I once more remembered Santiago and said, “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it the opposite of what I want? I’m trying not to remember so vividly.”
Sydney smiled. “The point of this exercise is for you to confront and embrace your memories in a safe way. Writing about, for example, being held at gunpoint might bring up painful memories, but you’re not actually in danger. There’s no one there with a gun to your head. And writing about the feelings you had at the time helps you acknowledge that it’s okay to feel fear or other emotions when something bad happens.”
“Other emotions? Like what?”
Sydney’s smile broadened. “I’d rather not put ideas into your head. Do the exercise, and you’ll discover what emotions you had.”
I glanced at the colorful photos on the wall. “All right.”
Sydney stood and opened a drawer in the desk. She withdrew a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “This is for you to read when you get home. It’s an overview of the mindfulness techniques we’ll discuss today. Remember, this takes practice, and part of meditation is not being critical of yourself when your thoughts wander. Now, close your eyes and feel the air on your skin…”
An hour later, I was on my way home with a lot of new things to think about. Despite my resolve, I’d felt really stupid meditating. My mind wandered frequently, caught up in thoughts of the auguries I had to interpret and what tomorrow might bring at work and a dozen other pressing problems. I hadn’t done any physical labor, but I felt exhausted from jerking my mind back to the present so often. And I dreaded the other part of the assignment: recording the events that had hurt me most. I didn’t want to think about them, and I didn’t see how writing about them would help.
“It just seems so…I don’t know. Pointless?” I told Malcolm as we got ready for bed.
“I’m sure it’s not pointless,” Malcolm said. “Your therapist wouldn’t waste either of your time on something pointless.”
“Okay, wrong word. I guess it’s that I don’t know what the point is. I can’t look at any of what Sydney wants me to do and identify how specifically it will help me. So I feel like I’m flailing around and looking like a fool.”
Malcolm went into the bathroom and picked up his toothbrush. “Maybe you should ask her that question.”
“Maybe I should.” I got my own toothbrush and went to work. Knowing how all these things helped would make a difference in how I approached them. I’d be more enthusiastic, for one.
I spat, rinsed, and put my toothbrush away, then walked to my side of the bed. The notebook lay on my bedside table, taunting me. I sighed and put it away in the drawer. I’d face my demons some other time.
I climbed into bed and snuggled up to Malcolm, who put his arms around me. “This is the kind of therapy I prefer,” I said. “When I’m with you, my memories don’t trouble me.”
“It’s an impractical kind of therapy, unfortunately,” Malcolm murmured. “Given that I can’t follow you around all day.”
“I know. This is enough.” I smiled into the darkness as another memory, a good one, emerged from the back of my mind. “I was thinking the other day of how we met. I would never have guessed, from that day, that we would someday end up here.”
Malcolm chuckled. “I remember. I thought you were cute, but hopelessly out of your depth. Honestly, I didn’t think you’d last a week, let alone three years.”
“I almost didn’t. And I was out of my depth. But I survived.”
“You did.” He held me closer. “And the better I knew you, the more I was attracted to you. Your courage, your perseverance, your sense of humor…and then there was a day when I realized I couldn’t imagine my life without you.”
“I felt the same. Oh, Malcolm, I love you.”
“And I love you.” He kissed me, though it was a kiss that only fell partly on my mouth in the darkness. I shifted and kissed him back, enjoying the feel of his lips against mine. Then I snuggled in closer and let myself drift off into sleep.
“Judy,” I said the next morning, “do you think it’s possible to receive an augury for another person?”
“Sure. That’s what aug. fam. is.”
I shook my head. “I don’t mean ask for an augury on another person’s behalf. I mean get an augury for yourself that’s really meant for someone else.”
Judy paused in her typing. “I’m not sure I follow.”
I tapped the Animorphs book on the desk’s edge. “I studied this all morning before I came to work, and I really feel like the warning isn’t directed at me. More like I’m supposed to warn someone else.”
“A specific someone else?”
“Yes. I think it’s meant for Mr. Wallach.”
Judy held out her hand for the augury and flipped through the pages as if she could read its meaning as easily as skimming it. “Warning against what?”
“Well, there’s really only one thing he’s working on, right? Shifting our reality.” I accepted the book back from her and dropped it into my capacious purse. “But I don’t get it. It’s such a good idea, why would the oracle warn him against pursuing it?”
“It could be the way he’s pursuing it is wrong. Or he’s on the wrong track.”
“But he’s received auguries about it. If the oracle thought he was on the wrong track or something, it wouldn’t give him responses. Not depend on someone else to deliver a warning.”
Judy went back to typing. “Well, if he comes in today, you can ask him.”
I shrugged and left the office.
There weren’t many mail-in auguries that day, but all of them had to do with the current disaster. Most of them asked for predictions about where the invaders would strike next. All of those resulted in the NO AUGURY response. That worried me because it could mean so many things, none of them good. I particularly worried about the possibility that the oracle wouldn’t give an answer because it couldn’t—that the invaders’ tactics were so different it couldn’t predict their movements. I reminded myself that the oracle had told me about the attack on the Bridgerton Node and then remembered it had only done so at the moment of the attack. That was no comfort.
I stood surrounded by red-tinged light, clutching the latest failed augury. “I hope I’m wrong,” I said. “Maybe it’s just that these have to be mailed to their recipients, and the invaders strike so quickly, they’ll have attacked before these people ever get their responses. So it would be a waste of their time and money. It doesn’t have to be that you don’t know.”
The oracle’s attention never shifted. I closed my eyes and drew in a calming breath. Why not? Now was as good a time as any to practice Sydney’s meditation techniques. And I could certainly use inner peace.
I drew in another deep breath, focusing on how it filled my lungs, how it streamed out of my nostrils. I pictured it colored like the light, red air being changed to blue inside me so it made a long indigo streamer that swirled away into the distance. It was a fun image…and I was getting distracted already. I drew in another breath and focused on the air brushing my forearms and my face. There were no fans in the store, and the air was generally still, but within the oracle, breezes occasionally moved. The air was warm and strawberry-scented, and if I relaxed enough, I could feel it stirring the fine hairs on my arms.
I let myself feel that for a while, then shifted my attention to my sense of the oracle. It still wasn’t paying me any attention—no, that was wrong, I could feel its notice like a tingling tickle across my skin that wasn’t dispelled by the warm breaths of air. I embraced the feeling and focused on it until that sensation filled my whole world. It was like sinking into a beanbag, if beanbags were filled with shaving cream instead of pellets. The deeper I sank into meditation, the more aware I became of the oracle’s presence and the more I distanced myself from my awareness of my own body.
The oracle drew nearer, observing me like a cat approaches a new ball of string. I felt an unexpected wa
rmth creep over me, not so hot as to be painful, but comfortable like the sun on a clear spring day. My excitement rose as the oracle focused all its attention on me. I felt closer to it than ever before, close enough to understand its thoughts—
My concentration snapped. Suddenly the warmth was gone, and the oracle had withdrawn to somewhere nearby, its attention once more elsewhere. I scowled and opened my eyes. That had nearly been something interesting.
I went back to the counter and scrawled NO AUGURY on the paper. If only the oracle would explain—but it never did. I hoped its lack of response meant something positive, like that there was nothing to worry about. Or that whatever happened, it believed I was strong enough to deal with it without its direct guidance.
13
Viv and Wallach showed up around 4:30, just as the Ambrosite rush had trickled to nothing. Viv greeted me cheerily, but I knew her well enough to recognize when she was feeling a little down. “Anything wrong?” I said.
“No, of course not,” Viv replied. She smiled broadly and said, “This is the most interesting job I’ve ever had, and I include those two weeks I was a pearl diver.”
Wallach, on the other hand, didn’t conceal his scowl. “Let’s hope this augury is more successful,” he said, handing me a torn piece of paper.
“Wasn’t the last one? I thought you said you could see how it related to your work.” The augury request read How should the anchors be connected?
Wallach scowled more deeply. “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s move this along. I still have work to do.”
Stung and a little confused by his irritability, I made my escape into the oracle. I was used to Wallach’s occasional grumpiness, but that had always been directed at a recalcitrant problem, not at a person, and now he seemed upset with me as well as with the oracle. The light was blue-tinged, not red, so at least I’d be able to present him with something to focus his irritation on.
I rounded a corner and found the augury, another slim paperback—no, another Animorphs book. The Threat. “Weird,” I said. When I opened the cover, I got another surprise: this one was for me again. “This is really strange,” I said. “What do you have in mind, I wonder?”
Instantly, the oracle’s presence bore down on me, painfully sharp instead of the usual slow pressure. I cried out and tried to wrench away from it, but the pain followed me. “Stop!” I shouted. “What do you want? Why can’t you just speak?”
The pain lessened from a spike jabbing my shoulder to a pinprick. Warn, I thought. Danger.
“You could have just said that. Warn Mr. Wallach? What danger?”
Warn. Danger. The anchor vanishes. The oracle’s presence disappeared.
I rubbed my shoulder and rotated it to ease the lingering pain. That had been slightly less cryptic, but if it could tell me what warning to give, why had it also given me an augury? Unless the augury wasn’t like the previous one, and was actually for me. I’d have to study it and find out.
I headed for the exit and then remembered I hadn’t received an augury for Wallach. There must be one, or the light wouldn’t have been blue. Sighing, I set off in search of another tiny blue star.
When I found it, it wasn’t so tiny. It was another fat hardcover book you could bring down a pigeon with. The title was in huge red letters across the cover: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I set the Animorphs book on top of it and returned to the store’s front.
“Here you are,” I said to Wallach, handing him the big book. “$3500. I hope you don’t have to read the whole thing. That’s a long one.”
“Ms. Haley interprets the auguries,” Wallach said. He handed the book to Viv, who pretended to groan under its weight and then offered Judy several tubes of sanguinis sapiens.
“There’s one other thing, Mr. Wallach,” I said. “I received an augury yesterday about your work. It was a warning.”
Wallach’s eyes widened. “A warning? About what?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s about your new project. Something about how it’s too good to be true? And the oracle spoke to me now and repeated the warning. It said, ‘the anchor vanishes.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
The old scientist’s face cleared. “I already know about that. I don’t see why the oracle wants to give me a warning about dangers I’m already aware of.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said, feeling a little defensive of the oracle, as if he’d called its competence into question. “But I don’t think you should dismiss the warning.”
“Of course not,” Wallach said with a smile too paternalistic to be anything but insulting.
I suppressed an angry retort and said, “Good luck with your augury.”
Viv looked like she wanted to say something, but just hefted the enormous book and followed Wallach out the door.
“Did that seem weird to you?” I asked Judy, who’d silently taken payment from Viv and now lined up the tubes of raw magic on the counter.
“No weirder than anything Mr. Wallach does,” Judy said.
“I mean that he was so dismissive of the oracle’s warning. Most people, if they hear the oracle’s spoken to me, get all flustered.”
“He’s not most people.” Judy swept up the vials in both hands and headed for the basement. I flipped through the Animorphs book and wished I remembered the series better. Fighting alien invaders in secret, using magical powers—all right, technology, but it might as well have been magic. The back cover copy mentioned a new Animorph who started out as a help, but became dangerous when he began breaking rules. If it applied to Wallach’s new project, this combined with the first book suggested strongly that whatever Wallach was inventing to shift our reality would have unexpected, negative effects.
I sighed and carried the book to the office, deposited it in my purse, and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. It seemed the oracle, rather than warning Wallach directly, had decided to put the burden on my shoulders. Since Wallach was experimenting with something world-changing, if I failed to get him to take me seriously, those negative effects could include widespread destruction and maybe death. Like I needed that kind of responsibility. I could barely manage myself and my personal demons.
I heard footsteps on the basement stairs, running ones, and emerged from the office to see Judy slam the basement door shut and run toward me. “Another attack,” she panted. “Someplace in Louisiana I can’t pronounce.” She displayed her phone, whose screen was filled with a long text from her father.
I squinted. “Natchitoches,” I read. “I’m probably saying it wrong, too. What happened?”
“Father says the Wardens were there in time to save most of the population. Only a couple hundred deaths. But that’s a problem.”
“Yeah, any number of deaths is a problem.”
Judy shook her head. “The problem,” she said, “is every time the Wardens stop the invaders after they’ve begun their attack—whenever the city is identified publicly as a victim of the ‘biowarfare’—we run the risk of having someone wonder what, or who, is keeping the disaster from becoming greater. Right now—” Her phone chimed with an incoming text, and she held up a finger for me to wait while she read. “The news outlets are reporting it as an attack gone wrong, like the terrorists failed to properly deploy their weapon. Their words. But if this continues, somebody’s going to start asking inconvenient questions.”
“How could they possibly figure out the truth? Failed ‘attacks’ might be suspicious, but there’s not enough evidence to reveal what’s really going on.”
“I don’t know,” Judy said grimly. “But Father’s concerned, and he’s the most cautious thinker I know. If he thinks there’s a problem, we should be worried.”
I leaned against the door frame. “I’m worried that the oracle didn’t warn me like it did for the Bridgerton Node attack. It was too busy warning me about Mr. Wallach’s augury. The oracle’s priorities aren’t the same as ours, but if it’s more concerned about what Mr. Wallach
might do than about a city being destroyed—”
“Crazy Wallach might be in over his head, you mean?” Judy sighed. “I don’t see what we can do about either of those things, except keep doing our jobs.”
“I just wish it didn’t feel so much like this is the end of days,” I said.
I sat in my bed with the notebook on my knees, laid down my pen, and flipped back through my pages of notes. The Old Tin Sorrows augury had me stumped. Three crimes, many suspects, a powerful motive…there was an obvious interpretation, but it was so obvious I was reluctant to go there.
I turned back to the end, where I’d stopped halfway down the page. Not a bull in a china shop, I wrote. The main character admitted his method for solving crime was to go stomping around until the bad guys got nervous and made mistakes, but I was certain the bad guys in my own situation were invaders, and they weren’t likely to respond to that method. And this augury had been in response to the first attack and the destruction of the Fountain, and I knew who’d done that. It was why that was eluding me. And how, to a lesser extent.
I sighed. I’d eliminated every possibility I could think of but the first, most obvious one. I turned to a fresh sheet and, at the top, wrote: Invaders are eliminating Neutralities one by one until only one is left.
It was at the heart of the book. The old man had written a will that divided his fortune among his surviving family and staff, and one of them had been killing off potential heirs—though that person’s motive had turned out to be not what I’d expected. It fit really well. The invaders destroyed powerful Neutralities, winnowing them, but why? Again, the invaders had a motive I couldn’t fathom. And why the ones they’d chosen?
Not all are equally powerful, I wrote. The Cracchiolo Node in particular was an average-size node, smaller than the Gunther Node and out in the middle of nowhere. If there was a pattern to their attacks, I couldn’t see it. Need to ask Lucia about the pattern.
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