Chapter Twenty-Seven
“We need to leave,” Candace whispers. “Now.”
She’s right. We’re facing too many variables, too many risks. Mirabel could come back. She could call Griffin. She could text him that she heard noises behind the Highwall Collection door. She could find him, wherever he is.
But.
This may be my one chance in the Archive. And I don’t know whether we’ve found what I need. Hints and mysteries, yes—but is leaguing my silver bullet? My cure?
While Candace and Vik repack their boxes, I pull open the box I set on the floor. Its top layer is four notebooks of various sizes. I grab them and shove them into my sweatshirt front pocket. Then I close the box and struggle it back onto its shelf.
Vik and Candace have finished putting back their boxes too.
“I’ll go first,” Vik whispers. “No one will question it if they see me leaving the Archive. I’ll text you guys when it’s safe to come out. Leave one by one. Meet at the clearing. Okay?”
Candace and I nod.
Vik slips out.
We wait. We don’t speak. Trapped in that cold, dim basement, I reach into my pocket and press my fingers against the hard corners of the notebooks, hoping they hold something I can use.
My phone buzzes in my sweatpants, Candace’s in her hand.
Come out, Vik has texted.
Candace slips away.
I’m alone among the looming boxes and gleaming shelves, the odor of cardboard and old paper, my blood crashing against my ears.
Come out, Vik texts again.
***
Vik and Candace are waiting for me in the clearing. Candace’s phone flashlight points at a southern magnolia, evergreen leaves gleaming in the dark. The uneven light keeps Vik in shadow and picks out the hard ridges of Candace’s face: eye socket, cheekbone, mandible beneath muscle. Skull-like.
“I stole these.” I pull the notebooks from my pocket and hand them to her.
She flips one open and shines her phone on the pages. “Why these?”
“Why steal at all?” Vik asks.
“We didn’t find it,” I say.
“What?”
An impatient grunt forces between my teeth. “The key to all mythologies.”
“We found the cure,” he says. “It’s leaguing.”
“We don’t know that. So when we had to run, I—I grabbed what I could. That way at least we aren’t empty-handed.”
Vik shakes his head. “If Griffin realizes material is missing from—“
“He’ll figure out someone was in his section anyway. As soon as Mirabel finds him and yells at him about ignoring her. And on the topic of Griffin, where the hell is he? He was selling me pretty hard on the claim that he needed to sleep or he’d go full gremlin.”
“Same with me,” Vik says. “When I ran into you guys he made a point of reminding me—what did he say?”
“He turns into a pumpkin at midnight.”
Candace’s eyes tick around the clearing, tree to tree. I’m reminded we have no idea where Griffin is. He could be hiding in the woods, eavesdropping on us. I squint into the thick-layered washes of dark beyond Candace’s flashlight: stillness and silence.
When Candace speaks next, she whispers: “He stays up till five a.m. at home all the time. Has he always gone to bed early, the years you guys have been blockmates?”
Vik considers. “He pulled all-nighters freshman year. He got better at managing the workload after that. He complains about needing more sleep, but everyone does. This midnight-pumpkin gag is more recent.”
“Is there a door hidden behind the boxes on the back shelf in your section, Vik?” I ask.
Vik blinks. “No?”
“I found one in Griffin’s,” I say.
Candace stares at me. “You found a hidden door in the Highwall Collection?”
I nod. “Right before Mirabel showed up. The door was locked with an electronic keypad.”
Vik chews his lip. “Why hide a locked room inside a locked room?”
We stand in silence and think about that.
“Okay,” I say. “What have we found that’s actionable?”
“Highwall and her collaborators could league,” Vik says.
“They were experimenting with group leaguing. And leaguing—it’s not like channeling.
With channeling, the navigator gets access to their own nav plus the channeler’s.
One plus one. Add another channeler, and it’s one plus one plus one.
When we league, our powers multiply or—or it’s exponential, or—I’m not sure how far I can push the math analogy.
The point is, five-person leaguing means unprecedented power.
Even three-person leaguing… We should try it. ”
“Now?” Candace asks.
Vik looks tempted, but he shakes his head.
“Tomorrow. Before we try, I want to search the names of the ‘candidates’ online. See how many of them suddenly left the Academy, the way Jake and Aria did. And I want to reread Jake’s biography of Highwall, see whether I can figure out who MO is.
If they’re alive, maybe they know how far Highwall got with leaguing—and how many leaguers it takes to cure a bite. ”
“While you’re doing that…” Candace says. “Did Jake own any books that talked about nav machines?”
“Parascience and the History of Navigation.”
“Is that the one,” I ask, “where people are speculating that nav comes from Satan and aliens and, like, earth auras?”
“Among other things.”
“That doesn’t sound useful,” Candace says. “But the creepy schematic we found implies that Highwall and her team did build a machine to amplify nav that they didn’t tell the public about. So. Lend it to me?”
“I’ll bring it by tomorrow,” Vik says.
“Which leaves me with the notebooks,” I say. “Okay, tomorrow morning we read—and tomorrow afternoon we try three-person leaguing. Now break.”
***
I wake around 10 a.m. with dull winter light glowing around my curtain’s edges. On my phone is an all-Academy email blast reminding us to attend Secretary Tully’s speech at 5 p.m. in the fine arts auditorium. Yeah, definitely skipping that.
I’m afraid to leave my room, afraid to go anywhere without the notebooks, but my stomach is growling.
I jog to the dining hall. Fine snowflakes sift from the overcast sky as I hurry back to the dorm double-fisting to-go coffees, four hard green apples zipped into my bag’s front pocket.
In our common room, Candace sits on the sofa in her pajamas, legs curled under her, reading.
When the door closes behind me, she looks up. “Have you started yours?”
“About to.” I glance at Candace’s closed bedroom door. “Bree in?”
“Nope. She wasn’t in when I got back last night either. I guess curfew’s fallen by the wayside.”
“She was here when I got back from the formal, though. Weird.”
“Well, I texted her. I think we should tell her about, you know.” Candace nods to my wounded arm. “Leaguing.”
I swallow. “Are you sure she’ll want to help me after…”
“She will once she knows you’re dying,” Candace says flatly. “She may be a bubbly blond, but she’s rock solid, Norah.”
“O—okay.”
Candace’s lips curl. “Good. If she doesn’t text me back, I’ll call her after I finish…
” She raises the paperback she’s holding.
Parascience and the History of Navigation, the cover reads in blocky neon-yellow font.
Around the title float a serpentine flickerbeast and several disembodied heads.
The largest head has bee-stung pink lips and feathery platinum hair—Bizarro-World Sexy Highwall?
“Did the cover artist drop acid before mocking up that design?” I ask.
“Signs point to yes.”
“And Vik delivered it earlier.”
“Pretty early. I think you were asleep.”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t infer that he’s intentionally avoiding you.” Candace taps her nails against the book. “What’s going on there these days?”
“Nothing.” I sound more bitter than I mean to.
“Which was your decision.”
“Which was my decision.” I turn to my bedroom. “Catch you on the flip side.”
At my desk, I slurp pilfered coffee, order Highwall’s notebooks according to the date on the first page of each, and start skimming.
I stop whenever I come across initials—Highwall never writes out a full name—and read around for context.
At first, I make a note of every time she mentions her possible leaguing collaborators—DM, KL, LDS, MO—but she goes out with DM so often, to what sound like pretty boozy lunches, that I have to stop.
Halfway through the last notebook, coffee drained and apples munched, I find an entry that reads Last night I dreamed.
Highwall doesn’t write what she dreamed about. But I know.
I skim faster.
It’s another four months of lab days and martini lunches and Sunday morning swims in the superexclusive fitness club pool before Highwall mentions her dreams again.
It’s the same entry with a different date: Last night I dreamed.
As I flip the pages, these entries increase in frequency: two months later, one month, three weeks, two weeks, six days, every day…
After a couple weeks where Highwall dreamed every night, she wrote, I had DM, KL, LDS, and MO over for dinner yesterday. LDS and MO dislike each other, but we overcame the problem. We managed it, finally: a five-person league. Last night I didn’t dream. I won’t again.
Five-person leaguing. It took five-person leaguing to cure Highwall’s bite.
I read as fast as I can through the remaining pages. Maybe ten pages from the end, I find an entry that reads Something in us broke. We can’t league anymore. How can we announce that we’ve found a cure if we can’t replicate our method?