Page 106 of Flickerstate

“SeeLDSagain?” I say. “Laura De Soto. The other letters must be initials too.”

“Vfor Victoria Highwall,” Vik says. “DMfor Daisuke Miura.KLfor Kay Lucasson.”

I nod. “Do you guys know any Highwall collaborators with the initialsMO?”

Vik shakes his head.

“If the letters are people,” Candace says, “what are the stars?”

Vik leans in closer. When his chest brushes my shoulder, I feel a wildly inappropriate flash of heat, like I’ve teleported from this chilly climate-controlled room to a southern summer day.

“Wait,” he says. His voice rings off the walls, full of hope and possibility.

Startled, I twist to look at him. And feel another inappropriate flash: Our faces aresoclose.

Then I clock his expression. He’sshiningwith joy, like a treasure hoard in a dark cave some explorer stumbled into with a torch.

“What is it?” I whisper.

“What if we already know how to cure bites?” he whispers back.

I trade confused looks with Candace. We bend over the doodle, trying to see what he sees.

He points to the line betweenVandDMwith a star in the middle. “When we league, we each throw our nav into a fusion point exactly between us. We’ve never tried leaguing with more than two navigators, but what if we did it with three?” He pointsto theV-DM-KLdoodle. “Or four?” TheV-DM-KL-LDSdoodle. “Or five?”

The idea settles over us. Even with two, leaguing feels like a glass we hold up by our fingertips—if we pull back a millimeter or press too hard, the glass will fall or crack. Yet it’s so powerful. How far into the future could you see withfivenavigators? How far could you bend possibility?

“You think,” I say slowly, “that we can cure bites with leaguing.”

“Everyone knows that curing bites with navigation is theoretically possible,” he says. “If a woundcanheal, then in some future—”

“But the possibility’s just too remote. They’ve experimented with a dozen channelers feeding power to the strongest navigators ever, andnothing.”

Vik keeps shining. “How many eyes does the strongest navigator in the country have?”

Somewhere in the cold ashes of my hope, an ember flares to life. “Two.”

“How many do we have when we league?”

“I couldn’t count them,” I admit.

“It might work,” he says. “We have to try.”

“We do,” Candace says. “But we also have to remember that Highwall and her team were looking for analternativeto leaguing. So maybe they failed to cure Highwall’s bites with leaguing—maybe they needed five navigators for it but couldn’t keep a collaboration that complex stable.”

“Are all Highwall’s collaborators dead now?” I ask.

“All the initials we recognize,” Vik says. “I don’t know aboutMO.”

I check the reverse side of the sheet. Blank. “I guess we keep looking.”

The leaguing sketch is the only useful thing I find in my first box. But as I’m tugging the next one from its shelf, I happen to spot the edge of something on—in?—the shadowed wall behind. It looks like the lintel of a door.

A door to where?

I step back, estimating which box is blocking the door’s handle. Once I’ve chosen my candidate, I slide it to the floor and peer into the gap. Sure enough: An electric locking handle appears, a nine-digit keypad above a steel knob.

I grab the knob and try to turn it. Locked.