Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “You look awful,” North said when he saw me, coming around the counter to meet me.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  He put his palm on my forehead. “You have a fever.”

  “I do not,” I said, pushing his hand out of the way and putting mine there instead. “I don’t even feel hot.”

  “That’s because your hand is as warm as your forehead, genius.” I punched him in the arm and he laughed. “So what are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you have class?”

  “Hershey got kicked out of school.”

  North’s mouth dropped. “What?”

  “Dismissed for ‘psychological reasons.’ It’s a complete load of crap, obviously. Tarsus just got rid of her because Hershey stood up to her.”

  “And Tarsus is who, again?”

  “The teacher Hershey was spying for. She doesn’t think I should be at Theden because of my mom. Hershey told me she was going to tell Tarsus she wouldn’t do it anymore. I guess this is where that got her.”

  North looked skeptical. “Does this Tarsus woman really have the power to get Hershey kicked out like that? I’d think there’d be a whole process, doctors’ signatures, stuff like that.”

  “That’s why I need to see Hershey’s psych eval,” I told him. “Can you h—” I stopped myself before I said “hack” and lowered my voice. “Can you help me get it?”

  “I’ll try,” North said. “She was at the campus health center?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I should probably get back to work,” he said apologetically. “Kate has the flu, so we’re understaffed. But I get off at four and can look into the Hershey stuff then. You want to come over after your last class and we can do it together?”

  “That would be great,” I said, pulling out my handheld to check the time. “I should get going anyway. My calculus class started five minutes ago.”

  “Will you please stop at the drugstore first and get something for your fever? It’ll take two minutes. I’d give you something, but Kate cleaned out our medicine drawer last night.”

  “You’re worried about me,” I said, and smiled.

  “Nah. It’s purely selfish. I want to be able to kiss you without infecting myself.”

  I punched him in the arm. He caught my fist and touched it to his lips. “I’ll see you later,” he said, then jogged backward toward the register, as if he didn’t want to take his eyes off me. “Go get some medicine,” he instructed, pointing at the door.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, giving him a little salute.

  The drugstore was just at the corner, so I stopped in for a bottle of Tylenol and a Powerade. There was a crowd of people at the pharmacy window, lined up for the flu vaccine. Crap. I hadn’t gotten mine yet. My dad had sent a text to remind me, but I’d just spaced, mostly because I’d never had to think about it before. At Roosevelt, the school nurse came around with a cart at the start of flu season. I’d seen something in the Theden Herald about a free flu clinic on campus, but obviously I hadn’t followed through. And now I was paying for it.

  “I guess Lux is good for some things,” I muttered as I stood in the ridiculous line to pay. If I’d been syncing the app to my calendar like I normally did, Lux would’ve reminded me that I was due for my vaccine.

  I took four Tylenol and pounded the Powerade, then tossed the empty bottle into a trash can on the green. It sunk into the bin without hitting the metal rims. In my head, I heard Beck doing his crowd-goes-wild sound and smiled.

  It was just before seven in Seattle. Beck always left for school at 6:45. I turned off the sidewalk into the woods and dialed his number, resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to make it to calculus. One skipped class wouldn’t kill me. I was sick after all.

  Beck picked up on the third ring. “I’ve discovered the most perfect breakfast food ever invented.”

  “Hello to you, too,” I said, the top layer of my anxiety melting away as soon as I heard his voice.

  “Egg white frittata. It tastes like an omelet, but—” His voice got muffled as he took a bite. “You can eat it with your hands. While walking to school.”

  “A revelation,” I said. “Hey, why haven’t you returned any of my calls?”

  “You’ve been busy,” Beck said between bites.

  “How would you know? You haven’t called.”

  “Ah, but if I had, I would’ve gotten your voicemail, and that would’ve been inefficient.” I had never, in our eight years of friendship, heard Beck use the word inefficient.

  “Come again?”

  “I had Lux schedule a call back. Since we haven’t called you back yet, I can assume there hasn’t been a good time.”

  I would’ve thought he was joking, but there wasn’t a punch line. “You’re using Lux?”

  “I know. Your world is officially rocked right now. But part of the deal for the beta test was that we had to use all the preinstalled apps. Lux is even more integrated with the operating system on the Gold, so it’s hard not to. Not that I would try to avoid it now. How did I ever get by without it? I’m actually sort of pissed at you for not making me use it before.”

  That one was definitely a joke. I’d gone as far as offering to clean out Beck’s locker if he’d commit to using Lux for a week, and he’d turned me down.

  “Wait, so you’re using it, and liking it?”

  “What’s not to like? My life is like a well-oiled machine. I haven’t been late to school in a month, I’m a day ahead in all my classes, and I no longer get the shits after lunch.” Beck used to insist on eating a ham and cheese sandwich from the coffee cart every day despite the fact that he’s severely lactose intolerant. “It’s amazing. I’m operating at, like, eight hundred and forty-eight percent. I don’t even have to think anymore.”

  I don’t even have to think. It’d never bothered me before, how little thinking Lux users had to do. How little thinking Lux users wanted to do. That’s why we used the app, after all. It did the work for us. But when did decision-making become such a chore? I shivered, wrapping my bare arms around my rib cage.

  “Hey, Beck,” I said, interrupting him. “I—I have to tell you something. It’s about my dad.” I took an unsteady breath.

  “I definitely want to hear about it, Ro, but I’ve got trig in two minutes, and Lux is pinging me to hurry. Talk later?”

  “Sure,” I said, hiding my disappointment. There was a click and he was gone.

  I called Hershey next. My call went straight to voicemail so I logged on to Forum to see where she was.

  @HersheyClements: Even the bathrooms are better in first class

  was Hershey’s most recent status update, sent ten minutes ago from somewhere over Nebraska. I messaged her. Call me when u land.

  The dorms were quiet as I mounted the steps to our room. Our room. There was no “our” anymore, despite the fact that the space looked the same as it always had, with Hershey’s stuff everywhere. All at once, the reality of the past twenty-four hours descended like a heavy cloak around me. My dad—the man who’d taught me how to ride a bike and who’d worn a tiara to my ninth birthday because I told him only princesses were allowed—wasn’t actually my dad. My mom was a pregnant high school dropout. And a liar. My faculty adviser was out to get me. My roommate had betrayed me, which was bad enough, and then gotten kicked out of school when she tried to make it right, which was ten times worse. And, to top it all off, I had the freaking flu.

  The tears I’d been holding back came pouring out of me in giant, racking sobs. I pressed my face to my pillow, letting myself scream. When my throat was raw, I sat up, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater, and resolved that I wouldn’t cry again. I’d wanted the truth, and the truth was what I’d gotten. Some of it, anyway. And if I wanted the rest, I couldn’t back down now.

  “I’m listening,” I said to the voice. But there was only silence. Then I curled up in a fetal position and went to sleep.

  I stared at him. “What do you mean she ne
ver went to the health center?”

  After a two-hour nap and another two Tylenol, I was wrapped in a blanket on North’s couch while he worked on his laptop beside me. He’d managed to hack the health center’s patient records database but hadn’t found a psych eval in Hershey’s file, so he’d tracked her Gemini’s GPS instead.

  “She was in your dorm building all night,” North replied, pointing at the GPS log on his screen. “She left early this morning and went to a house on High Street, then went straight from there to the airport less than thirty minutes later.”

  “But she wasn’t in our room last night,” I told him. “Unless she somehow came in while I was sleeping?” I thought about it then shook my head. “Her bed was made this morning.”

  “Then maybe she just left her phone there and came to get it before you woke up,” North suggested.

  That seemed plausible. Every time Hershey had snuck out to meet her mystery guy, she left her phone behind. “Okay, so where’d she go after that?”

  North reached for the tablet on the coffee table. “That one doesn’t even take any hacking skills. It’s all public record.” He launched a property finder app and typed in the address from his computer screen. “Whoa,” he said when the results popped up. He handed me the tablet.

  My eyes went straight to the word owner then went wide when I saw the last name. Tarsus.

  “She went to confront her,” I said. “Just like I thought. But there’s no record of her checking into the health center, and no evaluation in her file?”

  “Nope. She went straight from that address to Logan Airport.”

  “So Tarsus lied.”

  “From what you’ve told me about this woman, are you surprised?”

  He had a point.

  “How did Tarsus get her to leave, then?” It didn’t make any sense. Hershey wouldn’t give up Theden voluntarily, not after she’d survived midterms and made the decision to focus. I pictured her tearstained face the night before the second day of exams. No, she wouldn’t have gone without a fight. So what did Tarsus have on her? “Ugh,” I said, nearly shaking with frustration. “Every time I think I’ve gotten more of the truth I realize how little of it I have.” I threw the blanket off and stood up. I instantly felt dizzy and put my hand on the arm of the couch to steady myself. “Why does that woman hate me so much?”

  “You think it’s all connected?” North asked. “Your mom, this Tarsus woman, the stuff in your Lux profile?” I hadn’t yet told North what I’d pieced together about my dad not being my dad. It was too fresh a wound to make it permanent with spoken words.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I wish there was a way to find out who those social security numbers belong to.”

  “I’ll try to get into the Social Security Administration’s database,” offered North.

  “I thought you said you’d tried that already.”

  “Not the SSA directly. The kind of thing I do, my clients give me their social security numbers going in. I try not to go anywhere I don’t need to go. It just increases the risk of detection.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything risky for me,” I said quickly.

  “Good thing I’m not doing it for you, then,” he said. He pulled up the website for the Social Security Administration on his tablet.

  “You can do it right from there?” I asked.

  “No, this is just research,” he explained, finger scrolling to the bottom of the page. “See that G? That means they use a Gnosis firewall.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “It makes it harder. Maybe not impossible. It’ll take me a couple of days.” He set his tablet on the coffee table then reached for my hand. As soon as his skin touched mine, he shot to his feet. “Rory, you’re burning up,” he said, laying his palm on my forehead. “When was the last time you took something?”

  “An hour ago,” I said. “Have you gotten the flu spray? I’m probably infecting you.”

  “I don’t do vaccinations,” North said. “But my immune system is superhuman. I’ll be fine. You, on the other hand, worry me. You need medicine.”

  “I’m fine.” But the truth was, I didn’t feel fine. I felt awful.

  “Rory, if you want to fight the forces of evil, you need your strength.” He said it with a completely straight face. I laughed lightly.

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said, and helped me to my feet.

  20

  IN THE END, we went to the student health center. I told North I was fine to go alone, but he just rolled his eyes at me and put on his coat.

  The waiting room was empty. “Looks like someone has the flu,” the nurse at the check-in station said as we came through the automatic door, making a little tsk sound with her tongue.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You have that hit-by-a-truck look about you,” she replied. “You a student?” I nodded. “Tap your handheld there,” she instructed, pointing at a sensor on the desk. As I did, a new text appeared on my screen.

  “Have a seat in the waiting room,” the nurse said.

  “Mm-hm,” I murmured, eyes on my screen.

  I am the beginning of every end,

  and the end of time and space.

  I am essential to creation,

  and I surround every place.

  What am I?

  It was a riddle, and I read it again as I shuffled into the waiting room where North was swiping through an issue of Wired on one of the health center’s mounted tablets.

  “Everything okay?” I heard him ask.

  “Mm-hm.” I sat on the edge of the seat next to him and read it a third time. I am the beginning of every end, and the end of time and space. I am essential to creation, and I surround every place. Beads of sweat popped up on my forehead. I had nothing.

  “It has to be an element,” I murmured. “Air, is it air? But how is air the beginning of every end? God. It’s God. It has to be God.”

  “Rory, what are you talking about?” I looked over at North. He was staring at me. “You’re babbling.”

  “I’m trying to solve a riddle.”

  “A riddle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  “Okay. Well, what’s the riddle?”

  “I don’t think I can tell you. That would be cheating.” It struck me that I hadn’t been given any rules for this exercise. Maybe it was perfectly acceptable to ask someone else or GoSearch for the answers to these things. But somehow I doubted it. Something I didn’t doubt was that the society would know, either way.

  “Cheating? Is this a graded thing?”

  “Sort of,” I said. Which was sort of true. “It’s for a club I’m trying to get into. An extracurricular thing.”

  “What kind of club?”

  “It’s just a club, okay?” I snapped. “And I have to solve this riddle to get in, so please just let me think.” I pulled my handheld back out, hoping that maybe the words themselves would give me a clue. “I think it’s God,” I said again, trying to convince myself that I could be right. But the beginning of every end part didn’t seem right.

  North leaned over to look at my screen. “It’s the letter e.” He settled back into his seat, looking smug. “Think they’ll let me into their club?” I reread the riddle. He was right.

  I quickly typed the answer and hit send. My whole body relaxed when I got the standard response. I leaned my head back against the wall behind me and closed my eyes. Every part of me ached.

  “Why do you want to be in this club so badly?” I heard North ask.

  “My mom was in it,” I said.

  “Aurora Vaughn?” a nurse called.

  “I’ll be here when you get out,” North said as I got to my feet.

  “You really don’t have to stay.”

  “Uh-huh. See you when you’re done.”

  As I waited for the doctor, I pulled up the snapshot I’d taken of my mom the
night of the Masquerade Ball. I hadn’t looked at it since. I stared at her eyes, nearly black in this photograph, as if they held the answers I needed. Who had Aviana Jacobs been?

  I was still looking at my screen when the exam room door opened.

  “Hello,” I heard the doctor say as I started to put my phone away. Just then, my eyes caught something I hadn’t noticed before at the very edge of the frame.

  My mom was holding someone’s hand.

  “I’m Doctor Ryland. What brings you to—?”

  “Hold on a sec,” I said, cutting him off as I zoomed in closer on the photo. It was a boy’s hand that held my mom’s, and he was wearing a ring I’d seen once before. Four symbols engraved in silver. All of a sudden I remembered who’d been standing next to her in that photo.

  Griffin Payne. The Griffin Payne. CEO of Gnosis Griffin Payne.

  Holy. Shit.

  Shaking, I went to GoSearch and typed out his name and added “at 18.” Griffin’s senior photo popped up on my screen. I stared at him, at the boy he’d been. The aqua-blue eyes. The wavy mahogany hair. The decisive cleft in his chin. Features I saw every morning in the mirror.

  It was all the proof I needed. In that instant, I just knew.

  Griffin Payne was my father.

  I pressed my head against the seat back, feeling light-headed.

  “Are you all right?” the doctor asked.

  I jumped a little. I’d forgotten he was there. “No,” I said simply. I was definitely not all right.

  “I need your help,” I told North when I returned to the waiting room twenty minutes later. He stood to greet me, holding my coat awkwardly in his arms.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’d the doctor say?”

  “Flu.” I handed him the bag of antivirals the nurse had given me and I took my coat. “I need access to Griffin Payne.”

  “Uh, okay. And by access, you mean . . . ?”

  “I need to talk to him. Alone.”

  North reached forward and put his hand on my forehead.

  “I don’t have a fever anymore,” I snapped, pulling away from him. “They gave me aspirin to bring it down.”