Chapter Five #2
Before I can second-guess myself, I wave my hand in the air. “Dr. Langmore? Um, I’d really like to participate. Mind if I step in for Bree?”
Dr. Langmore raises an eyebrow, but she doesn’t protest when Bree flees to our table. I leap to my feet and walk toward the room’s center. As we cross paths, Bree whispers, “Thanks.”
“No problem,” I whisper back.
Soon I’m standing across from Mirabel. She gives me a look. Not exactly cold, more like, Are you sure you don’t want to run too?
I can’t beg off. I need to snag a third teammate for myself and Candace once we’ve (fingers crossed) passed the screening.
That means I need to impress people. I can’t let Mirabel define me, in our class’s eyes, as a helpless nav neonate she could murder with one good shake.
I give her my toothiest grin, the one I perfected during pickup basketball at the Y: Maybe you’re taller or faster or a better shot, but I swear to God I’m tougher.
“You have ten minutes to siphon your opponent,” Dr. Langmore says. “If there is no victor after ten minutes, you’ve stalemated. I’m going to count down from three, after which you should all enter flickerstate to watch the duel. Three, two, one—”
Mirabel’s eyes blank out. A bizarre pain overtakes me, like a fishhook lodged in my heart is reeling it out through my navel. I drop—I’m pulled—into flickerstate.
Futures unfold above me. All around me, my classmates are overlaid with their flickerstate manifestations: emerald vines, white-and-pink rosebushes, a gushing fountain, an astonishing balustrade of gold filigree.
In their center, overlaying Mirabel, stands an impossible cubist skyscraper—a screaming leap toward heaven. Sun flashes from infinite windows as it climbs, every room a future, every floor a choice-point, the building branching and branching.
And Mirabel, that skyscraper—it’s denaturing me.
Fire flees from me in a crimson rope that streaks Mirabel’s windows bloody as it vanishes into her grasping hands. Futures branch above us, lurid with red-on-steel shine. In almost every one, I crumple while Mirabel grabs the cards from the table.
While my throat gulps against bile, my mind casts around for a strategy, any strategy.
My nav department didn’t teach siphoning any more than Bree’s did. But my instructor did mention once that to siphon another person’s navigation, you need to come up with a tactic specific to how they manifest.
So, okay.
I’m fire. Mirabel has manipulated my nav, turning it into a rope of fire.
How does a rope topple a skyscraper?
It hits me. Mirabel and I are playing tug-of-war.
I’ll pull her down by force.
With a weird effort, I feel along my power’s outflow. And yank. Mirabel’s skyscraper tilts toward me with a metallic screech.
Then Mirabel rights her skyscraper, and it’s an all-out dogfight.
She’ll beat me. I know she will. The futures dancing overhead are reading me long odds, the branches where I collapse to the floor and Mirabel draws cards growing brighter, more definite.
Also, because I have so much less practice in flickerstate, my grip feels greased.
The rope slides through my hands. My fire thins, pales.
Blood drips from my nose down my throat, copper staining my tongue.
A tug on the rope. Mirabel stops pulling. Her silhouette has vanished within her skyscraper, whose windows glitter with fire, but while I can’t see her face, I know why she’s stopped pulling, what she’s trying to say: If you don’t struggle anymore, I’ll siphon you gently.
I swallow blood and pull as hard as I can.
Fire floods into me. The skyscraper blurs. The futures where I win, which were flat and bleached as paper, expand and brighten.
But I’ve overextended myself. Mirabel widens her stance and hauls back what she’s lost. My fire dims. My winning futures flatten and contract.
I fall out of flickerstate and onto my knees, snorting blood across the floor.
“Six minutes, thirteen seconds. A real duel.” Dr. Langmore sounds faintly surprised.
While Mirabel draws cards, I rock onto my heels, stand, and almost fall over. Someone grabs me. Bree. Whispering thank you, I stiffen until I’m standing straight, then shrug off her hands. I’m grateful she rushed to help me, but I can’t let future competitors see me looking weak.
Mirabel draws the ace through queen of clubs before failing on the king.
“Excellent,” Dr. Langmore says. “An excellent demonstration. Any questions? No? Then we’ll divide you up for more efficient dueling practice. Count off by threes.”
***
The first two weeks of classes zoom past in a crazed sprint.
I designed my senior schedule with an eye to winning a full-merit scholarship from a state school or acceptance to one of the Ivies, which have the best need-based financial aid.
That meant taking the hardest, most impressive workload I thought I could manage: AP U.S.
Government and Politics, AP Statistics, AP Physics, AP Spanish, AP Art History, Classic English Novels (Honors), and, of course, nav clinic.
I’d hoped that Art History and Classic English Novels would lighten my heavy schedule with a little fluff, but my Art History teacher wants us to memorize hundreds of slides of cave paintings, and Mr. John just assigned Clarissa, which is, no joke, 1,500 pages in paperback.
I get up at five every morning, but I’m still studying in my room till eleven every night.
And forget about sitting down for a meal: At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I run into the dining hall like my hair is on fire and run out clutching to-go coffee and whatever bagel is closest at hand, so I can wolf down some carbs over my endless, endless reading.
At some point, I should probably locate a vegetable.
But, to be honest, siphoning in nav clinic keeps me so perpetually queasy that I can’t stomach moist, high-fiber, and/or nutrient-dense foods.
I’ve gotten pretty good at the duels—it turns out, when I’m not pitted against a heavyweight like Mirabel, I tend to win—but I still have a Pavlovian nausea reaction to the kids in my regular siphoning group, presided over by Dr. Ortega.
Luckily, Candace is in Mr. Davis’s group; teaming up with her would be harder if her face made me want to hurl.
Mostly, I have too little time to freak out about the screening barreling toward me.
Except… Almost every night, bent with an aching back over the desk in my single, I hear Bree on the phone: “Yeah, Kayla, if I have time—no, please don’t—Mom didn’t mean it like that—”
It reminds me that my mom has called me exactly once since I came to the Academy, the Sunday after I got here. It reminds me that I didn’t pick up. And it reminds me why.
Her strained voice echoes in my ear: Sometimes you can’t do anything.
But I can. I’ll get through this screening. I have to.
Still. Despite how tired I am, it takes me a long time to get to sleep at night.
My heart just beats so fast.
Rabbit-scared.
***
The Friday of the screening, the Academy boils. It’s ninety degrees at dawn, and the sun grows more punishing as the day continues. I’m glad. Not that I love global warming generally, but the heat gives me an excuse when I walk into nav clinic sweating with fear.
As soon as the class has assembled, Dr. Langmore divides us into three new dueling groups—created, she tells us, by picking names out of a hat this very morning.
“If time permitted,” she informs us, “we would require every student to duel every other student in the interest of fairness. But such thoroughness would keep us here till midnight. And so much navigation, of such duration, in the same enclosed space, might attract…unwanted attention in flickerstate. So, unfortunately, logistical constraints have introduced an element of randomness into the proceedings.”
I’m in group three, Candace in group two. Dr. Ortega summons the threes to join him at the big room’s south end. As I set off, Candace and I nod to each other. Without speaking, we’ve agreed to scout prospective thirds for our team from whichever other kids pass the screening.
My group forms a circle around Dr. Ortega.
“We’ll start with a pair of duelists,” he says in his quiet, apologetic voice.
“The winner will duel until they lose, at which point the new winner will take challengers. Any student with a zero-loss or a one-loss record after ninety minutes will compete in the Archive trials. Afterward, my colleagues and I will rank all qualifying students by their win-loss record, the time it took them to siphon their opponents, and their post-duel card draws. Any volunteers to go first?”
“Me,” I say.
Ever since I lost to Mirabel on the first day of class, my brain has been whirring. When we manipulate our flickerstate concepts, we manipulate reality. In flickerstate, I’m a fire. How can I make that work for me in a siphoning duel?
I have ideas.
Dr. Ortega clears his throat. “Come stand by me. Anyone else?”
Rob Lesnik, a husky boy with a Southern accent thick as a brick, raises his hand and walks over.
This is it. The real competition. Can I beat Rob? Can I pass the screening?
Suddenly I’m standing at the free throw line, one point down, ten seconds on the clock.
I’ve been here before. But in the past, the crowd noise would dim, and the opposing players would fade.
The world would scope down to the pebbled orange ball in my hands and the basket in front of me.
That focus—it deserts me now. I keep remembering Dad’s legs like sticks under his blankets.
“Ready?” Mr. Ortega asks.
“Yeah,” Rob says.
My mouth is full of sand. I nod.
“Three, two, one—”
I’m partway into flickerstate when Rob starts cutting away my nav.
He blooms, a thicket of blades, like the goddamn Iron Throne of Westeros.
And to him I must be raw, red flesh, because he’s carving me like a butcher.
Metallic liquid drips down my throat, wetting my sandy tongue.
I’m wounded, I’m a wound, Dad’s eyes are wounds, Dad, screaming under the swarm—