Page 122 of Flickerstate

“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 onroommatesandblockmateswith 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 haveneededto 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’tdisproveinterference.”

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 gamblingaddiction 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.