Foretold Read online

  Regan lets out an exaggerated sigh and slumps back against me. “He’s divine. Swoon-worthy. Completely awful with girls, but I’d let him be awful to me any day of the week.” I learned during Regan’s random fact-dump that she devours romance novels. It shows.

  “No one’s worth being treated badly.”

  “It’s not that he’s mean or anything. It’s more… he’s got a reputation. Never had a long-term thing. But girls don’t believe him when he says he’s not interested in anything serious, I guess.”

  Does the guy catch Regan staring? No. To my everlasting mortification, he looks up as I’m eyeing one of his muscular legs, outlined brilliantly thanks to his casual stance and revealed by a shuffle in his entourage. He raises a single perfect eyebrow, and I try not to twitch self-consciously or blush a permanent shade of red as he looks me up and down.

  Instead, I mimic Aunt Bree, minus her essential nasty Bree-ness, and force myself to return his gaze when he finishes his inspection, raising my own eyebrow in response. I can reinvent myself here, and the new Cassandra Morai is calm, confident, and collected. I turn away and immediately ruin the effect, tripping over my own feet. Stupid tight shoes. Only a moron would wear new ones today.

  Swallowing an embarrassed groan, a glance back confirms that Sebastian noticed. His eyes mock me, and the corners of his lips twitch to reveal a hint of roguish dimple in his right cheek. I glare back, but it’s impossible to control my full body shiver. He is trouble—for someone else though. I have Colin, kind Colin, whose gentle teasing invites me to participate in the joke instead of suggesting I am one. Keeping him alive is more than enough trouble for me.

  “Wait, why is Bastian legit full-on staring at you?” Regan exclaims. I close my eyes and pray her loud voice hasn’t carried. “Call the paramedics, I need resuscitation.” She lets out a giddy giggle and grabs my arm. “According to the rumor I just started, you guys are totally dating, engaged to be married, making babies. We need to bottle up your pheromones.”

  Thankfully a gong sounds, loud enough to nearly vibrate the teeth out of my mouth, calling us into the auditorium. I practically flee through an entrance Sebastian isn’t guarding, Regan still clinging to my arm.

  The room is painted gold and black, with a stage set at the bottom of the room like a sun, its aisles radiating up and out like beams of light. We drop into the seats an usher indicates, and I spot Aunt Bree settling into the front row alongside a few other power suit types. She spots me and gives me a slight smile when I raise a hand in greeting. Sebastian Welborne follows the direction of her gaze and spots me as well. He says something to Bree as he takes the seat next to hers, and I hear her throaty laugh.

  An inferno consumes the auditorium, and I am trampled during the stampede to safety.

  The stupid thought trips through my mind. I look around, taking note of the exits. For my anxiety’s sake, I’m happy my seat is in the aisle, even though I realize the likelihood of fire is nonsense. I shush Regan’s loud Sebastian-related declarations as the lights fade. The room falls completely silent except for the occasional cough or sniffle or rustle of clothing. The quiet stretches.

  “Everyone, please give a warm welcome to our CEO, Jordan Welborne!” a woman’s voice calls out over the speakers.

  A spotlight punctures the dark. It trains on a man standing in the doorway behind us, and everyone turns in unison like rolling thunder.

  “Good morning, Theban Group!” he says.

  The room erupts in applause, and the man grins and waves, the spotlight following him as he bounds down the steps with a coltish energy I’d expect from someone way younger. He’s a lanky man with a long, angular, horsey face, a bit older than my dad, and dressed entirely in black. He greets Aunt Bree and the others when he reaches the bottom of the room before moving to the center of the stage.

  “Thank you!” He bows extravagantly, eating up the crowd’s adulation, then gestures for the cheering audience to settle down. “Oh, enough now, hush or it’ll all go to my head. Now… who is ready to make history?” The crowd roars its approval, and the man’s smile gleams in the light. He holds up a hand again, waiting until everyone falls silent.

  “The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, ‘The most painful state of being is remembering the future… particularly the one you’ll never have.’ That sounds like something a scryer might say, doesn’t it?” He speaks in a cultured voice that sounds like warm silk pulled over gravel.

  “Well, I’ve gathered you all here, including our twenty-four new initiates who will forgive me for coopting their orientation—” He presses his palms together and gives a slight bow in our direction. “—and those of you watching remotely, my Theban Group family, to tell you those futures Søren worried over? They’re not so far from reach after all.”

  He lets the crowd’s hush linger. Then the nothingness behind him suddenly bursts to life, three giant screens showcasing images of torture, death, and chaos, music swelling in time with the horrors shown. I turn my head away from the awful visuals, fuel for my OCD-ravaged imagination, and my heart thumps. The images dissolve into licks of flames. They rise up behind Welborne, casting him in an orange glow. I wonder, if Aunt Bree knew me even a little better, whether or not she'd have warned me.

  “Theban Group is our social compact, our commitment to keeping each other safe. We came together thousands of years ago for protection, to hide. And I know that for some of you in this room, if you had it your way, Theban Group would only be this, still.

  “But to those critics I would argue, why hide behind walls when you can control what’s being built beyond them?

  “Yes, our coming together made us stronger, in the way there is strength in numbers, but even as our refuge grew in size and sophistication, with multiple satellite chapters around the globe, we were still weak. Powerless. Even though we could huddle behind Theban Group walls, we couldn’t do anything about our foes, or about the things we foresaw.

  “Now the traditionalists out there are undoubtedly objecting to this right now in their minds. I can almost hear the stern talking-to they long to give me: ‘Scryers could always make minor tweaks to the things we foresaw, Welborne. We have our scrycasting, our rituals.’

  “Yes, but what of everything else, my friends?” Footage of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, troops marching, firing squads once again dart across the screens at Welborne’s back. The images are gone before I can react. I glance at Regan. Her expression is rapt.

  “Foresee the outcome of a great battle? A plague? Shame, nothing to be done about it, move along. Live with the dread and wait for it to come. We were forced to mourn the futures we wanted, the futures we could never have.”

  The musical cacophony fades into sentimental violins, and a black-and-white portrait of an older man appears on the screen. His features look blasted from a slab of granite.

  Welborne continues, “My father knew we were better than that. And he realized there was a way to benefit from what was, essentially, a curse. A way to turn it around. To protect our own—to hide, yes, but also take control. I’m talking, ladies and gentlemen, about money. Father recognized that wealth is power, and so he proposed to the Grimoire Council that Theban Group start a business. No reading palms at fairs for us. We would provide insurance to those whom we knew would never need it. Simple. Elegant. Some of you have argued it is dishonest—the ones I respect most are those who have said so to my face.” Welborne grins at this, and a few people chuckle. “But even those naysayers can’t deny that the money we’ve made has allowed us to influence the world around us for the better, and made us all safer than we’ve ever been.”

  Tender music sounds, accompanied by images of smiling faces that belong on the second half of a commercial about feeding the poor for the cost of a cup of coffee.

  “Plague?” Welborne says. “We fund medical research and life-saving medicines before an outbreak to minimize the carnage. Food in times of famine, water in times of drought. We support politic
ians we know will bring about positive change. We’ve finally been able to use our abilities to do something!”

  There are some hoots from the crowd, clapping.

  Welborne paces. “But it’s not enough. What about us? The scryers making all that happen. We’ve done so much good with the money we’ve made. Don’t we deserve more? Maybe those codgers forever grumbling about taking care of our own have a point?”

  “We’re getting a raise!” someone shouts from crowd. Laughter erupts, and Welborne chuckles.

  “Better.” The screen behind him goes black, and the music dissolves into tinny futuristic sounds.

  “We were able to profit from our insurance endeavor because my father’s engineers spent countless hours examining past omens and visions, pairing them with historic events until they hit upon an algorithm that allowed us to chart out the little events that lead up to larger ones—to map pockets of the future out like a puzzle. That technology required a great deal of computing power. In fact, it required a supercomputer which took up the entire three basement-level floors of this building. But I’m pleased to announce that, thanks to some bloody brilliant breakthroughs on our part, we’ve been able to take all that tech and streamline it for individual consumption.”

  The image of a thin, slowly rotating device flashes, catching the light as it goes. It looks like someone poured silver into a smartphone mold. In fact, it could almost pass for a rejected smartphone prototype, longer and thinner than my iPhone but metallic gray all over. It’s the same device Aunt Bree was messing with in the lift on the way to my meeting with Pict.

  “Announcing—the ICARUSS!” Welborne crows to the approving crowd’s cheers. “If you struggle with brevity as much as me, you can call it by its full name—the Intelligent Communication Apparatus for Rituals and Understanding Second Sight.” Hoots sound, and Welborne holds up a hand. “Wait now—you’ll want to pay special attention to this. The ICARUSS will not only allow you to do all that my father needed three floors of supercomputers to accomplish. It will not only allow you to decode your visions and omens faster than ever before. It will also provide you with precise instructions for scrycasting rituals to change the future!”

  The device on the screens stops rotating, and the silver front melts away to reveal a pair of white flapping wings on a black background. The wings dissolve a second later to reveal dense paragraphs of words and diagrams.

  The room explodes into thunderous applause. It echoes in my chest as the hard ball of fear living inside me quakes and goes supernova in a blast of exhilaration. It’s an optimistic Big Bang, and I can hardly contain it. No more fear? Stop Mrs. O’s move? Save Colin? Save Colin. Save Colin. Save Colin. Save Colin.

  “Outrageous!” a man shouts. The cheering quiets and the room becomes a mess of whispers as the man, older by the look of him, storms up an aisle to bust through one of the metal exit doors at the front of the room.

  “Traditionalists,” Welborne says with a smile, undeterred. “They hate change. But make no mistake, change is coming. After today, everything changes. After today, money isn’t the only way we can influence our lives and the world around us. After today, we have real power.”

  I scan the room to see if any more traditionalists are shaking their heads, ready to storm out, but I see only eager faces.

  “No more combing through arcane texts for rituals, or mourning those futures we want but cannot have,” Welborne continues. “There are restrictions, of course—you’ll learn more about those later from my friend Sidney Ford in your Scrycasting course—but you’ll be able to change the future more than ever before, easier than ever before.”

  He starts to move up and down the stage again, loping faster as his words pick up in volume and urgency. “You have helped this company become what it is. You are responsible for all the good we have put out into the world. You deserve something for yourselves. We have all needed, or wanted, or lost. Seize control of your lives!” The cheers reach a fever pitch, and the room reverberates with the force of it. He raises his voice to be heard. “I am Jordan Welborne. And I welcome you all to your future.”

  Welborne rockstars his way off the stage and up the aisle toward the doors behind us, shaking hands and waving. Regan is hanging over me, desperately trying to get his attention. When he gets to my row, he reaches out to shake her hand briefly and touches my shoulder. He smiles down at me and barely pauses in his progress to the door, but the warm weight of that hand lingers long after he moves on.

  “I’m never washing this hand. I could die right now and be happy,” Regan says.

  Agatha Triggs marches out onto the stage, looking like a posh scarecrow, and clears her throat into the microphone clipped to her collar. “Another round of applause for Mr. Welborne,” she says in a monotone. She tucks her clipboard under her arm and claps like someone who studied clapping in a book once, before adjusting her thick blue-framed glasses and consulting her notes.

  “Alright now. Please. A few housekeeping matters. Directly following this assembly in—” Triggs pulls a silver pocket watch attached to a chain from her gray jacket pocket, glances at it, and snaps it shut. “—less than one minute, we will begin distributing ICARUSS devices in the room just outside the doors here—” My pulse leaps, then immediately plummets as she continues, “—to all but our new initiates. The latter group will be issued an ICARUSS by Sidney Ford during his Scrycasting course. For now, all initiates must go off and visit with their mentors. This evening’s welcome festivities will be held in the Astromancy Lab. I understand we have some interesting entertainment lined up for your enjoyment.” Her tone makes it sound like the entertainment will be watching mold grow. She once again pulls her watch from her jacket and clicks it shut with a snap. “Time is up. Off you all go.”

  The lights are turned on, and everyone gathers up their belongings and files outside. I glance down at the front row but can’t see Aunt Bree or Sebastian in the crowd.

  Regan hugs her folder to her middle as we leave the auditorium, squeezing her eyes shut with a rapturous expression. “My mentor is Sidney Ford. I’m so excited! Fortnight Foresight said he took over for Linda Fenice in Scrycasting when he joined the org, and he’s crushing it. Fenice was more old school, you know? I’m positive he’s going to rock.”

  I feel a twinge of envy hearing the excitement in her voice.

  “What’s wrong?” Regan asks, noticing my expression.

  For a second, my default setting of the last few years kicks in, and I immediately clam up. It’s been ages since I’ve discussed my feelings or fears with anyone besides Mrs. O, but Regan looks genuinely concerned and nothing about any of this is normal. I hesitate a second before confessing I’ve met my mentor before.

  “Does he suck? Who is it? Maybe I’ve heard of him,” she says.

  “His name is Mr. Pict, and he’s like a walking, talking root canal.”

  Regan’s jaw drops. “Shut. Up. Shut up! You do not have Martin Pict as your mentor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cassie, he’s a legend! Like, beyond legend. He’s an expert in every kind of scrying under the sun. He’s pulled down some of the biggest visions in recent history, and he’s never taken on an initiate! How did you manage to score him? I’m blown away! First Bastian eye bangs you from across a room, and now you’re being mentored by scryer royalty. I’m so jealous.” She charges through the auditorium doors into the hall, throwing her hands up.

  I sigh. “You shouldn’t be. He’s not nice.”

  A voice behind us interrupts. “Don’t feel bad. He’s mean because his family died in a car crash a long time ago. Kids, wife, everyone. Even his dog in the back. Pict was driving.”

  “What?” I turn, frozen with horrified pity and mortification over bashing my poor, evidently grieving mentor. A husky boy is grinning back at me puckishly, his expression completely at odds with what he just said. With his lightly bronzed skin and mischievous smile, he’s probably what some would consider baby cute, if they like
that yo-bro type. But I’m immediately wary. He reminds me of the guys at school who are forever shouting nonsense from the top bleacher at our assemblies. He’s about my age and height, and his clothes are rumpled as if from a fresh bout of rough-housing.

  He lowers his voice to a loud whisper and leans his dark head toward us. “They say he’s wracked with guilt because it was his fault. Pulled his wife out of the wreckage, and she died in his arms.”

  “Pict’s whole family died. Did you hear that?” a woman whispers to her friend as she passes us. “No wonder he’s so… you know. That’s so sad.”

  “How did I not know this?” her friend responds.

  “Is that true?” Regan demands. “I’ve never heard anything like that about Pict, and I’ve read everything.”

  The boy waits until the crowd around us thins out before answering, his brown eyes twinkling. “Not even a little bit. But oh man, by the end of the week, everyone at Theban will have heard it. Besides Pict, anyway.”

  “You’re a sociopath.” Regan turns to me and hisses, “This is Griffin.”

  “Oh, come on, dude smells like mothballs and moldy books, and he’s never met a person he hasn’t pissed off. He called me a ‘gollumpus’ earlier. What kind of person uses insults you have to look up in a dictionary? Who the hell knows what a gollumpus is?”

  “It’s a big clumsy oaf,” I answer.

  “That was supposed to be rhetorical.” He blinks. “Whatever. No harm, no foul. Now everyone he’s ever been mean to will feel a little better about themselves, thinking he was only being a douche because of some horrible tragedy. And they’ll treat him extra nice from now on because they feel bad for him. Which will confuse and probably annoy him. Which is hilarious. It’s all good.”