Chapter Thirty
Reality tears. Beasts pour from the domed ceiling: finned and gilled, arachnoid, serpentine, and simian, trilling and hissing and clicking.
Mr. Davis has Mirabel pinned, struggling, in his arms. When he sees the tear, he lets her go.
Griffin, Vik, and Candace must have seen this future shift from infinitesimally likely to inevitable in flickerstate. They return to the real with twitching eyes and shaking heads.
“What did you do?” Dr. Langmore cries.
Restraints press me to the Cruciform; when the machine overheats, shaking, I feel it in my bones. Sparks sizzle against my clothes. Some hit my bare ankles and hands. I can’t crane and see beasts chewing the wiring along the machine’s back, but I can guess what they’re doing.
I willed them here. I summoned them to distract Mr. Davis and Griffin and Dr. Langmore, to wreck the Cruciform. Anything they do now, any harm they cause, is because of me.
Vik runs to me and pulls the metal band from around my neck. He starts unbuckling the tight restraints around my wrists.
“Mirabel.” Candace reaches out a hand. When Mirabel takes it, their eyes go glassy. Channeling—Candace throwing her last nav to Mirabel, Mirabel willing the beasts away from the tender human flesh in the room.
Dr. Langmore skitters across the concrete. She’s running toward the beasts, not away—around to the slanted, sparking back of the Cruciform. “Mr. Davis!” she yells. “Griffin!”
Mr. Davis runs too—straight for the exit. He’s gone in seconds.
Griffin ducks around the machine.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Langmore demands. “Any minute, Secretary Tully—”
Griffin stumbles into my line of sight. He’s thrown Bree over his shoulder, his arms clasped around her knees. He lumbers past Candace and Mirabel into the dark tunnel.
“Griff, you’d better help her,” Candace calls desperately after him.
Vik finishes unbuckling me. I slide downward. Before my head hits concrete, he catches my waist and hauls me to my feet.
The room spins, ghosted with phosphorescent afterimages.
Beasts fill the room’s upper air like smoke, writhing, whispering, clawing, biting one another on necks, shoulders, limbs, and faces. One, pallid white as a deepwater eel, so like the one that marked me this past spring, spirals toward my face.
I stare, transfixed.
Vik yanks me, and I come back to myself. We falter away from Dr. Langmore, scrabbling at the Cruciform’s sparking guts, and across the room beneath the growing thundercloud of beasts.
“Wait!” Dr. Langmore cries. “We have to save the Cruciform! We have to change Tully’s mind!”
Beasts are gnawing at the machine’s inmost parts. It sparks more, sputters more.
Good.
I stumble doggedly toward the door, Vik supporting my unsteady weight.
He yells to Dr. Langmore, “You need to get out of here. Call the nearest nav department and—”
“Stupid boy!” she yowls.
He doesn’t try again.
Behind us, she starts screaming.
The beasts have her.
Candace and Mirabel, deep in flickerstate, must have seen our escape approaching. As soon as Vik and I shuffle past them into the tunnel, they follow us, covering our retreat.
When the dark tunnel swallows us, my vision goes wild: green and red and platinum phantoms everywhere, strobing with my labored heartbeat.
Sheer dread strikes. I fear reality is disintegrating.
I check for Vik. There he is, beside me, jaw knotted.
I glance behind me. Candace and Mirabel trudge at my heels.
Every few seconds, they scan the tunnel behind us for beasts.
Mirabel’s scans are workmanlike—no regret, no desire to return and help.
Candace’s linger. Each time she faces forward, turning her back on the deep room where Dr. Langmore is screaming, her frown is deeper and grimmer.
But she stays with us.
When, somehow, we reach the top of the steep stairs, we stand—Vik, Candace, Mirabel, and I—and pant, mindless with shock.
“The beasts,” I say. “The beasts are…”
Vik touches my back. “Norah.”
“Mirabel first,” I croak. “Me last.”
Mirabel climbs onto the skinny landing, and Vik and I give her our arms. She hoists herself onto the shelf, her grip on my forearm hard and impersonal. After she’s ducked and knelt up on the middle shelf, she nods to me. Then she shuffles through.
Candace next. “Bree!” she calls into the Archive. “Bree!”
When it’s just Vik and me, he searches the dark stairs behind us for beasts. Once he’s found it empty, he climbs through.
It’s Vik who helps me into the regular Archive—doors thrown open, people crowding in with loud voices and wild eyes, Bree pitched sideways in a chair with Candace bending over her. When the room dims and my legs fold, it’s Vik who catches me.