Chapter Twenty-Eight
We panic.
I reach for Vik and Candace. Our fingers tangle: his and hers, mine and hers, mine and his.
“Remember the diagrams,” I say quickly. “The star was in the center. We’re not giving half our nav to each partner. We’re giving all our nav to the middle of the group. Three, two, one—”
I drop into flickerstate and hurl my fire into the heart of our triangle.
To either side of me, flashing gold, flashing green.
Fusion.
We see—
Our league holds for a second, maybe less.
But in that instant, an infinite mansion of possibility leaps around us.
We hunt, frantic, at impossible speed, for a room, a hall, a future where no one crosses our paths as we run—on a weekend afternoon, when most kids have crammed into library carrels, hoping to squeeze out enough work to justify attending the Winter Formal yesterday—back to the Archive.
We look. We don’t influence. If we threw our power behind any future where students and teachers stayed away from the Archive door, that would be interference. We aren’t going to break that taboo. If one of us tried, it would shatter our unity and throw us from flickerstate.
We stumble over a suite of burning rooms where we wait five minutes, walk a looping route to the library’s side entrance, enter the Archive with Vik’s keycard, and—
We fall into pieces and out of flickerstate.
When reality fuzzes into focus, Vik, Candace, and I are kneeling in a ragged triangle on the common-room carpet. Sweat glimmers under Vik’s eyes. Candace’s chest heaves.
“How many futures?” she pants.
Too many to count, too many to guess. And so solid, like apples we could pluck from possibility’s branches. “You were right,” I tell Vik. “It multiplies.”
“I’ll go check—” He rubs his jaw. “Check whether Griffin’s keycard’s in his desk.”
“Either way,” I say, “we’re going in.”
If Griffin’s working in his Archive section, we go through him. If he rats on us and we get expelled, we get expelled. No matter what, we’re finding Bree.
Vik leaves.
Two minutes later, he knocks on our block door. When I let him in, he’s breathing fast, like he ran the stairs. “The keycard’s gone.”
As one, Vik, Candace, and I check our phones. A minute till we need to leave.
When the minute ends, Candace says: “Now.”
Outside, snow falls faster, sugar-dusting turrets and spires. We zigzag around buildings and across footpaths to the library, the future we saw in flickerstate throbbing in our minds.
We approach the library from the back and coil through a side door. At the Archive, Vik puts a finger to his lips and taps his key card to the reader. When the door clicks open, he steps through, glances around, and waves us in.
The Archive’s entry room is empty. I’m about to sigh in relief when I notice a dim glow beneath the Lucasson Collection door.
Mirabel. Any second, she could pop from her section and bust us.
We can’t do anything about it now.
Vik, Candace, and I creep around the desk and stop in front of the Highwall Collection. “This may be harder,” Vik whispers.
He may mean that the probability of a spontaneous malfunction opening an electronically locked door is lower than anything we’ve managed before.
Or he may mean that each time we league, we deplete ourselves.
After we break into the Highwall Collection, we’ll need to deal with Griffin somehow.
We’ll need to league through a second locked door.
And we don’t know what we’ll find on the other side of that.
I shrug. Candace rolls her head on her neck like a boxer before the starting bell.
A smile ghosts across Vik’s mouth.
Searching the mansion takes longer this time, maybe half a minute. When we drop out of flickerstate, blood oozes around my mouth; at some point, I bit my cheek open. Red cords stretch from Candace’s nostrils to her upper lip. Vik swallows hard like he might puke.
The door clicks and unlocks.
Once we step through, I close the door, but it sighs open again. Whatever malfunction we forced busted the latch. I leave it ajar. No help for it.
I lead the others down the stairs to the back of the Highwall Collection, where I saw the locked door behind the boxes. When the right shelf comes into view, I stop dead.
Boxes stand in chest-high piles in the back corners. Empty space gapes on the shelf where the boxes used to rest. The secret door, unlocked, opens onto a dark stair shaft, traveling down.
We haven’t run into Griffin.
And someone’s already gone through the door.
Vik squints at the shadowy descent. “Who said, ‘Once more unto the breach’?”
“Henry the Fifth,” I say.
“Trying to conquer France,” Candace adds. “Not sure the allusion’s apropos.”
“Either way.” Vik walks to the back wall. “Easier to slide between shelves than move the whole thing, I think.”
I join him and hold out a hand. He steadies me as I brace my foot on the empty middle shelf and slide my other leg through.
Soon I’m sitting on the shelf with the dark stair shaft swallowing my feet.
Releasing Vik’s hand, I shimmy like I’m playing limbo till my butt clears the metal and my shoes meet the concrete stairs.
My heels are planted on a step, my toes in empty air. I hold on to one of the shelf’s vertical struts and shuffle so I’m entirely on the step. Below me, in deep shadow, the staircase switches back. A blind corner.
“Shove over,” Candace hisses.
Vik helps her through. I steady her when she misses the narrow landing and almost windmills into the dark.
“Give him room,” I say to her. To Vik I call softly, “Careful. Landing’s skinny.”
Candace and I brace against the shaft walls and slant our bodies so we can catch him if he missteps.
He makes it. Quick feet.
I pull out my phone and hit the flashlight. A weak white beam changes the stair shaft’s angles and shadows. Step by step, one hand braced on the wall, the other holding my phone in front of me, I descend. Vik and Candace follow.
I place my feet, my mind whirring like an overheated laptop. We found the second locked door open. Griffin must be down here somewhere. Did he come on his own steam? Or was he—taken? Coerced? Interfered with?
We never found out whether someone was interfering in the Archive competition and, if so, who.
Mr. Davis?
He itemized Highwall’s papers. He must know about the Cruciform.
But he’d also know that, per Highwall’s will, a few students every year would get access to the papers that could reveal the existence of the machine.
Was he manipulating the trials to make sure the winners included kids he could recruit as accomplices?
If he wanted Vik’s team to win, was he planning to recruit Griffin or Mirabel?
During the trials, Griffin pooh-poohed Vik’s suspicion that someone had interfered with Sam Lu to make him cheat and get his team disqualified.
But at the formal, Griffin admitted in so many words that he was scared someone had interfered with him around the time Jake disappeared.
And Vik—Vik thought someone had interfered with him that night too.
Jake, Griffin, and Vik went to that party with Mirabel.
Mirabel was looking for Griffin last night. If she found him, what did she do with him?
We saw a light in her section. That doesn’t prove she’s in her section. She could be down below. Waiting.
By the time I reach the landing, I half expect to find Mirabel just beyond the turn, grinning a too-wide smile, Griffin flanking her in a zombie trace.
That’s not what I find. I don’t find more stairs, either. The landing switches back into a smooth-floored tunnel descending to a yellow rectangle: an open door, a lit room.
“End of the line?” Candace whispers.
We keep moving. Our footsteps echo against the tunnel walls. As I’m worrying that whoever waits beyond the yellow light will hear us coming, I notice music, faint and crackling, like an old record player. The music’s classical, with violins. Lucky: It should cover the sound of our approach.
Bree’s phone alarm is classical too. She can’t be the only person on campus who listens to symphonies or whatever.
But maybe candidate means something less sinister than I assumed?
Maybe Bree’s down here working on a secret project Dr. Langmore selected her for.
It’s possible, right? Bree’s smart, she follows vanguard nav research, her team came second in the trials.
And Dr. Langmore invited Bree to office hours to discuss Bree’s research interests.
Maybe, during that meeting, Dr. Langmore recruited Bree.
Could Vik and Candace and I, keyed up by coincidences and our own shady break-ins, have jumped to paranoid conclusions?
Maybe.
I hope so.
I don’t believe it.
Close to the narrow door, I flatten against the cold tunnel wall, slide sideways toward the yellow light, and squint into the brightness.
The room has a circular floor, thirty feet wide, with walls curving to a domed ceiling.
The ceiling’s top is too high to see from this angle.
The yellow light must beam from the ceiling’s highest point; it burns down on the bristling metal thing that looms in the floor’s center.
The Cruciform.
A paper coffee cup stands on the floor beside the machine. It looks alien in the context, like an intern’s cappuccino forgotten in-frame on a horror movie set. A crescent of beige lipstick kisses the white plastic lid.
Two figures appear.
Mr. Davis walks into view, toward the Cruciform, carrying a body by the arms.
A moment later, carrying the legs—Dr. Langmore and Griffin.
***
My stomach twists.
I’m not surprised to find Mr. Davis here. As soon as I saw him sneaking a donor into the Archive after hours, heard his smug voice as he dangled the keys to the kingdom in front of her nose, I knew his stupid bulldog face was up to something fucked.
But Dr. Langmore?