Chapter Thirteen
When I skid into the dining hall, skinny underclassmen are staring at a whiteboard by the nearest window. I walk over. They notice me, trade wide-eyed glances, and scatter.
My new reputation precedes me.
The whiteboard looks like the one in clinic, except someone has inked in the first trial’s winners. We’ll compete against Team Six in the second trial: Zipporah, Amber, and Layla.
While I collect my dinner, more students filter in. I snag a seat and spot Vik. I’m about to wave when Griffin thumps his plate on my table: grilled chicken, hamburger, pork chop, and salmon. Overkill in several senses.
He spots my grimace. “Vik and I lifted earlier, Miss Judgmental. I earned this protein. I wanted to ask—”
“I’m sure your question will be fascinating—”
“My questions always are.”
“—but I’m here for a mentor-transfer dinner. Two-person deal.”
“Vik will want me here.” Griffin cuts his salmon with his fork. “He thinks I’m awesome.”
“He’s never mentioned that to me.”
Griffin pops some salmon into his mouth and swallows. “He’s a chronic understater of his true feelings. And he’s worried that if he sings my praises as I deserve, you’ll call off the wedding and elope with me instead.”
“Your obsession with my marital status alarms me, as I am but a maid of seventeen.”
“Good thing my question’s about something else.” He leans toward me, propping his shoe on the lowest rung of my chair. “When your nav showed up, did beasts manifest?”
I freeze.
Vik walks up to the table, backpack hanging from one shoulder. His eyes flick to Griffin’s shoe on my chair.
“Your blockmate crashed,” I tell him.
He hangs his backpack from the last empty chair and sits. “I see that.”
“I’m not crashing,” Griffin says. “I’m gracing you with my presence. You haven’t answered my question, Norah.”
“Nope,” I say.
“Are you planning to?”
“You misunderstand. You asked a yes/no question, and my answer is—nope. No beasts when my nav manifested.” Hey, I’m not Vik. I’ll lie if I have to.
Griffin squints at me. “Disappointing.”
“I was not disappointed in the slightest.”
“Not disappointing for you. But we already know powerful navigation attracts beasts. I have this theory beasts manifest when powerful navigators first access their abilities, too. You’ve poked a hole—” Griffin startles happily and throws up an arm. “Hey, guys, come sit with us.”
I twist in my chair. Candace and Mirabel have paused in the runway between the left and right seating areas.
After a second Candace swerves toward our table.
It’s unusual for her to take suggestions from Griffin, even friendly ones—so she must feel weird about one-on-one mentoring from the girl who blabbed about her bites.
Mirabel marches after Candace with her plate in a tendon-flexing grip, like she can barely refrain from mashing it into someone’s face. Mine, I guess?
Candace slides her plate onto the table. “Scooch, Griff. And get us some chairs.”
“I’m a feminist,” Griffin says. “I truly believe you can get your own chairs.”
“We won’t all fit,” Mirabel says. “Candace and I should go.”
“Fine. Act out your internalized sexism and bully me.” Griffin hops from his chair. “Take mine, Mir. I’ll find some for myself and Candy.”
But Mirabel’s right: Five chairs won’t fit around the bar top. Besides, what if she graduates from staring daggers at me to sprinkling arsenic on my chicken? “Candace can take mine,” I say. “I’m finished.”
Right away, Mirabel brushes past Griffin and hops into his vacated seat.
“Thanks, babe,” Candace says to me with mild irritation, miffed I’ve abandoned her to Team Three’s tender mercies.
“Anything for you,” I say. Then I circle toward Vik. “Hey, you have the thing?”
He unzips his backpack and pulls out Philosophy of Navigation. “Here.”
Griffin, loitering near the table, freezes when he sees the cover. “Is that Jake’s?”
Vik zips up his backpack. “It was.”
Griffin flinches like someone jabbed him in the kidney. Mirabel scowls. Candace—noting their reactions—flexes an eyebrow at me.
I shove the book under my arm and grab my plate. “Gotta bus this. Bye.”
***
Back in my single, I thump Philosophy of Navigation onto my desk: gray dust jacket, white title in a conservative font. Aggressively boring-looking. Nothing explains its bad vibes—except that it belonged to Jake, he who maybe interfered.
It belonged to Jake. So what? Lots of people commit acts of heinous evil while also owning books. That doesn’t make the books evil.
I sit down and flip to the beginning.
Unfortunately, the first three chapters match the cover: dull, dull, dull. And I’ve been getting far less than the recommended eight hours of sleep. My head droops toward the pages. Each time I blink, my eyes open more slowly, until…
***
I stand in the dark, in the cold, in the woods. Wind tosses the trees, branches groaning. A withered leaf tumbles through the air past my face.
A crack overhead. Loud as snapped bone.
A blunt object strikes my skull—
***
I jolt upright and clutch my head, groping for bloody hair, a split scalp, a bruise.
Nothing.
The agony splitting bone and brain—it evaporates. I notice a crick in my neck, a knotty ache in my back. I must’ve fallen asleep reading: I’m at my desk, and a dime of drool on Philosophy of Navigation’s open page suggests I used it as a pillow.
Another death dream.
Goddamnit.
***
Monday morning, when I walk across campus, a gleaming red band divides the dark earth from the dark sky.
Birds trill in the trees, and the humid air smells rich, like grass and dew and pine.
I wish I could take comfort in all this natural beauty, but it does jack for me.
Panic and rage multiply inside me like blood cells, circulating through me, rising to the surface of my skin.
In the clearing, Vik sits on a rock, scrolling through his phone. Its backlight throws pallor across his face.
“Did you and Jake try to league?” I ask.
Vik slides his phone into his pocket. The clearing darkens. “No.”
“But the book belonged to him. And he wrote notes in the chapters about leaguing. Unless that was you. But I saw a lot of triple exclamation marks, and you don’t strike me as a triple-exclamation-mark kind of guy.”
“I’m not. Jake was interested in…pushing the boundaries of nav research.”
“So what’s the deal? I want to know…” I wave my arms, conveying the vagueness and enormity of all I want to know.
Vik stares at his boots. “Jake’s who I was looking for, when I ran into you in Admissions last spring.
Campus security found him in the woods the next day.
Confused, dehydrated. No memory of the past twenty-four hours.
At first we thought he might come back next year, but then Admin announced he’d dropped out. ”
That explains why Vik shut down when he saw me in the dining hall my first day. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about the memory of Jake.
“After they found Jake,” Vik continues, “his stuff vanished from our room. His clothes, his computer, his posters. All his books, too—except three he’d stashed under a floorboard in our closet. It was like he left them for me to find. And now he’s dead.”
In a nearby tree, a bird sings a flirtatious arpeggio, so inappropriate to the moment it sounds mocking. “Dead?” I say. “What?”
“This summer, Jake died in his sleep. I only know because his parents called to tell me. Sudden massive heart attack, the autopsy said. But that seems improbable, right? And…”
Each time Vik says “and,” I feel like we’re standing on stairs that descend someplace lightless and cold, and he’s tugging me down another step.
“…I think the night Jake disappeared, someone navigated me.” In the half-light, Vik’s eyes are shadows, his cheeks caves.
“How—” I cough. “How could you tell?”
“We went to a party. Me, Jake, Griffin, Mirabel. It was the Friday before spring break, so every senior with a fake threw a party. And I—I’m not a puritan.
I’ll take a beer. One. Getting drunk doesn’t do much for me.
That night, though, a voice in my head was whispering, Finish it, have another, finish it, have another.
I blacked out. The next morning, I woke up on my bed still wearing my boots.
Jake was gone. He hadn’t slept in his bed, and he wasn’t answering texts.
I went looking for him—that’s when I ran into you—but I haven’t seen him since. ”
My skin creeps. “Why—who would have wanted you out of commission?”
“No idea. Maybe I’m paranoid, and there was no interference, and I just decided to get wasted for once. But I’d watch out for people acting…improbably.”
Vik really believes interference could still be going on at the Academy.
If it is, Jake was framed—or he had accomplices.
My sympathetic nervous system revs like a sports car, zero to sixty, vision tunneling, ears ringing.
But I can’t panic; I have to breathe deep and handle shit.
“You found three books. I read one. What were the other two?”
“An unauthorized biography of Highwall and a book on navigation pseudoscience.”
“Navigation pseudoscience?”
“Fringe stuff.”
“Fringier than interference and leaguing?”
“I’m talking…UFOs. Alchemy. Perpetual motion machines.”
My ears keep ringing. I try to think through the phantom noise.
“I’ve read Highwall biographies before, and UFOs won’t help us.
Let’s focus on Philosophy of Navigation.
The chapters on leaguing were super abstract, but they agreed it would require shared flickerstate concepts and, uh, ‘maximal unity of purpose.’”
Vik nods. “I saw fire and gold when we banished the beasts. You?”
“Same.”
“What about ‘unity of purpose’?”
“I wanted the beasts gone. I assume you did too.”
He raises his eyes to the reddening trees. A shard of sunrise glints in each pupil. “The spidery one was going to bite somebody. Our teachers weren’t moving fast enough.”
His words squeeze my throat. Because he’s right: The supposed adults in the room weren’t going to save us.
“Thanks,” I say. “For coming to help.”
His forehead knits. “Of course.”
No “of course” about it. When every other student was too petrified to move, he walked into striking distance of a beast to lend me power. It was uncalled-for and idiotic and brave.
“I mean…” He looks lost. “We’re friends. Right? I don’t have that many.”
I wonder whether he’d want to be my friend if he knew about the wound under my sleeve. If he knew about my dreams.
Maybe. Maybe he’d be brave then too.
“Me neither,” I say. “Yeah, we’re friends.”
He smiles, sudden and brilliant in the hazy half-light. “Shared concepts. Unity of purpose. Want to try again?”