Flickerstate

Chapter Fifteen

Thursday evening before the second trial, we vote to make Candace our main navigator. When I raise my hand, my fingers tremble. I almost beg my teammates to reconsider: My fire hurts you, but we know it works. Can’t you white-knuckle through the pain for the W?

I bite my cheek hard. Bree won’t change her mind.

And Candace will have noticed my shaking fingers.

I don’t want to blow my lid and give her a better look at the roiling terror underneath.

I don’t want to undermine her confidence with my fear.

Navigation’s always a game of chance, I suppose.

I’ve got to bet on Candace now. Go all in with her for real.

“All right, then,” she says after a pause, looking at me.

She was giving me time to freak-out. She wanted to know whether I’d go back on my word. Another test. I can’t resent it: I almost failed.

I grin unsteadily. “Kill it.”

She gives me a prim smile. “I intend to.”

“Now that’s decided, can we practice?” I say. “I need to perfect my solar power. Don’t want to give you guys blistering sunburns tomorrow. For the ninth time.”

Bree laughs out loud. Soon we’re all laughing, a little hysterical, but real and warm. It feels like solidarity. Like friendship.

Like the calm before a hurricane.

***

On Friday, I blink awake before my alarm. Sleep has not refreshed me. I had nightmares again. Ugly, jumbled images.

Triangular teeth kissing my bicep.

Mom and Jo staring down at me where I’m trapped in a deep well. Me clawing at the slick stone walls till my nails bleed, screaming for help. Them not moving, tears running down their blank faces.

Dad dying every death I saw in flickerstate. His skull crushed like a deflated basketball. His mouth foaming pink. His fingers clawing his shirtfront while he topples onto his face.

My hands feel numb. I delete every second letter as a typo when I text Vik: Keep our meeting this time?

I drop the phone to my chest and stare at the dark ceiling. I’ve been running on fumes for weeks. I should be conserving the dregs of my energy for the trial. Why make plans to fail at leaguing for the umpteenth time?

Because Vik’s my friend. Because…

My phone buzzes on my sternum. The vibration fizzes my heartbeat.

Sure thing, he’s texted back.

When I walk into the clearing ten minutes later, he’s already there. He angles his flashlight so it illuminates me without blinding me. “You okay?”

I glance down. It’s habit now to check my clothes for blood in response to questions like that. In the low light, my white shirt glows ghostly.

“You just looked upset,” he says.

“That’s my lapidary face.”

“What?”

“Lapidary. It means—”

“Like something carved from stone. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Do you have a class nickname?”

“Afterthought.”

I stare at him. “I don’t get it.”

“Griffin is Golden Boy. Mirabel’s Resident World Controller. Jake… Jake was Mad Scientist. Big personalities. I hang out with them, but I’m not like that. I’m the afterthought.”

I have low expectations of other people. Meanness rarely surprises me. But this piece of stupid cruelty makes me want to punch a tree. “You were front of someone’s mind. Otherwise, they couldn’t have been such a bag of dicks to you.”

Vik laughs. “It’s not a big deal. I know what I’m like. Is that what’s bothering you, that they’re calling you intense?”

“You heard that one.”

“Griffin told me.”

“Griffin probably started it.” Boy loves his nicknames. Maybe he decided Supergirl was too nice.

“I doubt it,” Vik says. “Every time he hears someone trying out names for Candace, he shuts them down hard.”

“I’m not his sister.”

“Uh. Very true. But if he started the ‘intense’ thing, he meant it as a compliment.”

“When someone calls a girl like me intense, it’s never a compliment.” I sigh and rub my face. “But no, that’s not what’s bothering me.”

“Then what?”

I wonder how honest to get. I shouldn’t show my throat to a competitor…but I can’t imagine Vik using what I say against me.

“I siphoned Candace and Bree during the last trial,” I say in a rush. “They’ve forgiven me, but I don’t deserve it, and I’m sleeping like shit, and I—I’m tired. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired.”

“Want to go back to the dorm and sleep?”

I strain to hear pity in his voice. I can’t find it, only concern.

He cares how I’m doing. When was the last time anyone cared more about how I was doing than what I was achieving?

Even I don’t care. However I’m doing, I keep grinding myself to the bone.

I want to cry from fear, exhaustion, self-pity.

But I can’t fall apart. I stiffen up, straining till my knotted muscles ache.

“I’d rather push through. Let’s league.”

In the half dark, it’s harder than usual to parse his non-expression. “All right. How do you want to try it this time?”

I don’t want to mess around with cards or dice. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of games.

An invisible bird twitters in the trees. It gives me an idea. “What if we nav to a future where a bird comes out, lands in the middle of the clearing?”

Vik’s teeth flash in the dim. “Summoning bluebirds. Like we’re jointly Cinderella.”

“Not a bluebird. A cardinal, in honor of the country’s best baseball team. And why not jointly Cinderella?”

“No, I like it. Shall we?” He holds out his hand.

I lace my fingers through his. His thumb brushes over my tense knuckles.

“Let’s find you a cardinal,” he says. “Three, two, one—”

I give him everything I have: fear, resentment, rage, determination, grief. No careful parceling out of nav. No rhythmic breathing. No strategy. Like a trust fall but less controlled, like life has cut my legs from under me and I need him to bear my whole weight.

I know he can do that for me. He’s done it before. And I believe, with my entire heart, that he’s willing to do it again.

He meets me gift for gift.

We open our eyes onto infinite rooms, burning and limned in gold, each one a world.

In many rooms, birds fly from their hiding places into the clearing.

They alight on tufty grass, on flat rocks, on our shoulders like we really are Cinderella.

Some are small, some plump. Black, brown, iridescent green.

But we’ve agreed on a cardinal—so we bend our will toward the distant world where a winged scrap of red lands in the grass, pecks the ground, and flutters into the woods.

Our nav rushes into that world and lights it up, incandescent.

Power flows from us. We fall out of flickerstate.

I’m one person again, Norah, gripping the hand of another person, Vik, while predawn gray creeps up the sky. The shift from we to I with you spins my head so badly that I forget what I’m waiting for.

A winged scrap of red lands in the grass. It pecks the ground and flutters into the woods.

Choked noises from Vik—laughter, almost soundless. “We did it.”

I’m sweating through my shirt, my legs tremble like they might fold, and I feel so good, good like I haven’t felt since beasts swarmed my front yard. For a second, I bask in that feeling.

Then, because I am who I am, I ask, “Any idea why it worked this time?”

“I—” He looks embarrassed. “I wanted you to get your bird.”

He hasn’t let go of my hand. His damp hair clings to his forehead; his damp T-shirt (emblazoned with a faded Vermont flag, cow and all) sticks to his chest. We accomplished the impossible for the second time, not because lives were in danger but because I looked wretched and I asked to see a cardinal and he wanted to make it happen for me.

I stumble forward and kiss him.

After a shocked second, his arm slides around my waist. He pulls me into him till he’s bearing my whole weight.

His hand knotted in my hair, his mouth hot on my mouth—

I melt. Liquid and burning. Molten gold.

***

My bite throbs beneath my sleeve. Dad’s not healed. I care about those things, I do. I’ll feel their drag soon, like rocks in my pockets while I struggle not to drown.

But today I float. I float through breakfast, classes, lunch, and more classes, smiling at my coffee, the AP Physics whiteboard, the imperfect-vs.

-preterit review sheet in AP Spanish. Elena, handing out the sheets, contemptuously asks whether I’m that horny for grammar.

I smile and say yes, I am, I am that horny for grammar; thank you for asking.

When I walk into clinic, Candace stands alone at the inner circle of tables. She’s wearing a black velvet skirt suit, poised as Madame X.

I float to her. “Dressed for murder. Nice.”

She looks at me sidelong. “You’re jazzed. I thought you’d walk in here like you were headed to the hangman.”

“If I trust anyone to get shit done, it’s you.”

“Key word: if. Your nickname should have been Control Freak,” she says—but she sounds fond.

“Yours should’ve been Mastermind. I see you, maneuvering us all.”

Her face splits into a wolfish smile. “I like that. You can call me that from now on.”

“Yes, ma’am. Also, I love your outfits and you’re the very prettiest.”

“Too far—you sound like the drunkest girl in the ladies’ room.”

Griffin and Mirabel choose this moment to walk past us. Griffin’s lips twitch, and Mirabel darts a baffled glance our way.

So much for striking fear into my enemies’ hearts.

***

Vik arrives on time. Since everyone else came early, Dr. Langmore and Dr. Ortega have already divided us up, Dr. Langmore with Vik’s team and Antoine’s at the room’s north end, Dr. Ortega with my team and Zipporah’s at the south.

Vik hurries north. I beam at his back. I must look goofy as hell, and that bothers me, but not as much as I would’ve expected.

When I turn back to my group, Bree wiggles her eyebrows at me. Luckily, no one else was paying attention.

The trial is what we predicted: a main navigator casting an occlusion over their team, while the other two teammates channel back to the main navigator.

Whichever team can hold their occlusion longest wins.

Zipporah’s team goes first. I expect her to be their navigator, but it’s her quiet blockmate, Amber Rashid, who steps forward, so nervous that the bracelets piled on her skinny wrists rattle as she reaches for Zipporah’s and Layla’s hands.

Dr. Ortega pulls up the stopwatch app on his phone. “Three, two, one.”

I don’t dip into flickerstate and check out Amber’s occlusion.

In flickerstate, every occlusion is the same swirling shadow column from the outside.

In the real, Amber, Zipporah, and Layla stand like sleepwalkers while dark patches of sweat spread under their arms. Around minute eight, blood slides from Amber’s nostrils, mixing with her lip gloss.

A minute after that, she pitches forward and pukes Pepto-Bismol across the floor.

“Nine minutes, two seconds,” Dr. Ortega says. “Ready, Team Eight?”

“One moment.” Candace pulls a folded piece of plastic from her satchel. When she shakes it out and shrugs it on, I realize it’s a translucent rain jacket. She must have brought it to protect her game day getup from bodily fluids.

I smile at the unhinged logic: Sure, wear plastic sheeting over a velvet suit to a magic duel if that’s your power pose. Bree giggles. When Candace holds out an imperious hand to each of us, we grin like loons as we link up.

Dr. Ortega blinks at us behind his glasses. “You’re ready now?”

“Correct,” Candace says in a passable imitation of Dr. Langmore.

He laughs. “Okay. Three, two, one—”

As I slip into flickerstate, an idea hits me.

When my team decided I should manifest as a red sun, I instinctively imagined one of the Academy’s inferno sunsets: rage against the dying of the light, pelting Candace with photons like subatomic flames.

It worked in the short-term, but after awhile it was always too much.

The occlusion dissolved when I burned her out.

But this morning—after Vik and I finally stopped kissing, wide-eyed and laughing when we realized we were late for breakfast—we hiked up the footpath in the hibiscus-red light of an October sunrise, warm and gentle on our faces.

I could be that sun instead.

As Candace’s occlusion forms around us—impenetrable shadows to outsiders, a living wall of branches to our team within—I shine softly, painlessly on her ivy-wrapped sycamore.

Channeling like this isn’t a desperate, flaring effort. It’s like breathing.

I glow. Bree stays solid. Candace, drawing on us, holds the occlusion.

And holds it. And holds it.

***

All good things end. My sun vaults too high, burns too hot. Bree’s trellis droops. Candace’s wall of branches dries out and dies. When we slip from flickerstate, drenched like dunk-tank volunteers, Dr. Ortega announces, “Ten minutes, thirty-three seconds.”

Bree squeals and throws her arms around Candace.

Candace laughs. “My ribs, Bree; my ribs are important to me—”

Smiling hard, I push sweaty hair off my forehead and look for Vik.

I hope he saw us win—saw me act like a team player, grow as a person, all that razzle-dazzle.

I hope he’s thinking that he liked me already, and he likes me more now, and he wants to have dinner with me tonight, sitting at a cramped bar top, our knees brushing under the table.

Near door 12, Vik and Antoine are shaking hands.

With a sharp drop in my stomach, like I’ve put my foot through a rotten stair, I remember the other reason kissing Vik was a bad idea.

My eyes ricochet around the scene: Jacqueline shrugging, Jae smiling resignedly, Griffin whooping and sweeping Mirabel off her feet.

They won. Vik’s team won.

They’re my final competition.