Chapter Twenty-Six
After the last dance, students stream into the cold night air, onto the quad, toward the Great Tree. I catch Griffin’s sleeve and pull him sideways out of the flow.
“Am I taking you home now, or…?” he asks.
I need to keep eyes on Griffin until he goes to bed, to make sure he doesn’t sneak off to the Archive. But I won’t hook up with him for the cause. I’m an awkward eighteen-year-old, not Mata Hari. So I willfully misinterpret his subtext: “I’m not tired yet. Want to walk around?”
“I would, but—” A long yawn cracks his face. He might be angling to get me to his room, but I take his apparent sleepiness as an opening.
Griffin with me or Griffin in bed—either way, he’s not in the Archive. “I’ll escort you home,” I say, “I’m sure you need your beauty sleep.”
At his block, Griffin leans in to kiss me on the cheek. “Night, Norah.”
“Sleep well,” I say.
He yawns, smiles sheepishly, and closes the door.
I jog up to my floor. When I key into my block, muffled opera seeps from Candace and Bree’s room. Bree’s back from studying, then.
I change into sweatpants, a hooded sweatshirt, and my tennis shoes. Then I sneak out of my bedroom—leaving the light on, so if Bree comes back into the common room, she’ll assume I’m home—and into the bathroom, where I scrub my face, shake out my updo, and cover my hair with my hood.
I see no one as I hopscotch through shadows between lampposts toward the library. When I’m inside the atrium, I turn sharply away from the deserted first-floor study fishbowl, to the right, toward the Archive.
I text Candace and Vik: Let me in?
Moments later Vik’s hand pushes the door open a millimeter. “Pretend to swipe a keycard,” he whispers.
Right: If anyone sees me, I need to look like an Archive assistant.
I pass my hand over the lock pad and slide through the door.
I follow Vik, walking briskly, through the entry room to the Highwall Collection.
He’s acting so businesslike—and I find that comforting under these bizarre, perilous circumstances, but also infuriating.
My life is on the line, and my dad’s life is on the line, and I just went on a convoluted date with a guy who is not Vik, and now I want Vik to feel as terrified, confused, and conflicted as I do.
And I want him to be jealous. Because I’m selfish, I want him to be jealous.
But, hey, life isn’t about what I want. It’s about what I can survive.
He taps his knuckles on the door.
Candace opens it. “I found something else.”
She leads us down steep concrete stairs to an even chillier basement level: the Highwall Collection itself.
It’s a deep, wide room lined with floor-to-ceiling metal shelves bearing big cardboard boxes labeled by number.
In one corner looms an oversize document scanner and a V-shaped book scanner.
The sole light is a dim bulb in a cage over one of the work desks pushed up against the wall.
On the desk, an open box sits with beige folders spread out around it.
A chair is pulled out opposite the mess.
Candace drops into the chair. She opens a file, revealing a stack of papers and a leather-bound notebook. “Take a look.” She flips through the notebook and hands it over.
I take it carefully. Across a two-page spread extends a dizzyingly complex diagram in precise black ink of some weird machine. It looks like a mecha Vitruvian man doing a headstand. In the upper corner float tiny words: Alternative to leaguing? Discuss with LDS.
Through my constant terror shines a glimmer of hope, of awe. I’m holding a notebook handwritten by the Victoria Highwall. I’m so close to her secrets.
But will I understand them if I find them? I stare at the diagram. I can’t see how this spiky thing could be an alternative to leaguing.
“May I?” Vik takes the notebook gingerly. “It’s a schematic, but…”
“But objects can’t amplify nav,” I say. “I’ve read about this. All the prototypes Highwall and Miura designed failed.”
“As far as we know,” Candace says. “Who’s LDS?”
“Laura De Soto,” Vik says.
“Who?”
“It was in the unauthorized Highwall biography Jake left behind.” Vik shakes his head.
“The textbooks talk about Highwall like she pioneered nav by herself. But she had collaborators, and she ran an interdisciplinary lab—postdocs, grad students, undergrad grunts. Laura De Soto was a PhD in statistics who did some of the math to prove nav altered probability. She was also one of a handful of people in the lab who could navigate.”
I study Vik’s unsettled face. “Highwall’s the big name, but we know some of her collaborators—Miura, Lucasson. I’ve never heard of De Soto. What happened to her?”
“Car accident.” Vik bites his lip. “I only remember De Soto because the biography has this long, paranoid chapter about every collaborator of Highwall’s who died young.”
“Is it so surprising they died young?” Candace asks. “Some of them studied beasts. If they were beast-chasing and got bitten…”
She falls awkwardly silent.
I speak with forced matter-of-factness. “I’m not sure how much this schematic tells us. ‘Alternative to leaguing’ doesn’t let us know whether Highwall wanted to league but couldn’t or…had leagued but found it…unsuitable for her goal.”
Candace rubs her eyes. “As far as clues go, it does open more questions than it closes.”
“Is this the only mention of leaguing we’ve found so far?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“What about bites?”
“Lots of mentions of bites,” Vik says. “And beasts. No cures.”
“But when we came in, Candace said—” I turn to her. “You said you found something else. What was the first thing?”
Candace and Vik share an uncertain look—loaded, a little afraid.
“It’s not—” Vik squares himself. “We don’t think it belongs in Highwall’s papers.”
“A misfiling?” I ask.
“We don’t know.” He reaches across the table to a fat accordion file holder made of thick Academy-green paper and lifts it for my inspection.
I take it from him. It’s heavy. There are maybe a hundred folders inside the accordion file. Each folder’s tab bears a name. I flip through the first half dozen tabs without recognizing any of the names. Then one jumps out at me.
brEE ALLEN.
I thumb through more tabs. More names I don’t recognize—no one in our Academy year, anyway—and then JACOB LIPPMAN.
A bunch more names, and then NORAH SULLIVAN.
Last of all, ARIA ZACCONI.
I pull my file. When I open it, Vik’s mentor feedback survey lies on top, Neither agree nor disagree chosen for every statement.
In the margin, someone has written in blue ink, Mr. Souza uncooperative as usual.
When I flip to the next page, I find a grid.
A list of—what, characteristics?—runs down the grid’s left side.
Along the top, numbers 1 through 5. On the row labeled NAVIGATION, someone has circled a 5; family social support, 3; family resources, 2; peer social support, 1; cooperativeness, 2.
Below the grid, the same blue pen has written, Very strong navigation.
However, while superficially eager to please, on a deeper level manipulative and willful.
A possibility, but not an ideal candidate.
“Candidate for what?” I ask the room.
“It doesn’t say,” Vik says. “Every file is just that rubric clipped to a copy of the student’s application. And a mentor evaluation if the student’s a transfer.”
“They’re all students?”
“Yeah. I recognize some names—kids who were juniors or seniors when I was an underclassman. But judging by the dates on the applications, the files go back eight years.”
“Is there a pattern? Something that links these students together?” Links us together.
“No one was rated below a three on navigation or above a three on family resources.” Candace exhales. “At first we thought maybe Admin was rating candidates for assistantships. But that doesn’t explain the focus on family. And there’s no file on Vik, Griffin, or Mirabel.”
“I’ve made a list of the names,” Vik says. “Once we’re out of here, I’m going to look them all up.”
I open JACOB LIPPMAN: Navigation, 5; family social support, 1; family resources, 1; peer social support, 1; cooperativeness, 4. Below the rubric, neatly printed words: Fascinated by bleeding-edge research. Excellent navigator. Desperate for approval. Poor family. Practically perfect.
Then ARIA ZACCONI: Navigation, 4; family social support, 0; family resources, 1; peer social support 2, cooperativeness, 5. Again: Perfect.
This revelation that Jake, Aria, and I were all candidates for someone’s mysterious project makes my skin crawl. “Do you think Griffin’s seen these files?” While he was at the dance with me, and talking to me about my dad, did he know the Academy was considering me for—whatever this is?
“The box was fully sorted,” Candace says. “Probably a previous assistant did it.”
I rub my forehead. “These files look like another mysterious dead end. How many boxes do we need to search through?”
“We identified nine as important with leaguing,” Candace says. “Box 3—that was the candidate files. Then boxes 51 and 52, boxes 81 to 84, and boxes 101 and 102. I’m looking through box 51 now.”
“I’m on box 102, working my way back,” Vik adds.
“I guess I’ll take the 80s,” I say.
I find them high on a metal shelf against the deeply shadowed back wall. Box 81 is almost too heavy to lift. I haul it, biceps straining, to the nearest desk and flip a nearby light switch. A caged bulb blinks on over my head.
When I pry open Box 81, I see hundreds of beige folders crammed inside. I pull out a fat stack and start opening them.