Chapter Seventeen
Vik and I are strolling the campus loop, passing by Admissions.
Autumn sun glows white on wrought iron and leaded windows.
He glances, bright-eyed, at the students ahead of us on the path and sneaks his pinkie around mine.
I smile helplessly. I think of teasing him, saying something like, No one cares, if you want you can hold my whole hand.
He leans over to kiss me. His lips, soft and hot, brush mine. I press into him, deepening the kiss, and his hand moves to my waist, slides to my hip, tightens—
Engine noise kills the moment. A minivan chugs up the hill toward us, veering side to side on the road the shuttle uses to drop off students. Sun bounces from the windshield in a solid glare. I can’t see the driver, but whoever they are, they’ve lost control.
I grab Vik’s arm to yank him out of the way. The van swerves, the front bumper strikes my chest, and—
***
The bedroom is dark. Sweat oozes down my forehead and stings my eyes. My body clenches in sourceless agony.
It’s two weeks since the last trial, two weeks till the final one.
Every evening, Candace, Bree, and I practice siphoning, channeling, occlusion, anything Dr. Langmore might demand we do in the mysterious “summation” our syllabus promises.
Every night, I call Jo. I hear about the high school classes she likes (art, PE) and the ones she doesn’t (everything else—“We can’t all be homework robots like you, Norah”), about the many ex-friends who still flinch from her in the halls.
And I hear about Dad: how loud his bite-dreams are, how scared Jo’s getting.
Her fear steels me. I need to win for her.
Every morning before sunrise, Vik tutors me, reviewing conventional nav techniques in preparation for the final trial.
But we’ve also been leaguing.
Every day we hold the connection longer, peer farther into the future, push reality to outcomes less plausible.
And every day I learn more about him. He tells me that though his childhood was lonely, he had one close friend, the girl who gave him the Vermont T-shirts, but she drifted slowly away after the Academy accepted him: His future was going to be so different from hers, so much stranger.
At the Academy, he made a new close friend, Jake, but…
“Look how that turned out.” Self-loathing simmers in Vik’s voice.
“Before Jake disappeared, he was agitated. Paranoid. He was doing out-there reading about Highwall’s research team, saying no one knew the whole story, muttering about a cover-up.
When I asked what he meant, he shut down.
When I asked if he was okay, he said he was fine. I let it go. Big mistake.”
After Jake, Vik’s nav struck him as a bad joke: How could he have a special power to shape the future when he couldn’t even help his friend?
“What would you do, if you really could shape the future any way you wanted?” I ask.
Maybe it’s a frivolous hypothetical. But he ducks his head and thinks hard.
“The world hurts people,” he says after a pause.
“I’d like to help them. But I’m a black-and-white thinker.
This is wrong, that’s right. This is stupid, that’s smart.
Not everyone thinks the way I do, though, and I’m sure it’s wrong to force my vision of the future on everyone else.
That’s one reason I was curious about leaguing.
With leaguing, one navigator can’t force the rest. The whole league agrees on the future they want.
So if I had infinite power to shape the future—I wouldn’t use it.
Not by myself. I’d talk to people. Debate.
Research. Collaborate. And use the power to help us all—the way we all decided was right. ”
In return for his honesty, I share stories of my own.
How my best friend since kindergarten dumped me the spring before I came to the Academy.
How I cherish Candace’s Paris Fashion Week style and Bree’s relentless cheeriness but sometimes I worry that one day they’ll decide I kind of suck, actually, and then our blockmate dinners, evening nav practices, and occasional horror-movie nights will just vanish.
How the person I’m closest to is my sister Jo, but since I’m basically her third parent, I’ve developed this hyper-responsible mother-knows-best way of interacting with the world that I maybe need to let go of.
The more I tell Vik, the lighter I feel, glowing and suspended in air. I say so much, I can pretend I’ve said everything.
But I never mention what happened to Dad. I never mention my bite.
Another chilly morning, I press Vik’s warm body against a tree and kiss him. He laughs against my mouth and says, “I like you so much.” I laugh too, delighted, lightheaded. He slides his hands up my arms—and I spring backward like a startled cat before his fingers brush the bandage under my sleeve.
When he asks what happened, I have to lie right to his face. Some nonsense about ticklish elbows.
Now this. My third bite-dream: pancaked by a minivan.
I sit up in bed, shivering when cold air hits my sweat-soaked shirt. I strip the shirt off and toss it at my laundry basket. The shirt, unfurling midair, drops to the floor a foot short. I get up, shove it in the basket, and turn on the lights.
Red stains seep through the bandage covering my bite.
I lock the door, work a nail under the bandage, and rip it off.
The last time I examined my bite, one tooth mark was open and bleeding. Now six are. Another five have scabbed: big, shiny, crimson beads. Only two remain half-real projections, flickering on my skin like uncertain penlights.
Calm, Norah. Calm.
Yes, my bite is progressing faster than normal. But I have a plan. I almost have the Archive. I just have to stay calm.
If I panic, I’ll probably die.
***
Outside the air is black and cold. Goose bumps prickle under my crewneck. Vik isn’t there when I reach the clearing, so I drop my backpack and pace, leaves shushing under my shoes.
The wind picks up, tossing the trees. Branches creak and groan.
Crossing the footpath’s mouth, I pause. Boots are coming toward me. Vik appears and starts down the last stretch of path. “Hey.” He’s stepping over a mossy log when something cracks overhead. Loud as a snapped bone.
I barrel into him. We fall together. Rocky dirt rips open my palms, and air whooshes from his lungs as my body slams onto his.
A heavy branch crashes across the path behind us.
We lie there panting. His body heat radiates against me, and his ribs lift me every time he breathes in.
Blood rushes to my face. I scramble up before I humiliate myself somehow, like by kissing him when I should be making sure he’s okay. “Sorry, I—that branch—”
“Thanks,” he says from the ground. “It would’ve brained me.”
It would’ve brained him.
If I’d walked down the footpath a minute later, it could’ve brained me.
I remember my second death dream: a falling object crushed my skull. In that dream, I was alone. But in my latest dream, Vik was right beside me. Did the van hit him too?
There’s no proof the bitten put bystanders at risk. No proof.
But that branch almost killed Vik.
“Hey.” He sits up. “You all right?”
As soon as I kissed him, I worried how our relationship might affect me. Would it throw me off in the trials? Could it blunt my killer edge? I never worried I was putting him at risk.
He stands and steps close, still radiating heat. “Are you hurt?”
Thoughts rush at me like bats from an attic: Of course you don’t get to be an us. You’re an intense girl, a control freak, a walking danger zone. You can’t keep friends; you can barely keep teammates.
Why did you think you could keep this?
“Scraped my hands,” I say.
Vik slides his hands under mine and lifts them. In the shadows, blood threads along my lifelines. Tiny pebbles lodge in my torn skin. He hisses through his teeth. “We should pause practice. Go get you cleaned up.”
“We should stop practice.” I force a steady, unemotional voice.
He goes still. “For today?”
“I’ve been thinking…” I hesitate. Close my eyes. Make myself speak. “I mean, we are competing in the trials. I hoped it wouldn’t matter. But it does. We’re competitors. We should act like it.”
He lets go of my hands. “What happens after the competition?”
Once I’m inside the Archive, I don’t know how long finding the cure will take.
Supposing Highwall did hide a cure there for opaque reasons of her own.
Supposing I’m not a deluded moron, wasting my last months on a hunt for a nonexistent silver bullet.
If my bite makes me a danger to others, I need to keep human contact to a minimum till I’ve healed.
Or died. So. No more group dinners, no more blockmate movie nights. And no more Vik.
“After the competition, I’m going to be busy with the Archive,” I say.
He could respond so many ways. Demand to know why I kissed him in the first place if I was going to act like this.
Point out his team might beat mine. Beg me to change my mind.
I long for flickerstate, where I could hear every possible thing he might say.
But now more than ever, I have no right to invade his privacy.
He breathes out. “All right. Can I walk you to the nurse’s office?”
All right. Like that, I’ve thrown away the thing that’s made me happiest since beasts swarmed my yard. Like that, he accepts it, no questions. I’m so angry—at myself, him, everything—that the dark air pulses red before my eyes. “I have first aid stuff in my room. Excuse me.”
I climb over the fallen branch and get my backpack. When I stomp back up the path, Vik stands where I left him, unmoving. Waiting for me? Lost in thought? Asleep?
I wish he were sobbing or furious. I wish he’d show me that I’ve hurt him half as much as I’ve hurt myself.
I’m so selfish.
I brush past him up the stony path. I ignore the ache in my chest. I ignore his eyes on my back as I leave.