Page 45 of Flickerstate

I’m wallowing in guilt—when suddenly, the short hairs escaping my ponytail, damp with rain and sweat, prickle upright.

A weird odor, hot metal and sulfur, teases my nose.

I’m tensed to run before I even remember where I’ve smelled that before. Then it hits me.

Oh,God—

A rent opens midair in the room’s empty middle. A chitinous leg—real, flickerstate, real—pokes through. An arachnoid beast, fully manifested, falls to the floor with a slithery thud.

Another beast falls through. Another.

The screaming starts.

Chapter Eleven

All three beasts have manifested. No more flickering between species, fang to mandible, pincer to nail to claw. It’s too late to occlude.According to Academy Handbook protocol, we can only try not to attract their attention until our teachers navigate them out of existence.

The room echoes with panicked breathing and the beasts’ susurrus.

“Students, don’t move,” Dr. Langmore calls, voice hard and strained. “Teachers, to me.”

One beast picks toward our group: large as a pony but spiderlike, with segmented legs attached to an armored thorax and eight yellow eyes stacked above serrated mandibles. Its sharp feet click against the floor. I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop staring.

It’s a nightmare.

Candace breathes hard through her nose. Bree clamps both hands over her mouth.

Heart hammering, I edge in front of my teammates. I already have an active bite. If one of us gets bitten, it should be me.

I remember how my first bite felt. I was finishing a jog, off-season conditioning for basketball. I love running, always have. I crave it like some people crave chocolate. It’s an indulgence to escape my crowded house and chase a selfish endorphin high, free from Mom’s judgment and Jo’s prickly neediness and Kev and Irene’s clamor. That day, I should’ve stuck around the house to help Dad weed the garden or to proofread Jo’s English midterm paper. But ever since I’d jolted awake before my alarm, weird energy had been simmering under my skin. Like I was a fire, creeping through underbrush, about to flash up and destroy a forest. I knew that if I stayed home, I’d explode in someone’s face. So I laced my running shoes and snuck out. I took the longest of my usual loops, eight miles, hoping the distance would burn me down to lukewarm ash. But with every pounding step I felt hotter, more powerful, and less in control.

As I turned the final corner and sped down the grass-cracked sidewalk toward my house, I spotted Dad kneeling, weeding our front yard’s tiny tulip plot.

When my foot touched our yard, it happened. The air grew as thick as water. My vision blurred. I fell headlong—for the first time—into flickerstate.

Bright distortions wrinkled the space around my head and Dad’s. Fractals in strange colors swirled from us into the sky, into infinity. The world shone, psychedelic, like I was watching a Miyazaki movie on forty-eight hours of no sleep.

I stumbled to a stop, realizing with a topsy-turvy twist in mystomach what was going on. We’d learned about it in health class, of course, and I’d heard stories about a few kids from rival schools who’d manifested early. People gossiped about them at basketball tournaments, in church basements, outside coffee shops—always in hushed voices. Reverent. Afraid. The things they coulddo.

This was navigation. I was anavigator.

Seconds later, the sweaty hairs escaping my ponytail prickled upright.

Hot metal and sulfur teased my nose.

Beasts, summoned by my nav flaring into existence, began to flicker in and out of reality around Dad: flashes of silver fur, glittery eyes, the red inside of a mouth. At any moment, the beasts could manifest. And bite.

Terrified, I staggered toward him. I had some vague idea of dragging him to safety.

He threw up a hand, palm out,stop.

I couldn’t stop. In too many futures flaring above us, Dad died. The beasts bit him till his heart gave out. A branch from our front yard oak fell and crushed him. An unknown allergen sent him into anaphylactic shock. In some futures, I died too. Dad and I crumpled together on the grass. Mom found our bodies. Jo found our bodies. Kev and Irene, holding hands, found our bodies.

I should have hunted flickerstate for a few unlikely futures where the beasts vanished without attacking. I should have taken the newfound force surging in me and thrown it at those few. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve saved us then.

But I didn’t. I was a seconds-old navigator with no training.Too scared to think.

I kept staggering toward him. Determined but helpless. Mindless. Weak.