Chapter Twenty-Nine
When I come to, the room is upside down. Gravity swells my head with blood.
I’m hanging from the Cruciform.
Gawking down at the ceiling, I see tree roots.
They snake through the domed concrete around the burning light.
The Cruciform room sits beneath the Great Tree.
No wonder the tree always creeped me out.
It was a secret monument to this. Dr. Langmore could pass it by, see students sitting in its shade, and gloat at how she might suck their futures dry if she decided to.
I try to kick, to flail. Restraints hold me tight.
Behind me, a heavy object—a body?—thumps to the concrete. Dr. Langmore must be dropping Bree to the floor.
Footsteps.
Dr. Langmore’s god-awful nude heels enter my field of vision.
When she crouches beside me, her face and shoulder loom.
Fat red comets streak her cream silk blouse.
She’s stripped off her suit jacket and balled it up against her nose.
She reaches for the Cruciform’s metal neckband with her free hand.
“How did Miura die?” I blurt.
She grabs the band. Locks it around my neck.
“Is that how you’ll kill me? Steal my futures with this machine till I snuff out somehow?”
“What did I do,” she asks, muffled by her jacket, “to convince you I was such a monster?”
“Hit me over the head and strapped me to a literal inverted cross.”
She actually laughs—a soft chuckle ending in a pained hiss. Hilarity’s no good for her nose. I feel sourly satisfied; now’s not the time for her to reveal a well-hidden sense of humor. “Be that as it may…”
“You convinced me before that. When you kidnapped my blockmate. No, before—last year, when you made Griffin nav Vik blackout drunk so you could kidnap their blockmate, right? And, what, Jake escaped the next morning somehow? He might have been cooperative, and curious, and desperate, but he was also brilliant. Even with your interference, he must have figured out pretty fast the Cruciform was bad news. That was the emergency call you got during my interview. Did Griffin call you, or did someone else? Who’s in on this? ”
“How did you figure out so much?” Dr. Langmore sounds mildly impressed. If a metal band weren’t circling my neck, I’d lunge and bite her smug face.
“You convinced me again,” I continue, “when you navved me toward this machine. You navved me. You interfered.”
She suppresses an eye roll. “The taboo against benevolent interference is nonsense. People need guidance to grow in the right direction. Their choices need—pruning. Like bonsai. You, Ms. Yang, even Mr. Souza—you can see reason. Secretary Tully can see reason. Ultimately, everyone can. That’s what you and the Cruciform will help me accomplish, Ms. Sullivan. A little guidance. A little pruning.”
She reaches beyond my field of vision. When I see her hands again, they’re shaking a little. And they hold two syringes.
“No.” I glance around desperately, looking for help, but Vik and Candace are still locked in silent battle with Griffin and Mr. Davis. “No, no—”
The first syringe descends. Above my collarbone, I feel a sting.
Her hand shakes harder. As the second syringe approaches, she drops it. It shatters on the concrete floor.
I don’t know what she’s injected me with.
Bree seemed completely out of it. That might have been something else, like maybe Dr. Langmore smothered Bree with a chloroform-soaked rag when—but no, Dr. Langmore’s not strong enough to carry Bree’s limp body through the Archive, down the secret passage, to this place.
Griffin is, but he couldn’t have done it without someone noticing, not even at night.
One of them must have navved Bree too. Bree must’ve been curious enough about the Archive that when, say, Griffin offered to sneak her in under threat of expulsion, she took the chance in a few fringe futures.
Those few would’ve been all the opening Griffin needed.
But she was out of it before Dr. Langmore and Griffin manhandled her onto the Cruciform, which means…
I lose track of what it means.
Reality stretches. Objects glow and stutter, throwing off solid images. Vik, Candace, Griffin, and Mr. Davis, locked in combat, spawn shiny overlapping silhouettes, a giant fan of cloth and flesh and light. I can’t see past them; they’re stupendous—
No. Concentrate.
Cooperativeness. The candidate files rated students on cooperativeness. If the Cruciform requires cooperation, that means I can not cooperate. I can resist.
Resist.
How?
Dr. Langmore lays her hand on the Cruciform. I can’t see it—I’m hypnotized by her whirring shins—but I know it happens, because a second later, the machine launches me deeper into flickerstate than I’ve ever gone.
I stand on red sands within an all-consuming fire. A hundred feet away looms a pyre as tall as a ziggurat. The pyre is a conflagration within a conflagration, every lick of flame a future: a burning, winkling mass of possibilities.
A figure stands beside me, liquid chrome from her slick French twist to her pumps dripping metal onto the thirsty sand. A half-melted railroad glistens into the sky over her head. Dr. Langmore.
When I try to control the flame around me—my fire, my nav—nothing happens.
Dr. Langmore smiles. She doesn’t look at me, just keeps watching the pyre. My pyre.
A branch splits off from her railroad and snakes toward the pyre. But the burning air liquefies it, and it drips down to the sand before it reaches the giant charred logs at the pyre’s base.
Dr. Langmore sneers angrily, white teeth framed by tense chrome lips.
The pyre, the flames—they jump and blear and dance and spread—
Resist. Think.
I passed the screening, the first siphoning duels, because I could blast my competition, melt or scorch their nav concepts to formlessness, and steal from them while they were incapacitated. Like I did to Rob.
And even when I channeled to Candace and Bree, when I tried to give them my nav, they had trouble taking it because it appeared to them as fire. It was only when they saw me differently, as sunlight, that I really succeeded in channeling to Candace.
Vik never has trouble. He switches between concepts with ease, and he thinks of nav in terms of flow.
But I bet Dr. Langmore doesn’t. She’s too inflexible, too brittle.
This is a woman who broke Highwall’s league because she couldn’t stand that leaguing requires unity and cooperation, because she wanted to impose her vision on the rest of the group and the rest of the world.
Now, her rigid concepts of herself and me—solid steel, fire—are hobbling her as she tries to manipulate my nav, even though the machine has harnessed it for her.
You are a railroad, I think at her. I am a fire, I think at myself, the red sand, the burning air, the white-hot pyre. If you try to use me, I think at her, I will melt you. That’s your nature and mine.
She shoots out more tracks, a snaking fleet of rails that hisses furiously across the sand. They soften, puddle, and sink into the desert.
Her own concepts are thwarting her. It’s working.
She bares her teeth again and scuttles, bent-kneed, awkward but quick in her chrome-dripping heels, toward the pyre.
I don’t know what she’s doing. I’ve been so focused on maintaining these nav concepts—the railroad, the fire—that I hadn’t considered how we could use our flickerstate bodies themselves to navigate.
But maybe if I can keep her from reaching the pyre, I can keep her from doing anything with my hijacked nav.
Maybe I can get down from this machine. Help Vik and Candace hold off Griffin and Mr. Davis.
I will my feet to move.
My feet do not move.
When Dr. Langmore reaches the pyre, she climbs, log by log, into the flame-soaked futures, navigating them with her whole imaginary body. The chrome slides off her in patches as she struggles upward. Her exposed flesh sizzles.
I hope the pain slows her down. She’s climbing up the pyre’s thickest, most probable spout of flame, where Griffin and Mr. Davis, flaring orange, white, and blue, siphon away the dark protective cloud Vik and Candace have summoned.
They nav Vik and Candace into a collapse.
Once my friends are sprawled like rag dolls on the concrete, Mr. Davis injects them with syringes.
That spout branches into thinner, more ghostly flame futures. In several, Candace has an allergic reaction to the syringe. She seizes, skull tapping concrete, and foams at the mouth. Dr. Langmore turns her cracked, blistering face away from those futures and sidles in the other direction.
In that direction, I see two main groups of futures. In one, Vik and Candace lie breathing peacefully on the floor after their injections; that’s where Dr. Langmore’s heading.
In the other, Mirabel—
Mirabel?
“What the fuck.” Her voice bites through the desert sands, through the roaring pyre.
I splash back into the glowing, hallucinogenic real.
Dr. Langmore’s legs blur forward. “You’re never supposed to enter another assistant’s section,” she blusters. “What are you doing here?”
Mirabel stands framed against the dark tunnel.
Loose ponytail, sweatpants, sneakers. Her eyes glint under the fluorescent light, taking us all in: me, strapped upside down to some weird machine.
Dr. Langmore, manipulating the machine who knows how.
Griffin and Mr. Davis, attacking Vik and Candace in flickerstate as they frantically occlude.
“What am I—” Mirabel cuts herself off. “I went to get some water and saw Griffin’s door had malfunctioned. It wouldn’t stay closed. I was trying to find him and let him know. What are you doing?”
The Cruciform’s current tugs at me, urging me back toward flickerstate. A sharp thought pierces my mind’s glow and blur: If Dr. Langmore never managed to harness my nav with the Cruciform, the machine hasn’t endangered me yet. I can’t let it pull me under. But—can I navigate? Can I help us somehow?
“Ms. Delgado, let me explain.” Dr. Langmore’s bluster has exited the chat. She’s trying for a reasonable, adult tone. “Ms. Sullivan was helping us with a special experiment when Mr. Souza and Ms. Yang burst in and—”
Fighting the Cruciform’s tug every second, I dive into flickerstate.
On the red sands, the pyre burns higher. Its base has fused into a single thick gout of flame. Some forks I saw earlier must have corresponded to Mirabel discovering or not discovering us. Now that she’s here, the spread of futures has changed.
In every future I see, Mirabel tries to unstrap me from the Cruciform.
In almost every offshoot of those futures, Mr. Davis swerves out of the dragged-out flickerstate battle with Vik and Candace to stop her.
He puts her in a chokehold, knocks her out, and injects her, or holds her down and injects her till her sneakers stop kicking the concrete, or—in a few ghastly streams—throws her so hard against the floor that her neck cracks and her chest stills.
And in almost every offshoot of those offshoots, Dr. Langmore takes advantage of Vik’s and Candace’s distraction as they rush to help Mirabel to interfere with them, navving them unconscious.
Mirabel doesn’t have much time. Neither do Vik and Candace.
As soon as I find a future where Mr. Davis and Dr. Langmore can’t hurt or kill them, I throw all my nav toward it.
In that future, a swarm manifests above us—just like in my last bite-dream—and tries to devour the Cruciform. And us.
In that future, the Cruciform is destroyed.
In that future, we aren’t fighting each other because we’re busy trying not to die.