Page 46 of Flickerstate

I grabbed for his hand.

Six beasts manifested, like an oversaturated solution crystallizing.

Dad shoved me out of the way, shielding me with his body. Five beasts fell on him. He screamed, a belly scream I’d only heard before from children. He was covering his eyes, protecting them from the ferrety creature diving at his face, when the sixth beast—a deepwater eel, pallid white—wriggled past him through the air and kissed my bicep with triangular teeth.

They all winked away.

Blood gushed from my nose. I pulled up the sweatband from my wrist to hide my marked bicep before Dad, whimpering, uncovered his eyes. Then I fell to my knees, fighting a faint.

Fighting a scream.

My vision cut to black.

Back in the nav building, I watch the beast advance on me and think:Banish it, you have to banish it, you have to MAKE IT GO AWAY.

I plunge into flickerstate.

In the nearest, clearest futures, the beast snaps mandibles around my throat. Beyond that thick blaze of probability, the beast bites Candace. It bites Bree. It slashes Vik—

Vik?

Gold filigree shimmers along the room’s edge toward me.

“Mr. Souza,” Dr. Langmore calls, voice faint in flickerstate.“Don’tmove.”

He keeps moving.

I spy a high, improbable future that jitters like a guttering candle. In this future, the beast demanifests feet from me. I’m worn-out from the trial. I can’t navigate to that improbable outcome now, not by myself. But if I channel my last nav to Vik, maybe he can.

That must be his plan. Why else would he risk approaching the beast?

Vik passes out of sight, hugging the wall. He’ll approach on my left, from behind.

The beast clicks a clawed foot to the floor and pauses. It sees Vik. Now it doesn’t know who to attack. I think, if it had a neck, it would cock its head.

Footsteps sound behind me. Vik clasps my sweaty hand in his cold one.

Breath arrhythmic, heartbeat frantic, I launch my nav at him without control or technique—but I give him my all, no holding back, like I’m shooting a comet down my arm into our joined hands.

In the same instant, he channels gold to me.

I misunderstood him. He didn’t come to take my power. He came to give me his.

When our navs slam together . . .

I used to have two eyes. Vik and I together should have four.

We have thousands.

An infinite mansion of futures, solid as reality, flames over our heads. Every corridor is a branch of possibility, every room anoutcome. And we can see each room at once, more futures than we have seen in any other journey we have ever taken to flickerstate combined.

In seconds, we locate the future we want: beasts gone, students collapsing in relief.

Our nav isn’t two strands, separate, one dominating the other like in channeling. It’s a single red-gold torrent that rushes toward that future, filling it, making it real. Power, more power than we knew we had, rushes out of us. Our knees are buckling, our heads spinning, our blood turning to water as we give and give.

We bend possibility toward the future we need. It lights up, bright, bright, bright.

I let go of Vik to shield my eyes. Reality snaps into place around me. I stumble backward into a table, catching myself as my legs give out.