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  I fidgeted with the bracelet and made it slide around and around my wrist. “Yeah. You do that, okay?”

  Liam

  You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die, they sing most and most beautifully, as they rejoice that they are about to depart to join the god whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, tell lies about the swans and say that they lament their death and sing in sorrow.

  —Socrates on his Death Bed

  —S-3000, V-234323-L989877889, Prod.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “It was strange,” Santiago said. “I never would have pegged Sully for a Shadow Boxer. He seemed so… un-extraordinary.”

  I thought about the boy I’d seen in report after report making Texi laugh at mundane, ordinary things. I tried to think of any clues he gave as to what he was, but I couldn’t remember a single one. It made sense that Santiago might have missed it, but how could Nobu and I have? I was supposed to be Mr. Objectivity, and I had to consider the possibility that my perspective could be just as limited by Texi as the others. Was I as distanced from her as I thought I was?

  I countered his observation with questions. “And he tried to strangle her? That’s what sparked the Bucket Hop?”

  “Without the bracelet,” Santiago added.

  I shivered at the thought. She could Hop and possibly Jump at will. The tracker imbedded in her bracelet was more important than ever now, or else how would we be able to find her if she accidentally went elsewhere? How would she know how to get back to us?

  “Luckily, when we Interim Jumped, I gave Texi some time to settle into it before we came here. I’d hate to think what we would have had to do if Sully’d followed us down this Vein. At least we were able to figure out what his tracker was hidden in.” He added sugar to his coffee, letting the white grains sift into the dark liquid. He swirled it with the spoon and breathed in the steam before he took a sip. “How could I have been so blind to him? He was right under my nose.”

  “You know that means they’ve always known where the subject was.”

  “My guess is just not who the subject was. We kept her so much in the dark about it all that any prodding Sully did probably came up empty. He couldn’t exactly go around murdering every teenage girl that fit her description, could he? He had to wait until he had proof, and he probably noticed the headaches when I did. They aren’t exactly easy to hide if someone knows what to look for. Plus she had the added benefit of voodoo eyes.”

  Her eyes were the things I noticed in that last feed of her in the gym that Santiago sent. There was a fissure in the color. A crack into her soul. The color change was barely audible, but something let me hear it. I almost thought I’d imagined it was there, but it was. The Change. The clue. It was like the Multiverse meant for me to see it, because there was something bigger going on than just the strange eyes.

  I looked up as if I could see through the two decks above and into my room. I let Texi take it. There were other rooms I could have given her instead, but for the hour we talked, she seemed most comfortable there. It didn’t feel right to make her move, and my room had the second best view on the entire boat. Things were about to get even more chaotic for her, and she deserved the peace of a good sunrise to start her day off in the morning.

  Texi was different in person. I know I’d seen her a million times before, but there’s a difference in knowing facts about a person and knowing a person in their entirety. In many ways, I’d known her my entire life, and it was surprisingly easy to talk to her. I felt the movement from each question she asked as it transitioned into the next. Some of the things she asked were repetitive and others were inventive, but I could tell she kept some to herself entirely. She was intuitive to the process of understanding—when to push, when to wait. Strangely, what was most impressive was how she was able to set aside her fear and still be a smart ass. From afar, I’d witnessed her snarky nature, and experiencing it in person threw me off a little. She reminded me of Nobu in some ways, with her quick, quirky quips. Except she wasn’t like Nobu in all the other ways. She was the first girl I’d ever met, and I was shocked to find how easy it was to match her attitude step by step. She seemed to respect it more, though I was nervous for reasons I couldn’t describe.

  “How are you holding up?” Santiago asked.

  “So, you’ve known, too?”

  He took another swig of coffee. “I know stuff I wish I didn’t, but that always seems to be the way of things. It’s funny. When I first found out what I was, I hated her. I thought she was the reason I could never be normal, and even when I got to start Jumping, it took me a while to realize that normal was never going to be in my future whether or not Texi was in my life. This existence eventually became my new normal, and I was able to let go of my anger, but she couldn’t let go of hers. She hated me for years after the summer I found out. I said so many hurtful things, thinking it’d make me feel better—that it’d change things. By the time I realized it wouldn’t, she couldn’t stand being around me. This summer, I tried even harder to fix things as we worked on that stupid fence, but it was like the more I tried to make things right, the more she pushed back against the idea. I was scared she wouldn’t trust me when it came time.”

  “But she did trust you.” I was growing tired of this line of conversation. I remembered when Santiago was learning how to correspond with us when he was fourteen. The tone of his attached notes to the vid feeds and data he’d collected were full of frustration and anger as he learned to deal with his new reality. He’d gotten better over the last year, but only because he became overly sure of himself and his purpose as a Saltador. He’d grown into a cocky pain in the ass. Mostly, I found both kinds of Santiagos exhausting. I tried to redirect the conversation by asking, “When did the Change finally trigger?” This was the useful information—the kind I didn’t know yet.

  “I was talking to her when the swirling in her eyes started at the Homecoming Dance, and at first I thought it was a trick of the disco lights. I followed her into the restroom, and when she looked at me, purples invaded the greens of her irises. It was terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.” Santiago stared into the brown depths of his coffee and the dimples in his cheeks sunk further into a frown. “When I dropped her off, I should have stayed with her. I just needed to think. The eyes were so strange. It was dumb to leave! What if I had been too late? What if Sully had succeeded in killing her? What if I walked into that stupid house only to find her dead?”

  I pulled open the refrigerator and grabbed the orange juice. I didn’t want to answer his questions. My mind was stuck on the question of the eyes, and I tried to pull him back to the topic. “What was going on?”

  “You know how our eyes tend to marble in the irises, no matter what color we think they are? The cracks in her marble started bleeding out shades of purple, and they began to swirl like storm clouds in her eyes.”

  I shivered and took a long swig from the container. There was something about the eyes that drew out even more questions. I remembered the feeling of caterpillars crawling on mine, and wondered what it would feel like to have what happened to her happen to me. How do you empathize with an experience you haven’t gone through? And more importantly, why were the eyes a side effect?

  “She could have died.” There he went, getting back on the train of unproductive thoughts. Being a broken record was not going to help us get through this.

  “She’s not dead, though. No use dwelling on it,” I said, hoping he’d finally get the point.

  Santiago scratched his head, and I could hear the way his fingernails grazed his scalp. The new sense of hearing kept getting in the way of concentrating, and I pulled at my earlobe.

  “You know, it sucks that you were kept in the dark, too. Maybe after some time, you’ll figure out that your new normal won’t be so bad,” he said.

  Annoyance flittered through me. I wasn’t like S
antiago and Texi. I didn’t need any more time to adjust past understanding because I had enough time in the hours I gave myself on the island. Things were one way, and now they were another. Maybe that was another difference between how Watchers and Explorers are raised. We learn how to use objective acceptance because we are aware that situations can change in the blink of an eye. “I’m not Texi,” I reminded him. “You don’t have to try and soothe this transition over with me. I’ve known my entire life that I belonged to the cause. Just because my role has been altered a bit doesn’t make it any less or any more important.”

  “I wouldn’t say less important.” There was fear playing on his face as he continued. “She Spliced on a Stagnant.”

  “What?” I had to choke back the swig of orange juice I’d just taken. It burned the back up my throat and the pathways up to my nose.

  “That’s how we escaped Sully. She created four new Veins.”

  I pulled in a breath, but the hairs at the back of my nose were still on fire. “Four?”

  Santiago finished off his coffee, and the ceramic clinked against the marbled countertop. “The worst part is… I took a brief Culture Pulse before we left. Those four Veins? They aren’t Stagnant anymore.”

  My mouth swam in new levels of acidic with this information. I knew I needed to form words, but they wouldn’t coagulate on my tongue. Texi had set the inert into motion. “But Energy can be neither—”

  “Created nor Destroyed,” Santiago finished. “But what if it can be?”

  I shook my head. There had to be another explanation besides Creation. Just because she could Splice didn’t mean the Calvary succeeded in harnessing Creation. I slid the rest of the juice back onto the shelf in the fridge and closed the door. The stainless steel of it felt cold on my fingertips, and I tried to mimic the metal’s cool calmness as I asked my next question. “So these Veins could possibly expand out?”

  “I doubt they will without her there to push them along. I’m sure she just bought them time, but when it happened, I thought she was gonna collapse the entire Vein.” Santiago shuddered as he confessed, and I remembered the way a vein in the arm can collapse around a needle. Nobu always took blood from me four times a year to check my vitals, and he always struggled with finding just the right place to make the needle stick. Once, just as the blood began to stream into the vial, the vein fell in on itself and blood spurted out, sprinkling us both with red, metallic dots. I imagined the Multiverse squeezing out entire universes like these red, metallic dots into the Nothing.

  Santiago continued his story: “And when I told her this, she said it was like breathing. Liam, she did it as naturally and instinctually as taking a breath, and she pulled us both through it without needing the Planck Activation Bracelet.”

  I didn’t know what to make of it. She could not only Jump without her bracelet, she could pull others along with her? Although all Saltadors had the power within them to Jump, no one should be able to access the power on their own. And although every Splicer had the ability to Splice, none of them should have the power to be self-aware in doing so. Yet here Texi was, doing both.

  Santiago tapped his fingers across the counter. “We have to be even more careful—especially when it comes to sympathizing with her. We don’t know what can happen.”

  “I think I understand objectivity even better than you do,” I reminded him. I tried not to let his superiority bug me. I recognized he was telling himself these things more than he was telling me. Still. It bugged me that he thought I might need a reminder of it.

  “Maybe it was a mistake to let you meet her so soon. We don’t know what she’s capable of yet. I should have gotten more time alone with her.”

  Patience. It was a hard thing to maintain with this conversation. When Santiago learned to Jump two years ago, he visited Geeta often. I tried not to be annoyed by the way he believed in his own understanding of things. He latched on to every new concept like they were absolute truths, and he always said them out loud to remind himself of their importance. Except he’d include me in this conversation because he saw me as younger. The big brother complex he had with Texi and Mina transferred onto me, since I was at least someone he didn’t have to watch his mouth around. He still didn’t get that even though he was over two years older, I had the breadth of a different experience—one that let me truly grasp concepts a million times easier than him.

  “And what would that have accomplished? The fact that the Shadow Boxers knew where she was should only tell you that the extra time you speak of never existed. If I’m supposed to be a part of this, now is as good as time as any to get started. This was the right thing to do, and you know the failsafe if things get out of hand.”

  His chest rose as he sucked in a deep breath. “I have to be honest. I don’t know if I could do it. I don’t know if I could kill Texi if it came down to it.”

  I didn’t reply. It only solidified the conclusion I came to in the 2040s. It wasn’t Santiago’s job to do, although he thought it was. The fact that he was prepared for it, even if he couldn’t follow through with it, gave me a strange sense of respect for him.

  I understood how difficult it could be for Explorers as they discovered the truth behind what they were. During that time, loyalty to duty can be a hard thing to establish, so even though his reaction to it annoyed me, I kept reminding myself to show compassion towards him. Santiago was preparing to honor his duty to the Saltadors despite his relationship with Texi, and that was a feat in and of itself.

  He closed his eyes and whispered, “Be intrepid.”

  The way he put softness into the phrase made me pity him. He was right, and he wasn’t alone in that fear. When it came down to it, was I willing to take a life? Objectively or not, no matter what conclusion I’d come to on that island, I wasn’t sure if I could follow through with disposing of the subject. “For we Stand on the Shoulders of Giants.” I finished the phrase, but the more complicated things got, the more I realized that sometimes the Shoulders of Giants was a crappy place to stand.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The buzzing on my wrist woke me. I’d fallen asleep in the den, and before I sat up, I realized I had an uncomfortable crick in my neck.

  I pulled up my screen and clenched my fist. New Post to the Eightieth Generation.

  Geronimo was spewing out more and more of his crap at a faster and faster speed. I tried tracking it before I read, but, as usual, nothing came up.

  Then I read:

  We are warned against impatience in the Manifesto, yet it is in our nature to fear that which we don’t understand. It is also in our nature to destroy that which we fear.

  Is it any wonder that when the Humanitarian Project was revealed for what it was, we sought to destroy it all? No. I can forgive that which was in our nature.

  Fifteen years later, we have had time to digest the whims of our fear. Now that we have, I will not be able to forgive any Destruction that comes beyond this moment.

  For I have met her, and I have been her friend. She is no more dangerous than you or I when you consider everyone’s ability to create or destroy. You, my countrymen, who seek her death, are those whom we should fear. Destruction rests in your will more than it does in hers.

  His logic sounded logical, but his feeds were, like always, unbalanced. If he’d just play up both sides, I would have more respect for him.

  I shook my head. At least Texi wasn’t trapped in that universe anymore. Geronimo could go ahead and keep spouting off that crappy propaganda, because at least now we could keep her safe. Maybe, now that I didn’t need to worry about the forum giving away Texi’s location, I wouldn’t have to keep such a close eye on it. I shut off the screen, unwilling to give the forum any more of my Energy. Although it did make me realize that there were things Texi needed to learn faster than I would have liked her to.

  Forums. They were the same in every universe that existed within technology, and the Planck Activation Bracelets allowed for instantaneous downlo
ads from Explorers for Watchers to filter. I remembered when Nobu allowed me access to it for the first time. “Do not attach yourself to any belief, because you’ll only find one that contradicts it two articles later. Explore all sides of every issue you come across, because if you believe before you understand, then you fall into ignorance.” He was right. For all the talk within The Manifesto about balance, our government sure did like to sway into extremes.

  But maybe it was time to teach Texi how to use the forums. I recognized that it may be a mistake to give her the databases so early on, but she’d understand more if she knew how to find the answers to random questions on her own. After last night, I felt the cold fingers of time squeezing around us. Now that she was opening her mind up to learn, she needed to absorb as much as she possibly could before events started to unfold in front of her.

  The morning was well on its way out when I finally went to wake her up, but she was already sitting in the same chair I’d left her in last night. I wondered if she ever left it. I glanced over at the still, pristinely made bed and got my answer.

  I sat in the other chair and thanked the fish-tank-table for the space it put between us. Objective distance was going to be difficult to keep now that she was on Geeta, and after talking to Santiago last night, I realized I needed to be surgically careful around Texi. Any extra wall to keep between us, even if it was in the form of a coffee-table-fish-tank, helped. “Want to learn how to pull up your screen?” I asked.

  “Good morning to you, too.” She passed me a sly smile, and let the words litter the room with sarcasm.

  I laughed without meaning to, and the moment I heard it, I cut it short. I couldn’t like her or be her friend. I needed to maintain emotional distance as much as physical distance. I pulled my mouth out of the smile, and said, “Do you know how to activate it?”