Chapter Thirty-Two
Bree, another newly minted eighteen-year-old legally empowered to make her own bad decisions, checks herself out of the hospital.
She, Candace, and I find Vik and Mirabel at the hospital roundabout.
Candace orders us an XL rideshare back to campus, but the first two drivers cancel—guess they heard about the swarm at the Academy—and the third is twenty minutes away.
While we wait, Bree calls Kayla. I’m trying not to stare at Vik, so when Candace wanders off from the rest of the group and takes out her phone, I follow.
She’s frowning at a picture of herself and Griffin, flanked by a petite Asian woman and a leonine white guy with silvering blond hair. The guy’s hand rests possessively on Griffin’s shoulder. On his wrist is a two-tone gold watch, which must have cost more than Mom’s Corolla—
Recognition jolts me. But I keep quiet as Candace slides her phone into her pocket. She knows the ugly outlines of what her stepfather did. She doesn’t need to hear I spotted him in Dr. Langmore’s office the same day Jake escaped the Cruciform.
I slide my gaze sideways toward her—inviting eye contact but not forcing it. “You okay?”
She snorts. “A nightmare about fish woke me up at three a.m. this morning. I’ve had sixty-four ounces of coffee since then. My brain’s jiggling out of my skull.”
“Fish?”
“Hate them. Bulge-eyed monsters.”
“I was asking about—”
“I know.” She slumps.
“We don’t have to talk. I’m just checking in.”
“I should be checking in with you.”
“We went on one date. He’s been your brother since pre-K.”
She inhales, puffing her cheeks, and exhales like a deflating balloon. “Yeah. So I should have known.”
“He loves you. He was family.”
“I don’t know what saving my life did to Jake. I didn’t ask for that.”
“That’s why Griffin never told you the truth.”
“But what would I have done if they hadn’t saved me?”
“What I did.”
“Assembled a crack team? Not my brand.”
“I didn’t assemble a team. I tried to game the system; I quested around for a loophole. You and Vik and Bree—I lucked into you guys.”
“Selling yourself short.”
“Giving credit where credit’s due.”
Candace sighs and pushes her forehead into my shoulder. I rest my chin on her head. We stand, bracing each other, while we wait for our ride.
***
Campus bustles, swarming with rental cars and irate parents come to rescue their endangered darlings.
The last two weeks of the semester have been canceled.
I wonder whether we’ll take our final exams remotely.
Will we even come back next semester, or will the revelations about Dr. Langmore force the Academy to close?
At the moment, I’m too tired to guess. Or care.
The five of us trudge through Lucasson up to our block.
In the common room, we cluster on the hummingbird carpet.
Over Mirabel’s shoulder, through our window, the Great Tree lies felled, gnarled roots like helpless tentacles in the open air.
Where it used to stand, a dark hole punches into the snowy earth.
Nav Department officials swarm around it.
I shudder and look away.
“We should try it now,” Vik says, like we should all know what he’s talking about.
I suspect I do know, but I won’t jump to conclusions. “What?”
“A cure.”
My eyes leap to Mirabel.
“They told me you were bitten,” she says.
That’s ambiguous, of course. She could mean the hospital staff warned them when they came to visit—though surely it’s illegal for the hospital to hand out my medical information like lollipops to random fellow students? Or she could mean that Vik and Candace told her about my bite, the true story.
I’ve hesitated too long. Mirabel must have inferred by now that I’m uncomfortable with her having this information about me. She doesn’t reassure me, but she doesn’t make any smug, narrow-eyed microexpressions to lord it over me either.
“They told me about leaguing too,” she says.
Right.
“I, uh, haven’t thanked you,” I say. “For trying to stop Dr. Langmore.”
She shrugs tightly. “Don’t. I had to. It was the right thing to do.”
“And…is that why you’re here now? Why you’re helping with my…ongoing issue?”
An awkward silence descends on our group. We all want to know, I think, why Mirabel helped us and keeps helping us.
“I thought we were playing a fair game at the Academy,” Mirabel says slowly.
“I thought, by playing the Academy’s game, I would learn something important about life.
And become…better. That’s what my brother said.
” When she mentions her brother, emotions crack through her blank expression: hatred, respect, disappointment, fear.
“But the game was rigged—Dr. Langmore rigged it. And Griffin helped her. And the whole time, you guys were learning something real and powerful. That’s what I want to learn too. That’s why I’m here.”
There’s something pure logical, and utterly self-centered about Mirabel’s motives. It lends her a cool glow, like a marble statue no museumgoers are allowed to touch.
She ruins the effect when she mumbles, “Plus Candace asked me to come.”
I recall what Candace told me about Mirabel that first day at orientation: They used to talk, used to text. I recall how Mirabel disliked me for showily defending Candace when Mirabel had been trying to defend Candace too, in a subtler, less in-your-face fashion.
Maybe Mirabel never resented me for “stealing” her ex—despite Candace’s speculations, she never really seemed that hung up on Griffin. Maybe she resented me because she felt like I’d stolen her friend.
I keep my thoughts off my face. I’m curious about Mirabel’s inner workings, sure, but right now my life depends on what she does, not why she’s doing it.
“I’m grateful for all your guys’ help,” I say. “Seriously.”
Bree smiles. “You’re welcome.”
Mirabel rolls her eyes. “Don’t thank us till we’ve actually done it.”
“I’m grateful you agreed to try,” I say.
She looks thrown, like I’ve wrong-footed her by acting less than bitchy.
“This is going to take serious energy,” Candace says. “Shall we load up on snacks, rest, and reconvene in an hour?”
The group breaks apart. I trudge into my single, close the door, and flop onto my bed.
My phone rings.
It’s Griffin.
***
I hesitate.
But I hit accept.
“Am I seriously your one phone call?” I ask.
Griffin snorts, the sound distant and crackling. “I’m in federal custody, but they’re mostly worried about keeping me from navigating. They let me call whoever I want.”
I stare at my ceiling. “Then stop screwing around. Talk to your sister.”
“You think I didn’t try? She’s not picking up.”
“Oh. If she’s not interested in what you have to say, I won’t play messenger girl.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
I sink a little deeper into the thin mattress. I feel unbearably weary. “At this point…why?”
He inhales loudly, like I gut-punched him. For a few seconds, I just hear him breathing. Then he says in a rush: “I didn’t know Jake would die. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Do you believe me?”
Sadness knifes me. “What—what kind of answer are you looking for here?”
“The truth.”
“The truth?”
“Yes.”
I cover my eyes and speak into darkness. “You didn’t know. You suspected. But most of the time, you could hide your suspicions from yourself, because of how badly you needed Candace to live.”
In my ear, a choked laugh. “You really never give me an inch. So, what, you think you’re better than I am?”
The truth. “I’m luckier.”
“Remember that,” he says. “But also—I think, if we’d met under different circumstances, you could’ve been really good for me. Bye, Norah.”
He ends the call.
I lie there, heartsick, thinking about all the ways I’ve been lucky. About the people who’ve been good for me. About the people I want to be good for.
I stand up and text Vik: Come talk to me?
***
A few minutes later, Vik slips into my single.
Suddenly, we’re alone in a small room that smells of citrus floor cleaner and my shampoo.
The situation fills me with animal unease.
He feels so present: the space his body carves out of the air, his black hair curling against his neck, the slow sound of his breath.
I could cross the distance between us in one long step.
But I’m scared to. If I move toward him, I’m almost sure he’ll meet me halfway—but who knows better than a navigator that almost sure isn’t certain?
Maybe he won’t want me back.
That would make a fitting punishment for me, a fitting end to my story with him.
Me wanting, him turning away. Just to put a pin in the lesson I’ve been painfully learning since beasts swarmed me and Dad: You can’t achieve everything alone.
You are not an island, entire of itself.
Sometimes, despite your strength and cunning, you find yourself as horridly dependent on other people—on friends, acquaintances, and strangers—as you were when you were a smelly baby.
And sometimes your neediness won’t summon, won’t merit, the help or friendship or love you’re inwardly begging for.
But sometimes it will.
I make a sad, muffled, tiny, yearning noise.
He lifts his head and examines my face, a question in his eyes.
“I don’t care about your bite,” he says quietly. “I mean—I care about curing you. More than anything. What I’m saying is, I want to be with you. Bite or no bite. For however long it takes to cure you. And after that too. So do you want…”
I can’t speak. I just nod.
We meet halfway.
***
It takes me, Vik, Candace, Bree, and Mirabel ten hours, three snack runs, uncountable nosebleeds, and one vomit break in our previously pristine block bathroom to manage a five-person league.
Afterward, the experience of that much power drops through my mind like fine flour through a sieve—or maybe, I think with a shiver of nauseated memory, like molten steel through sand.
Once it’s over, I can’t remember what it’s like to have that many eyes, what we saw as we.
But my bicep is bare and smooth—except for thirteen small white scars.
“Holy shit,” Candace says succinctly.