Chapter Thirty-One
I wake up in a hospital room: mint walls, industrial light, beeping machines. A woman sits in the blue plastic chair across from my bed. She’s in her thirties or forties, with short natural hair and steady eyes. She’s wearing a U.S. Department of Navigation uniform.
She’s watching me.
“Good morning,” she says. “Are you up to answering questions?”
“Uh,” I say stupidly. “Water?”
She points to a Styrofoam cup on the table beside my bed. I look inside. Ice chips. I slide one between my dry lips.
“My name is Agent Fletcher,” she says. “I’m here to interview you for the incident report. Can you tell me when and how the beasts manifested?”
“Trade you,” I rasp. “Question for question.”
She smiles. I guess I amuse her—an overconfident teen even banged up, bandaged, and gowned, trying to establish a quid pro quo with the authorities. Her amusement is a good sign, I hope: a sign I’m not dying or suspected of murder-by-beast. “Sure. You must have as many questions as we do.”
Over two hours—full of long pauses while Agent Fletcher writes down what I’ve said in a yellow legal pad and I suck ice chips to death—I tell her about the Archive.
Yes, my friends Vik and Candace and I got suspicious about the Archive when we realized that since it opened eight years ago, Academy students had been dropping out and dying in a weirdly regular pattern.
Yes, we broke in. Yes, we found a secret door and a chamber of horrors: our trusted (ha) teachers Dr. Langmore and Mr. Davis, aided by Griffin, strapping my and Candace’s blockmate Bree—
“Blockmate?” Agent Fletcher interrupts.
“Oh,” I say. “She’s Candace’s roommate. I live in a single off the same common room.”
Agent Fletcher looks amused again. “Boarding school lingo?”
I think back to meeting Candace, just a few months ago. She schooled me on roommates and blockmates with such defensive cool. It feels like another life. “Yeah.”
“Okay. Let’s continue.”
I tell Agent Fletcher about trying to get Bree off the machine, Dr. Langmore whacking me unconscious and strapping me up in Bree’s place, Mirabel, the beast swarm, our escape, my collapse. “That’s all I remember.”
“And at any point,” Agent Fletcher asks, “did you see Dr. Langmore or Mr. Davis navigate Griffin Minter? Or was he helping freely?”
“I… You can’t see navigation unless you’re already in flickerstate, and I… I was distracted. Drugged.” I crunch through another ice chip. “Why?”
Agent Fletcher taps her pen against her pad. “He’s lawyered up and claiming interference. Says everything bad he did, he did because Marissa Langmore interfered with his choices. As soon as her influence weakened, he rescued your, uh, blockmate Bree from that underground creep show.”
She stares at me. Waiting, I think, for me to confirm or deny.
“I saw him carry Bree out,” I say.
“Do you believe the rest of it?”
“Does it matter what I believe?”
“Not legally.”
“Then why ask?”
“I’m curious.”
I fidget under her stare. Frankly, Griffin’s lawyer is pulling stereotypical lawyer bullshit.
Griffin was desperate to save Candace—Dr. Langmore wouldn’t have needed to interfere with him.
But I can’t quite condemn him to a government official either.
In how many futures did I use the Cruciform to save Dad?
“I don’t know. I—I mean, you can’t disprove interference. ”
Agent Fletcher makes an unimpressed face. “Fair enough.”
In exchange for my flat and halting story, she tells me that Griffin not only rescued Bree but rang the campus alarm about the beasts.
Secretary Tully was promptly evacuated by his security team.
Mr. Davis was arrested speeding out of North Carolina; he’s in federal custody now.
Evidently, his adult son had a gambling addiction and owed very large debts to very bad men, debts that Dr. Langmore was helping Mr. Davis pay back in exchange for his help and his silence.
Dr. Langmore is dead. Official cause: massive stroke.
Unofficial cause: three dozen beast-bites, which raised the probability of her immediate death from vanishingly unlikely to near inevitable.
Otherwise, no one was bitten. When Agent Fletcher tells me that, I bite down on a tremendous, guilty sigh of relief. I summoned the swarm that killed Dr. Langmore. At least it didn’t attack anyone else.
Anyone else, that is, but me—when the EMTs found my bite, they assumed I got it in that night’s beast swarm. (Vik or Candace must have taken my bandage off before the EMTs arrived. Quick thinking.) Nav departments from three counties around descended on the Academy to contain the situation.
The U.S. Department of Navigation has confiscated the ruined remains of the machine (Agent Fletcher never slips and calls it the Cruciform, though I suspect she knows its name). They’ve also confiscated the Highwall Archive.
“Bet they’ve wanted to do that for a while,” I say.
Agent Fletcher chuckles. “Kids these days. Socialists till they have to trust the government.”
Bree’s in the hospital too. She woke up before I did.
Finally, Agent Fletcher walks me through the laws and protocols governing my behavior due to my “new” bite. I nod and nod, pretending I’ve never had reason to look up bite protocols before and certainly don’t know them backward and forward.
When she finishes, she says that the Nav Department doesn’t need anything else from me, for now, and she hopes I feel better soon. She leaves quietly.
A middle-aged nurse with brittle bleached hair brings me a single-serve cardboard box of cereal and a carton of milk, watches me eat, and orders me to rest.
About five seconds after she’s gone, I find my phone in the drawer of my flimsy bedside table and call Jo.
She picks up on the first ring, breathing raggedly into the receiver. “Is it true?”
“Uh,” I say. “Which part? A lot of things—”
“Don’t mess with me. There was a massive beast swarm at the Academy; it’s all over the news.
They called Mom last night, they said you were in the hospital, they said you were bitten.
She called Grandma Marino to watch Kev and Irene, and she’s driving to come get you.
Because they won’t let you fly anymore. Norah, is it true? ”
Oh, shit. Jo’s freaking out. Distraught. And if Mom peeled out of the driveway before she could find a better, more with-it babysitter than Grandma Marino, she’s freaking out and distraught too. I need to head this off. Damage control.
“I found the cure,” I say.
A pause on Jo’s end. “So… You were bitten? But you…cured yourself?”
I wince. “Not yet?”
A steely silence. “Explain.”
I do explain, as fast as I can: what Candace, Vik, and I discovered about leaguing, Bree’s disappearance, our frantic second invasion of the Archive.
“What the hell, Norah,” Jo says when I’m done. “Why are you like this? Who wanders down a secret murder tunnel? You would not survive a horror movie.”
“I did survive a horror movie,” I point out.
Jo blows through her lips, a disgusted phhhbt.
“Now I have to go cure my bite before Mom arrives,” I say, “or she’s going to kill me. Love you. Bye!”
I hang up on Jo’s outraged squeal and text Candace. As a newly minted 18-yr-old, I plan to use my adult rights to check myself out of the hospital against medical advice. Come get me?
I sign the discharge paperwork; change out of my hospital gown into yesterday’s clothes, which the disapproving nurse hands me in a plastic bag; and slink through fluorescent corridors to the hospital’s front roundabout, where a bright December morning greets me.
Snow lies in a thin, rumpled blanket on the roadsides, but it’s already melted from the asphalt.
Minutes later, a Camry with a glowing pink Lyft sign on the dash pulls into the roundabout. The back passenger door swings open. Candace steps out, followed by Vik and Mirabel.
They look good. Surprisingly good, considering.
But Candace’s face has closed on itself.
I remember what Agent Fletcher said about Griffin blaming Dr. Langmore’s interference.
I wonder what Candace believes. I wonder what sort of conversations she’s had with her mom.
Whatever’s going on in her head, it must hurt.
We huddle near the hospital’s front door while the Camry trundles away.
“Um, hi, everyone,” I say. “Have you seen Bree yet?”
“No,” Candace says. “They wouldn’t let me go with her in the ambulance. We were already coming to visit you both when I got your text. Want to try to see her now?”
At the front desk, the receptionist, a bored guy with a septum piercing, tells us the limit is two visitors per patient. Vik and Mirabel wait in the lobby while Candace and I follow the receptionist’s directions to Bree’s room.
When Candace knocks on the door, Bree calls, “Come in!”
Her hospital room looks like mine did: mint walls, flimsy side table, beeping machines. She’s sitting up in bed, blond curls wild, beaming. I lurk awkwardly near the door while Candace walks straight over and takes Bree’s hospital-braceleted hand.
“Really late the night of the formal, Griffin told me Dr. Langmore wanted to talk to me,” Bree tells Candace.
“And she told me they needed help with a special project in the Archive. And you know, we’d talked a bunch about my research, I thought—but she’d kept asking about my family too, about my sister’s problems and the money we didn’t have.
Like she was looking for vulnerabilities.
I don’t know why it didn’t ping me as weird; the whole thing was obviously shady… ”
“Interference,” Candace says quietly.
Queasiness overtakes Bree’s face. “Was Dr. Langmore interfering with Griffin too, or…”
“His lawyer claims she was.” Candace’s voice gets even quieter. “But…”
“I—I’m sorry.”
Candace nods.
“I wanted to ask you guys…” Bree glances at me. “What really happened? No one’s been able to tell me the whole story. And I don’t remember much after walking through the Archive door.”
After everything, I owe Bree the truth. So I take a shaky breath and spill it.
My bite.
My dad’s bites.
Leaguing.
Breaking into the Archive. The candidate files, the Cruciform, Highwall’s five-person league.
Vik, Candace, and I realizing that Bree had disappeared. Everything after.
As I talk, Bree’s eyes snap between me and Candace like we’re playing the U.S. Open finals.
“Griffin carried you out of there, and we ran after him,” I finish. “Or, I mean, stumbled after him. Then I fainted. Dr. Langmore had injected me with something. Mr. Davis had injected you with two somethings, which I’m guessing explains your amnesia situation.”
“The Nav Department and the EMTs arrived,” Candace adds. “They checked you guys for bites and took you to the hospital. Wouldn’t let me come with.”
Bree stares at Candace.
Bree stares at me.
“So, wait, Norah,” she says. “You flipped out on me after the final trial because…”
I hunch. “I’m sorry.”
“…because you were dying, and the whole time I’d been telling you to chill out about the trials, you knew there was a cure in the Archive?”
“I didn’t know,” I say. “I hoped.”
“Oh my God.” Bree covers her mouth with the hand Candace isn’t holding. “I’m such a jerk. I was like, just relax, Norah! Let’s go to a party!”
“You’re not a jerk,” I say miserably. “You had no idea what my problem was. I didn’t tell you. I pushed and pushed, and I never explained—”
“Of course you didn’t explain. Why would you, after I was so awful to Candace at orientation over her bites. I’m so sorry—”
“Stop saying that. I’m sorry—”
“Guys,” Candace interrupts. “How about you cease and desist apologizing to each other, and we just hug it out?”
Bree flings out her free arm, welcoming me in. Soon I’m embracing her lanky, bird-boned torso while Candace puts an arm around my back.
“So,” Bree mumbles into my shoulder. “Five-person leaguing cures bites? I’m in.”