Page 7 of Flickerstate

Mom sighs, weary and sad. “Norah.”

I turn to the window in silence.

***

At home, I avoid Mom. I need a parent to sign my transfer paperwork, but I’m worried that if I push her, she’ll refuse, trying to “protect” me again, and we’ll be back at square one—that is, screwed. And I don’t want to bother Dad. I can barely look at him. If I’d wowed Dr. Langmore, if I’d had the chance to search Highwall’s Archive, maybe I could’ve cured us, but now…

Adding insult to injury, the Academy won’t put me out of my misery and reject me. A week passes with no word from them. Eight days, nine, ten eleven twelve.

The call comes on the thirteenth day.

It’s my turn to bring Dad dinner. I’m perched on his bed, breathing stuffy sickroom air, while he picks at a chicken saladsandwich. I made the sandwich how he likes it: black rye bread, tomato, mustard, and Grandma Sullivan’s famous chicken salad. Personally, I find salad sandwiches vile. Chicken, tuna, egg—blech, blech, blech. Last year, if I had to watch Dad chew that mess, I’d have faked retching noises. Now I just wish he’d take another bite.

Since flickerbeasts swarmed him earlier this year, Dad’s belly has deflated and his orange hair has gone gray. Under his blankets, his long legs look brittle. Blood constellates the bandages over his bites.

Unlike normal injuries, possibility wounds almost always get worse over time, not better. At first, they phase in and out. Then they scab. When the scabs slough off, they reveal bleeding punctures. Slowly, the punctures deepen—until one day, someway, you die.

Almostalways.

On a very few occasions, like the beasts that cause them, possibility wounds flicker out of reality on their own. But when I say it’s rare, I meanrare: eleven confirmed cases of wound demanifestation in the forty years since the CDC started tracking beast data. In theory, we should be able to cure wounds with navigation—if a woundcandemanifest, then a possible future must exist where itdoes—but in practice, we’re talking about a possibility so tiny that no one can find it in flickerstate. The best navigators in the world, people who can force the most wildly improbable futures to come true, have tried to cure wounds. Every one of them has failed.

That didn’t stop me from dropping into flickerstate after Dad and I were bitten, searching for a cure.

All I saw was death.

He has nine bites. With my one bite, I can walk around justdandy—for now—but nobody walks around just dandy with nine bites.

“Try to eat more, Dad.” I hate how pleading my voice sounds.

“You’re not the boss of me. You can’t tell me what to do.”

He’s joking. It’s good that he can joke, though his sense of humor is pathetic. But I worry he also means it. He’s exhausted, in pain, sick of Mom and me pressuring him to stay as well as possible. He wants us to leave him alone so he can turn off the lights and drift away.

It puts me on edge. “If I were the boss of you, you’d be eating leafy greens and antioxidants, not old-man deli sandwiches.”

“Everyone was healthier back in Grandma Sullivan’s day when they drank raw-egg milkshakes and never counted calories.”

“Until they got polio.”

“At least they didn’t have to worry about…”

Dad used to discuss what he wanted, when he wanted, and damn the niceties. But since the beasts swarmed him, he’s been timid.

“Actually,” I say in my most deliberately provoking know-it-all tone, “the first beast manifestation was during World War II, so Grandma Sullivandidhave to worry about—”

“Shh.” Dad’s eyes are bloodshot, like the wounds themselves.

“They’re not the Candyman; they don’t appear when—“

“Stop that or get out.”

I weigh those options.

No one really understands beasts. Their firstrecordedmanifestation was during World War II—the date of the Trinity test,the original nuclear detonation. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud fireballed the Jornada del Muerto desert. And at 5:39 a.m., about thirty miles away, in sleepy Socorro, New Mexico, a housewife named Martha Highwall was pulling rain-soaked slips, suspender belts, cone bras, and other period-appropriate underthings from her backyard clothesline when flickerbeasts tore into reality and mauled her. Thirty-two bites. Seconds later, a lightning bolt struck her dead—even though the early morning thunderstorms that had delayed the Trinity test had cleared.

Young Victoria Highwall, watching in terror from her bedroom window, saw her mother die. Decades later, she became the first person to prove she could alter probability with the power of her mind.

So, yeah. Peoplespeculatethat the combination of a momentous human choice and a nuclear detonation—the intentional splitting of atomic nuclei—altered the relationship between flickerstate and the real, bringing them closer together, allowing beasts to spill through and creating the first navigators.