“WHERE WERE YOU last night?” Eliot asked as we trudged toward the cafeteria. “Didn’t you get my texts?”
“Sorry. I crashed early.” Guilt nibbled at me. First a secret, now a lie. I hadn’t seen Eliot’s messages until I’d returned from Doughnut World, too late to reply. And he would not be thrilled to hear I’d already violated my probation to make out with Simon’s Echo.
I changed the subject. “What happened after I left last night?”
“Left” wasn’t quite accurate, but it sounded better than “After the Consort guards escorted me to my doom.”
Eliot looked away, and I wondered how much he was holding back to spare my feelings. “Just regular class. Boring without you.”
“What are you working on next? More break analysis?” The answer would only make me feel worse, but I couldn’t help asking.
“For another week or so. Shaw said we’ll start inversions soon.”
I ground my teeth. “It’s so unfair. I’m stuck with Addie for the next six months while you’ll be off having adventures and kicking ass.”
“I’m only the navigator,” he said. “Asskickery is your department.”
I jammed my hands in the pockets of my sweater. “Do you think I can pass the test? I’m going to miss out on all the fieldwork.”
“Addie’s good at fieldwork,” he said. “She was ranked first in her class, wasn’t she?”
“Naturally. You know how she is. It’ll be all textbooks and essays. I’m screwed.”
He didn’t contradict me. “We need to figure out why the Echo deteriorated so quickly.”
“The Consort doesn’t care. They thought I did it on purpose.” My impulse in that moment hadn’t been to cleave, but something else both foreign and familiar, a new verse to a song you knew by heart. “The only reason I’m not expelled is because Addie told them I was too dumb to know what I was doing.”
“They listened to her?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I said bitterly. “Now she’s in charge of my training. She has to submit progress reports each week. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? She turns me in and gets to grade me?”
“Hold up.” He shoved his glasses farther up his nose and sat down at one of the couches clustered around the student commons. “I need to think.”
While I waited for his latest flash of brilliance, I studied the trophy case on the far wall, crowded with evidence of Simon’s basketball prowess. State championships and tournament wins, nets draped over the tops of their first-place trophies. Hanging behind them were team pictures, groups of tall, broad-shouldered boys wearing royal blue and matching scowls. It might be a game, but basketball was serious business around here. Even Simon looked solemn and determined . . . until you saw the faint curve at the corner of his mouth.
I thought back to the way Echo Simon had smiled at me last night. That had been a game too, in a way.
Eliot coughed, and I jumped like he’d caught me doing something wrong. “We need to prove you’re not at fault. If we can do that, they’ll have to review your sentencing. They’d reinstate you.”
A loosening in my chest, the faintest stirrings of hope. But hope was a dangerous, fragile thing, easily shattered. I couldn’t afford it.
“Nice plan, but the entire Echo’s gone. If there was any proof, I destroyed it.” I shuddered, remembering the melting sky and flickering children.
“Records,” he said, with the same patient tone he used when explaining my trig homework. “Your mom’s map. Frequency samples from previous Walks. Even similar branches might have relevant information. The Consort adds terabytes of data to the Archives every day. I’ll bet you anything the answer’s in there.”
I didn’t know how much a terabyte was, but it sounded big. And time-consuming. And like a very, very long shot. Hope fluttered again and I tamped down on it. “Addie’s not going to let me spend my suspension going through records. She’s got half the lessons planned already.”
“I’ll take care of the research,” he said, holding open the cafeteria doors.
“What am I going to do while you’re off scouring the Archives?” The noise and bustle of the cafeteria was overwhelming, the smell of steamed hamburgers and canned green beans turning my stomach.
“Funny you should ask,” he said. “I have a theory I want you to test.”
The tension left my shoulders. Eliot had theories about everything, and he was forever asking me to test them. Sometimes this turned out well, like when we figured out how to give people earworms by amplifying the Key World frequency in Top 40 hits. Sometimes it resulted in a sprained ankle and dislocated shoulder, like when we were eight, and I conclusively disproved his idea that you could fall through a pivot if you jumped from a high enough distance. Taking a seat at our usual table, I said, “I’m listening.”
“Watch.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and sketched the floor plan of the cafeteria. “Three pivots since we walked in.” He circled three separate places—one just outside the doors, another at a table full of sophomore girls, and a third near the cash register—and hummed their frequencies.
I closed my eyes, letting the chatter of the room recede. “More than that. I’ve got at least a dozen.”
“Half of those are diminished,” he said confidently. “They’ll blend back in any minute. The other three are off-key but stable. Forget them.”
“How can you tell?” I stared at him. Most Walkers had to be standing in an Echo to judge its stability. Even I couldn’t do it from this distance.
“Because I have a map.” With a flourish he produced his phone, a prototype with a screen bigger than my hand. “And I need to test it.”
“Gimme.”
He handed it over. Tiny lights dotted the screen, like the stars on a clear night. “How does it work?”
“It’s like a GPS. Instead of reading satellite information, it uses the microphone to plot nearby frequencies. Stronger frequencies are displayed as bigger circles, unstable ones flash, and pitch correlates to brightness.”
“Big, bright, flashing circles are bad? Small, dim, steady ones are good?”
He ducked his head. “I know it’s not subtle. . . .”
“Since when have I cared about subtle? You’re a genius!” I threw my arms around his neck. “A map that updates in real time? You’re going to be famous.”
He hugged me back for a second, then pulled away, almost bashful. “I don’t need to be famous. I haven’t even shown it to Shaw yet.”
“Why not? Once he sees it, you’ll own the class rankings.”
“There are a few bugs in the software I’m trying to work out. If I install it on your phone, do you promise you’ll use it?”
His tone was urgent, and I frowned. “Sure, if it helps you test it out. What are you so worried about?”
He shrugged. “That Echo deteriorated way too fast. It could happen again.”
“Park World was a fluke.”
“A fluke that almost killed you. I’ve been checking Echoes in the same frequency range, and they seem fine. But this will tell you if a world is too dangerous before you cross.” He stared at his sketch of the cafeteria and tapped the biggest of the pivots. “Use the map, Del. Promise.”
A burst of laughter from across the room distracted me—Simon, holding court at one of the big round tables near the windows, his chair tipped back on two legs, completely unaware of my presence.
Why would he notice me? He hadn’t been the one to kiss me breathless in the rain. Last night was a secret known only to me and a boy who wasn’t real.
Bree snuck up behind him, covering his eyes with her hands, and the chair dropped down with a thud. She let go, giggling as he reached back and caught her hand. It was the kind of casual gesture I was terrible at reading: Were they flirting? A couple? An actual couple?