Chapter Twenty-Six #2
It’s astonishingly random, this wood pulp detritus the Academy has gathered, cherished, and hidden: a paper menu with Highwall’s notes about dry cleaning and hair appointments scrawled across the appetizers.
A specialty-foods-store receipt, where she bought $101.
97 in artisanal olive oils. A newspaper clipping, a negative review of her ghostwritten memoir, on which she’s written in black Sharpie beside the byline SCREW YOU TOO.
A printout from a 1999 academic article in The Journal of Navigation whose reference page bears a rippling half-moon wine stain and the scrawled comment Should have cited me more.
It goes on and on like this. I begin to get a sense of Highwall: vain, thin-skinned, self-indulgent, obsessed with her legacy.
Also, she doodles.
She’s a talented artist—I recognize self-portraits, sketches of Miura bent over a book, a woman I think is Lucasson sweating midnavigation—but more than people she draws boxy architectural-looking things, arrows zipping between them.
I find so many doodles that when I spot an important one, I almost don’t realize what it is.
It looks like a geometry exercise: a line between two points with a star marking the midpoint.
A triangle with a line drawn from each vertex to the incenter, marked with another star.
A square with diagonal lines making an X inside, a star in the X ’s center.
A pentagon with lines drawn from each vertex to the center, once again starred.
I’m about to turn the page when I notice minute letters. The two points that the starred line joins are labeled V and DM. The vertices of the triangle: V, DM, and KL. The corners of the square: V, DM, KL, and LDS. The five points of the pentagon: V, DM, KL, LDS, and MO.
“Guys,” I say. “Look.”
Soon Vik and Candace are standing at my shoulders.
“See LDS again?” I say. “Laura De Soto. The other letters must be initials too.”
“V for Victoria Highwall,” Vik says. “DM for Daisuke Miura. KL for Kay Lucasson.”
I nod. “Do you guys know any Highwall collaborators with the initials MO?”
Vik shakes his head.
“If the letters are people,” Candace says, “what are the stars?”
Vik leans in closer. When his chest brushes my shoulder, I feel a wildly inappropriate flash of heat, like I’ve teleported from this chilly climate-controlled room to a southern summer day.
“Wait,” he says. His voice rings off the walls, full of hope and possibility.
Startled, I twist to look at him. And feel another inappropriate flash: Our faces are so close.
Then I clock his expression. He’s shining with joy, like a treasure hoard in a dark cave some explorer stumbled into with a torch.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“What if we already know how to cure bites?” he whispers back.
I trade confused looks with Candace. We bend over the doodle, trying to see what he sees.
He points to the line between V and DM with a star in the middle.
“When we league, we each throw our nav into a fusion point exactly between us. We’ve never tried leaguing with more than two navigators, but what if we did it with three?
” He points to the V-DM-KL doodle. “Or four?” The V-DM-KL-LDS doodle. “Or five?”
The idea settles over us. Even with two, leaguing feels like a glass we hold up by our fingertips—if we pull back a millimeter or press too hard, the glass will fall or crack. Yet it’s so powerful. How far into the future could you see with five navigators? How far could you bend possibility?
“You think,” I say slowly, “that we can cure bites with leaguing.”
“Everyone knows that curing bites with navigation is theoretically possible,” he says. “If a wound can heal, then in some future—”
“But the possibility’s just too remote. They’ve experimented with a dozen channelers feeding power to the strongest navigators ever, and nothing.”
Vik keeps shining. “How many eyes does the strongest navigator in the country have?”
Somewhere in the cold ashes of my hope, an ember flares to life. “Two.”
“How many do we have when we league?”
“I couldn’t count them,” I admit.
“It might work,” he says. “We have to try.”
“We do,” Candace says. “But we also have to remember that Highwall and her team were looking for an alternative to leaguing. So maybe they failed to cure Highwall’s bites with leaguing—maybe they needed five navigators for it but couldn’t keep a collaboration that complex stable.”
“Are all Highwall’s collaborators dead now?” I ask.
“All the initials we recognize,” Vik says. “I don’t know about MO.”
I check the reverse side of the sheet. Blank. “I guess we keep looking.”
The leaguing sketch is the only useful thing I find in my first box. But as I’m tugging the next one from its shelf, I happen to spot the edge of something on—in?—the shadowed wall behind. It looks like the lintel of a door.
A door to where?
I step back, estimating which box is blocking the door’s handle. Once I’ve chosen my candidate, I slide it to the floor and peer into the gap. Sure enough: An electric locking handle appears, a nine-digit keypad above a steel knob.
I grab the knob and try to turn it. Locked.
If the door requires a code, Griffin’s keycard couldn’t get us through. Does Griffin know the code? If he hasn’t worked on this shelf, would he even know about the door?
Candace sits bent over a notebook, black hair falling forward to bare a pale triangle of neck.
Vik stands, his profile sharp, with what looks like an appointment book open in his hands.
I’m trying to decide what to say—Hey, Vik, is there a secret locked door in the back of your section?
—when someone knocks on the door at the top of the stairs.
“Griffin, we need to talk.” It’s Mirabel, direct as usual, muffled by wood.
Candace, Vik, and I freeze.
“I know you’re in there. I knocked on the door to your block for, like, five minutes, and you’re not that deep a sleeper. Come out. I want to talk.”
Candace and Vik, moving only their eyes, stare at me.
Mirabel heard something through the door.
And Griffin is not in his bedroom asleep, like he wanted me to believe he would be.
I put a shaky finger to my lips. It feels horrible—not acting, just waiting—but our best option is to keep silent.
Mirabel’s fist lashes against the door.
I flinch and inhale. Too loudly?
“Asshole,” Mirabel calls. Her footsteps retreat, away from the door, into silence.