Chapter Eleven #2
But actually, I’m not sure how much power a couple of relatively inexperienced navigators have to be packing to banish three fully manifested beasts.
You can’t measure navigation ability the way you can measure height or blood pressure.
Nav’s a fuzzier concept, like intelligence.
Asking how much nav you need to reach a certain future is like asking how smart you need to be to write a witty sonnet.
Plus, everyone believes I channeled to Vik.
And when you channel, you lose some power in the transfer, creating a system less than the sum of its parts.
Leaguing seems to have the opposite effect.
How powerful did it make us?
I can’t ask anyone. For some reason, Dr. Langmore hates leaguing, and she controls access to the Archive. I need to play like I’m a clueless striver who doesn’t know or want to know anything except what’s on my final exams.
Instead of waiting outside Dr. Langmore’s office, I lurk inside the main entrance. I’m hoping Vik leaves detention by himself, so I can grill him on what Dr. Langmore asked him.
At six, Vik walks out of the office, Dr. Langmore a step behind.
She tailgates Vik all the way over here; I can’t whisper to him without her overhearing.
He catches my eye, and I hope for unexpected post-leaguing telepathy.
But no, his face just shifts minutely, from annoyed blankness to friendly blankness.
“See you,” he says, sliding past me, gone.
“Ms. Sullivan,” Dr. Langmore says. “This way.”
I follow her into the office. It looks different from how I remembered it, from the spring morning when she and the VIP looked down their noses at me and Mom.
When sun sparkled through the window, the cream walls and pale furniture projected an airy, modern aesthetic.
On this cloudy evening, the decor glows uncannily, as if slimed with ectoplasm.
In the groundbreaking ceremony photo, the donors sport shadowed eye sockets.
“Did you design your own office?” I ask.
Dr. Langmore slides into the chair behind her desk. “Come again?”
I attempt breathless charm—playacting Bree, to be honest. “No gargoyles. Your style’s much more minimalist. Sorry; should I not talk? I don’t know how to act in detention. I’ve never been detained.”
“We’ll talk,” she says. “Sit.”
I lower myself into the blond-wood chair facing Dr. Langmore. The chair has those butt grooves you see on pricey handmade furniture, and the carpenter must have carved them with a long-shanked Amish patriarch in mind, because I can’t get comfortable. I shift around, trying not to make faces.
“Victoria Highwall was a genius,” Dr. Langmore says. “But she was eccentric. An eccentricity that extended to her taste in architecture. It was a quality the people around her encouraged. Maybe they should have curbed it.”
I don’t think liking stained glass and wacky statuary is that eccentric. But I’m not a lipless WASP whose wardrobe lives on one millimeter of the color spectrum between off-white and beige. “Which people?”
Dr. Langmore pauses. “You’ve probably heard of Highwall’s closest collaborator, Dr. Miura. Did you know he was a psychiatrist before he joined Highwall’s research team?”
“I thought he was her psychiatrist. Isn’t that how they met? She went to him because she kept falling into flickerstate, and she was worried it was a hallucination, but he’d had the same thing happen to him, so they started, um, exploring the possibilities.”
She blinks, lizard-like, at my know-it-all showboating. “Correct. And while psychiatry has made great strides since Miura’s day, psychiatrists were a bit…woo-woo when he and Highwall first met.”
Come on, lady. Navigation’s woo-woo. I’ve spent hours and hours forging symbolic relationships between fire, leaves, and yarn.
It’s not an exact science. Besides, the whole idea of a flickerstate manifestation is one step removed from a BuzzFeed quiz (“Plan Your Cheese Consumption for a Week and We’ll Tell You How You Appear in Possibility Space!
”). But I can’t share this insight with Dr. Langmore, who has never demonstrated a sense of humor and also probably doesn’t know what BuzzFeed is.
“What about Kay Lucasson?” I ask instead, like a good little student.
“What about her?”
“She was Highwall’s collaborator too. Did she encourage or curb the eccentricity?”
“You have a quick and retentive mind. What’s your relationship to Mr. Souza?”
The change of subject throws me. “He’s my peer mentor. What do you mean?”
“Most navigators can’t channel to a new partner on the first try. You channeled to him very effectively.”
Vik warned me not to tell Dr. Langmore about our attempts to league. Now she stares at me, and I wonder whether the situation is even weirder than he suspected. I mean, she’s not blinking. Don’t her eyeballs get dry? “He’s been tutoring me in channeling. But we don’t, like, hang out.”
“It’s generous of him to help you. Given the trials.”
“Yeah, well.” I let exasperation bleed into my voice. “Most kids don’t see senior transfers as real competition.”
“They’ll see you as competition now. Did anything strike you as strange about how you channeled?”
I spread my hands helplessly. “I don’t know. My Nav Department didn’t teach channeling. I’ve only tried it with my team and Vik. Did I do it wrong?”
My lost-lamb act works. Dr. Langmore blinks (thank God) and shakes her head gently. “You managed an unlikely demanifestation. It was my duty to ask.”
“Oh.” I give her a relieved smile. “Okay. But—are there strange ways of channeling? Like, would it be bad if I…” I can’t ask what I want to ask—Why do you hate leaguing?—without giving my game away. I flail my hands, faking inarticulate confusion.
“Some navigators work better together than others,” Dr. Langmore says.
“Highwall and Dr. Miura had natural rapport, for example. But relying on rapport is a mistake. If the rapport breaks down, you can lose access to power right when you need it most. And speaking of easy rapport’s dangers…
Mr. Souza may be generous. He’s undeniably bright.
What he’s not is a role model for success at the Academy. Understand?”
I don’t. Vik’s a top-tier navigator. If he’s not a role model, who is? I nod anyway.
For another few minutes, Dr. Langmore asks me polite questions about my classes, and I pretend to be an eager-to-please rube.
Then I ask her a few starstruck questions about the famous guys whose photos hang from her walls, and she humors me with anecdotes about the big fat donations she winkled out of them to fund the school.
“Navigation is humanity’s sole defense against the beasts,” she says somberly.
“As you saw today. And Academy students are trained to be humanity’s best defenders.
If the rich won’t open their pocketbooks for that…
” Then she cracks a tiny smile. “But my pitch tends to persuade them.”
“What about Secretary Tully?” I ask. “Will you pitch him when he comes to campus?”
Her upper lip curls in frustration. “Tully is a shortsighted hypocrite. He pays navigators to protect him from interference and beasts, but he wants to slash funding for emergency beast-response services that protect ordinary citizens.”
I think about how long it took the response team to arrive after Dad was swarmed. How few navigators there were, how exhausted they looked. How many calls they must have taken already that day. “Yeah. He sucks.”
She snorts. “As a teacher, I officially deplore your language,” she says. “But… Yes, he sucks. I can only imagine what he plans to say to us in his wretched speech.”
Chitchat over, she makes me handwrite a short essay about why students should always obey beast-manifestation protocol. When she releases me, I smile and wave goodbye and walk slowly to the exit.
Dr. Langmore knows—or suspects—that Vik and I leagued. She gave us detention to question us privately, to find out whether we knew what we’d done. I’ve convinced her I’m blissfully ignorant. But what happens if she realizes I fooled her?
I’m hyperventilating by the time I push through Admin’s doors. When my shoes hit grass, I run.