You’re not alone, came a whisper.
The voice was right. I had North.
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Do you know . . . who he was?” I couldn’t say who my father is. Not to my dad. I’d already decided not to tell him about Griffin, not yet. Not unless he already knew.
“No,” Dad replied. “Your mom wouldn’t tell me. She said it was better—safer was her word—if I didn’t know.”
It was warm in my room, but I suddenly got cold.
“Safer,” I repeated.
“That’s what she said. She was insistent that I not try to find out, and made me promise that I’d never tell you that you weren’t mine.”
“Why? What was she afraid of?” What I really meant was who.
“It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million and one times since then. But your mother never said. All she told me was she thought her life was in danger, and yours was too, and that she needed me to marry her, and if anything happened to her, to raise you. She made me promise never to tell you that I wasn’t your father unless you found out on your own.”
It was hard to imagine my dad at eighteen, taking all of this on. “And you said yes to all that?”
“It was Aviana. I would’ve done anything for her.” His voice caught. “Plus, what she was asking, it was what I always wanted, anyway. To be with her. I thought we’d get to spend the rest of our lives together. I never thought she’d—” He stopped himself again. He never thought she’d die.
She thought her life was in danger, and nine months later, she was dead.
What if her death wasn’t an accident?
I didn’t sleep that night, wondering. It seemed implausible, but then again I didn’t know who my mom was dealing with. Neither had Griffin. There was a piece missing, a big one, and I had no idea where to find it.
At two a.m. I turned on my light. I couldn’t just lie there in the dark anymore, clutching the baby blanket my mom had been so determined to finish. But there was no way I could concentrate on the mountain of schoolwork I had to do either. North’s copy of Paradise Lost was on my nightstand, the card my mom left me marking the page where the quotation appeared. I grabbed the book and settled back into bed, letting my fingers skim the raised stitching on my blanket as I read the words aloud:
Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge, and what they choose; for so
I formed them free: and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d
Their freedom: they themselves ordain’d their fall.
North was right. Saying the words out loud made the meaning clearer somehow. Authors to themselves in all. Milton was saying that we always had the power to make right choices, even if we seldom did. It reminded me of Pythagoras’s view of upsilon. And Griffin’s timshel ring. Virtue or vice, thou mayest or mayest not, there was always a choice.
I set the book in my lap and picked up my Gemini, turning it over in my hands. For the first time I sensed the Doubt before I heard it, as if my mind had been preparing for it to speak.
You lift it, you carry it, you set it in its place, and it stays there; it cannot move.
If you cry out to it, it cannot answer or save you from your trouble.
The words, the odd phrasing—it felt like one of the society’s riddles. With this one, though, I didn’t have to work for the answer. I was holding it in my hand. It struck me as completely ridiculous all of a sudden, how reverent I’d been of this little rectangle. As if the secrets of the universe were tucked inside these four inches of program code and metal.
I set my Gemini back on the nightstand and brought my eyes back to North’s book. At the top margin of the next page, written with loopy script in dark red pen, was the name Kristyn with a phone number. Boston area code.
“Great,” I muttered. So much for trying to distract myself with poetry. I’d managed to stop obsessing about my mom only to start wondering about the girl who’d written her phone number in North’s book. Someone he dated back in Boston? Kristyn with a y sounded like a hot girl’s name. For all I knew, North had a slew of hot girls in his past. Had he slept with any of them? He was definitely experienced in the hookup department—I could tell that from the way he kissed. My cheeks got hot thinking about the way I kissed. Could North tell how inexperienced I was?
With a sigh, I shut the book and put it back on the nightstand, exchanging it for my Gemini. It’d been a couple of hours since I last checked on Griffin’s status, so I clicked over to Forum and filtered my newsfeed by the #GriffinPayne hash tag to scan the chatter. The latest official update had been posted just after midnight.
@Gnosis: @GriffinPayne being prepped for emergency brain surgery. Follow @GnosisNews for the latest on his condition. #GriffinPayne #Gnosis
Brain surgery. With no tears left, I stared at my screen with dry eyes until I fell asleep.
Noise from the courtyard woke me. Some boys were playing a very heated game of ultimate Frisbee, and from the sound of it, they had quite a few cheerleaders. I was still clutching my Gemini, so I quickly checked Griffin’s status before getting out of bed. There’d been an official Griffin update at seven a.m., just over two hours ago, which said that he was still in surgery but that the report from his surgical team was that it was going well.
Buoyed by the good news, I splashed some water on my face then stepped into Hershey’s closet to find something to wear. In the mad prep for the party, I’d missed the laundry drop-off again, so unless I wanted to look like a homeless person, I’d have to wear something of hers. The associate dean had asked me to pack up Hershey’s things—her parents were having them shipped—but I kept putting it off, mostly because doing it would force me to accept that she wasn’t coming back. I’d been Forum messaging with some of her friends back home, one of whom had told me on Friday that her parents had heard from Hershey’s parents that Hershey had withdrawn sixteen hundred dollars from an ATM at the Boston airport before getting on the plane to Seattle, and that the Clementses figured their daughter would come home as soon as the money ran out. I couldn’t believe they were so blasé. I didn’t doubt that Hershey could fend for herself, but I was still worried about her and thought her parents should be too, especially since none of her friends in Seattle had heard from her since she disappeared.
I took the road route to downtown, not wanting to get mud on Hershey’s shoes. I read Griffin’s Panopticon article as I walked, which had already been updated to mention his stroke, but of course said nothing about my mom. It was odd, actually, that no one had found their marriage license. Journalists were notorious for digging that stuff up. I linked over to the page for the Gemini Gold. The device, nearly half the size of the previous Gemini but with twice the memory and infinite battery life (it was powered by the user’s movements when it was snapped into the wrist holster and could hold a charge for up to an hour when it wasn’t hooked in), was set to go on sale on Monday morning, and there was a quote from Gnosis’s CFO, added to the page less than an hour before, saying that the company hoped consumers would show their support for Griffin’s recovery by preordering the device he’d worked so hard to bring to market. The marketing ploy, in its transparency, put a sour taste in my mouth, especially since I knew it would work. Not that people needed that much urging; Gnosis was offering the Gold for less than it’d cost to buy an older model Gemini.