Corina feels my fear. I can feel her pressuring me to let her explore. I try resisting, but I can’t. She reads my feelings and she knows: she knows something bad has happened.
I feel her pull back from my fear like it’s a knife’s blade. I can’t do anything except wait for her in the commons.
Corina comes out of the glide hall into the commons with Maddie, who walks directly to the dormitories. Corina slows to a stop where I’m standing by the game tables.
They’re watching. They already know.
Barely able to keep from shaking. “Chess?” I ask her. I don’t play well, but it’s her favorite game.
“Sure,” she says, feeling my need for her to play along.
We sit at the game table and set up our pieces, but as we’re about to start, movement distracts me. Corina and I look up at the same time.
Bishop is at the patio door. My chest begins to burn.
“Alex,” he says. “Can you come with me, please?”
He stands at the door waiting, thickly built and sure of himself. He feels like a priest or a cop. I nod and stand up.
They’re not good guys.
I try and clear the memory from my head because I’m suddenly sure he can read my mind. I force myself to think about lying to my parents, smoking weed, tagging up school property—other things that I got in trouble for that would leave me nervous.
I turn to Corina. “I’ll be back in a minute.” My voice is mostly breath. Our fears mix and I suddenly have to use the bathroom.
“I’ll be here,” she says. Her love comes in a wave that makes me both stronger and weak in the knees.
Bishop leads me out onto the patio. It’s raining again. Water slides off the invisible cover in sheets.
I fall in three paces behind him. He doesn’t show that he even knows that I’m there.
“Sit down, Alex,” Bishop instructs when we enter his office, gesturing at the circle of furniture.
I sit down in a chair with its back to the door. He sits across from me.
“What’s up?” I ask as casually as I can.
“I think you know, Alex.”
I shrug. I scan the room for an escape route. There’s no door besides the one we came in.
“You and Corina are in a relationship.” His voice is calm, casual like it’s no big deal.
I shrug.
“Richard really likes you, Alex. He doesn’t have his own kids yet, but he thinks of you like one.” Bishop shrugs. “He’s reluctant to call you on it, but he’s very disappointed.” He studies me for a long moment. I meet his eyes, but it’s hard to hold them. “But there’s something that concerns me more.”
I wait without reacting. I think about my breathing, the feel of my tongue against my teeth.
“Your work, Alex.” He gestures up at the wall and the displays change, shifting from window-images of famous places to something I don’t recognize—it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. The panel he’s pointing to is just a collection of colors, lines and squiggles that move around. The colors change from red to orange and yellow. “That’s what your witnessing should look like when you’re visiting Jordan Castle.”
“You can see when we glide? When we’re down under?”
He laughs. “Of course we can. We have to know everything and we can’t just trust a bunch of teenagers to behave, can we?”
“I haven’t—” They already know. I feel the fight leave me and I slump in my chair.
He waves me off, gesturing back to the wall.
I look up at the wall—it’s sort of like the image he showed me before, but this one looks like somebody puked a thousand rainbows into a bucket full of bubblestuff, then splatted it all onto a canvas. There are millions of colors and squiggles, but they’re too many and too small for me to even be able to tell what they are.
“This is a capture from an unscheduled event that happened in a glide room after hours a while back.” He waits, and a dozen more images like the first ones cycle through. “These events happened in your dorm room, which shouldn’t even be possible.” He looks at me, squints. “And yet here we are.”
I look at the images and then back at him. I wait.
“Can you explain these, Alex?”
I shake my head.
“Have you been doing unscheduled work?”
I shake my head and wait.
“I don’t think you understand how much this concerns me.”
He looks me in the eyes and I hold his gaze. I’m not looking away before he does.
“I haven’t been witnessing.” My voice is stronger than I thought it would be.
“What have you been doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true, Alex.” He pulls something from his pocket and reaches out for my hand. Something clamps down on my finger before I can pull away. It’s Live-Tech, the size and shape of a sausage. I try to pull it off, but I can’t. It just bites down even harder. “Don’t struggle,” Bishop says quietly. “Just go with it—it’ll only hurt if you resist or you lie to me.”
I try to shake it off, but all I get in return is excruciating pain that shoots from my hand and arm all the way through my chest and down into my feet. It’s so bad that I’m afraid I’m going to mess my pants, but then the pain stops completely. “What the hell?” I shriek.
He puts his hand around mine, supporting the Live-Tech with his wrist. “I don’t want to hurt you, Alex, but you can’t keep secrets that would affect the success of the project. Tell me the truth and you won’t have to feel the pain.”
I try to shut my mind, and then the pain starts again.
It’s horrific. It feels like all the skin and meat is being peeled back from my fingers and the palm of my hand. I force myself to look. The skin is still there, but I’m screaming anyway and my body is covered in sweat.
“Don’t resist, Alex.” His voice is soft and kindly, like a doctor talking to a child scared of needles.
My vision clouds from the pain.
“Let the truth out, Alex.”
I cannot move and I cannot remove the thing from my finger. I will die from the pain.
Find your Voice, Cassandra said.
I dive, unlock the drain cover and slip down inside.
I’m in the Jungle. I can still feel the pain and I think I can even hear Bishop’s voice as he asks me to “Let it out,” but I can’t be sure that he’s said it again or if I’ve slowed down in time.
Bishop’s strand hums in front of me, vibrating, pulsing with color. I can see him, feel him.
He’s enjoying this.
I bring myself up against him, my thread against his. His music is sharp, concise, missing signs of doubt or fear. With Jordan, there are openings, places where I can push, change the texture of the thread, which makes the music change. I can erase doubts, make them bigger.
John Bishop has no openings. He has no doubts.
I try anyways:
LET ME GO.
Nothing happens. Whatever openings he has for change are too small, the notes around them too firm. And I’m too weak. The pain in my biology is too much for me to concentrate.
I try again: LET ALEX GO!
His music doesn’t change. I hear him say, “Open your eyes, talk to me.” The pain from my hand grows even more intense, and even the crashing noise and color of the Jungle begins to fade in me, overwhelmed by pain.
I’m going to lose. I’ll either talk or I’ll die.
The pain-cloud blocking out the Jungle intensifies. Things begin to grow dim. Dark.
I feel myself cresting toward the surface even though I don’t want to, but then:
GRAB HIM, SCARED BOY, WRAP HIM LIKE YOU DID CORINA.
The Voice. It is loud, strong. It fills me with hope and the fog shifts, pulls back.
SHARE WITH HIM, BOY, MAKE HIM FEEL YOUR PAIN!
There’s no time to argue. I shift, open myself to him instead. Immediately our gravities begin. We are crashing. We are joining.
His joy is my joy.
My pain is his pain. I feel him blanch, a stab of uncertainty. Fear interrupts his music.
He’s left an opening. I pull back, refocus on his point of indecision, connect to it, use my own fear and pain to spread it until it begins to uproot the solid notes around it.
I feel him falter.
KEEP PUSHING, SCARED BOY.
I drill down further into the hole our fear created. His music is becoming a series of jangly twangs, buzzing like too-loose strings.
I spread, feel myself smothering his sound.
He grows muffled.
Then silent.
RUN AWAY, RUNAWAY BOY. IT’S TIME TO RUN AWAY!
I surface.
Bishop is on the floor at my feet, his head resting awkwardly against my foot, his whole weight propped up by a hip pushed flush against the chair where he was seated when I went under.
The Live-Tech that was on my finger is lying on the floor by his head.
I can’t tell if Bishop’s breathing.
He’s not . . .
He might be dead.
I run.