by Laura Legend
“That is not what we agreed to practice,” Kumiko began.
Yada, yada, Cass thought. With great power comes blah, blah, blah.
But Kumiko surprised her. What came next was diagnostic, not accusatory. Kumiko took Cass’s head in her hands and turned it gently to the side so that she could look directly into Cass’s cloudy, wandering eye.
“I do not understand,” Kumiko said, looking into the eye from different angles, “why access to your powers has anything to do with your weak eye. There are no reported cases of this ever being true for any other Seer.”
Cass shrugged. “I’m just special, I guess.”
“Be still,” Kumiko said, her grip on Cass’s chin hardening. Kumiko leaned in very, very close to get an even better look. She was so close that Cass could have puckered her lips and kissed her if she’d wanted.
She didn’t.
“Your eye,” Kumiko continued, “appears to function like a circuit breaker, interrupting the normal flow of your power . . . unless perilous circumstances force the eye into alignment so that the energy flows.”
Kumiko paused for a moment, weighing her words. “I don’t think you were born this way. I think this was done to you—intentionally. I think someone deliberately rerouted your powers through that wandering eye, short-circuiting your access to them.”
Kumiko gestured for Cass to stand up. Cass did, rolling her liberated head and popping bones in her neck.
“Also, I have a strong hunch that both your weak eye and this short-circuiting of your powers are deeply intertwined with how your emotions have been locked away.”
Without warning, but with surgical precision, Kumiko jabbed three rigid fingers right at Cass’s solar plexus. Reflexively, Cass jumped backward, dodging the blow.
“Good,” Kumiko said softly, advancing on Cass again. Apparently, they were back to sparring.
Cass settled into a defensive posture, giving ground and maintaining some distance. Keeping that distance would be worlds easier to do, she assumed, than it had been with Dogen.
“Tell me,” Kumiko asked, “about your weak eye. You weren’t born with it, were you?”
“No. It happened right before my mother’s death—Before Rose’s death,” Cass added, recalling that Kumiko and her mother had been close. “I had an ‘accident’ of some kind. I don’t remember the details, and my dad always refused to talk about it.”
“I see,” Kumiko said as she feinted to reposition Cass, then moved with uncanny speed to pinch a nerve in Cass’s neck. Cass stepped right into it and her knees immediately buckled when Kumiko applied pressure. Kumiko let go and, almost involuntarily, Cass popped back up onto her feet.
“Tell me about your emotions. When did you lose contact with them?”
Cass cocked her head, thinking. “It happened around the same time my mother died. I always assumed that the distance between myself and my emotions was a result of my grief—that I just kind of shut down my feelings to protect myself from the pain of losing her, and never quite found my way back to those feelings as I got older.”
Cass stopped and connected the dots. “But you don’t think this is a coincidence, do you? You think there’s a reason why the injury to my eye, my walled-up emotions, and my mother’s death all happened around the same time?”
Kumiko’s tiny, ancient hands dropped to her side, and she instantly looked like an innocuous octogenarian again—her slightly humped back stooped, her white hair pulled in a tight bun. And as she reverted to harmless old lady mode, Cass could have sworn that a look of sorrow and compassion flickered across Kumiko’s face before she swiftly reimposed control.
Cass bristled at this pretense. Why couldn’t Kumiko just show that she cared? Why did they have to play these games? Why did Kumiko have to be such a hard-ass?
“You are correct,” Kumiko said, her face now a stiff mask. “This is no coincidence. Your eye, your powers, your emotions, and your mother’s death are surely four loops in a single knot.”
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents, and dialogue are the product ofthe author’s imagination or used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Hopeless. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Legend. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be produced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Momir Borocki
First edition
EPub Edition September 2018