Free to Fall

23

“RORY, WE HAVE TO GO,” North said urgently. EMTs were hurriedly strapping Griffin to a stretcher, barking at one another in rapid fire. I hadn’t moved since Griffin collapsed nineteen minutes ago. Nor had I spoken. I felt as if the floor beneath me had given way and I was floating through the air, weightless. This couldn’t be happening. I didn’t even know what “this” was yet. Was Griffin dead?

“Rory,” North said again.

I forced myself to meet his gaze. “Okay,” I said.

Beck was on his Gold, watching the Forum chatter about what had happened. Since Griffin had collapsed during a live broadcast, it was all anyone on Forum was talking about. New posts were popping up so fast, Beck’s screen was a whirl of vertical motion.

“Come with us,” I said to Beck suddenly. “Take the train with us back to Theden. You can stay at North’s.” I looked at North for confirmation. “Right?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of room.”

Beck was already shaking his head. “I can’t. I have the MFA event tomorrow.”

“You’ll be back by then. There are trains nearly every hour.”

I could see Beck considering it. He seemed uncertain. “Let me ask Lux,” he said finally.

“You can’t ask Lux,” I said sharply. “I’m not supposed to be here, so you can’t ask it if you can leave with me.”

Beck’s eyes were instantly suspicious. “What do you mean, you’re not supposed to be here?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, squeezing my fists in frustration to keep from shaking him. “God, Beck, just come with us. You’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Rory, we really need to go,” North said gently. “It’s gonna be hard to get a cab, and we can’t miss our train.”

I looked at Beck. “You coming?”

He took a step back, away from me.

“Forget it,” I barked, spinning on my heels as angry tears sprung to my eyes. “North, let’s go.”

“Nice to meet you,” I heard North say behind me. “Good luck with the exhibit.”

“Rory!” Beck called. I didn’t look back.

By the time we made it to our train, the mainstream news media had picked up the story. We watched coverage the whole way back. A little after eleven, Gnosis released a statement. Griffin Payne had suffered a stroke.

“A stroke?” My voice faltered. “He’s thirty-five. He was on the cover of Men’s Health last month. How could he have a stroke?”

North just shook his head. “He’ll be okay. He’s got the best doctors in the world.”

I pressed the heels of my hands to my forehead in frustration. “Ugh! I feel like we took one step forward and, like, eleven steps back.” And then, out of nowhere and out of everywhere, I was crying. This time I didn’t even try to hold it in. North pulled me toward him, wrapping both arms around me. I wept noisily into his jacket, which smelled like woodsy cologne and not like North at all.

“None of it makes any sense,” I said, my voice muffled by herringbone. “Griffin said my mom was their class valedictorian. Why would she leave just hours before graduation?”

“Maybe she was scared,” North said. “Maybe she knew someone was out to get her. Someone who was capable of more than just some doctored medical files.”

“But who? And why didn’t she just go to the police? Or at least to Griffin. She could’ve proven to him that those test results were fake.” Unless she sent them to him. But why would she do that?

Just then something out the window caught my eye. A flash of light in the dark. It was a meteor, zipping through the night sky. For a moment I thought there were two of them, one below and one above, but then I realized the second one was a mirror image of the first, reflecting off the water below it. We were passing the reservoir. We were almost back.

“Theden” came the train’s automated voice. “Theden Central Station is next.”

I wiped my eyes and sat up as the train pulled into the station.

“Well, as far as dates go, this one was pretty uneventful,” North deadpanned.

“Totally dull,” I agreed.

“I’m glad you got a chance to talk to Griffin,” he said, softer and sincere.

“Me too.” Neither of us needed to say what we were both thinking. That we hoped it wouldn’t be the last time I got that chance.

The train stopped and we got to our feet. Mine were aching in Hershey’s stacked heels. “So we regroup tomorrow?” North asked as we stepped off the train onto the empty platform.

“Yeah, I guess so.” It was Saturday, so I didn’t have classes, but I’d resolved to use the weekend to catch up on all the schoolwork I hadn’t done. I’d assumed that talking to Griffin would answer my questions, not raise about a hundred more. Now I doubted I’d get anything done before Monday, or that this coming week would be any different from the past one. A blur of lectures I wouldn’t absorb and homework I wouldn’t do.

My jeans and sneakers were in the compartment under the seat of North’s motorbike, which was parked outside the station. North shrugged out of his suit jacket and held it up as a curtain, keeping his eyes on the sky as I changed in the space between it and him. When I had my jeans on but not my sweatshirt, I took a step closer to him so our bodies were touching, my bare chest against his white dress shirt. He looked down at me in surprise.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him. When my lips touched his, I let my eyes flutter shut and my thoughts go still, pretending, just for that instant, that we were just a boy and a girl kissing in a parking lot. A boy who wasn’t a cyber criminal and a girl whose life actually made sense. I felt his arms begin to lower. I shrieked. “Back up, back up!”

“Sorry,” he said, raising his arms again. “I got distracted.”

I giggled. “Okay, look away again, I have to put my sweatshirt on.” Obligingly, he tilted his head back, exhaling a big puff of warm air into the cold night sky. I tugged the sweatshirt over my head, and the skin on my chest prickled with goose bumps. “Okay, done.” I folded the dress and handed it to North. “Tell Noelle thank you.” North put the dress and his suit jacket under the seat then handed me a helmet.

“I should call my dad,” I said as I buckled the strap. “It was crazy to think I could keep this from him. He deserves to know the truth.” My voice broke a little. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t imagine actually saying the words. Mom lied to you. I’m not your kid.

“What can I do?”

“Download Beck’s Lux profile,” I told him.

“What are we looking for?”

“An explanation,” I said. “He starts using Lux and suddenly he’s taking crappy photographs and not returning my calls. That can’t be an accident.”

“Contentment changes people,” North replied. He swung a leg over his bike and tilted the seat down so I could get on behind him. “He’s obviously getting a lot of validation for those photographs—which, by the way, aren’t that crappy—”

“Yes, they are.”

“And he feels like his life is coming together. It’s the same reason ninety-eight percent of the people in this country won’t make a decision without Lux. Life gets easier when you use it.”

I gaped at him. “You’re defending Lux?”

“Hell, no,” North replied. “I’m just explaining it.”

I shook my head, the helmet knocking against my temple. “No. There’s something else going on.”

“Like what?” North asked as he started up the bike.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I climbed onto the bike and wrapped my arms around his waist. “But maybe it’s connected to whatever Griffin was about to say tonight. Before he left for his speech, he said something about needing to say a few things before ‘this thing’ went any further.”

“But he collapsed before he could get it out.”

“That’s pretty odd timing, don’t you think?”

North turned his head to look back at me as the bike roared to life. “Wait. You think there’s a chance what happened to Griffin wasn’t an accident?” he yelled over the noise.

I met North’s gaze. “I think there’s a lot we don’t know.”

I got back to the library ten minutes before closing, and my Gemini was right where I’d hidden it, under a seat cushion in one of the upper reading rooms. It’d posted two mundane status updates in the time we’d been gone, and other than a few likes, my late-night study session hadn’t drawn much attention on Forum. We’d pulled it off. Unless, of course, Tarsus heard from Griffin that I was at the party, or worse, had seen me, but at that point I had no way to know. I’d just have to wait.

I called my dad on the walk back to the dorm. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet in Seattle, so I knew he and Kari would be awake. He answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, my voice breaking.

“Sweetheart, what is it?”

The tears spilled over. How could the man who knew me well enough to know that something was wrong from the words Hi, Dad not be my real father?

“It’s about Mom . . . ,” I began.

“Okay,” Dad said slowly, guarded. There was the sound of a door opening. I imagined him stepping outside onto the small porch off the kitchen, barely big enough for the charcoal grill he kept there.

I started with the simplest truth. “Mom was— She was already pregnant when you guys got married.”

My dad sighed. “I know that, honey.”

“And”—I took a shaky breath—“you weren’t the father. You aren’t—my father.”

There was a long pause. I stopped walking and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing against his reaction, the pain I expected to hear.

“I know that, too,” I heard him say, his voice heavier than I’d ever heard it.

My eyes flew open. “You know?”

“I’ve always known,” he said sadly. “Your mom and I, Rory, we— We were never a couple. Not romantically, anyway. Your mom— She was in love with someone else. But, sweetheart, that doesn’t change how much I love you. Or the fact that I will always be your dad.” His voice broke. Tears rushed to my eyes.

“I love you too, Dad,” I whispered. “So much.”

“Maybe I should fly out there,” he said then. “I could—”

“No, that’s okay,” I said quickly. Airfare was expensive, and money was tight for them already. Plus, I felt like North and I were getting closer to whatever truth was behind all this, and having my dad around would only slow us down. “With classes and homework, I would hardly even see you.”

“If you’re sure,” my dad said, sounding uncertain. “I just hate that you’re by yourself in all this.” By myself. My mom was dead, my biological father was in the hospital, my best friend was acting like he’d been body-snatched, my roommate was missing, and my dad and stepmom were three thousand miles away. I felt like one of those bright-orange buoys in the ocean, floating in deep water. But those were tethered by rope. I was on my own.

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.

I stopped at Paradiso for two coffees. “Round two already?” the guy at the register asked when I ordered. North introduced him to me once, but I couldn’t remember his name. Blake, maybe? I gave him a quizzical smile.

“Round two?”

“North was just here twenty minutes ago,” he explained.

“Oh. Then I guess never mind then.” I pocketed my handheld and headed up to North’s apartment, smiling to myself. He’d gotten me coffee.

When his door opened, I realized that the coffee hadn’t been for me. Stunned, I stared at the girl standing in his doorway. Hershey grinned when she saw me and put a hand on her hip.

“Nice outfit, bitch.”