Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “Lux hasn’t decided anything, Rory,” North retorted. “Lux is an app following an algorithm that some computer programmers wrote after some business people pretending to be social scientists decided they could ‘optimize’ society by making people’s lives run more smoothly.”

  “Fine, but that algorithm has determined that there are six people out there who somehow have the potential to throw my life into chaos. It’s weird, North. Really freaking weird. Who are these people and what does my blood type have to do with anything? If you were me, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “Sure, but—”

  I grabbed his arm. “So do it. Move them to my opportunities list. Lux is designed to move a person toward her opportunities, right? If those people are at the top of the list, then—”

  He put his hand on mine. “I can’t, Rory.” He sighed. “Not won’t. Actually can’t. What you’re talking about would require access to Lux’s back-end data, behind Gnosis’s firewall. That’s impossible, even for me. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  Hot tears sprung to my eyes. I turned away from him. “So, basically, I’m powerless.”

  “You’re far from powerless, Rory.” I felt his hands on my waist. “You have a guide that’s far better than Lux.”

  I spun around to face him. “You’re telling me to trust the Doubt?” My voice was incredulous. Accusing.

  “I do,” he said softly.

  “You— You hear it too?”

  He nodded, his eyes searching mine. “Not every day or anything. But sometimes.”

  “Have you ever seen a doctor about it?”

  North made a face. “Why, so they could numb me out on antipsychotics? No, thank you. My brain is fine the way it is.” It was the same thing Beck always said.

  “But what if we’re . . . sick?” Sick was easier to say than crazy.

  “Do you feel sick?” North asked.

  “Well, no. But I’ve read the research, and—”

  “Whose research are we talking about here?” he scoffed. “‘Science’ with a capital S? The same geniuses who said the Earth was the center of the universe?”

  “Okay, so what is it then? If it’s not a hallucination, where is the voice coming from?”

  “People used to think it was the voice of God.”

  “But that’s crazy,” I said, then winced when I saw North’s face. “Not crazy. I just meant, why would God give us the capacity to reason and then tell us not to use it?”

  “Human rationality convinced Eve it was a good idea to eat forbidden fruit,” North challenged.

  “But what if the Doubt is the other voice?” I countered. “The snake.”

  North just looked at me. “Do you really believe that?”

  I thought of everything I knew of the voice in my head. When it had spoken, what it had said. I thought of those little children on the dock, the ones the voice had tried to help me save. “No. I guess not. But I’m still not totally convinced I should trust it. Not all the time, anyway.”

  North flipped over his forearm and pointed to one of his tattoos. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways it read, in simple block type. I touched the words with my fingertips. There was truth in them. Unstable was exactly how I felt. Not mentally, but somewhere in my chest, at the root of myself. “It’s from the Bible,” North said. “The Book of James.”

  There was a medical term for double-mindedness. Dipsychos. It was part of the pathology for akratic paracusia. “Of two minds” was how my textbook defined it. Reason and the Doubt at war in your brain.

  “The point is, there will always be competing voices,” I heard North say. “In your head and in the world. You can’t spend your life caught between them.”

  I looked up at him. “You’re telling me to choose.”

  “I know better than to tell you to do anything,” North said, reaching around me to shut down his computer. “But if you don’t decide, the world will choose for you.”

  18

  I CALLED MY DAD on the walk back to campus, but he and Kari were at Mulleady’s for trivia night, and with the background noise, I could barely hear him, so the conversation didn’t last long. I wasn’t sure what I was planning to say to him anyway. I wanted to ask about my blood type, to see if he had any clue how it could’ve possibly ended up at the very top of my Lux threat list, but obviously couldn’t tell him why I was asking or what North had shown me or why I felt so rattled by what I’d seen.

  I tried Beck next, but he didn’t pick up.

  Hershey wasn’t in our room when I got there. It was already after ten, so I buried myself in bed and tried to relax under the weight of the covers. My mind was whizzing, whirling, and my body ached with tension I couldn’t let go of. Over and over I heard North’s voice. If you don’t decide, the world will choose for you. It reminded me of something the Doubt said that night in the arena. Choose today whom you will serve. But I hadn’t. I was still wavering, hovering, between trusting the voice and wishing it’d leave me alone.

  “I don’t want to be double-minded,” I said to my ceiling. Then I waited, as if I might get a reply. When none came, I rolled over onto my stomach, feeling silly for expecting one, and slipped my hand under my pillow. As I did, my fingers brushed paper. It was a piece of computer paper, folded several times. Like a note.

  I unfolded the paper and lit my screen. I saw the words Academic Achievement Report first, then the columns of grades, then her name. Aviana Grace Jacobs. It was my mom’s Theden transcript, stamped SPRING MIDTERM 2013 at the top. How the hell did it get under my pillow?

  I studied it more closely now, grade by grade. A, A, A, A, A. All of them, As. How could that be? A psychiatrist had called her academic performance “dismal” two weeks before the date on this transcript. But these grades were far from dismal, they were perfect. It didn’t make sense. Was that the point whoever had put this here was trying to make? Uneasy, I refolded the transcript and slipped it back under my pillow. “I’m so confused,” I whispered in the dark, clutching my pendant. “What am I missing?”

  Time passed. Hours, maybe. I was too tired to look. My achy, weary body warred with my brain, fighting for sleep. But my mind was spinning in relentless circles, keeping me awake. At some point, I pulled the blanket my mom had given me up over my shoulders and tried to envision myself running along the yellow path of the cross-stitched spiral, charging toward the center, the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence reverberating in my head: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1,597. Behind my eyelids, the squares on my blanket became stone walls, and the spiral became an illuminated path in the dark. A trail I was following to the center, as if I knew I’d find something important there.

  As I came around the last curve, I saw my mother. She was wearing the green sweater she’d had on in her senior class photo, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders the way I often wore mine. She smiled when she saw me, opening her arms wide.

  “Mama,” I cried, rushing toward her. I slipped my arms around her, pressing my face against her neck.

  “Don’t be deceived,” she whispered into my hair. “Where the lie is, there is truth.”

  “What lie?” When she didn’t answer me, I pulled back to look at her face, but her eyes were still and vacant. The eyes of a corpse.

  With a gasp I stepped back, watching in horror as leafy branches pushed out of my mother’s mouth and eyes and ears, as if there were a tree growing inside of her, overtaking her. I turned to run, but suddenly there were walls all around me, closing me in as the trunk of the tree swelled against me, filling the tiny space and crushing me between wood and stone.

  I awoke with a start, ice-cold, my face beaded with sweat.

  It was 3:33. Hershey’s bed was still empty.

  With my breath ragged from the dream, I went to the bathroom to splash some warm water on my face. It didn’t help. Shivering, I stood blinking at my pale reflection in the mirror, my dark hair matted to my forehead. I looked like crap. Maybe Ta
rsus was right; maybe the stress was getting to me. Maybe this was the brink of a breakdown. Dreaming about one’s decomposing mother was hardly an indicator of health.

  I turned off the faucet then tapped off the light. As soon as the room went dark, my tablet lit up.

  Don’t be deceived, the voice whispered.

  With a creeping, tingly feeling I walked toward my nightstand. The login box for the DPH medical records database was open on my screen. But I hadn’t used the DPH app since I turned in my research paper. Two weeks before.

  The hair on my arms stood on end as I tapped the username field, praying my login credentials were still active. My heart surged with relief when the landing page appeared.

  I typed my mom’s social security number into the search box and waited.

  No matching entries.

  I checked the number I’d typed. I’d gotten it right. I tried again.

  No matching entries.

  The beads of sweat were back. It was as if the entire file had disappeared.

  Or been erased.

  “And in sets the paranoia,” I muttered. My dream had left me rattled, making me suspicious when there was no reason to be. My mom’s file was one of the oldest I’d run across. It’d probably been deleted to free up storage space. I was the idiot who didn’t think to download it. But I had taken a picture. A screenshot of the final page, the entry from the day my mom died. It wasn’t the whole file, but it was something. I quickly pulled it up on my screen.

  I moved through the phrases slowly this time, methodically, determined to understand each word. Ultrasound consistent with fetal post-maturity and acute oligohydramnios. I cut and pasted the entire phrase into GoSearch. The first hit was a link to an article in the American Journal of Obstetrics entitled “Management of Post-Term Pregnancy.”

  My eyes scanned the abstract of the article. Fetal post-maturity syndrome refers to a fetus whose growth in the uterus after the due date has been restricted.

  It didn’t make any sense. My parents were married on June 11. I was born exactly thirty-six weeks later, a month before my due date. With a salty sour feeling in the back of my throat, I went back to the screenshot and scanned it for evidence of my mom’s due date, or some description of how many weeks along she was. There was nothing there.

  Then my eyes caught the thumbnail image of an ultrasound picture taken when my mom arrived at the hospital. I zoomed in with my fingers. When I did, my breath snagged in my throat.

  GA: 43w6d.

  I’d taken human anatomy as an elective in ninth grade, and there’d been a whole chapter in our textbook dedicated to fetal development, with ultrasound images just like this one. I knew all the acronyms. CRL meant crown-rump length. ABO had something to do with blood type. And GA stood for gestational age. If the fetus in this picture was forty-three weeks and six days old when this image was captured, then there was no way I’d been conceived on my parents’ wedding night. My mom was already seven weeks pregnant by then.

  Don’t be deceived, the voice had said.

  Suddenly the entry at the top of my Lux threats list came barreling back to me.

  Knowledge of her blood type.

  My eyes flew to the margin of the ultrasound photo.

  Maternal ABO: A+

  Fetal ABO: AB+

  Blood type is genetic. Another fact I learned in human anatomy. If you know the type of a child and one of her parents, you can figure out the other parent’s type. But I already knew that my dad’s blood type was A positive, same as my mom’s. He was a regular blood donor, so it was right there on the donor card in his wallet. There were exactly two possibilities for the offspring of double A positives: type A or type O. According to this ultrasound photo, I was neither of these.

  My dad wasn’t my dad. He couldn’t be.

  I switched my screen off, preferring to process this in the dark. The whites of my eyes were still visible in the glass, illuminated by a sliver of lamplight coming through the crack between the blinds and the windowsill. It had never entered my mind before that moment that my dad might not be my dad. Not once, in sixteen and a half years, not even after the bazillionth milkman joke. But, sitting there in the dark, letting the idea settle over me, it was as if I’d always known. And all at once it seemed impossible that I hadn’t realized it before. We looked nothing alike. We were nothing alike. “I take after my mom,” I’d always say, but that didn’t explain the blackness of my hair or the blueness of my eyes or the fact that I had a cleft in my chin when neither of my parents did.

  My chest burned like someone had fired a cannon through it. My poor dad. I understood now why my mom would let the pregnancy go so far past her due date; she needed my dad to think I was due later. Otherwise he wouldn’t believe the baby was his.

  I put my head on the bathroom counter, feeling its slick coolness on my skin. Who was my real father? Did he know that I existed, or had my mom lied to him, too?

  When my screen lit up with a text, it was after six. I’d been sitting in the dark for hours, my thoughts like tennis balls shooting out of one of those practice machines. As long as I was thinking, I wasn’t feeling, and I didn’t want to feel this.

  The message was from a blocked number, with an attachment. Another task from the society. But it wasn’t a word puzzle this time.

  Your task is to connect these nine dots. You must use straight, continuous lines.

  You may not lift your finger once you have begun. You may not retrace a line you have already drawn.

  What is the fewest number of lines necessary to complete this task?

  You have two minutes to respond.

  It seemed so straightforward. Five lines. That’s what it took to hit every dot. But it seemed too easy. The society’s puzzles were harder than this. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t do it in less than five.

  Don’t you have eyes to see?

  My body tensed, not with anxiety that I’d heard the voice, but with anger that its words were so completely useless. “Eyes to see what?” I shouted at my screen as the timer passed the one-minute mark.

  And then, in a flash, out of nowhere, it seemed, the solution came to me. I’d been keeping my lines within the confines of the dots. If I swung my lines out wide, I could do it in four.

  With twenty seconds left, I hit the number four and pressed send, then held my breath as I waited for a reply.

  Well done, Zeta.

  Gemini still in my hand, I closed my eyes and gave into the dulling fog. Dreamlessly, I slept.

  19

  I SLEPT THROUGH BREAKFAST and only barely made it to practicum. I thought I’d feel better after a couple more hours of sleep, but I woke up shivering and achy. Fortunately, Hershey either hadn’t come back or had slipped in and out of the room without waking me, so at least I didn’t have to deal with her on top of everything else.

  We were working in teams in practicum, which was good because I was useless on my own. My head was pounding and my eye sockets felt like they were radiating heat. Meanwhile my brain was on a screaming loop: My dad is not my dad! My dad is not my dad!

  “Rory, could you stay after class for a few moments, please?” Dr. Tarsus said at the end of the period. She phrased it as a question, as if I could refuse.

  “Sure,” I said, making my way to her desk as everyone else filed out.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Tarsus said when we were alone. “But as your adviser, I thought you should hear it from me first.” She pinned her beady black eyes on mine. “Hershey Clements is no longer a student here.”

  The words didn’t register. “What?”

  Tarsus was watching me carefully. “She was taken to the health center early this morning for a psychiatric evaluation. Her doctors made the recommendation for dismissal a few hours ago.”

  I stared at her. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Tarsus pursed her lips. “I obviously can’t share those details with you, Rory. But it appears that the stress of our rigorous acade
mic program caused Hershey to become a bit . . . confused.”

  It was her word choice that tipped me off. If she’d said any other adjective, I might’ve believed her. But Hershey wasn’t “confused” about anything.

  “Trust me when I say it’s in everyone’s best interest—including yours—that she not be on campus anymore. Out of respect for Hershey’s privacy, I’d ask that you’d leave it at that.” Trust her? Not on my life.

  “Where is she now?” I asked. “I want to talk to her.”

  “I strongly suggest that you focus your energy on your own well-being and let Hershey attend to hers.” How was it that the woman could make everything sound like a threat?

  I expected her to turn away then, the way she always did when she was finished with me, but she reached out and took hold of my necklace instead, examining it in her palm. I resisted the urge to step back, out of her reach, knowing how it would look to her if I did.

  “Pythagoras’s letter,” she said, raising her eyes to meet mine.

  I put on a bland smile, refusing to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. “Oh?”

  “The upsilon,” she replied, letting go of the pendant at last. “Pythagoras saw it as an emblem of the choice between the path of virtue and the path of vice. One leads to happiness, the other to self-annihilation.” She cocked her head, the corners of her mouth turning up a little. “A fitting choice for someone like you.”

  “I have class,” I said abruptly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Though I wanted to sprint from the room, I forced myself to walk until I made it to the courtyard. When I hit the grass, I broke into a run, charging toward the woods.

  I arrived at Paradiso out of breath and light-headed, my eyes like little fireballs in my skull.