Resonance - Erica O'Rourke Page 0,18

room. Next to the projection screen hung a battered whiteboard. A numbered column ran down the side, and next to it, the names of every person in our class.

Except me.

“Maybe Shaw has been too busy to put my name back.” My throat felt dry, my skin hot.

“Your name’s been up there since the day you were reinstated,” Eliot said, hovering next to me. He spun his mechanical pencil with sharp, jerky movements, like he always did when stumped. “Shaw’s been waiting for you.”

“Why would he take you off the list?” Callie asked. “There’s no reason.”

Unless they knew about Ms. Powell. Unless I was about to vanish from the Walkers like my name had vanished off the board, like Gil Bradley had vanished from Simon’s and Amelia’s lives.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said finally, the words swallowed up in the silence around me.

“I bet—” Callie began, but a big, barrel-chested man wearing a lime green Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants entered the room, shutting the door firmly behind him.

“Let’s see that homework, people. We’ve got a lot to cover.” Shaw, my instructor, clapped a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Good to have you back. How are you?”

The question seemed genuine enough. His eyes didn’t leave my face, and I had a feeling he knew more about what had happened in Train World than he’d told my classmates.

“Getting there,” I said in a low voice. “Did I do something wrong? My name’s not on the leaderboard.”

He glanced at the front of the room, annoyance tightening his features. But when he turned back around, his expression was smoothed out again. “Administrative glitch,” he said. “I’ll sort it out. Have a seat.”

Across the table Eliot shrugged.

“Big day, people. Your latest inversion analysis should be in that pile.” He pointed to the stack of papers in front of him. “We’re in the home stretch. Your final project before we start preparing for the licensing exam is to select a world for cleaving, make your case, win approval from the Consort, and perform the cleaving.”

Callie sat up, glowing with excitement like the sun’s corona. “Ourselves? Seriously?”

“We’ll break down the process so I can help you with each step, but yes. By the time you’re done, you’ll have cleaved a world on your own.”

I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to quell the sudden rush of nausea.

“You okay?” Eliot mouthed.

To my right Logan Koskodan asked, “Cleavers work in teams—will we?”

“Not this time,” Shaw said. “You’ll have support nearby, but this will be a solo cleaving.”

Madison Russo, sitting across the table from me, frowned. “But I’m applying for a medical apprenticeship. Do I really need to know this? Medics only Walk in an emergency.”

“We don’t always end up where we expect.” Shaw’s eyes flickered to me. “It’s best to be prepared for anything.”

You’re heading into infinity, Monty had told me once. There’s no way to prepare for it.

I fumbled for the bottle of water in my backpack, hoping it would wash away the sour taste filling my mouth.

“Ready? Good,” Shaw said, not waiting for a response. He hit a button on his computer, and a diagram appeared on the screen behind him. “Somebody tell me why we just spent a month on stabilizing inversions. Eliot?”

“Cleavings unravel fastest at inversions,” he said. “If you don’t stabilize them before the first cut, you run the risk of unraveling the wrong world or allowing the inversion to spread.”

“Exactly. Correct, then cleave.”

Before Shaw could continue, I asked, “If inversions can be fixed, why don’t we repair Echoes instead of cleaving them?”

Eliot dropped his pencil. Shaw’s tone was carefully neutral as he said, “Good question. Theories, anyone?”

The entire class looked at him blankly.

“Come on, now,” he said, more amiably. “We haven’t covered it yet, but you should have some ideas. It’s a safe bet you’ll be seeing questions like this on the ethics portion of your exam.”

“Fruit of a poisonous tree,” said Callie. “A flaw in an Echo’s frequency is passed on to any Echoes that spring from it. Tuning would fix one Echo but leave the rest unstable. Cleaving cuts off the problem at its source.”

“But what if there’s another way to fix the flaws?” I’d heard Callie’s rationale a million times, but I had witnessed entire worlds disintegrating into ash. “We could save all those people.”

“What people?” Logan said. “Echoes don’t even notice when they’re cleaved.”

“Dying in your sleep doesn’t make you less dead,” I snapped.

He lifted a shoulder. “You can’t kill what’s not alive. Besides, if