Page 112 of Flickerstate

The last hit on the first page makes me blink. Blink again.

I click the link and read with mounting disbelief.

“Molly O’Reilly’s at Columbia now,” Candace says. “Professor emerita. She’s published a bunch of articles on unregulated nav destabilizing financial markets. Nothing about machines.”

“Guys,” I say. “Marissa Olson was an engineering PhD at UNC-Chapel Hill in the eighties, around the same time Highwall was running a lab at Duke. The campuses are less than ten miles apart. And I found Olson’s wedding announcement. She married one of her professors.”

“Sketch,” Candace says.

“Yeah, but—the professor’s name was Dr. JohnLangmore.”

For a moment we stand in silence.

Then Candace’s eyebrows scrunch together. “Every navigator alive shouts it from the rooftops if they attended one reception where Highwall showed up for five minutes to eat half a canapé and down two cocktails. If Dr. Langmore is Marissa Olson—if she worked closely enough with Highwall that Highwall mentioned her in personal papers—wouldn’t we have heard about it?”

“Unless Dr. Langmore wanted to keep what she did with Highwall a secret.” Associations fly at me thick and fast. “MO—Dr. Langmore—she agreed to dismantle the Cruciform. Maybe she was ashamed of what the Cruciform did or was scared the wrong people would get their hands on it. But when Mr. Davis itemized Highwall’s papers after she died eight years ago, maybe he found the Cruciform schematics. Maybe he rebuilt the machine. Then, also eight years ago, the candidate files start, looking for students who are powerful but vulnerable—“

Candace stands. The paperback falls to the floor. “Wait. Wait. There was a file on Bree. There wasa file on Bree.Where is she right now?”

“We need to—” I gulp air. “We need to get behind that second door.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We panic.

I reach for Vik and Candace. Our fingers tangle: his and hers,mine and hers, mine and his.

“Remember the diagrams,” I say quickly. “The star was in the center. We’re not giving half our nav to each partner. We’re giving all our nav to the middle of the group. Three, two, one—”

I drop into flickerstate and hurl my fire into the heart of our triangle.

To either side of me, flashing gold, flashing green.

Fusion.

We see—

Our league holds for a second, maybe less. But in that instant, an infinite mansion of possibility leaps around us. We hunt, frantic, at impossible speed, for a room, a hall, a future where no one crosses our paths as we run—on a weekend afternoon, when most kids have crammed into library carrels, hoping to squeeze out enoughwork to justify attending the Winter Formal yesterday—back to the Archive.

We look. We don’t influence. If we threw our power behind any future where students and teachers stayed away from the Archive door, that would be interference. We aren’t going to break that taboo. If one of us tried, it would shatter our unity and throw us from flickerstate.

We stumble over a suite of burning rooms where we wait five minutes, walk a looping route to the library’s side entrance, enter the Archive with Vik’s keycard, and—

We fall into pieces and out of flickerstate.

When reality fuzzes into focus, Vik, Candace, and I are kneeling in a ragged triangle on the common-room carpet. Sweat glimmers under Vik’s eyes. Candace’s chest heaves.

“How many futures?” she pants.

Too many to count, too many to guess. And so solid, like apples we could pluck from possibility’s branches. “You were right,” I tell Vik. “It multiplies.”

“I’ll go check—” He rubs his jaw. “Check whether Griffin’s keycard’s in his desk.”

“Either way,” I say, “we’re going in.”

If Griffin’s working in his Archive section, we go through him. If he rats on us and we get expelled, we get expelled. No matter what, we’re finding Bree.

Vik leaves.