Foreseen (The Rothston Series)

by Smiles, Terri-Lynne

  Chapter 16

  Kinzie

  I leaned back in the bucket seat of the game in the Rothston arcade, comfortable with everything that was about to happen in front of me. I maintained my focus, ignoring the growing mass of middle-schoolers who huddled closer to see the competition’s inevitable end.

  “He’s letting her win,” a boy behind me called out. “He wants to be part of history.”

  A girl to his side disagreed. “Nuh-uh. Beating her would be more epic. He’s trying. Look at him.”

  My eyes shot a sideways glance at my competition. Thirteen-year-old Ernie. Nerd-boy extraordinaire. A good kid. His eyes were glazed over, his mouth set in grim determination, and a bead of sweat was glistening at his temple. The best of the current arcade players – until now. I casually steered my control, stopping my cart in exactly the right spot, while I nudged my competitor with my mind. He twisted his controls, sending his vehicle skidding around the corner with absolute certainty that I’d set a bomb for him the other direction. But that brought him face-to-face with me, no more than three cart lengths away.

  “Oh, shi…”

  The word was half way out of his mouth when I fired. The blast sent him hurtling into the air in a blaze from which the words “Game Over” emerged. A cheer rose from the audience of boarding school students who’d resumed classes on Monday, as the game played its triumphant refrain. The high score screen flashed up. I leaned forward to escape the hands clapping my back and pretended all the noise was from the game. The top spot blinked with empty underscores, awaiting my input, and I knew my audience expected a show. I swallowed hard and forced a smile on my face.

  “Should I do it?” I asked and was met with a cacophony of encouragement and demands. I didn’t look back, knowing the crowd had swelled far beyond the three kids that started off watching us. Instead, I thumbed through the letters, inserting them one by one. C – Z – R, for Czarina, now flashed over those of the previous high score holder and the feat was complete. A massive cheer went up. As of now, I had the high score on every game in the arcade, and from the growing reaction of the students over the course of the week, that made me a star. My fans crowded in around me, and I felt the panic begin to grow. Time to leave.

  Sydney, the girl I’d played on my first attempt at the arcade before Christmas, chattered excited at my side as I left the room. “I can’t believe you beat the scores on all the machines!” she squealed as we headed up the stairs. “All of them! No one’s ever done that before. I mean, even Rex Brolie missed on a few.”

  My eyes bolted open, but I recovered quickly, not letting on my surprise. The first-place initials on most of the machines had been the same – KNG – and I figured it was someone I didn’t know. But now it seemed obvious. KNG for king. A play off his own name. I’d just beaten Rex.

  “I guess the king is dead,” I told her with a laugh, and my hand rose to touch the chivasta under my shirt. I’d started wearing it when I’d gotten back from Boston, and each day it seemed to hold more meaning for me. I belonged here. Every day, as I trained and explored the adept world further, I knew this was what I wanted – not just because I was good at it now, but because the world needed adepts. Needed people like me to keep it on the right path. But that troubled me as well. I knew I couldn’t lead a double life by hiding this all from Greg, and every day, I vowed to break up with him. But every evening, chatting with him on my laptop, I knew that was wrong too. It seemed like I belonged with him, and if nothing else, I cared about him too much to hurt him. And it would hurt him, because he didn’t understand that it wasn’t real. And so, my charade of a think-tank internship continued.

  Sydney said goodbye to me before I turned onto the middle-wing of the third floor. I was headed for the Coates Room to meet with Mel. She’d suggested the use of the chalkboard in the small conference room might come in handy for today’s lesson. But voices reached me as I approached the room – angry voices.

  “What you are suggesting is outrageous, Ms. Lee,” a deep, booming voice announced. From the distinctive timber, it had to be George Alphonse, a member of The Seven. Mel had introduced us one day in the cafeteria. I remember thinking that his burly body and wavy gray hair, flecked with black, fit his magnificent voice. But now, I stopped in the hallway, not wanting to face the current hostility of that voice.

  “It is not absurd,” a female voice answered. Marci Lee, I assumed from what Mr. Alphonse had said. Her voice was whinier than I expected from a member of The Seven, and more nasal. “We have been harmed, through no fault of our own, and we should be compensated. It is as simple as that.”

  Harmed? Compensated? I was curious now, and moved to the side of the hall, pretending to study the stained glass image in the window so I wouldn’t look like I was eavesdropping if someone left the room. The background of the image was a chivasta, variations of which were found all around Rothston. Almost every design and decoration here contained one.

  “It is hardly through no fault of our own, Marci,” Mel’s voice answered sternly. “Even before you were on The Seven, we entrusted you to select the investment advisor to manage our funds. You knew quite well from his psychological profile that he had a tendency to overstate his abilities in every regard, and might use his adept attributes to cover his tracks. We deserve what we got. It’s the commons who lost billions who were harmed.”

  “They were harmed!?!” Marci Lee’s voice shrieked. “We lost …”

  “Now, Marci, Ms. Whitacre, let’s all calm down here before we say things that any of us would regret,” came Mr. Jamison’s smooth words; always the voice of reason.

  “Regret? You mean like questioning whether your colleague here was involved in the scheme herself?” George Alphonse boomed. “None of us believe he could have held off the entire SEC for that long. And all by himself? And I do not regret that accusation one bit.”

  “How dare you!” Marci Lee squeaked. “You have no reason to even think that I …”

  “That’s enough!” Mr. Jamison interjected. “Maybe Ms. Lee should have invested Rothston’s funds differently. But maybe we’d have lost nothing had the two of you not insisted that Rothston influence the SEC to take action.”

  “It was the vote of The Seven,” Mel countered.

  “At your prompting,” Mr. Jamison answered. His voice had grown tighter.

  Mr. Alphonse’s voice let loose again. “And why were you so threatened by that? I recall you vehemently opposed prompting the SEC to do its job, but declined to give a rationale.”

  A tense silence loomed for an instant. “Yes, I did,” said Mr. Jamison evenly. “But none of this matters anymore. What’s done is done. The only question now is whether we should make up our losses.”

  “By influencing the stock market?” George’s deep voice added flatly. “Adept or not, there are laws against that, and we do live in the United States of America.”

  “My god, grow up,” Marci Lee drawled. “We aren’t in kindergarten anymore.”

  Mel responded with a statement that sounded like a sad, but regal pronouncement. “The commons have suffered because we didn’t stop our advisor’s Ponzi scheme. Our fate should be no different from theirs.”

  “We must ensure that Rothston’s resources remain intact so that we may continue to fully pursue our mission,” Mr. Jamison pointed out.

  “Our mission or our lifestyle?” Mel asked him bluntly, but he didn’t answer, deflecting her question instead.

  “Obviously, we will not work this out by consensus. We will have to put it to a vote with the others,” he stated.

  “Certainly, Mr. Jamison,” Mel agreed. “But do not count on the outcome you wish. We still have a majority.”

  “Majority?” Mr. Jamison spat. His voice had a harsh edge I’d never heard or imagined from him before.

  “Not for long,” Marci Lee’s voice interjected, followed by a tittering giggle that made the hairs rise on my arms.

  “Ms. Lee,” Mr. Jamison resumed, having reco
vered his usual calm tone. “We are not a partisan body. The Seven have always been unified and nothing is going to change that.”

  “I have work to do,” came Mel’s voice and an instant later she whisked out of the room. She grabbed my elbow when she spotted me, pushing me along in front of her brisk strides. “Hurry,” she whispered urgently. “You should not have heard that.”

  We rounded the corner and she bustled me down the stairs before slowing her pace, and herding me into the Charrington Room. The couple in the portrait still beamed down at me, but Mel’s face looked like thunder.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …” I began to apologize. But Mel dismissed my apology with a wave of her and pointed me to a seat while she paced across the room.

  “I’m not upset with you, Kinzie,” she said brusquely. “But tell me, how much did you hear?”

  “Enough,” I answered. “Rothston was involved in that big investment scandal from a while back, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Kinzie. The mastermind behind it was adept.”

  “So Rothston should have known?”

  Mel stopped her pacing and turned to face me. “Should have, and perhaps did,” she corrected me. “Marci Lee has been overseeing Rothston’s investments for years. It is inconceivable to me that this escaped her attention.”

  “But that was years ago,” I pointed out. “Why is it a problem now?”

  “Because Mr. Jamison and Ms. Lee see the current market volatility as a chance to recoup our losses by investing in underperforming stocks. Timing the market, so to speak.” She resumed her pacing, as if the mere thought of it disturbed her. “They want to use our attributes to artificially run up the price of stocks we invest in. The individuals who buy the stock as the price increases will have no idea it is an artificial bubble that will crash once our influence is removed. And who knows what the consequences of that will be?”

  “But you do know. The bubble will burst and other people will lose money, right?” I asked.

  “In the short run, yes. But the long-term consequences of our interventions are nearly impossible to know, even for adepts. This is the Principle of Unintended Consequences that we’ve only briefly touched on in your studies. But it comes down to this: we cannot see the future, Kinzie. No one can.”

  Unintended Consequences. I’d seen the term in some of the reading materials. It was a factor that screws up the results adepts were attempting to achieve, but there’d been no further explanation of it. Now, Mel fell into her teaching mode, and supplied it.

  “In general, short-term results are predictable based upon what we can read in either objects or people – although, even then an individual could still choose a different course of action we did not anticipate. But the further into the future you go, the more our accuracy drops. Exponentially, in fact. This uncertainty has been a substantial factor in our decisions as to when to intervene or not intervene in a particular situation. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were many points at which we could have altered the course of events. Many would argue, quite convincingly, that it would have been safer to do so.”

  I settled back into the leather chair. “I’ve thought that too. So why didn’t you?”

  “Because of the unintended consequences. Had we intervened sooner, perhaps the world would be the same as it is today. On the other hand, perhaps being on the brink of nuclear disaster left an impression on the world’s superpowers that avoided a nuclear war in the long-term. Applying it to this issue, I’m sure you would agree that money is power in this country, or at least access to power.”

  I nodded.

  “We could change people’s fortunes by tinkering with the market for our own good,” Mel explained, leaning forward as she spoke. “One person may suddenly find themselves without the money to attend college, or another may become wealthy beyond his dreams. We cannot know the effect that would have. Deprive the world of a great future leader, perhaps, or give rise to a new Hitler. There are too many variables for us to know how our interventions change the long-term course of events. Therefore, we wait and use it sparingly. That is the basis for our Minimal Intervention Policy.”

  “But Ms. Lee doesn’t agree.”

  “Yes. She, along with Brad Jamison and Bart Pasternak, feel it is time to do away with the Minimal Intervention Policy. The rest of us stand by it, and fortunately, we are still in control.”

  “But what Ms. Lee said – that you won’t be for long …”

  “A reminder that we are not getting younger,” Mel said in a tone that almost snapped. “And when Rex Brolie ascends, it will tip the balance of power.”

  “Rex! Ascend? You mean he becomes part of the The Seven?” I asked in shock.

  “Yes. He has been training for it for two years.”

  My stomach froze at the idea of Rex Brolie lording over everyone as a member of The Seven. He was unbearable enough as it was. But I needed to push that aside. The leadership of Rothston dealt with ideas and decisions that were far beyond my petty dislike of him. And in some ways, a change in the leadership would be good. Because as much as what Mel was saying made sense in the current context, overall, it struck me as a cop out.

  “You look puzzled,” the old woman prodded, and I explained that the Minimal Intervention Policy restrained them from intervening at the point that it might be easiest to change the course of events. Not intervening at that point could be disastrous. Still, I had no doubt that in some situations, it was better to let the commons work through the matter with no influence. But it was impossible to know which situations were which. “To me, both sides seem right and not right at the same time,” I summarized.

  Mel smiled and patted my hand where it rested on the table. “And that, Kinzie, is why I so enjoy teaching you,” she told me. “Mr. Jamison and his colleagues are waiting for us old folks to get out of their way, believing that everyone else agrees with them. You bring a new perspective to Rothston that may heal this division. You give me hope for the future,” she concluded, beaming at me like a grandmother.

  “But I don’t think Mr. Jamison is wrong,” I confessed. “Or that you’re entirely right either.”

  Mel’s smile grew. “I know. And that’s what gives me hope.”

  ψ

  Steady drips pattered onto the floor underneath me. I looped the chain of the chivasta around my neck before wrapping the towel that had been underneath it around me to keep warm. Sasha, on the chaise beside me, didn’t seem to notice the chill from the evaporating moisture. Or more accurately, she very much noticed and was as cold as I was, but liked the effect it had on her body. She stretched her arms over her head to braid her wet hair, but somehow it arched her back, thrusting her barely covered boobs out for display.

  “Stop it,” I scolded. “There’s no one here you need to show off to.”

  “Aw, but they like it,” she cooed, with a dazed grin. I didn’t need to read anyone to know she was making the five middle-school boys in the pool uncomfortable as they kept stealing glances at her, and it was just as obvious that she enjoyed the attention.

  “They’re kids, Sasha!”

  “Jeez, it’s not like I’m going to do anything. But they deserve a little pleasure, don’t they?” She nodded to the deep end of the pool where one of the older boys – fourteen perhaps – was climbing up the ladder. He froze when he reached the deck, gaping openly at Sasha’s chest, while his “pleasure” at the sight was pushing out the front of his swim trunks. The boy’s face turned beet red, but he seemed unable to turn away until finally Sasha laughed. The boy’s hands lurched in front of him, as if he could now hide the evidence, as he awkwardly slid back into the water, all the way in, hoping to sink and never emerge, I suspected.

  I picked up Sasha’s towel from the floor and threw it at her. “You’re sick. Why did you do that to him?”

  She straightened the towel across her, but at least she didn’t remove it. “I didn’t do anything to him,” she objected with a pout. “He wanted
to get a better view.”

  “But he wouldn’t have on his own.”

  “So? I helped him do what he wanted anyway. Nothing wrong with that.” I shook my head, ready to leave the subject, but she pursued it anyway. “You’re such a prude, Kinzie. How are you ever going to know when a guy likes you?”

  “That’s not ‘likes,’ Sasha. And these are boys.”

  “Okay, they are a little young, I’ll give you that. But you’ve got to see how it’s handy to know what a guy is deciding when he looks at you, not to mention giving them a little nudge sometimes. You should try it sometime.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her I’d never force a guy to do anything, but the words stuck in my throat. I’d never do it on purpose, but was there really any difference? After all, I’d done much worse than Sasha teasing these boys. Looking back over the few days at Christmas, I’d played out nearly every juvenile fantasy I’d ever had, with Greg as the leading man. The tender embrace with him gazing down at me against the romantic backdrop of the falling snow, the flirting kisses when he’d quickly pull me into a hallway, away from the eyes of his parents, the sensual entwining of our bodies as we lay on his bed Christmas night, watching the flickering flames in the fireplace. And if I’d needed any more proof that I was causing it, that scene provided it. With the weight of his body pressed against mine, I’d been waiting for more, but I was nervous over the idea of going from my first kiss to full womanhood in twenty-four hours. And so, it didn’t happen. Instead, he’d just held me. Sometimes we talked, over and over he’d kissed me, and sometimes we’d just lie there, listening to the mingled sound of our breath and our hearts, until eventually, I fell asleep. It was romantic and comforting, but didn’t fit with anything I knew about Greg Langston.

  The commotion of the middle school boys gathering their towels to leave broke my thoughts. Free swim was over. Only adults were allowed here now. Eighteen and over. Molley called to us from the locker room entrance. Sasha waved her over, and I settled back on the chaise.