Chapter Thirty-Two #2
Mirabel stares at my healed arm, entranced less by my new lease on life, I think, than by the fleshly proof of what leaguing can accomplish.
I don’t blame her for that. She and I aren’t friends.
And she just helped dramatically reduce the probability that I die an early death.
And I’m about to ask her—ask all of them—for another miracle.
Mirabel drops Vik’s hand and Candace’s. Bree drops mine, but she doesn’t let go of Candace.
And Vik doesn’t let go of me.
I thread my fingers tighter through his. “How do you guys feel about road trips?”
***
While I wait in the parking lot near Admissions, cold fists shoved deep into my pockets, for Mom to arrive, I wonder whether my new, five-person team will be able to do it—to cure Dad.
Highwall built a team of navigators, first her longtime friends Miura and Lucasson, then her young recruits De Soto and Langmore.
They leagued together. They cured Highwall.
Then they broke. They lost unity. When they tried to claw back the power they’d let slip—building the Cruciform from Lucasson’s beast research, Langmore’s engineering know-how, and all their cunning—the machine went horribly wrong.
Miura died. Highwall wanted to dismantle the thing, but Langmore…
Langmore must have pretended to destroy it, saved its parts, and reassembled it after Highwall’s death, when the last person who might guess what was occurring in the Academy’s bowels was gone.
I think about it. Me, Vik, Candace, Bree, Mirabel. Young, hopeful, and powerful.
We don’t have to end up like Highwall’s team. We won’t.
***
When Mom’s Corolla pulls into the parking lot, I make sure I push my left sleeve up. The new scars from my healed bite stand out white and shiny. She parks, and I hurry to the driver’s door. As she opens it, I thrust out my arm. “Mom, look.”
She takes my wrist in a trembling hand. She absorbs my scars, lit by an LED on a pole two parking spaces over. Her faces thaws from an icy despair to a painful hope.
“How?” she asks.
“A lot of people helped,” I say. “But, Mom, the cure’s not monstrous. Or—it doesn’t have to be.”
She starts weeping silently. Shaking. And I think how wretched this fourteen-hour drive must have been for her, convinced she was speeding down the interstate away from her dying husband toward her dying daughter.
I want to hug her. I will. But first I need to ask her a question.
“Mom,” I say, “could we fit six people in the Corolla?”
She stops shaking, going rigid with visible effort. “Not safely. If you’re okay driving it home, I could always rent a van. Why?”
I call Jo. When she answers, I put her on speakerphone.
“Did you do it?” she asks right away.
“I did,” I say. “Mom, tell her.”
“The bite’s h-healed.” Mom’s voice cracks on the last word.
“Now I’m coming home with my friends.” I meet Mom’s exhausted, watering eyes. “And we’re going to cure Dad.”
***
We leave the Academy in our rearview mirrors before sunrise and turn onto my street in St. Louis well after sunset.
Over the course of the drive, Vik, Mirabel, and Bree take turns calling their families and explaining—or lying about—where they are.
(Candace makes no calls. As she puts it, “I can do whatever I want. My parents have lost the moral authority to order me around.”) As our Corolla and the minivan rental park on the street outside my house, Jo comes onto the front landing in an old red sweater of mine, SAINT CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA sweatpants, and woolly socks.
Since I last saw her in August, she’s grown an inch and thinned out painfully, cheeks hollow, clothes bagging.
It hits me: Yeah, it was hard for me to leave Dad, but it must’ve been hard for Jo to stay, watch him shrink and sicken, hear his nightmare screams—and wait for me to come back.
She watches my companions pile onto the sidewalk with a guarded expression.
She knows they’re here to help, but she doesn’t trust them yet. She doesn’t trust easily anymore.
When I climb from the Corolla, though, she runs down the steps, past the dead tulip plot where Dad got bitten, across the tiny brownish lawn, right into me. I squeeze her hard; she squeezes back.
My friends watch us with unease or envy. Candace, Bree, Mirabel, even Vik. Siblings are complicated for a lot of people, I guess.
Jo grabs my hand. “Come on.”
She leads me into the house, smaller and more cluttered than I remembered: low popcorn ceiling, tables piled with bills and junk mail, worn chintzy furniture crowding the floor. When my friends follow us inside, I’m almost embarrassed—but no. I’m not doing that. This is my home.
Jo keeps pulling me.
Into Dad’s room.
He’s in bed, slumped against his headboard, a newspaper flopped unread across his lap. Red-stained bandages mummify his torso. His lips are chapped, his breath thin and whistling.
When he sees me, he lights up. His old playfulness crosses his face. He’s about to spit out a truly awful dad joke, I can tell.
Coughs seize him, rattling his throat, choking him.
I don’t speak. I can’t. I do what I did with Mom—roll up my sleeve and show him my scars.
He stares at the scars, at me. His eyes are bloodshot. But proud. So proud. “You did this,” he manages to say.
Footsteps sound softly behind me. Vik, Candace, Bree, and Mirabel file into the room.
“We did this,” I tell Dad. “We will again.”
“Even if you can’t—” Coughs interrupt him.
Jo shuffles away from me, making room. Vik takes my right hand, Candace my left. Mirabel and Bree step in beside them.
I can picture the future we want so clearly: Dad’s bandages gone, his bites scarred, healthy flesh filling out his gaunt torso. His voice returning, his awful jokes returning.
Dad standing tall again. Six feet five inches.
We’ll heal other people too. Teach other navigators to do what we do. Vik will use his power to help, Candace will set the bite cure free, Bree will research navigation’s bleeding edge, Mirabel will learn something real and powerful, and I—
I’m not even sure what I’ll do. But for the first time since beasts swarmed me, the future doesn’t scare me.
“I promise,” I tell Dad. “We can.”
We drop into flickerstate and begin.