Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
After my detention, when I realized how angry she was that Secretary Tully planned to cut funding for the emergency beast-response services that protect people like my dad, I convinced myself she had principles even if she was a hard-ass.
After we discovered she helped engineer the Cruciform prototype, I wanted to believe she’d genuinely agreed with Highwall that it needed to be dismantled.
I wanted to believe she wouldn’t rebuild it.
My mistake.
And Griffin?
Griffin, who loves Candace so much, who’s been friends with Vik since they were skinny freshmen, who asked me so gently about my dad?
I want to vomit.
I can’t see who they’re carrying. Then, as they manipulate the body upside down onto the Cruciform, I can.
Those powder-blue-painted toenails and narrow ankles, which Mr. Davis straps with synthetic bands to the stake. Those long arms, which Dr. Langmore buckles one by one to the transom. That lolling head, gravity unfurling its blond curls to brush the floor.
Bree.
***
Vik, Candace, and I guessed what we might see in this subterranean hidey-hole, but now that we’re seeing it, we reject it.
The crackling music, no. The burning light, no.
The bristling machine, no. The lipsticked cup, no.
Dr. Langmore tightening restraints around Bree’s wrist until her flesh bulges white around the black synthetic strap, no.
Griffin, our Griffin, kneeling to snap a metal band around Bree’s neck, no, no, no.
Mr. Davis pulls out two syringes full of colorless liquid. He stabs the soft hollow between Bree’s collarbone and throat. A bright bead of blood rolls into her falling curls.
“Miura died, Jake died—we have to get her down from there,” Candace whispers. “Now.”
I nod, turn on my heel, and stride into the bright chamber—without knowing what I’ll do next and without truly believing in the situation, like it’s a bite-dream, painful but not yet real.
“Let her go,” I demand, my voice bouncing off the domed ceiling.
Griffin jerks upright. His face contorts in shock. “What are you doing here?”
Candace stalks forward to stand beside me. “What are you doing to Bree?”
She keeps her voice soft and steady. But I think if Griffin stepped too close to her now, her hands would fly to his throat. She would do her best—and her best is formidable—to crush his windpipe.
Griffin won’t meet her eyes. There’s no hint of his usual boyish energy.
Mr. Davis stares at us glumly and says nothing.
Dr. Langmore tightens Bree’s last strap and swivels on us. Her beige heels clack against the floor like chitin. “Ms. Allen volunteered for this experiment,” she tells us, apparently unconcerned that three students have burst in on her evil basement laboratory.
Vik, at my left shoulder, snorts in disgust. “Like Jake ‘volunteered’? Like Aria did?”
Candace is staring hard at Griffin. “Is this where they took me, the night my bite healed?”
Swallowing, he nods. “Last year, I told Dr. Langmore you were bite-sick, and she told me…you didn’t have to be.”
Candace inhales painfully. “What did healing me do to whoever was in the machine?”
“Nothing,” Dr. Langmore cuts in quickly. “Mr. Lippman had a heart attack. It’s unfortunate, but the Cruciform didn’t cause it.”
Griffin freezes, eyes darting to Bree. “Jake’s dead?” he whispers.
“Kay Lucasson designed the Cruciform,” I say to Dr. Langmore.
“Highwall’s notebooks said Lucasson modeled the machine on her research into beasts.
The Cruciform powers itself off a navigator’s futures, the way beasts feed on futures.
It dramatically increased the possibility that something would kill Jake.
So it killed him. You know it killed him.
Why even use the machine? You can cure bites with leaguing.
You leagued to cure Highwall’s bites, we know you did. ”
As I speak, Griffin whitens. He must have suspected the Cruciform was dangerous, but I don’t think Dr. Langmore or Mr. Davis told him how it worked.
Dr. Langmore’s face just wrinkles up like she smells something rank.
“Leaguing is a pipe dream. It requires absolute equality and absolute unity among participants. At the first hint of a single leader—at any minor controversy—it fails. Highwall’s league fell apart as soon as the others refused to use our power for more ambitious projects. ”
“More ambitious projects?” I echo.
Now Dr. Langmore is staring down her nose at me like I smell rank. “Ms. Sullivan, you and your friends have broken into a locked archive. I could have you expelled. I could have you arrested. Why do you believe I’m obligated to answer your questions?”
“You said Bree volunteered,” I snap back. “But did she sign any consent forms? I’m betting not. I’m betting that if we call the police and some journalists and some lawyers, we could have you arrested.”
She tenses. Her eyes flick to the exit, maybe gauging how fast I could sprint upstairs and find a cell phone signal.
When she speaks again, her tone has changed. No longer commanding or contemptuous. Pitched to soothe, to convince. “Griffin told me about your father, Norah.”
I stiffen.
“And I’m so sorry. But he’s far from the only person affected by beasts. People are dying everywhere. The Cruciform—”
“Helps the ones who can pay,” I spit. “Like Terry Minter.”
“You don’t understand,” Griffin says desperately. “If Candace died because my dad and I didn’t help her, do you think we could live with it? If your dad died, could you live with it? This is the cure, Norah. The only cure we have.”
Dr. Langmore turns to me. “Where do you think the donations go? Do you think I keep them for myself?”
“I don’t know, lady. That’s a pretty swanky watch.”
She weighs me with her eyes. “This ‘swanky watch’ was a gift from my husband. For our first wedding anniversary. He died a year later. After Highwall’s league crumbled, before we engineered the Cruciform. Three beast-bites. Metastatic cancer. He was forty-two.”
Forty-two. Almost the same age as Dad.
She takes my silence as encouragement. “The donations fund the Academy—fund your education—so that we can train the most promising young navigators, not simply the ones whose parents can afford private school tuition. Almost a quarter of our graduates end up working in beast-response. Academy training matters. And the donations go to developing the Cruciform. It’s an extraordinary device—”
“And so you agreed to a little human sacrifice.” Vik sounds ill. “Jake. Aria. Bree. Students without many resources, so suspicious parents couldn’t pay private investigators to look into the Academy. Students who were interested in nav research, so—what? So you could trick them down here?”
It’s as if Vik hasn’t spoken. Dr. Langmore keeps talking to me: “Think of what else the Cruciform could accomplish. It could make people into better versions of themselves. Right now, Secretary Tully is driving onto campus in a bulletproof Escalade. In a few hours, he is going to make a speech. A speech that will be televised, recorded, shared. A speech that will encourage our legislature to slash funding for public navigation and beast-response, driving navigators into the private sector, onto security details of men like Tully, who don’t care whether their choices kill men like your father.
Now imagine a future where Tully makes a different speech.
Where he ignores his teleprompter and listens to his tiny, withered conscience.
Where he lobbies Congress for more funding—for nav education, for beast-response, for us.
Imagine futures where the tiny, withered consciences of the politicians he lobbies get too loud for them to ignore. The Cruciform can make it happen.”
I think about how powerful three-person leaguing felt.
How far we saw into the future, how much we could have controlled if we’d tried.
And Highwall wanted the Cruciform to replace a five-person league…
“Interference,” I say. “You want to use the Cruciform for interference. First to interfere with Tully, and then…a lot of powerful people. On a massive scale.”
Dr. Langmore’s eyes flick from Vik to Candace to me.
“Since it seems you three have done some impressive—if possibly illegal—research into Highwall’s…
lesser-known accomplishments, I’ll give you the offer I gave Mr. Minter.
Help me with, ah, recruiting and logistics, and in exchange, I help you. With whatever you desire.”
Whatever I desire.
The machine could cure Dad.
It could cure me.
But Miura died. Jake died. And Bree…
“Highwall wanted to dismantle the machine,” I say. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m reminding myself.
“Highwall was an egomaniac, but she wasn’t a psychopath,” Vik adds, glaring at Dr. Langmore. “Unlike you. Now we’re going to take Bree down from there, and then we’re going to take that thing apart.”
“Mr. Davis, Griffin, persuade them,” Dr. Langmore says dismissively and turns to the machine.
I expect Griffin to talk: point out again that the Cruciform saved Candace’s life, maybe, or bring up Secretary Tully and my dad.
Instead, he faces us, expression sick and grim. His eyes go vague—the telltale vagueness of a navigator entering flickerstate. So do Mr. Davis’s.
Dr. Langmore said persuade. She meant interfere.
“Occlude!” I yell.
I trust Vik and Candace to protect us from Mr. Davis and Griffin. I’ve got to trust them, because I don’t have time to worry about them dueling not only a teacher but also an Archive trial winner—and, apparently, Dr. Langmore’s secret special protégé—while they’re worn out from leaguing.
When I slalom around Griffin toward the Cruciform, Dr. Langmore stands guard. “Ms. Sullivan,” she says like it’s an ordinary afternoon in nav clinic. “Think this through. What happened to Dr. Miura during prototype development was unfortunate but not—”