Chapter 11

  Within The Draft

  With all life, uncertainty is just reality.

  It sounds pretentious, because it is. Life is pretentious. It hands you a thousand moving pieces and then acts offended when you can’t predict where the screws will land when it all falls apart.

  That’s normal, though. That’s the deal. It is impossible, physically, to track every variable. Nobody can account for every outcome. You pick a direction, you commit, and then you get whatever you get.

  Now—with that established, what would you do if someone sat you down and said: ‘Hey, I need you to account for every possible outcome over a four-year period. If you fail, the world collapses. Good luck, please don’t fuck it up.’

  You’d most likely call them deranged.

  But if you were me, and got shanghaied into this mess without much of a choice, then you stop calling uncertainty ‘just life’ and start calling it what it actually is—a loaded gun.

  And the worst part is the gun is a book.

  “It’s all about how you read it,” Alaric told me, like he was explaining something as simple as how to boil pasta.

  The Draft sat between us under my apartment’s ugly overhead light. Plain cover. Silver clasp. The kind of object that wants to look harmless.

  Alaric folded his hands and looked at me like a proctor giving an exam.

  “Just know this: when you look inside, the words will move and they will try to pull you in. That is what they are designed to do.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “I remember that much.”

  “You will be tempted to follow them. Do not do that.” His eyes flicked to my face, then back to the book. “Before you ever open it and attempt to see the future, you must decide what you are focusing on. One thing, and say it clearly.”

  “Out loud?” I ask,

  “Yes.” He leaned forward a fraction. “If you can’t hold it in your mouth, you won’t hold it in your head.”

  I didn’t like that.

  “But… how am I supposed to know?” I asked, “I thought I was supposed to figure that out after I looked.”

  “No.” He answered quickly. “You don’t open it if you don’t know. If you go in unfocused, trying to see everything, you will be swept away.” That was Alaric’s favorite move: confirm your fear without comforting it. He leaned back slightly. “That is why I say you cannot chase the words.”

  “I’m not chasing anything!” Agitation was crawling up my throat again.

  Alaric’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. Like he found my panic mildly educational. “The student orientation. That’s our first event leading into the opening act. We must know what transpires. Now, focus on the page.”

  I threw my hands up. “Well what’s on the freaking page, Alaric? You just told me not to look at the words.”

  “No. The page, Jesse.” He drew the words out like he was speaking to a dog that had learned one trick and wouldn’t stop doing it. “The white space between the letters. The page is the doorway. It decides where you go and what you see based on your intent. Now, say what you want to see, and focus on the page.”

  I exhaled, slow, through my nose. “Jesus Christ. Man, why does this need to be so complicated? What is this shit… voodoo calculus?”

  “It is our only advantage,” he said, and somehow made that sound like a grocery list item. “Say what you want to see. Then we begin.”

  I clicked my tongue and set my hand on the clasp. Cold metal. Too smooth.

  “...Show me the Institute’s orientation,” I said, as plainly as I could manage.

  “Good. Now hold on to that thought. Do not lose it.”

  He didn’t move as I flipped the Draft open, but I caught the way his attention tightened anyway. I’d never seen him this focused. Not even when he was lecturing.

  The pages were plain white at first. Boring. Blank. Almost insulting in their cleanliness.

  Then the surface shifted under my gaze, like heat rising off baking asphalt.

  Words began to ghost in and out. Not neat sentences. Not anything that wanted to behave. Just suggestions. Half-started ideas. Thoughts crisscrossing and colliding like they were all trying to be first in some senseless race.

  My eyes tried to grab them, because of course they did. Reflex. Like watching a crowd and instinctively locking onto motion. The back of my skull started to prickle.

  Alaric’s voice cut in, calm and sharp. “Jesse. The page.”

  Right.

  I forced my gaze to go soft. Not reading. Not hunting. Just… looking. At the space, not the bait.

  For a second nothing happened. Just blank paper pretending to behave.

  Then the apartment began to fade.

  Not like a dream dissolving. More like someone turned the saturation down on reality and left me with only one hard line: the page in front of me.

  Then even that line vanished.

  A tunnel stretched out ahead of me, black and narrow, like the inside of a throat. I knew immediately that I couldn’t turn around. Not because something physically stopped me, but because every instinct in my body hissed, “Do not look behind you.”

  Sound came next.

  Voices. Screaming. Whispering. Talking over each other until it became one constant volume, like a crowded room where everyone was trying to be heard at the same time. Laughter. Tension. Names spoken in passing. A sob swallowed before it could escape. All of it mashed together into static.

  Show me the student orientation. Show me where it starts.

  I tried to center my attention like I could wade through the noise by sheer will alone. Instinct was doing most of the driving at this point.

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  And somehow it worked.

  I caught sight of a spark in the distance. Like a light turning on behind a window. I focused on it and the noise dulled around it, the static parting.

  Something snapped into place.

  A crowd.

  Rows of young men and women packed together in an auditorium, shoulder to shoulder in their seats. Up front, a speaker talked into a mic. The words were muddy and echoing at first, like my brain hadn’t decided whether it was allowed to understand them yet.

  Then the viewpoint shifted slightly and it hit me.

  I wasn’t watching this like a movie.

  I was inside someone’s perspective.

  They glanced away from the speaker and scanned the crowd like they were pretending not to be distracted.

  And then they landed on a familiar shape—or what should have been

  Me.

  I was there in the sea of faces like I belonged. Yvette sat beside me, relaxed in the way she always is, like she’d been born specifically to make stiff events feel easy. She lifted her hand and waved at the person whose eyes I was borrowing, smiling like she already knew them.

  The person waved back.

  A little hesitant at first. Then, like they remembered how to be human, the wave turned real. Yvette faced forward again, but the gaze stayed on me a fraction longer.

  And I swear, in that same moment, my own eyes turned toward them.

  The borrowed gaze jerked away.

  Applause broke out.

  The scene lurched hard, like someone changed the channel.

  Now we were somewhere brighter. A party, maybe. People talking too loudly. Heavy bass-ridden music blared and bounced off the walls. Red solo cups everywhere filled with God knows what. A laugh burst out that sounded a little forced, a little late.

  Orientation, I told myself. This is supposed to be orientation.

  But the details were sharper here. Stickier. My attention snagged on them without permission, and once it snagged, it started pulling.

  Then, without warning, we were moving fast down a hallway.

  Bathroom door. Handle. Lock.

  The sound outside muffled. The air changed.

  They stepped up to the mirror and then I saw her.

  Malika St. Claire.

  Sharp features. Short layered hair resting above her shoulders. But her eyes were puffy and swollen, like sleep hadn’t been an option in days.

  She stared at herself like she didn’t fully trust the body she was wearing.

  “Oh,” I whispered, even though I didn’t know who I was talking to.

  It clicked into place in the worst way.

  I was seeing everything through her.

  And instead of holding the nail of my question, instead of staying on the first day, I leaned in. I tried to pull more. To understand why she looked like that. What happened. What was about to happen. I wanted the answer so badly my focus fractured into a dozen smaller hungers.

  The static swelled.

  The edges of the image jittered like the Draft was losing patience with me.

  Heat crawled up my sinuses. My mouth flooded with the taste of metal.

  Then the scene started to come apart, not cleanly, but violently. Images and voices layering on and on and on until it was hell twisting out in front of me, trying to bleed my mind dry.

  A hand grabbed me from somewhere beyond the tunnel and the world snapped back into place so hard my vision stuttered.

  Kitchen.

  Chair.

  Overhead light.

  I was gasping for air, Alaric’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me just enough to drag me back without tipping me to the floor.

  “Jesse,” he said, voice low, controlled, but too close to urgency to be normal for him. “Look at me.”

  I tried, but my vision was smeared. My breathing came in hard pulls. My heart was attempting to climb out of my ribs.

  Warmth ran down over my lip.

  I lifted a hand, touched my nose, and my fingers came away red.

  “Ah, fuck me…” I managed, eloquent as ever.

  “You lost focus.”

  I coughed, wiped my nose, and succeeded only in smearing blood across the back of my hand. Then I looked at him. “What the hell was that? I saw… I saw her.”

  “Who?” Alaric asked, leaning in.

  “Malika,” I said. “I was… watching everything through her eyes.”

  Alaric reached for the napkins, shoved a wad into my hand, and nodded once toward the book. “Indeed,” he said. “Naturally, in the beginning, our key to understanding where we are going and where we will stand is through her.”

  I pinched my nose with the napkins. Blood soaked into them fast.

  “...That was so fucking weird.” My mind kept replaying the orientation, the mirror, the music bleeding through the walls, the way her face looked. “I could almost… feel it all, too.”

  “Very good,” Alaric said. He circled around the table, eyes flicking once to the Draft like it might lunge. “That means you were almost there. Where you need to be. Because you weren’t watching, you were there at that time and in that place.”

  I swallowed. “Okay. At first it all made sense. The orientation and the crowd and speaker. But then it flipped real quick.” I paused and dabbed my nose a few more times. “She was at a gathering or something, storming into a bathroom looking like she’s about to have a mental breakdown. Her eyes were all red and puffy and she was breathing funny.”

  Alaric stopped pacing. His attention snapped to me. “Breakdown?” he repeated. And that was the first time he sounded genuinely unsettled. “That’s… too soon for that.”

  My brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  Alaric shot me a sharp look. “Were you at a party? Was it nighttime?”

  “Uh, I think so, I couldn’t see outside but I guess? There was booze, loud music, bunch of people… it felt like a party.”

  “So it was a party or it wasn’t?” His tone flattened and his tone carried an edge. “This is important to distinguish, Jesse.”

  “Jesus! Okay, yes! It was a fucking party.” I pressed the napkins harder to my nose, “Christ, I got ripped out of there like a bandaid, Alaric. I didn’t get to choose what I looked at, it just showed me that. Right now, my attention is on my damn head, which feels like it just went through a fucking meat grinder.”

  Alaric made a frustrated sound and started pacing again, muttering to himself.

  “It could be her mother’s health…” he said, turning and running a hand through his thinned hair. “Her father. Her brother… that manchild is going to be a problem… or could it be her own suppressed trauma surfacing ahead of schedule?”

  He stopped and turned back to me. When he spoke again his voice softened only by a fraction.

  “We have a long way to go,” he said. “We need to know why the Draft is pointing you toward her specifically, especially this early on. The good news is now we know specifically what to ask for.”

  I held the napkins to my nose and pointed at the Draft with my free hand like it was a live, feral animal. “Ah…,” I hummed, “I’m gonna need a minute before I go back into that fucking thing.”

  Alaric’s gaze didn’t move from me.

  “Well,” he said, “take your minute, and not a second more, because we still need answers and you need practice."

  And somehow, even with blood literally on my hands and my head still ringing, the worst part was that a piece of me believed him.