Page 119 of Flickerstate

Cooperativeness. The candidate files rated students on cooperativeness. If the Cruciform requires cooperation, that means I cannotcooperate. I can resist.

Resist.

How?

Dr. Langmore lays her hand on the Cruciform. I can’t see it—I’m hypnotized by her whirring shins—but I know it happens, because a second later, the machine launches me deeper into flickerstate than I’ve ever gone.

I stand on red sands within an all-consuming fire. A hundred feet away looms a pyre as tall as a ziggurat. The pyre is a conflagration within a conflagration, every lick of flame a future: a burning, winkling mass of possibilities.

A figure stands beside me, liquid chrome from her slick French twist to her pumps dripping metal onto the thirsty sand. A half-melted railroad glistens into the sky over her head. Dr. Langmore.

When I try to control the flame around me—my fire, mynav—nothing happens.

Dr. Langmore smiles. She doesn’t look at me, just keeps watching the pyre. My pyre.

A branch splits off from her railroad and snakes toward the pyre. But the burning air liquefies it, and it drips down to the sand before it reaches the giant charred logs at the pyre’s base.

Dr. Langmore sneers angrily, white teeth framed by tense chrome lips.

The pyre, the flames—they jump and blear and dance and spread—

Resist.Think.

I passed the screening, the first siphoning duels, because I could blast my competition, melt or scorch their nav concepts to formlessness, and steal from them while they were incapacitated. Like I did to Rob.

And even when I channeled to Candace and Bree, when Itriedto give them my nav, they had trouble taking it because it appeared to them as fire. It was only when they saw me differently, as sunlight, that I really succeeded in channeling to Candace.

Vik never has trouble. He switches between concepts with ease, and he thinks of nav in terms of flow.

But I bet Dr. Langmore doesn’t. She’s too inflexible, too brittle. This is a woman who broke Highwall’s league because she couldn’t stand that leaguing requires unity and cooperation, because she wanted to impose her vision on the rest of the group and the rest of the world. Now, her rigid concepts of herself and me—solid steel, fire—are hobbling her as she tries to manipulate my nav, eventhough the machine has harnessed it for her.

You are a railroad, I think at her.I am a fire, I think at myself, the red sand, the burning air, the white-hot pyre.If you try to use me, I think at her,I will melt you. That’s your nature and mine.

She shoots out more tracks, a snaking fleet of rails that hisses furiously across the sand. They soften, puddle, and sink into the desert.

Her own concepts are thwarting her. It’s working.

She bares her teeth again and scuttles, bent-kneed, awkward but quick in her chrome-dripping heels, toward the pyre.

I don’t know what she’s doing. I’ve been so focused on maintaining these nav concepts—the railroad, the fire—that I hadn’t considered how we could use our flickerstate bodies themselves to navigate. But maybe if I can keep her from reaching the pyre, I can keep her from doing anything with my hijacked nav. Maybe I can get down from this machine. Help Vik and Candace hold off Griffin and Mr. Davis.

I will my feet to move.

My feet do not move.

When Dr. Langmore reaches the pyre, she climbs, log by log, into the flame-soaked futures, navigating them with her whole imaginary body. The chrome slides off her in patches as she struggles upward. Her exposed flesh sizzles.

I hope the pain slows her down. She’s climbing up the pyre’s thickest, most probable spout of flame, where Griffin and Mr. Davis, flaring orange, white, and blue, siphon away the dark protective cloud Vik and Candace have summoned. They nav Vik and Candace into a collapse. Once my friends are sprawled like rag dollson the concrete, Mr. Davis injects them with syringes.

That spout branches into thinner, more ghostly flame futures. In several, Candace has an allergic reaction to the syringe. She seizes, skull tapping concrete, and foams at the mouth. Dr. Langmore turns her cracked, blistering face away from those futures and sidles in the other direction.

In that direction, I see two main groups of futures. In one, Vik and Candace lie breathing peacefully on the floor after their injections; that’s where Dr. Langmore’s heading.

In the other, Mirabel—

Mirabel?

“What thefuck.” Her voice bites through the desert sands, through the roaring pyre.