Flickerstate

Chapter Twenty-Three

That evening, I text Bree: Can we talk? The next morning, I text again: I’m sorry for how I acted after we lost. It was shitty of me. She leaves me on read.

I’m really sorry about Aria. On read.

I see Bree in Clinic B, where Dr. Langmore deposited the Clinic A teams eliminated in the trials, but she sits with Peyton and avoids my eyes.

Once, I bump into her in our block doorway—I’m coming in; she’s going out—and she flushes dark pink and darts around me down the hall before I can think what to say.

Sometimes, flopped in bed, I hear her talking with Candace in our common room. I could walk out and force a so sorry on her before she has time to dodge. But that would add insult to injury, I think. I leave her alone. When she wants my apology, she knows where to find me.

If she ever wants my apology.

***

Meanwhile, Griffin.

Between the last trial and the formal, I see him a bare handful of times. The trial winners are buried in the Archive, and I’m dodging human contact.

That said. He’s been texting me. A lot.

A blurry photo of a squirrel downward-dogging toward the Great Tree with the caption BESTIAL SATAN WORSHIP??? Memes involving Supergirl. Random questions about my life, which he calls “inquiries into my mysterious past.”

I don’t want to give him the wrong impression, to let him convince himself that I must be falling madly in love with Griffin Minter, Golden Boy.

The idea affronts my ego (I’m not his fangirl).

Besides, Vik’s stuck in my head like a song.

We’re not together anymore. So long as I’m bitten, we can’t be.

Even if we find the cure, I don’t know whether he’ll want me back.

But every time my phone buzzes, a stupid aching part of me hopes it’s him.

Still, I can’t ignore Griffin’s texts. I can’t make it weird.

Or make him suspicious. So now we have a whole thread going. Almost like we’re friends now.

Strange.

***

Meanwhile, meanwhile. Teaching Candace to league.

It’s a bitch.

The day after I show her my bite, she, Vik, and I gather before dawn in the clearing.

Clouds hide the stars, and my breath ghosts white in the black air.

I’m bundled into my thickest leggings and an oversize hoodie, but I shiver a little, pacing to keep warm, phone flashlight gripped tight in one cold hand.

Vik shows up a couple minutes after I do, i.e.

, a minute early. In a concession to the frosty weather, he’s wearing fingerless leather gloves and a knee-length black peacoat that emphasizes his long legs and broad shoulders.

By now, I’m so used to his faded tees and ripped jeans that his unexpected finery has me staring, deer in headlights.

Unfortunately, he notices. “You okay?”

“Nice coat,” I choke out.

He gets it. I see him get it. He stills, surprised. His gloved hands open and close, convulsively. I think, if I just stepped toward him—

Candace saves us from doing anything stupid.

She whirls down the footpath exactly on time, all faux-shearling jacket and cashmere scarf and embroidered designer beanie, and says without preamble, “You showed me leaguing. But I was thinking about it all night, and I’m still not sure what leaguing is.

So I’m going to need you to explain it in more detail. ”

“Uh,” I say. Because, well. Leaguing is one thing, but explaining…

I mean, in elementary school, I failed that classic assignment to write step-by-step instructions for assembling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I got so annoyed considering the nitpicky steps my teacher might demand we include (Do I have to remind the sandwich maker to keep breathing?

To keep standing? Wait, are they even standing, or are they sitting down to start?

Do I decide?) that I violently erased my entire anxious thirty-and-counting steps, scrawled JUST MAKE THE SANDWICH, YOU KNOW HOW across the ruler-lined paper, and handed it in with a challenging scowl.

Naturally, I spent the rest of the period in time-out, facing the wall, instructed to reconsider my bad attitude.

And that was a sandwich—not the weirdest, wildest, most widely considered impossible thing I’ve ever done.

I cast a beseeching look at Vik. Maybe he can step-by-step the impossible leaguing sandwich.

Our eyes lock. His expression mirrors mine: beseeching, dismayed.

The absurdity hits us. Eyes still locked, we start smiling, then laughing, at our shared helplessness.

After a minute, Vik gets a hold of himself and turns to Candace, who stands with her arms crossed, her platform oxford tap-tapping the ground, decidedly unamused by this little burst of hysterics.

“Let’s say navigation is like driving a car,” he says.

“If I channel to you, it’s like, instead of driving my own car, I drain the gas from my tank, pump it into your tank, and hop in your back seat.

Then you drive away. We’re sharing gas, and we’re in the same car, but you’re the one who decides where we go. ”

“Yes,” Candace says testily. “I have channeled. I understand channeling. Channeling is not the problem.”

“I’m just using it as a contrast case,” Vik says, not taking offense. “Because leaguing is like…we co-own a car. All our gas is in the same tank from the get-go. And when we drive, we’re both driving. Four hands on the wheel.”

“Here is where I run into problems with your analogy. With two drivers, how do you avoid jerking the wheel in two different directions and losing control of the car?”

Up to this point, counter to my usual bossy need to bust in and run any conversation that involves me, I’ve shut up and let Vik do the talking.

The—ugh, I wish I could use another word, but—the intimacy of our laughter has shaken me.

It’s one thing to admit to myself that, fine, I still find the blatantly hot guy attractive.

It’s another thing to keep stumbling into the knowledge that I, a person built of sharp edges and friction, can slide so easily into sync with this one specific other person.

But I can’t just stand around and freak out, leaving Vik alone to grope for a vocabulary of the inexpressible.

“When we league,” I say tentatively, “we don’t just share power. We share eyes.”

“Infinite eyes,” Vik murmurs.

“And not just eyes. A mind. Like we’re…surrendering our individual selves.”

He nods. “But the surrender leads to more control.”

“More control because we access this…unity. Unity of purpose, unity of power. Like…we-ness.”

Candace’s foot taps faster. An annoyed sigh hums in her throat.

I cringe a little. I mean, I get it. The girl finds rhythmic breathing too woo. I can’t expect her to embrace Yeah, if you could grow metaphorical infinite eyes, that would be great. “That might have been too vague,” I admit.

“You think,” she says.

“What about this. We already told you that the first time we leagued, it was an accident. We’d miscommunicated.

I thought Vik wanted me to channel him all my nav.

So I tried to. But he tried to channel me all his nav at the same time.

When the channels crashed into each other, the impact created this…

fusion. And we leagued. So maybe, instead of trying to league, you and I should try that. ”

Candace’s foot stops tapping. “I channel to you, you channel to me? Sure. That I understand how to do.”

I prop my phone against a rock, flashlight gleaming on our various footwear, and—after an obvious, awkward hesitation—extend my hand to her.

She takes it firmly and lowers her eyebrows at me: I’m over the fight. I won’t bite you; get out of your feelings and let’s do this.

“Right,” I say. “Um. Three, two, one—”

I hit the ground face-first, grass and blood in my mouth, night in my eyes as my flailing foot kicks over my propped-up phone.

Beside me, Candace retches dryly. “Well,” she gasps, “that didn’t work.”

I spit blood onto some dead leaves and gasp back, “Now try it with Vik.”

“Why would I do that?”

I roll over and blink at the clouded sky, barely lighter than the black canopy that frames it. “How do you see him in flickerstate?”

“Big-ass river.”

“And you’re a big-ass tree. Highly compatible nav concepts. He waters your roots, you stabilize his banks. So. Try the thing.”

She climbs to her feet, grumbling performatively about crazy blockmates, but she doesn’t say no.

Meanwhile, I sit up, wipe my mouth, and grab for my fallen phone, trying to suppress my sudden, inappropriate, insecure jealousy.

Because I’m right: They do have highly compatible nav concepts.

Much more compatible than mine with hers, or mine with his.

That’s a good thing, I remind myself. They’re the ones who have to search the Highwall Collection with leaguing. Unless and until you get a chance to join them, you’re just playing lookout.

Remember teamwork? Try to do it right this time.

All that matters is our plan. All that matters is the cure.

***

Cold, gray, misty days slide by. It’s December now, students scraping ghost or turkey decals from their dorm windows and slapping up snowflakes, penguins, and reindeer.

Each early morning when my alarm wakes me, I check my weather app and find the temperature has dipped another few degrees.

In the dark and frigid clearing, Vik, Candace, and I try to league again and again.

A week before the formal, Vik and Candace finally succeed.

They last two seconds, and I wonder whether they’ll get good enough in time.

The day before the formal, they league for a minute and summon a whole flock of white-throated sparrows, and I realize they actually might.

***

The formal starts at eight and ends at eleven.

At seven-thirty, I’m sitting on my bed, stiff as a mannequin.

Candace stands facing me, bent at the waist, expression dead serious as she does my makeup.

“You know,” I mutter through tense lips—it’s hard to relax when someone’s wielding a sharpened eyeliner pencil that close to your cornea—“I’m not sure this is necessary. ”

For my birthday—

Right. While Candace, Vik, and I were battering ourselves to bits trying to league and doing the planning-montage part of every heist movie, I turned eighteen.

I didn’t mention my milestone to anyone at the Academy.

Just like on Thanksgiving, I talked to my whole family: even Kev and Irene, who hate the phone and mumble aggressively; even Dad, who has a harder time speaking through his pain every day; even Mom, briefly, sadly.

That was going to be celebration enough.

Except that morning in the clearing, stars clear as diamonds in the frigid winter sky, Vik (awkwardly) handed me a book wrapped in brown paper and Candace added that her gift for me was up in our block.

And yeah, it was bad enough getting a copy of Shūsaku Endō’s Silence from Vik—how did he guess I wanted to read that particular novel before I maybe died?

—but later I found out that Candace had bought me an entire outfit for the formal because she’d noticed I’d packed one dress and no fancy shoes, and when I told her it was too much and that she had to take it back, she smirked and said she’d known I would be difficult, so she’d bought my gifts from a designer consignment store that didn’t do returns.

At which point I cried. Candace tactfully pretended I had something in my eye.

So now I’m wearing this dress, entirely on the Winter Formal’s Hollywood Glamour theme: dark red velvet with long, off-the-shoulder sleeves and a plunging back. Candace has piled my hair on top of my head and pinned it, baring my neck and shoulders.

“It’s necessary,” she says. “Don’t blink.”

I try not to blink—or breathe—while she tickles my lash line with the eyeliner pencil. When she draws back, I say, “I mean, do I need to glam this hard to, like, execute the mission?”

“Stop second-guessing my aesthetic vision and be grateful.”

“Thank you, Candace,” I say in a breathy voice. “I love your aesthetic vision, and you are always right.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Are you doing Marilyn? Don’t.”

“Where’s Bree anyway?”

“Studying. She claimed she couldn’t afford a fancy enough dress and begged off. When I offered to buy her a dress, she told me I wasn’t her sugar daddy. Which, rude. Now stop distracting me.”

When she finishes, she forms a rectangle with her thumbs and forefingers, frames me, and makes a shutter-click noise. “I’m a genius.”

Soon I’m admiring myself in my phone camera. Somehow Candace has a lipstick (Uncanny Burgundy, whatever that means) exactly matching the dress. I must say, I look good, but I can only gaze at myself for so long. “You nervous?” I ask, putting my phone away.

Candace leans against my dresser. “I’m ready to find out what happened to me. We can talk about the nervous-making logistics when Vik gets here.”

Like his name summoned him, Vik knocks on my bedroom door.

“Come in,” I call.

He enters and stops dead with his hand on the knob.

His black eyes drink me in: my burgundy mouth, my bare shoulders, my waist held tight by velvet that suddenly feels too warm despite the cool evening.

He’s dressed down as usual, in a faded T-shirt he’s outgrown and jeans with ripped knees, but the hot twist in my stomach tells me he looks better than any of the tuxed-up guys roaming campus right now.

His broad shoulders fill the doorway, and his hands—

Candace clears her throat.

Vik releases the knob finger by finger (his knuckles are white). “Yes?”

“Should we go over the plan one more time?” she asks.

“That’s why I’m here,” he says tightly.

“Norah?”

I look down at myself. I’m expecting to see my skin flushed red and sweaty like I’ve been standing inches from a bonfire, but no. When I brush a shaky hand down my sleeve, the velvet’s barely warm. “Yeah. Let’s talk. About the plan.”