Page 71 of Flickerstate

“If you hooked up with Griffin, for example,” Candace continues remorselessly, “he’d use it to undermine you in the trials somehow. Not because he doesn’t like you. Just because that’s how he is. I say this as someone who loves him. Vik doesn’t strike me as the undermining type—but honestly, I don’t know him that well.”

“He’s not,” I say. “The undermining type.”

“Then the question is, could liking him mess you up in the last trial? Why not put it on pause till the competition’s over?”

I look up at the sky, where the first stars are unsheathing knives of light. “I could put it on pause,” I say slowly, “but I’d still feel how I feel.”

Candace looks up at the sky with me. I can hear what she’s not saying, what she should say:Be serious. You’ve known this guy for two and half months. You can definitely get in deeper—that’s what the pause is for.Instead she says, “I’ll take your word for it. Want to raid the vending machines in the Lucasson basement and have an awkward movie night with Bree?”

A smile spreads across my face.

Bree and Candace’s whole thing blindsided me—which wounds my pride, since I’m an egomaniac who considers herself observant—but after I processed them kissing, I felt intensely relieved. I was worried that after what I did in the first trial, Candace had forgiven me but was still kind of done with me, and she was making friends with Bree to replace me as the person she hung out with. Turns out that in Candace’s Academy story, Bree’s the love interest—and Candace will accept me back as the funny best friend, so long as I don’t mess things up again.

I haven’t been anyone’s best friend in a while.

“Sounds good,” I say.

Chapter Seventeen

Vik and I are strolling the campus loop, passing by Admissions. Autumn sun glows white on wrought iron and leaded windows. Heglances, bright-eyed, at the students ahead of us on the path and sneaks his pinkie around mine. I smile helplessly. I think of teasing him, saying something like,No one cares, if you want you can hold my whole hand.

He leans over to kiss me. His lips, soft and hot, brush mine. I press into him, deepening the kiss, and his hand moves to my waist, slides to my hip,tightens—

Engine noise kills the moment. A minivan chugs up the hill toward us, veering side to side on the road the shuttle uses to drop off students. Sun bounces from the windshield in a solid glare. I can’t see the driver, but whoever they are, they’ve lost control.

I grab Vik’s arm to yank him out of the way. The van swerves, the front bumper strikes my chest, and—

***

The bedroom is dark. Sweat oozes down my forehead and stings my eyes. My body clenches in sourceless agony.

It’s two weeks since the last trial, two weeks till the final one. Every evening, Candace, Bree, and I practice siphoning, channeling, occlusion, anything Dr. Langmore might demand we do in the mysterious “summation” our syllabus promises. Every night, I call Jo. I hear about the high school classes she likes (art, PE) and the ones she doesn’t (everything else—“We can’t all be homework robots like you, Norah”), about the many ex-friends who still flinch from her in the halls. And I hear about Dad: how loud his bite-dreams are, how scared Jo’s getting.

Her fear steels me. I need to win for her.

Every morning before sunrise, Vik tutors me, reviewing conventional nav techniques in preparation for the final trial.

But we’ve also been leaguing.

Every day we hold the connection longer, peer farther into the future, push reality to outcomes less plausible. And every day I learn more about him. He tells me that though his childhood was lonely, he had one close friend, the girl who gave him the Vermont T-shirts, but she drifted slowly away after the Academy accepted him: His future was going to be so different from hers, so much stranger. At the Academy, he made a new close friend, Jake, but…

“Look how that turned out.” Self-loathing simmers in Vik’s voice. “Before Jake disappeared, he was agitated. Paranoid. He was doing out-there reading about Highwall’s research team, saying noone knew the whole story, muttering about a cover-up. When I asked what he meant, he shut down. When I asked if he was okay, he said he was fine. I let it go. Big mistake.”

After Jake, Vik’s nav struck him as a bad joke: How could he have a special power to shape the future when he couldn’t even help his friend?

“What would you do, if you really could shape the future any way you wanted?” I ask.

Maybe it’s a frivolous hypothetical. But he ducks his head and thinks hard. “The world hurts people,” he says after a pause. “I’d like to help them. But I’m a black-and-white thinker. This is wrong, that’s right. This is stupid, that’s smart. Not everyone thinks the way I do, though, and I’msureit’s wrong to force my vision of the future on everyone else. That’s one reason I was curious about leaguing. With leaguing, one navigator can’t force the rest. The whole league agrees on the future they want. So if I had infinite power to shape the future—I wouldn’t use it. Not by myself. I’d talk to people. Debate. Research. Collaborate. And use the power to help us all—the way we all decided was right.”

In return for his honesty, I share stories of my own. How my best friend since kindergarten dumped me the spring before I came to the Academy. How I cherish Candace’s Paris Fashion Week style and Bree’s relentless cheeriness but sometimes I worry that one day they’ll decide I kind of suck, actually, and then our blockmate dinners, evening nav practices, and occasional horror-movie nights will just vanish. How the person I’m closest to is my sister Jo, but since I’m basically her third parent, I’ve developed this hyper-responsiblemother-knows-best way of interacting with the world that I maybe need to let go of.

The more I tell Vik, the lighter I feel, glowing and suspended in air. I say so much, I can pretend I’ve said everything.

But I never mention what happened to Dad. I never mention my bite.

Another chilly morning, I press Vik’s warm body against a tree and kiss him. He laughs against my mouth and says, “I like you so much.” I laugh too, delighted, lightheaded. He slides his hands up my arms—and I spring backward like a startled cat before his fingers brush the bandage under my sleeve.

When he asks what happened, I have to lie right to his face. Some nonsense about ticklish elbows.