Chapter Twenty-Four
I’m meeting Griffin at eight. When I slip out of my block, leaving Candace and Vik in my single, he’s standing at the end of the hall by the window. The night frames his profile in soft black, while the ceiling lights cast a halo around his bright hair. His tuxedo fits perfectly.
I’ve never seen a boy in a tux that fits. He must own it. Wild.
His lips purse in a silent whistle. “You clean up nice.”
I snort. “What are you implying about how I looked before?”
“Nothing, but this—” He frames me with his thumbs and forefingers, like Candace did earlier. “This is something else.”
Griffin and Candace share an aura of wealth and assurance, but the two of them are otherwise so different—Griffin boyish and outgoing, Candace sardonic and self-contained—that you could forget they grew up together.
Except, every so often, they copy each other’s vocal tics and use each other’s gestures.
Their similarities make me fonder toward Griffin, but uncomfortable too, because I have to wonder: What does Griffin know about Candace’s cure? What has he guessed?
I shake off my disquiet and mime a curtsey. “We aim to please.”
He laughs—“Since when?”—and holds out a bent elbow. I wrap my hand around his arm. He’s flexing. I’d call him out, except I can’t think of how to do it without admitting that yeah, he’s jacked, so I forbear.
We descend the stairs and stroll out of Lucasson onto the cold, dark quad, lit here and there by iron lamps.
When we reach the dining hall, a messy line of students in formal wear spills from the propped-open main doors, past the bare-branched redbud, onto the frosty grass.
Waiting to offer their tickets to whatever volunteer is checking them, I assume.
“I’ll peek inside, see how long we’ll be waiting,” Griffin says.
As he meanders up the line, kids clear a path for him like magic. I pull my phone from my dress’s skirt pocket and text Vik: Got it?
We’re in, he texts back.
Okay. Vik and Candace have entered the Archive. Now it’s my job to keep Griffin surveilled and distracted, away from the library, away from his block, where he might notice his keycard is missing, until Vik and Candace find the cure.
“Ooh, your dress has pockets?” Jacqueline, in vivid purple pumps and a white silk halter dress, swans across the quad toward me. Antoine, a step behind her, models a black-on-black ensemble: matte black suit and shirt, satiny black tie.
I slip my phone into my pocket. “It does indeed. You guys look great.”
“You too,” Jacqueline says. “Are you here with Vik?”
My face does something complicated. “Um, no.”
Jacqueline’s big eyes widen. “Sorry, I assumed, ’cause… Who are you here with?”
Griffin walks his charmed path back through the crowd. “Antoine, Jackie, so stunning tonight,” he calls. “There’s some jam at the ticket desk. Looks like we’ll be waiting a while.”
***
Navigation is the one thing all Academy students have in common, aside from stellar test scores, so we rely on it as a discussion topic to paper over awkward moments.
When Jacqueline sees that my date is Griffin, her eyebrows float to her hairline—and I, in grand Academy style, ask what she and Antoine want to do with their nav career-wise.
She wants to research whether you can fine-tune nav to mess with subatomic particles, which sounds like either the next frontier in physics or her supervillain origin story.
(Her eyes glow with obscene enthusiasm when she says “waveform collapse,” so smart money’s on the supervillain thing.) Antoine wants to work in policy—specifically, in upping the number of navigators in emergency response.
“We should have nav teams the way we have fire stations,” he says, “one for every town and more in big cities. The county nav department system doesn’t cut it.
When people call 911 about nav issues”—he’s been talking about beasts the whole time but hasn’t said the word once—“it takes way too long for someone with the right skills to respond. And the funding cuts Secretary Tully is proposing will make it so much worse. I’m organizing a walkout at his stupid sham of a talk tomorrow, if you guys want to join. ”
I bite my tongue to keep from agreeing too forcefully. After a pause, I say in a casual tone, “This semester has owned me so hard that I forgot he was even coming to campus. Can’t say I’m thrilled to be reminded. I just might join the protest.”
“Agreed,” Griffin says fervently.
I’m surprised at his forcefulness. Then I remember: Candace. I wonder how long it took the emergency team to respond when a beast attacked her. “What about you, Griffin?” I ask to change the subject. “How will you employ your paranormal whiz-bang?”
Antoine laughs. Jacqueline chews her lip, clearly holding back from telling me that our lack of scientific understanding doesn’t make nav paranormal.
And Griffin, for the first time, pauses before speaking. “I want to study interference.”
Questions swarm my brain, but Griffin is clearly a little uncomfortable, so I mind my manners and change the subject by complaining about how much homework I have.
For a while, we all chitchat about problem sets and midterms and Mr. Grant’s blatant favoritism toward students who’ll talk to him about major-league baseball.
(“I mean, I like stats,” Jacqueline says, “but I cannot make myself give a shit about RBIs.”)
When Jacqueline and Antoine realize they forgot their tickets back in Lucasson and double back, Griffin and I are left standing together, silent and still.
Slowly, he raises his hand and brushes his knuckles down my velvet sleeve.
It’s a graze, featherlight, but I go rigid with surprise.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks. “When you go inside yourself, you always look so distressed.”
“Why interference?” I ask.
He withdraws his hand. “Did I freak you out?”
“Just curious.”
From the look on his face, he doesn’t believe me. “I’d think you’d be used to the idea of research on interference. I’ve talked to Bree about her plans. All the psych labs she’s interested in use interference.”
“They get consent,” I say.
“They’re still navigating people. Lots of, like, philosophical conundrums there. If you do something under interference, the possibility existed that you’d do it of your own free will. How can we know that the interference is what made you do it?”
“We can’t. And?”
A pained smile plays around his mouth. “You never give me a single inch.”
“Don’t whine, Minter; you love it.”
“I do,” he admits quietly. “Did you hear the rumors about my old blockmate Jake?”
I’m treading on thin ice. And the liquid sloshing beneath could be water or blood. “Some.”
Griffin’s shoulders hunch inside his tux. “I want to know if there’s some way to find out…whether someone has interfered with your choices. Or whether all your choices are the ones you would have made anyway.”
Griffin must be thinking of a particular choice he made.
What did his own internal voice tell him to do?
I want to grill him. But I’m not sure how he’ll react if I turn the heat too high.
Maybe the ice will break under us. The last thing I need is for him to storm back to his room while Vik and Candace are making merry with his keycard.
I touch his shoulder. “It’s an awful situation. I’m sorry.”
His eyes lift to mine. I’m not sure how long we stand like that, in a quiet bubble in a loud line, his shoulder burning through his jacket against my palm. The longer we stare, the more his pupils dilate, black eclipsing blue.
“Not distressed. Just intense, remember?” I say, trying to laugh it off. “Come on. We’re almost to the front.”
***
The dining hall drips streamers. A mirror ball sheds glow across the walls, and bass thumps in the floor. I stand in the doorway with Griffin and peer inside. Hundreds of kids dance, chat, or ladle punch into plastic coupes from giant crystal bowls on the long table at the room’s far end.
Hundreds of kids who might die if the roof falls on me.
I don’t want to go in.
But I have to. So.
When Griffin and I stroll inside, conversations near the doorway stutter out.
People—kids I know, kids I don’t—stare. Most stares are for Griffin, Golden Boy, Archive competition winner: furtive glances from giggly girls, envious or idol-worshiping stares from boys.
But some are for me: jealous squints, raised eyebrows, once-overs.
I’m not sure I like the attention. I feel something raw, angry, ugly.
Like, Yeah, bow down. Like, since my friends from home dumped me, I’ve connected with three other human beings total, but I messed things up with Vik, I messed things up with Bree, I nearly messed things up with Candace, and sometimes I wonder whether it’s even worth trying to find a shared level with a new person.
Maybe I should just scare everyone into leaving me alone.
Griffin turns to me. “Want me to get you a drink?”
The dining hall is warm with too many bodies. Sweat prickles my scalp beneath my piled-up hair. “Sure, thanks.”
Kids are crammed shoulder to shoulder, but once again, they move aside for Griffin like he’s Emperor of the Universe as he saunters toward the punch.
I turn, scanning the room for Mr. Davis—and come nose to nose with Mirabel.
“Hi,” I say. “You look good.”
She’s taken the Hollywood Glamour theme seriously.
She wears a black dress with a high slit.
Her chocolate hair fountains over her shoulders.
Her eye makeup smokes, her lipstick burns.
Lot of look, but it works. Beside her, her date makes a nice accessory: himbo handsomeness, fitted tux.
But her expression doesn’t match her outfit.
It’s not sultry, it’s stone-cold pissed.
“You too.” Her tone says die in a fire. “Candace pick your dress?”
To Mirabel, I’m an intense girl, a try-hard, not a fashion plate. If I dress nicely, someone else must have dressed me. She’s correct tonight, of course, and since I don’t give a solitary damn what she thinks, I’m happy to confirm. “Girl has taste.”
“Griff’s stepsister dressed his date. That didn’t weird them out?”
“I didn’t ask. They approved of the results, anyway.”
Mirabel flinches. Then she pulls back her shoulders and meets my what now stare dead-on. “How does it feel to come so close to the Archive and end up a loser?”
Rage detonates inside my skull, a quick, bright series of pops. Dad’s dying, and I’m dying, and I won’t spend what are maybe my last days letting passive-aggressive bullshit slide.
“I don’t know,” I say. “How’s it feel going to the dance with your second choice?”
She grimaces.
I’m bracing for her cutting comeback when I spot Austin McKeigh, a senior transfer who clearly imbibed a lot too much at some pregame, on a collision course with Mirabel’s shoulder. I notice the punch-filled cup in her hand. “Mirabel, watch out—”
Too late. Austin knocks hard into her shoulder. As she jerks forward, cup tipping, I step sideways. A few drops of punch spatter my skirt; the rest arcs through the air and strikes Griffin’s knees as he returns with my drink.
His pants are soaked. Rivulets drip into his dress shoes. He glances down—and back up, with perfect bored disbelief, at Mirabel. “Throwing your drink at my date? Be less cliché.”
“I didn’t—” Her expression shifts from shocked to humiliated to coolly blank as she decides not to defend herself. Instead, she turns tail and shoves toward the door, her confused date on her heels.
Suddenly Mr. Davis makes himself known, peeling off a shadowy stretch of wall toward the confused and stumbling Austin with a look of irritation on his sad bulldog face. That’s a piece of good luck: dealing with drunk students should keep him busy all night.
“She didn’t, though,” I tell Griffin. “Austin bumped her.”
“Sure.” He sighs. “My socks are squelching. I have to change.”
“Into what?” I ask.
“I have another tux in my room.”
In his room. Where his keycard isn’t.
If he notices his keycard missing, he could raise the alarm about a break-in at the Archive.
Griffin, catching sight of my face, raises his eyebrows. “You worried about missing too much of the dance? You can stay; I’ll meet you back here.”
I shake my head. “No, I’ll come. Lead the way.”