outcome. And we can see each room at once, more futures than we have seen in any other journey we have ever taken to flickerstate combined.
In seconds, we locate the future we want: beasts gone, students collapsing in relief.
Our nav isn’t two strands, separate, one dominating the other like in channeling.
It’s a single red-gold torrent that rushes toward that future, filling it, making it real.
Power, more power than we knew we had, rushes out of us.
Our knees are buckling, our heads spinning, our blood turning to water as we give and give.
We bend possibility toward the future we need. It lights up, bright, bright, bright.
I let go of Vik to shield my eyes. Reality snaps into place around me. I stumble backward into a table, catching myself as my legs give out.
The arachnoid beast fuzzes like an old television and disappears. So do the others.
The nav building bursts into noise. Students screaming, crying, asking questions.
I whisper: “Did we—
Vik, lips parted, nods.
“What did you do?” Dr. Langmore bears down on us, heels clacking. Her thin face contorts with strange anger, part outrage and part fear.
Vik breathes in. He’s about to tell the truth.
“He banished them,” I say, pushing myself upright.
“You expect me to believe,” Dr. Langmore says, “that two students accomplished what four experienced navigators might have crashed out attempting?”
Four?—oh. Dr. Ortega, Mr. Davis, and Mr. Dennison have converged near door 12. Dr. Langmore must have summoned them to channel to her. It’s hard to banish a manifested beast, harder to banish multiple beasts, so…
“It could be a coincidence,” I mumble.
Dr. Langmore’s head thrusts forward. “A coincidence?”
“Maybe the beasts vanished on their own.” My suggestion sounds feeble, but it’s possible. Vik and I couldn’t have navigated to that future otherwise.
She turns to Vik. “You navigated the usual way?”
“What else could he have done?” I ask.
Her eyes dart to me. Her expression—suspicious, wary—convinces me, sudden as a slap, that she has a what else in mind.
“Of course. He should be proud. That said, you both disobeyed instructions during an emergency. Report to detention after clinic. Mr. Souza, my office, five. Ms. Sullivan, six. Students, gather your things and line up in an orderly fashion to exit clinic.”
All around me, people grab their bags, talking in excited voices, shooting shocked glances at me and Vik, but I can’t pay attention.
I didn’t give Vik power. We shared it.
Leaguing.
***
By the time I walk into Admissions for detention, I’ve showered, eaten, and filled out a soothingly mechanical Spanish grammar worksheet (conjugating the imperfect subjunctive, mm, like warm milk to a baby).
I’ve tried to calm my ass down, is what I’m saying.
I still might buzz out of my skin. While we packed to leave clinic, everyone stared at Vik and me like we were nuclear bombs badly disguised as sweaty teens.