Page 28 of Flickerstate

Candace snorts. “I have no doubt. But in terms of your hopes and dreams?”

I don’t have hopes and dreams. I have needs. I’ve always known my family needed money, so as soon as I was old enough, I made practical plans: I’d become a doctor, a cardiologist maybe, someone who helped people but also earned scads of cash. That way, if anything bad happened, I could be my siblings’ safety net. Then something bad did happen, much earlier than even I, an obsessive worrier, had accounted for, and my timeline shrank. No more ten-year plan. Now it’s all about the next month, week, day. “Before my nav manifested, I thought medicine. Now I don’t know.”

“Cool,” Bree says. “Did you know there’s a lab at JohnsHopkins using nav to reduce the probability that tumors metastasize? Highwall helped set it up. People think there might be papers related to the initial experiments in the Archive.”

“Yeah. I’ve read about that.”

Candace peers at me. Maybe she’s wondering whether I have family members with cancer, whether that explains my yen for the Archive. I’ll let her think it. If she spins her own false narrative about me, it’ll help me hide what I need to hide.

Chapter Seven

My alarm wakes me at 4:45 a.m. Through my window, the quad is washed in darkness, trees and buildings looming blurs.

I pull on leggings and a tank top, rehearsing how I want this practice session with Vik to go. My success in the screening was three-quarters luck.Better lucky than good, Dad says. But to pass the trials, I’ll need to be good too. So. All business with Vik, Norah. Brush off his abrasive personality. Ignore his pretty, pretty eyes.

When I reach the basketball courts, I tap on my phone flashlight. Hoops, line-painted asphalt, and a strip of lawn separate the campus from the forest. A thin white beam floats through the trees: Vik, holding his own phone flashlight. This morning he’s wearing a T-shirt that reads DAN & WHIT’S above an old-timey gas pump and a barnlike wooden store. “Morning. This way.”

I follow him into the woods, down a rocky footpath barely wider than a balance beam. Thirty feet in, it opens onto a grassy clearing ringed with flattish stones the size of sofa cushions. Vikprops his phone against one rock and sits down on another.

I’m alone, in the woods, in the dark, with a guy I find magnetically, albeit annoyingly, hot.

Shut up, Norah. That is not the point of this.I firmly dismiss the flutters in my stomach and take the rock to his left, rough granite scratching my thighs through my leggings. “Are there a lot of places like this around campus?”

He nods. “Others are better known. I’ve never run into anyone else using this one. We found it freshman year.”

“You and Griffin?”

“No,” he says tersely. (Did I hit a nerve somehow?) Then he changes the subject: “It’s a good place to study in privacy.”

“Do we need privacy?” Vik raises his eyebrows, and I curse myself for the accidental innuendo. “I mean, who would have a problem with what we’re doing?”

“I wouldn’t tell Langmore.”

“What about Griffin and Mirabel?”

He shrugs. “They wouldn’t like me tutoring a competitor. But I agreed to, so.”

“Youhaven’t changed your mind about tutoring a competitor?”

“Like I said, I agreed to.”

I’m caught between satisfaction and annoyance. Satisfaction, because Griffin and Mirabel would hate Vik tutoring me, which means they see my team as a threat, however tiny. Annoyance, because if Vik agreed to my trade, he mustnotsee us as a threat, not even a tiny one. “Good,” I say shortly. “Let’s start.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out six dice, black withwhite pips. “I figured we could start with tutoring. In channeling. Might be a logical precursor to leaguing.”

“Siphoning isn’t?”

He grimaces. “Siphoning’s theft, not cooperation. It’s messed up that that’s the first two-navigator technique they teach transfers.”

I waver, deciding whether to push back against Vik’s condemnation of the Academy. Maybe if I bait him, I’ll learn something. But it doesn’t benefit me to piss off my tutor.

Then again, curiosityalwayswins. I push back. “In the handbook, it says navigators need to learn siphoning for emergencies. If there’s a manifestation”—I’m careful not to specify; he’ll know I mean beasts—“that needs more than one navigator to banish, but there’s only one trained navigator around. The person with training could siphon any untrained navigators in reach.”

“You could handle that problem better by teaching new students tochannelfirst.”

“But after graduation, most navigators we meet won’t be Academy alums. They’ll be small-timers taught by local nav departments. Half of those only teach occlusion. Hell, by the time Secretary Tully gets done cutting public nav funding, half will probably be closed.”

“Then maybe Langmore should call up the Academy alums on Capitol Hill and get them to lobby Tully for a funding bump instead. Do you actually believe the objections you’re raising, or are you…” He trails off, apparently unsure what my motive might be.