Page 57 of Flickerstate

I jolt upright and clutch my head, groping for bloody hair, a split scalp, a bruise.

Nothing.

The agony splitting bone and brain—it evaporates. I notice a crick in my neck, a knotty ache in my back. I must’ve fallen asleep reading: I’m at my desk, and a dime of drool onPhilosophy of Navigation’s open page suggests I used it as a pillow.

Another death dream.

Goddamnit.

***

Monday morning, when I walk across campus, a gleaming red band divides the dark earth from the dark sky. Birds trill in the trees, and the humid air smells rich, like grass and dew and pine. I wish I could take comfort in all this natural beauty, but it does jack for me. Panic and rage multiply inside me like blood cells, circulating through me, rising to the surface of my skin.

In the clearing, Vik sits on a rock, scrolling through his phone. Its backlight throws pallor across his face.

“Did you and Jake try to league?” I ask.

Vik slides his phone into his pocket. The clearing darkens. “No.”

“But the book belonged to him. And he wrote notes in the chapters about leaguing. Unless that was you. But I saw a lot of triple exclamation marks, and you don’t strike me as a triple-exclamation-mark kind of guy.”

“I’m not. Jake was interested in…pushing the boundaries of nav research.”

“So what’s the deal? I want to know…” I wave my arms, conveying the vagueness and enormity of all I want to know.

Vik stares at his boots. “Jake’s who I was looking for, when I ran into you in Admissions last spring. Campus security found him in the woods the next day. Confused, dehydrated. No memory of the past twenty-four hours. At first we thought he might come back next year, but then Admin announced he’d dropped out.”

That explains why Vik shut down when he saw me in thedining hall my first day. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about the memory of Jake.

“After they found Jake,” Vik continues, “his stuff vanished from our room. His clothes, his computer, his posters. All his books, too—except three he’d stashed under a floorboard in our closet. It was like he left them for me to find. And now he’s dead.”

In a nearby tree, a bird sings a flirtatious arpeggio, so inappropriate to the moment it sounds mocking. “Dead?” I say. “What?”

“This summer, Jake died in his sleep. I only know because his parents called to tell me. Sudden massive heart attack, the autopsy said. But that seems improbable, right? And…”

Each time Vik says “and,” I feel like we’re standing on stairs that descend someplace lightless and cold, and he’s tugging me down another step.

“…I think the night Jake disappeared, someone navigated me.” In the half-light, Vik’s eyes are shadows, his cheeks caves.

“How—” I cough. “How could you tell?”

“We went to a party. Me, Jake, Griffin, Mirabel. It was the Friday before spring break, so every senior with a fake threw a party. And I—I’m not a puritan. I’ll take a beer. One. Getting drunk doesn’t do much for me. That night, though, a voice in my head was whispering,Finish it, have another, finish it, have another. I blacked out. The next morning, I woke up on my bed still wearing my boots. Jake was gone. He hadn’t slept in his bed, and he wasn’t answering texts. I went looking for him—that’s when I ran into you—but I haven’t seen him since.”

My skin creeps. “Why—who would have wanted you out ofcommission?”

“No idea. Maybe I’m paranoid, and there was no interference, and I just decided to get wasted for once. But I’d watch out for people acting…improbably.”

Vik really believes interference could still be going on at the Academy. If it is, Jake was framed—or he had accomplices. My sympathetic nervous system revs like a sports car, zero to sixty, vision tunneling, ears ringing. But I can’t panic; I have to breathe deep and handle shit. “You found three books. I read one. What were the other two?”

“An unauthorized biography of Highwall and a book on navigation pseudoscience.”

“Navigation pseudoscience?”

“Fringe stuff.”

“Fringier than interference and leaguing?”

“I’m talking…UFOs. Alchemy. Perpetual motion machines.”