Foretold Read online

  Drip.

  Drip.

  This room feels damp.

  Drip.

  It didn’t look like they put a ton into maintenance. How much mold is hiding here?

  Drip.

  Maybe black mold. Cancer-causing mold.

  Drip.

  Mom’s tumor wasn’t from mold. It wasn’t from anything. Nothing to blame except cancer itself. And fate.

  Drip.

  Fate… Oh God, how long until Colin—

  “If you’re thinking about anything other than the drip, you’ll need to try harder. A hydromantic vessel needs to be scrubbed, rinsed, purified,” du Lac says.

  “That drip has me ready to piss my pants,” Griffin announces. I open my eyes to discover I’m nosing around the wall opposite the one I should be. Du Lac frowns at Griffin and waves him off. He runs off in search of a restroom, and I close my eyes again with a sigh.

  I listen for the real drip hiding amidst the recorded ones and tuck away the concern that so much of being a scryer hinges on controlling your mind. If I could’ve controlled my mind, I would’ve done it a long time ago, but my brain always swings from thought to thought like a demented monkey in a tree of rotting branches. I give up and use my time to mentally replay my interactions with Colin instead. I add new scenes, things I wish would have happened. I’m funnier. Prettier. More charming. He is all about me. He leans over in the moonlight and—

  “Cassie!” Regan shoves me.

  “What?” I look over the room, taking in the rest of the class filing out.

  “I was the first to find the drip,” Regan announces proudly. “And du Lac said we can leave early. You’re crazy good at the concentration thing but terrible at finding water. You’ve been stuck in this corner for ages.”

  I look around for our instructor, sure her eyes are burning holes in me with her disapproval. “Where did she go?”

  “Du Lac?” Regan shrugs and jabs her thumb at a door on the back wall. “In the back room with somebody. She stuck her head out to tell us class was dismissed, then shut the door. You seriously didn’t hear any of that?”

  I march for the exit. Noah is close behind us, and I grab at him to make an introduction to Regan, desperate for a subject change.

  “I didn’t notice you on the bus,” she says to him when we reach the hall. “Noah. No…ah.” Regan rolls the name on her tongue. I can’t tell what she thinks about him or his name, but Noah’s thoughts about her are writ large on his face.

  “Ray… gun,” he says in response, quietly teasing, his worshipful gaze married to her profile.

  Regan smiles and drills him with questions as we shuffle toward our next class, until I slam to a stop, realizing I’ve forgotten my bag on du Lac’s floor. Crap. Regan offers to walk back with me—and Noah, of course, immediately volunteers to be our escort, maneuvering so that Regan’s the meat in our hallway-march-sandwich.

  I push open the class door.

  “One word from me and everything you’ve been working on comes crashing down.” The usually flowy, supremely calm du Lac is in a fury. We can’t see her or the object of her ire, presumably the squirmy man, because they’re still in the back room, although the door is now open.

  Regan’s eyes widen. “Holy meltdown, Batman. What did she say about negativity tsunamis?”

  “Constance, please,” the man murmurs. “Don’t talk like that. Someone might hear.”

  I tiptoe to my bag, still resting next to the pillow I was seated on. I can see the man’s profile now: he’s handsome but gangly, with a shock of floppy hair that looks like it’s never met a comb it didn’t hate.

  “I don’t care if the world hears. I’ll say what I like when I like. And someone like you doesn’t leave someone like me.”

  “Okay, then let’s pretend you ended things, and we’ll part as friends. It’s over either way. I love her.”

  Crack. Her handprint, an angry red mark on the man’s cheek, is visible even from here.

  “On that note, I think we’re done here. For good,” she says.

  That sets me in motion. I rush toward the exit, waving at Noah and Regan to hurry before me. We shoot down the hall and around a corner, panting.

  I press my cheek to the cold stone of the wall, and Regan peeks back around the corner. “No one there. He’s either still in the room or bounced out of there in a hurry.”

  “Who are we spying on?” Griffin whispers from behind us.

  Regan and I shriek. Noah manfully swallows his own shout.

  “What are you doing here?” Regan demands.

  “I was headed back to class.”

  “It’s over. Du Lac let us out,” Noah says.

  “How long does it take you to pee?” Regan glances back around the corner nervously. The hall is still empty.

  “I don't like to rush things. So, who were you watching?” Griffin asks.

  “Du Lac just broke up with a guy and slapped him,” I say.

  “Cassie!” Regan cries.

  “What? He asked.”

  “Relax, Nancy Drew. I won’t tell anyone you’re a stalker. Besides, it’s not that interesting anyway. Isn’t she married to the dude who teaches Palmistry? She's probably just fighting with her husband.”

  “It was a guy with wild hair. He had a scar running down his cheek here.” I trace my finger down my cheek from right below my eye to my chin.

  “Holy shit. That’s Ford! Isn’t that your mentor?” Griffin asks Regan, his eyes dancing with glee. “Scandal!”

  “Seriously, you’re like herpes. Go. Away,” Regan says.

  “Regan, did you recognize him?” I ask.

  “Know a lot about herpes?” Griffin asks with a smile.

  “I know enough about you and your friends to know you’re like an annoying disease.”

  “Regan,” I say.

  “Herpes is one letter away from heroes,” Griffin says.

  “Alright, come on, guys,” Noah says.

  Regan rolls her eyes and turns to me. “I didn’t see him,” she mutters. “He came in when our eyes were closed.”

  “But I did,” I say. “If he had that scar…”

  “Oh, Sid,” Griffin says in a high falsetto, pressing his hands to his cheeks with a dreamy expression. “Daddy issues, much?”

  Regan flushes magenta, her eyes welling for a second. “Shut it, Griffin.”

  “I wonder what she meant about spilling the beans,” Noah muses.

  Griffin’s face positively lights up. “What, what? This keeps getting better,” he beams, ignoring the gathering storm clouds on Regan’s face. “What’s good ole Sid up to?”

  “He’s not up to anything,” Regan says hotly.

  “You met him when? You don’t know him from a hole in the wall,” Griffin says.

  Regan glares at him and takes a deep breath before turning to me and Noah, hooking her arms through ours and pulling us along to our next class.

  Griffin trails behind us, whistling.

  Our Rituals and Scrycasting classroom, with its singed Bunsen burners lining the sideboard and its walls covered in charts, could be mistaken for a darker, smaller version of my sophomore-year chemistry classroom. But only if you pretend the posters are of periodic tables instead of scrycasting spells.

  “Thank God we get a break from that douche,” Regan says, as we settle into our lab partner-style seats. Griffin’s scheduled Rituals class is on a different day than ours, something Regan has been celebrating since we parted ways. “You’ll get to meet Sid without Griffin. He’s amazing. Seriously. He’s like Griffin on opposite day.” Regan warms up to her topic, advocating for him like I’m a judge to be swayed during sentencing. It sounds like she's trying to convince herself of something.

  The man who ambles into the room is, without a doubt, the same one I saw getting slapped by du Lac. The faded scar running down his cheek is starkly white against his flushed face. Regan, all energy a moment before, suddenly looks away, avoiding eye contact. Noah, seated in front of
us, turns expectantly.

  “That’s him,” I whisper.

  “Hi, everyone. I’m Sid Ford. Sidney, if you’re my grandmother, but to everyone else… I may teach ceremony but I don’t stand on it, so you can all call me Sid.” Regan’s mentor has a rumpled, nutty professor quality, with deep crinkles around his eyes and an easy smile. He walks over to an antique cabinet and throws the carved doors open, the top half of him disappearing inside as he hunts for something deep within. I wince at the sound of glass breaking.

  Ford emerges from the cupboard a little dustier but sporting a triumphant grin and clutching an Ebenezer Scrooge-ish silver candlestick holder, a long tapered black candle, and a sharp pair of shears. He sets them down on the first table in our row and strikes a match on the bottom of his shoe to light the candle. It sputters before catching.

  “Your life is a collection of moments. Some happy, some sad, some mundane, some exciting. History is also a collection of moments. And so is the future.”

  Ford grabs the scissors on the desk with one hand, a tuft of his unruly hair with the other, and saws through a clump. Regan inhales sharply next to me. He closes his eyes and begins moving his lips wordlessly, and when his lids open, for a frightening second only the whites of his eyes show. It’s only after his retinas reappear that I realize I’ve put little half-moon nail marks into the soft black coating on our desktop. I loosen my grip and cover my nose when Ford holds his hair over the candle; the overpowering smell of burnt hair and rotten eggs fills the room. My eyes water and burn. The flame sparks, spits. There’s a hum in my ears, like when someone has turned on a TV nearby.

  “Take a look at the back of the room, guys,” Ford says finally.

  We all turn.

  Wait.

  A moment later, a large mirror, taking up a good portion of the back wall, shatters as if struck, startling all ten people in our class into jumping. A huge crack spreads slowly, creeping, the sound echoing.

  “Magic,” someone breathes.

  “Seven years bad luck for me, huh?” Ford says. I turn back to him. He’s grinning. “Did someone call it magic? That’s exactly what people thought when they’d see scryers do things like this. They’d mimic what they saw, trying to replicate it, giving birth to fun little superstitions. I guess the ability to make something you want happen—it is a kind of magic, isn’t it? That’s what scrycasting allows us to do. If you think of all of those moments that make up the future as a series of dominoes yet to fall, scrycasting is what we do to influence how they fall. Or if they fall at all.

  “Now, what I did there with the mirror is something we’ve always been able to do: exert direct influence on one small future change. Bigger changes are tougher to pull off, more complex. Anything really big was out of reach. Even our oldest and most comprehensive spell books weren’t much help. With this thing, though…” Ford picks up an ICARUSS device from his desk.

  One of Griffin’s friends, a boy named Dill who sports the most pitiful collection of facial hair ever assembled, snorts. “If I want to become a billionaire, I can make it happen with that thing?”

  “You becoming a billionaire is a little too disruptive,” Ford says with the air of someone who’s heard that question a few too many times. “It’s too big a change and would cause a lot of potential ripples in the futures of everyone around you. You've heard of the Butterfly Effect? It’s nonsense.” Ford turns to the board and draws a chalk butterfly, a series of mathematical formulas, and a tilting palm tree. He turns and claps his hands together in a cloud of chalk dust.

  “The tiny atmospheric disturbances caused by a butterfly’s flapping wings would level off before they can put a dent in anything as complex as weather patterns. That’s what our rituals are like right now—a butterfly’s wing flaps. As individuals, even as a company, there’s only so much we can change directly. That’s why we’ve tried to help make this company a ton of money, so that management can go out there and do all of the good we wish we could arm wrestle into existence. The ICARUSS, though, is like a butterfly relay race. It lets us extend the impact of those wing flaps.”

  Ford holds his ICARUSS in his left hand and rests his right hand on the surface. “To pull up a ritual I want, I need to channel my energy through this thing,” he says, closing his eyes. The device makes a little sound, and Ford removes his right hand and stares down at it. “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  He rushes back to his cupboard and pulls out a bunch of items, which he mixes, muttering to himself. He writes something down on a few slips of paper and sprinkles his mixed concoction onto them before folding them up. One he drops into a jar of liquid, and the other he buries in a jar of dirt. He burns a few herbs, waving the smoke into his face using a white feather and inhaling deeply. Then he puffs up his cheeks, holding his breath, and stares down at his wristwatch. Finally, he releases the breath and says, “Alright! Let’s see this in action.”

  A bird flies through the open window a beat later. It takes a turn around the class and settles on a beaker. When the bird tires of that perch and lifts off, the beaker teeters. A boy sitting closest to it grabs at it, catching the glass before it falls to the ground. He sets it back on the shelf and sits, tipping a book off his desk in the process and launching a pencil, missile-like, into the air. Ford catches the pencil and tucks it behind one ear.

  “Butterfly relay race,” he says with a smile. “I wanted that pencil. I got that pencil.”

  Everyone begins speaking at the same time, firing questions at Ford. He holds up his hand. “Yes, you were technically part of the ritual, Dinesh. Everyone, hang onto your questions for later. I want you all to give these a try first.” He grabs a basket and begins handing out ICARUSS devices to each of us.

  I palm mine, and up close it’s a light-as-air slip of silver, a little thinner, narrower, and longer than my cell phone. I see my reflection in the device, but there doesn’t seem to be a screen. I touch my thumb to the center of my device, and the silver melts away, dissolving like draining mercury into a home screen. A jolt of euphoria shoots through me, strong and pure. This is how I save Colin.

  “Scrycasting rituals can be used to try and bring in visions you want information on, or to manipulate future events, but all of the above require a sacrifice. Write that down. Every. Single. Ritual. Requires. A. Sacrifice,” Ford announces over the muted conversations. I pull out my notebook and record it.

  He continues, “The sacrifices can be minimal—a skipped heartbeat, an exhale, your energy—or they can be great. Years off your life, even! Your sacrifices will be subjective and proportionate to your requests, but make sure that you’re clear about what you plan on giving up or the ritual might decide for you.

  “I only asked for a tiny future change before: the mirror in my classroom cracking. Not much of an impact on anyone. Well, except maybe the accounting department since they’ll have to replace it. So I only had to sacrifice a small thing, right? As you can tell, I care a great deal for my hair, so it was a big deal.” He wryly gestures to the brown Einsteinian mess on his head. “Yeah, it’s okay, laugh it up. When I wanted Dinesh’s pencil, I had to sacrifice the air I breathe for a period of time. My air, though. If my ritual in ICARUSS calls for a pinky finger, it’s not going to go a long way if I take his finger, will it? Someone I just met?” Ford picks up the kid in the front row’s pinky and holds his scissors to it. The boy quickly snatches his hand back to safety.

  I lean back in my seat, a frown knitting my brow. What does it take to save a life? What will I give up to save Colin?

  “The bigger your request, the bigger the sacrifice and… write this down, too… the more involved the ritual will be. More steps, or more ingredients. You saw that with the pencil. That’s because you may need to change a bunch of little events leading up to what you really want to change. To get that pencil, I had to lure the bird in, and upset Dinesh. And the last piece of the puzzle: you need to be able to block out everything around you and visualize what you want to occur. It’s
almost like lying to yourself. You need to picture what you want so well you almost believe that your vision of the future already happened. Now, team up. I want you guys to give this a try,” Ford says. “Pick something simple.”

  I hold my ICARUSS the way Ford did and visualize what I want to happen. I visualize it over and over in my mind’s eye until the device makes a sound and a pair of silver-feathered wings appears on the screen, coming together and apart as if in flight, then dissolving into an outline of a short ritual. I make a note of what I need in the way of supplies, and Regan goes and gathers them for us from the cabinet. Noah is fetching for his team, and they chat while they wait in line at the cabinet. She’s still smiling at something he said when she returns with our stuff, spreading it all out in front of us.

  I close my eyes, sacrificing my sight for a time for my ritual, and concentrate, whispering the words on my device’s screen to myself until I can recite them with conviction. An electric current runs along my fingers and up my arms. The hum is back in my ears.

  A breeze gusts through the open doorway, slamming the door shut and putting out every candle flame in the room.

  “Oh em gee! Was that you?” Regan shouts over the complaining of the others, whose experiments I’ve interrupted.

  I laugh. “Yes!”

  Ford walks over. “Very nice job! You aimed for something small, you gave an appropriate sacrifice, and you made it happen. Very, very good work. What’s your name?”

  “Cassie Morai.”

  “Morai! I should have known. You resemble Aubrey, you know? In appearance and talent both. When Welborne was training us on the ICARUSS a couple of months back, she was a complete natural. Must run in the family.”

  I blush, unused to praise. Or positive attention. Or not being a screw-up. “Thank you.”

  Ford smiles at Regan and turns, unconsciously rubbing his scruff-covered cheek. It’s the one I watched du Lac slap, although the angry red handprint is no longer visible.

  “Sid, what would it take to make someone love you? Like, if they were married?” Regan narrows her eyes, watchful for his expression.