Foretold Read online

  I start to feel a tingling in my temples, like the beginnings of a headache.

  As I stare into my reflection, a drowsy darkness slowly spreads inward from my peripheral vision. Like smoke, it fills everything up until my sight is reduced to pinpoints. They linger long enough that I think this is it, the height of the vision, when the pinpoints begin to recede and whispered voices sound in my ears, slippery little hints of sound that come and go so quickly I can’t grab hold of one long enough to understand. I feel a little flicker of fear as the voices start in one ear and move to the other, circling and building like fluid until they become a cacophony. Dark shapes begin materializing out of the thick fog in front of me, but like the sounds, I can’t make them out.

  Suddenly, one low voice, much closer than the others and accompanied by the overpowering scent of flowers, rasps, “A red blessing approaches. Look to the glass. Death comes quickly and respects no one.” The vague black shapes begin to bubble and ooze before sliding down in red streams. “Death comes quickly and respects—”

  “What did you say?” The mirror is yanked from my hand, and the fog quickly lifts. I blink. Pict is peering at me. “I asked you a question.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I say. The space behind my eyes throbs.

  Pict sets the mirror down. “‘Death comes quickly and respects no one,’” he says, leaning forward. “That’s what you said, Ms. Morai.”

  “Oh,” I respond dumbly. I try to shake off the haze hanging heavy in my mind, the throbbing of a faraway headache growing closer. Pict is giving me a strange look, and I fidget as he stares. “Was that… was that a vision? What does that mean?”

  Pict ignores my question. “You are to report to Orientation in two weeks. Scryer Services will have a training schedule for you at that time, which will include our one-on-one supplemental training sessions.” He shuffles through the pile of books next to him and pulls a few worn texts from the stack. “I expect you to familiarize yourself with the principles outlined in these by the time we next meet. And so we are clear, if I am to serve as your mentor, you will eat, breathe, and sleep scrying. You will not lie about your abilities or lack thereof. You will not keep anything from me. Is that understood?”

  I accept the book. “Yes, sir.”

  “Asking or telling, Ms. Morai?”

  I have no idea.

  Chapter 7

  Aunt Bree is apparently too busy to see me out of Theban Group herself, but her extremely efficient assistant Martha is waiting for me when I leave Pict’s office, blinking her wide-set frog eyes and wearing an expensive but ill-fitting outfit that looks like a Bree cast-off.

  “So… you can see the future?” I ask her as she leads the way.

  She darts me a glance, quick as you can say ribbit, and nods. “I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t.”

  “How’d you end up working for my aunt?”

  She makes a noncommittal sound in response. Martha’s expression is hard to read, but I’m guessing maybe she wasn’t so hot for this job.

  “Does everyone work here after training?” I ask while we wait for the elevator.

  “Most,” she says, pressing the button for the bird cage elevator another few times.

  “What about school though?”

  She gives me a strange look and leaps to enter the elevator when it arrives. When the doors close, she mumbles, “Don’t know why anyone would ever go back to school when they’ve been handed this opportunity.”

  I guess most people ditch regular school after training? Aunt Bree’s definitely smoking something if she thinks her professor brother wouldn’t flip his gourd if I dropped out of school.

  Martha leads me back the way Bree brought me at a brisk pace—or tries for a brisk pace at least. My rubbernecking on the way out, especially in the Rotunda, no doubt slows our progress, irritating her. I hold my follow-up questions until we’re trudging back through the beige cubicle room.

  “So pretty much everyone works here. Do they all live here, too?”

  “Most live here or at one of the dozen smaller satellite offices we have around the world. Some choose not to,” she says.

  “Do people actually sell insurance here? These guys are scryers?” I gesture to the cubicles.

  Her sigh is infused with the frustration of a thousand kindergarten teachers. “Yes. And yes.” I get the sense she doesn’t want to tell me too much. Maybe scared of saying something to freak me out. God knows what Aunt Bree told her about me.

  Theodore waves as we pass his desk. I give him one in return.

  There is a car Martha arranged for me waiting out front, and she seems to relish packing me in it and slamming the door behind me.

  The ride home is a quick one. I let myself into my apartment, still woozy and, if I’m being honest, mentally treading water as I replay everything I heard today. If not for the weight of the books Mr. Pict gave me dragging down my bag, I’d suspect I’d had a nervous break.

  Dad is already home as I toe off my shoes. He grins like a nutjob, waving some papers at me. I smile warily, wondering what the intent look in his mossy-hazel eyes means.

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “Mad?” I say, walking to my room and dropping my bag just inside the door.

  “I told you about the college prep summer program upstate? The one that costs a boatload of money?”

  “Yeah?” I tamp down my suspicions. There is no way…

  “I called your guidance counselor up and told her it was too rich for our blood, and she insisted she call the camp and see if anything can be done. Scholarship spots or anything. Before you say anything, it was a longshot and I didn’t think it’d go anywhere, so there was no point in getting your hopes up. Or, you know, your anxiety up. And even if it did, I figured we could just turn it down if you really didn’t want to go. But then you said you were thinking of a job and… well, Ms. Kelly scored you a spot. Whatever your school pays that woman is really not enough. This place is really elite, Cass. I mean look at this.”

  I accept the glossy brochure and sit heavily, Bree’s words floating back to me: He’s already planning on sending you here. He just doesn’t know it yet.

  Dad is oohing and ahhing as he points out the imaginary upstate retreat’s best features over my shoulder, but it barely registers. Martha is crazy good at creating official-looking documents, complete with instructions for how parents can send off their “camp kids” and a Frequently Asked Questions doc tucked into the brochure. Transportation is included, Dad points out. Will they really arrange a bus load of kids to go to fake camp with me? Aunt Bree does seem the type to take her lies seriously, I guess.

  Dad mistakes my reaction. “You don’t have to—”

  “No, no. This is… this is cool, Dad. I’m pumped.”

  For just a moment, my belief in Aunt Bree’s abilities, in what I saw today, wavers. I almost laugh out loud at the thought of me disembarking from a bus at a normal camp and demanding to be taken to the fortune telling stuff. But no… the timing is too suspect, and as insane as today was, it was definitely not all in my head. How on Earth did they rope my guidance counselor into all of this? Did Ms. Kelly even know she was being played?

  Dad smiles at me, and I stretch my dry lips into an answering approximation of one. Then he heads to his room and parks himself at his desk to finish up some work stuff, and my ears pick up soft humming coming from his open door. My poor father is so excited for me that it’s enough to set my eyes watering with guilt. I feel like a dishonest douchebag.

  I wander into my kitchen and open the fridge, peering in as if some comfort food will have miraculously appeared in the twenty minutes since last I looked. Why couldn’t I develop chocolate conjuring abilities alongside the scrying? I pause, marveling at that thought: me, a scryer. I grab a blueberry yogurt and spoon and plop down on the couch, but I don’t have the energy to look for the TV remote so I just sit and stare. Somewhere in one of our plaster walls, an old pipe gurgles and clicks. Dad’s humming
has stopped. It’s too quiet.

  I lean back, licking my spoon and wondering again at Aunt Bree’s dominoes, leading me to Theban, getting Dad to send me to a camp without him knowing. I’m going to study mother-frigging magic. I huff out a laughing breath in wonder and launch myself off the sofa. I should be working on that MV-77 form or studying Pict’s books.

  I ditch my yogurt and jet to my room to grab my bag, frowning when I see a familiar orange coupon resting on my floor. I must have missed it when I opened my bedroom door earlier. “Madame Grey’s Psychic Readings. Good for one FREE reading,” it reads.

  Maybe I tracked it in on my shoe? The thought skeeves me. Those frigging things are everywhere lately. I pick the coupon up gingerly and toss it—after all, it’s not like I need to go to a psychic to see the future anymore—then detour to the bathroom to scrub the crap out of my hands for a long while.

  Maybe I should read on the roof. Where I might see Colin. Which is totally not the reason for wanting to study on the roof, but kind of completely is.

  I towel off my hands and grab for my bag before I head upstairs. My excitement at diving into the texts or maybe seeing Colin is dimmed only by thoughts of my contaminated bedroom. Only a cleansing fire would be enough to sanitize the space or to knock the thought that I tracked garbage into my room out of my head.

  Speaking of fires, there’s a fancy new warning sign on the door to the roof claiming an alarm will sound if the door is opened, but I know the owner’s way too cheap to have alarms installed. Honestly, I’m convinced that even the sprinklers in the halls are fake.

  The rain stopped before I left Theban Group, and the ground and the folding chairs have more or less dried, but a sweet post-downpour earthy smell lingers in the air here. It takes me back to summer walks with my mom in the park. The memory bites, flaying my scarred heart. Petrichor… that’s what the smell is called. The Trivinometry word comes to me, and I blame Colin’s garden-like patio for amplifying the scent.

  At the reminder of Colin’s existence, I look around nervously. No sign of him, so I walk over to the ledge and loiter there like a full-on weirdo. He would spot me instantly if he were to come out. I drag my folding chair so it faces his lushly green patio area and prop my feet up on the knee wall, pretending to read. After I’ve glanced at his door for the hundredth time, it becomes obvious Colin won’t be making an appearance today, which means that it’s safe to tuck into my reading. But first…

  I pull my phone out and search for whatever I can dig up on Theban Group. The first hit is for the company’s website.

  It’s so… normal. Like a digital version of that beige room with the cubicles. Insurance rate quotes. Commercial policies. Words and more words.

  I click out and scroll through the search results. A few news articles on glittering fundraising galas and do-gooder work. Aunt Bree is in one of the shots, smiling her cat-got-the-cream smile up at a man the caption identifies as the Prime Minister of Greece. The story gives her title as the Head of Theban Group Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Theban Group, and identifies her as instrumental to helping alleviate a migrant crisis. Another picture shows her and some random gray-heads posing with a group of refugee girls in school uniforms.

  Bree? Really? My aunt is the head of a global charity? Doing things like saving migrants? I guess her whole thing about helping me wasn’t bogus.

  Wikipedia gives me some more on the company. All of it boring and nice and impossible to reconcile with what I saw today. I click around, drawn deeper and deeper into off-topic hyperlinks until I’m reading about the ancient city-state of Thebes and its myths about Heracles and Oedipus.

  I set aside my phone and pull out the first book Pict gave me, skimming through odds and ends outlining the origins of Theban Group… and holy crap, this is nothing like that Wikipedia entry. Here, there is no mention of business subsidiaries or acquisitions or Wall Street; instead, it’s all about protection for scryers who were hunted, persecuted, stuck as royal pets throughout the centuries—real “off with his head” type stuff. The trivia geek in me sighs with glee before the thought occurs that my own ancestors may have faced these horrors.

  My eyes race over page after page, and I gnaw at my lip, not noticing until it stings. I stop, and once my concentration-tick has been mastered, I flip ahead and come across a section on something called the “Agon”—I guess a sort of ancient Olympics for scrying—and I pause, a footnote catching my eye.

  * * *

  “It is often described as having a cool and beckoning zephyr’s kiss that lures the unsuspecting in to investigate. Scryers have had a symbiotic relationship with the Celidon Coil for millennia, some saying the one’s abilities could not exist without the other’s, but that relationship is not without its struggles. The Celidon Coil is a place of power and protection for scryers precisely because it is a danger to outsiders. A controlled introduction of a scryer to the Coil environment during the Agon is necessary to neutralize the extreme danger the Coil would otherwise pose.”

  * * *

  I leaf through the remaining pages before setting it down, resolving to pour over every word later. A smile pulls at my stinging lip as I pick up another book. I’m going to learn how to do all of this. I’m a part of this. If I were the type to squeal, that’s how I’d describe the noise I just made. But I’m not a squealer. At least that’s what I tell myself as I shimmy in my seat and crack the hefty sucker open.

  Good lord. It’s like a chemistry textbook, except instead of stoichiometry and moles and oxidation, I’m reading about the Canon of Thought Singularity. It should be fascinating—it’s the how-to’s of magic, for God’s sake—but instead they could bottle Twardowski’s Principia: Principles and Techniques of Applied Scrying as a cure for insomnia.

  After I’ve blinked myself awake for the fifteenth time, I toss the book back in my bag and grab my MV-77 form and a pen, determined to recapture that feeling of elation.

  "Have you visited Mount Parnassus in the last twelve months?” “Have you ever been arrested for divination-related fraud?” “Indicate the date of your last incidence of déjà vu.” The hell kind of questions are these?

  “It looks like you just took every expression your face can make out for a test drive,” Colin calls out.

  I freeze and scan his patio, but don’t see him until he moves. “You were hiding behind the potted plants? That’s not creepy or anything.”

  “I wasn’t hiding. Well, not from you anyway. I was reading. Like you.” He approaches the little dividing wall and holds up the Stephen King novel Under the Dome.

  “Oh, I know that one. Aliens planted the dome, right?”

  Colin looks briefly stunned before flipping through to the end of his book. “Ugh, come on!” he groans with a laugh and tosses the book behind him.

  I blush. “I’m sorry! Your fault for skulking around in shrubbery.”

  “Clays do not skulk, thank you very much. We prowl mostly, and some lurk. There was an uncle once-removed who crept once, but we don’t talk about him.”

  I laugh, left giddy by my belly’s flip-flopping and the rush of heat that washes over me when I look at him. Some of what I read about the Coil could just as easily have been about Colin. His smile, his summer sky eyes… all of him. He has a happy gravity, a draw that pulls me in. Everything is brighter and lighter when he’s around, like changing a channel and living in high definition for the first time.

  “Synonyms won’t save you, skulker,” I say.

  He grins. “I think your punishment for spoiling my book, and my punishment for not-skulking, should be a visit to see the Spite House. Together.” He looks away. “If you’re free.”

  It’s funny how, before Mom died, my heart was a thing that beat in my chest to keep me alive. It wasn’t until Mom shattered it that I realized how much it could feel. And now… with Colin so awkwardly sweet and asking me—me—to hang out, I’m realizing my heart can feel more than pain. It is currently spasming and spinning with an ins
ane rush of delicious joy.

  “I mean, it’s cool if you—”

  “When?”

  His blue eyes swing back. “Now?”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah?” he asks.

  I nod and hold back a smile. “Sure.” I stand and back up toward the door to the stairs, my bag of books pressed against my chest. “I have to drop these in my apartment first, but… yeah. Let’s meet downstairs in a few.” I nod again for good measure because I’m not sure what else to do. And I flee, because that’s something I’m good at. I race down the stairs, through the door to my floor, down the hall and through my front door, definitely squealing all the way to my room.

  Chapter 8

  Today is a good day. And I don’t even have to convince myself of it too hard, though I’m wiped from a morning spent having the reality I’d lived in all my life torn away from me and replaced with an entirely new one.

  On the way to the park, we talk music—and at one point we both bust out the lyrics to one of the more obscure Atomic Dons songs at the same time. I blush and break off, but still, I’d bet my life he was the teensiest bit impressed.

  Plus it’s sunny out, I’m having a decent hair day, and hey, it helps to know I’m not insane—I can see the frigging future.

  I look over at Colin, his hands in his pockets as he strolls along next to me. He catches me looking and smiles. The future. The thought is suddenly a cloud blotting out the sun. My excitement dims, and my sense of self-preservation kicks in. What am I doing? What if I can’t save him?

  “There’s no way seeing the future is better than flying,” Colin says, his question about wished-for superhero powers having devolved into a debate.