36

The skies were all sorts of grey and the town’s square was covered in every shade of brown. The locals and the homeless alike had trotted over the lawns that led to the gazebo, stomping the snow into the wet dirt under the death grass. The footpaths and sidewalks hadn’t been visible for weeks.

The roads were relatively clean, due to cars and vans driving over them daily, but the Pupils had arrived at the Drunken Den on foot, as not to leave physical evidence of their presence outside.

They assembled inside, before going up to Juliette’s apartment.

“This is depressing,” Meriyem muttered, glancing outside, still wearing her winter gear.

“It’s been like this for a while now,” Jonathan shared, “but the winter definitely makes it look worse.”

“Reminds me of home,” Theresa said, referring to the grey cities in Eastern Europe that she had grown up in.

Anton and Alexander nodded.

The homeless that had survived the drownings moved through town like zombies. The ghosts-like appearances went barely seen, mostly unnoticed. Very few people were currently doing shopping in the town centre, making it look like a town deserted after an evacuation. Only the contaminated remained.

Brad arrived last. “No sign of them,” he informed, stomping to lose the snow that was sticking to his boots.

“Let’s go up,” James, wearing massive rainbow-coloured ski-goggles that covered half his face, encouraged.

“Marith and Nate aren’t here yet,” Amber brought in.

“That’s the whole point,” one of the Runners muttered.

“We’ve planned it that way,” Vanessa shared, with a pit in her stomach. She didn’t really want to do what they were going to do, leaving Pupils out of a Chain meeting, but certain things had to be discussed urgently.

“They’ll join us later,” Lisa said, holding the door to the pub open for her fellow Prophet.

The fifteen Pupils moved awkwardly through the narrow path the barstools and boots allowed, exchanging nods with the bar-owner. Juliette was waiting for them on the stairs that led to her apartment.

They huddled together around the kitchen table of the small studio. Apart from the Runners, everyone was still wearing their coats and some of them even kept their gloves on.

“What’s going on here?” Amber demanded.

“A secret emergency meeting,” James answered dryly, as if that part wasn’t clear yet.

“What is it about?” Theresa wondered. She had been aware of the meeting, just not the subject of discussion.

“Have any of you guys noticed how Marith has been having, you know, certain tendencies… or character-traits, ever since her Rebirth?” Vanessa wondered.

“You mean random and emotional outbursts?” Brad asked, knowing exactly what she meant.

“Those are loud,” Jonathan remarked, nodding with a twisted face.

“And kind of hot,” Kyle shared with a smirk, that a few of the men and none of the women answered with a smirk of their own.

“Well, I’ve been dreaming about Marith, a lot,” Lisa spoke. “I know that Nate had this weird connection to her before we found her, but ever since the Push his visions stopped and I’ve been the one having dreams about her.”

“In a hot way?” Kyle wondered.

“What is wrong with you?” Vanessa hissed from between her teeth.

“Yeah,” Theresa started quietly. “I think I know what you mean.”

The new Pupils crossed their arms and stared from face to face questioningly.

“What is it?” Brad inquired.

“I can’t see clearly,” Lisa continued, “which means that the Kid is involved…” she sighed, before going on, not sure if she was doing the right thing, “but what I do see is that she has one of those episodes and eventually… she stops being a part of my prophecies.”

“What about the setting? Was there anything unusual?” Vanessa asked.

“It was dark and outside and it was all happening in this area, judging by the trees and the snow.”

Theresa spoke with milky eyes, remembering some details, “a man I’ve never met was there. Brown, curly hair, light eyes. She was laying on the road and he was bending over her.”

“Nate,” Lisa said resolutely.

Vanessa frowned and crossed her arms as well, her dark eyes reduced to caterpillars.

A moment of confused silence followed.

“When she picked her sister up from school a few weeks ago she offered to drive me to the store. She flipped at least three people off, between Spectre Lake and Sweet Lake,” Kyle shared.

“Maybe that’s normal where she comes from?” Theresa offered.

“I stopped her from attacking somebody in a mobility scooter last week,” Brad admitted, scratching his neck. “We got a call about an unruly customer outside the supermarket. Apparently an elderly citizen had cut her off with his scooter upon entering the store. When we arrived we heard the old man say ‘I could have been your father, young lady’,” Brad re-enacted the scene, “to which Marith replied ‘in that case I am very glad my mother carried pepper spray that faithful night!’,” Brad spoke loudly, mimicking Marith’s Dutch accent.

“Okay, that’s hysterical,” Joshua commented, laughing.

Some of the other Runners snickered as well.

“Also, old people can be very annoying,” Meriyem soothed.

“Especially in scooters,” Kyle added, whispering, holding back laughter.

“Okay, she’s clearly a little nuts, okay?! But as it turns out we need her more than anything right now,” Pedro brought in. “The ‘cliff incident’ has kind of proven her value to the Chain.”

Some nods followed.

“Am I wrong?” Pedro pressed.

“No, you’re not,” Vanessa answered.

“What about you?” Jonathan asked Amber.

“I think she’s okay,” Amber said in a high tone of voice.

“You would get into a white van that has ‘free candy’ spray painted on the side. To you everyone is okay,” James scorned.

“Is that why I am the only one that wasn’t aware of this plan?”

Nobody answered that question either.

“For the record,” Meriyem started, “I did not agree with this plan.”

“Neither did we,” Theresa and Alexander whispered.

“Nobody wanted to do this,” Vanessa said, “and no one says she’s not okay,” she clarified, “but something odd is going on with her.”

“Well, dream-wise my experiences regarding Marith are more or less the same as yours,” Amber replied Theresa and Lisa eventually, staring guiltily at the kitchen table top.

“Should we tell her?” Meriyem wondered.

“I think she might already know,” Lisa said. “Most of us can feel it coming… you know, the end?”

“Really? I don’t feel a thing,” Jonathan said naively.

“That’s a good thing,” James mumbled.

“Right,” Jonathan nodded.

“Then what do we do?” An wondered.

The group looked up in surprise. They had somewhat forgotten he was there too. He stood leaning against the kitchen-counter, behind Joshua and Jonathan.

“We prevent it,” Vanessa said determined.

“Why are we not hearing this from Oracle or Anica?” Meriyem suddenly wondered.

“Because they can neither confirm nor deny it,” Lisa answered, somewhat tersely.

“How do you propose we prevent it?” Brad inquired. “We can’t give her house arrest and even if we would Samuel could still come at her.”

“We were powerless,” Lisa pleaded. “That’s the problem with what I saw. We couldn’t do anything for her.”

“Well, that’s what the Chain is for. We are designed to not be powerless,” Anton urged.

“They sound like nightmares more than prophecies to me,” Joshua said.

“And you know the difference, how?” Kyle wondered, more serious now.

“I don’t, but their visions might change after we do the Ritual,” Joshua went on. “That’s what the whole thing is for, isn’t it? To become one? Feel each other? Be invincible? Well, let’s find out if that’s the case first and then return to feelings of misery and despair.”

Some heads started to nod again, others mumbled affirmative words.

“I have powers too now,” Will started proudly. “Maybe your dreams didn’t take those into account either?” He stopped when he saw the look on Lisa’s face. He realised he was supposed to be on his girlfriend’s side.

An looked at him. “Indeed. We all have a role to play,” he uttered sudden and curt.

“What if Marith breaks the Chain?” Lisa wondered.

“Let’s form it first,” Amber urged.

“You guys act like she’s our only liability,” Brad muttered.

“What do you mean?” Amber’s head shot up.

“Don’t you guys see it?” Vanessa spat, not giving Brad the opportunity to answer. “She is me. I used to be like that. I used to be judgemental and temperamental.”

“I remember,” James said, “but why would you bring that up now that you’re nice again?”

“Because An is right. We all have a role to play. Apparently, this one is a vital part of our group. Let’s not make too big of an issue about it.”

“She has got your fire,” Kyle said nodding, as if he had just heard the biggest revelation of his life.

“We grow and evolve and change. I am sure there’s a purpose for all of us,” Meriyem concluded.

“If you guys are done with the inspirational drabness I would like to move to our next point of order,” James urged, in the commandeering tone of voice that managed to piss most of the women off.

“For that we need Marith and Nate here too,” Juliette reminded him.

“Speaking of the devil,” Brad said with a wink. “The lovebirds have just arrived.”

“Ladies first,” Nate mumbled, holding the door open for Marith.

She rolled her eyes and stepped through. The warmth inside the pub hugged her welcomingly.

Marith hated how he tried to be chivalrous. She hated that serious, questioning, innocent look on his face. He knew damn well why she had been angry at him.

She stomped through the elongated, dim space with Nate in her wake. She managed to smile at the proprietor of the Drunken Den. He waved back at her from behind the dark bar. Over the past few months he had gotten used to Pupils from all over the world visiting Juliette occasionally. He didn’t know any details, but like most people in the area he knew deep down that the details would only worry him further.

“How are you?” Nate asked hesitantly and in a hoarse whisper, while they entered the narrow hallway that separated the pub from the room where they had celebrated Jonathan’s birthday.

“It would be nice to live in a town that won’t show up in a documentary series at some point in time, but for the rest I’m fine I guess. You?” She informed reluctantly.

“Same,” Nate mumbled, even though he didn’t live in Sweet Lake.

They climbed silently upstairs surrounded by an atmosphere of awkwardness.

When they reached the top of the stairs they noticed how the door to Juliette’s was already opened. The group packed even closer together to make room for the Prophet and the Mage, in the little space that Juliette’s studio allowed.

“Are we late?” Marith wondered, noticing that everybody had already gathered there.

“No, not at all! Right on time!” The group exclaimed in near-perfect unison.

“Come on in,” Juliette urged, from somewhere in between the collection of Pupils.

“What we should make an issue about is the Kid’s next move,” Brad stated in an even tone of voice. “Marith gave him a heartbeat and with that an opportunity. He can now stay here longer and he might have his strength back, even if it’s only temporarily.”

“You’re right,” James jumped in. “There is no way he won’t be using that to his advantage and that is why our next point of order is the diaries. Remember those walking trees, Marith?” He asked, glancing over at her.

The lack of space caused Nate and Marith to still be standing in the opening of the door. Their arms touched, which annoyed her to no end.

“How could I forget?”

“Well, as it turns out our Elders did some homework for us. As most of you will know by now the majority of our ancestors kept journals. Since the Kid didn’t awaken in their time, so to speak, they studied the rolls underneath the lake, occasionally finding interesting stuff. Pedro, Alexander and Theresa brought the diaries from their ancestors. We’ve already looked over those the… eh… night of the drownings,” he finished with some tension behind his voice. There were no happy memories there.

“What did you find?” Juliette wondered, while Kyle was fumbling with his scarf.

“Well, there were a lot of similarities in the diaries, probably because they studied the rolls together, but what was most interesting was the stuff about the water around here,” An joined the conversation, being the expert of elements.

“To be absolutely sure, though, we would need to know if the other Elders came to the same conclusions,” Theresa said in a tone of voice that betrayed the ‘new’ Pupils had already had this conversation before.

Marith wasn’t surprised by this. They all stayed in Pedro’s house together. Of course they discussed matters amongst each other first.

“Did you bring the journals from the store?” James asked Kyle, who immediately shrank deep into his chair.

Theresa, An and Pedro each dropped a bunch of diaries on the kitchen table and flipped them open to the pages that mattered most. The booklets were of similar size and all bound in the same leather, as if Oracle had handed them out to each and every one of the Elders to capture their visions and their research. The old, yellowing paper crackled under their fingertips.

“What on Earth is this?” Jonathan wondered, looking at the foreign writings on the pages, alien to him and most of the group.

“Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese signs and these ones are Spanish,” James clarified, waving over the opened booklets, before Theresa, Pedro or An could answer. “We’ve already deciphered most of these.” He gestured at the non-English leather-bound diaries.

“What about the diaries from the safe?” James urged Kyle again.

Vanessa had a queasy feeling, originating somewhere below her stomach, about what Kyle was going to say. Something was amiss.

The young Prophet swallowed and avoided eye contact.

“Well?”

“The safe was empty when I opened it earlier today,” he eventually whispered.

“They stole those too?” James deducted.

Kyle just nodded, still looking away.

“Wait, what else did they steal?” Marith wanted to know. “What did Watchmaker say?” She added instantly.

“He said it was the kind of stuff he stored there because the creatures that could use it don’t exist anymore.”

“What?”

“It’s pointless crap, okay?”

“Well, clearly it isn’t meaningless to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of stealing it,” Juliette inserted herself into the discussion.

“It’s just tools, some ancient glasswork. They have it now, so it doesn’t matter anymore,” Kyle said, still defending himself.

“And who are ‘they’?” William wondered.

“Remember the nymphs I told you about?” Lisa informed her partner.

“The ones that Meriyem and Theresa told you about?” William wanted to know.

“You guys talk without us?” Jonathan asked, with a hurt undertone that Marith wasn’t sure he was faking or not.

“The Kid could have another ally?” Amber asked.

“Yes, we’re pretty sure he has,” Theresa answered, putting a blonde lock behind her ear.

“It’s three of them,” Kyle almost whispered.

“What?”

“It’s not one ally. It’s three. They came by the clock store and stole stuff,” he admitted, rather ashamed.

“They bamboozled our Kyle?” Joshua blurted out.

“I saw them later, on the footage from the security cameras,” Kyle clarified in a small voice.

“Where you there when it happened?” Vanessa asked with a frown.

“Yes,” he nodded, “but I never noticed them being there. They can like camouflage themselves.” Kyle sounded incredulous about his own explanation. “They walked past me and I just never…” he shrugged.

“How did they get into the safe?” Meriyem asked critical. “They couldn’t be in possession of any keys, right?”

“There were several moments they moved too fast for the cameras to catch up with them, but they opened it without damaging it,” Kyle muttered.

“Care to share how?” Meriyem pried, leaning towards him over the table.

“I keep the keys under the cash register. I do my homework behind that counter. There is no way they could have grabbed and returned it, without me noticing anything,” he tried to convince her, “no way.”

“Nymphs can shapeshift, right?” William asked, the whole group immediately looking at him.

“Yes.”

“What if they turned into a key?” William continued.

“Right,” Kyle said, “that’s as good an explanation as any. Maybe they stuck their fingers in there and turned the lock. I couldn’t see that part of the footage, because the other two were hunched over the one working the lock.”

“So we do know what they look like now?” Meriyem asked hopeful, letting the discussion about keys, locks and stolen goods rest for now.

“They can change into any local tree,” Joshua said, leaving through one of the diaries that had belonged to Marith’s grandfather.

“I meant in their human form,” the Prophet from Africa clarified, rolling her eyes.

Kyle shrugged. “Tall, slender, pale.”

“We’re going to need more.”

“Okay, this is going to sound insane, especially because they move around unnoticed, but their skin was almost blue, but a super light shade, their hair seemed silvery, like a shining necklace, and when one of them looked up into one of the cameras it seemed as if her eyes were made out of gemstones, bright yellow and pale orange with flecks of purple and blue in them. Truly bizarre,” he stated, shaking his head.

“Dr. Sybling told me his Evil is passive at first, but will always be aggressive later on,” Meriyem shared, with a milky look in her eyes, remembering the conversation she’d had with her distant relative, before Samuel had burst into the clinic to kill Iris and take Etienne.

“What does that even mean?”

“Samuel will become more active in his attempts to rule this world. I am guessing by using these blue beings,” she spoke demeaning about whatever creatures the Kid had summoned to aid him.

A wave of brief panic washed and settled over the Pupils as they realised they were being showered with a whole new set of struggles. Bringing Etienne to safety was not the end of this. They had known as much, but now that they were all together in one tiny space for the first time ever things got more real. As if they were one organism their breath quickened, their muscles tensed and their thoughts raced into a wall, trying to make sense of things, without possessing the all necessary information.

Marith sensed another wave of non-constructive chitchat was about to erupt and so did James.

“Okay, let’s keep calm, people. A little over half of you knew about the nymphs already, but we didn’t call a meeting sooner, because we wanted to be absolutely sure about what we’re dealing with here,” the Runner said, before letting out a sigh.

He explained how Watchmaker stored the diaries from the Elders in a safe in the back of the clockstore. The journals likely possessed information that these shapeshifting creatures didn’t want to be common knowledge.

Going back to the Corridors to fetch the rolls and study them again would be too much work. The Pupils had seen thousands of them, when they had been down there, guided by Keymaker. Their fight with the Kid was happening right now, so time was of the essence. The compact diaries were their best bet of finding out what was at hand.

“I did read most of them at some point,” Kyle shared softly, in an attempt to ease the pain of losing all that invaluable information.

“And we’ve got the ones from the lake house,” Jonathan informed, quite cheery under the circumstances.

“Right, before I forget, this belongs to Keymaker,” James said, fishing an old looking key out of a pocket and handing it to William, who put it away in his own coat.

“That guy is kind of a minimalist,” Joshua suddenly remembered, glancing at Marith as he said it.

“He’s been sleeping on a block of marble for thousands of years. He can probably live without luxury items,” Marith answered, with a wry smile.

She noticed how Nate shuffled his feet softly, before speaking. “What did you guys find?” He asked Kyle and the Pupils that had brought the foreign scriptures.

Marith knew he was too goal-oriented to listen to any of the back-and-forth side-tracking any longer. She hated the impatience in his voice, because it reminded her of her parents, but she loved his straight-forwardness.

“The history of these creatures appears to be somewhat muddled,” Kyle shared, “but I found this... Do you know how certain talents of the Mages re-emerge in chains over time?” He asked the group.

“Yes,” several people answered.

“Well, the journals were really hard to read... hand-writing wise, but this is what I could deduct. It turns out that there has been another Mage that let in creatures from other worlds. This all happened so long ago that the Kid was still, you know, in his first life. This is, of course, all hearsay, but since these journals are our only source of information, it’s the best information we got, I guess,” Kyle went on, staring at the books on the table as he spoke. “There is a decent possibility that most European mythology sprouted from the mind of one Mage.”

“Was that Mage called Ovidius?” Marith joked.

“Or Homerus?” Theresa added with a wink.

“So,” Kyle continued, ignoring the girls, “if you guys claim that the other diaries, the ones that weren’t in the safe, mention nymphs I am not in the least bit surprised.”

“Your ancestor was quite the artist,” Joshua commented, leaning over Theresa, who sat at the table, to study some drawings up close.

“Most of the diaries contain sketches,” Alexander said, leaving through the Russian one, “probably to fight the boredom of spending weeks on end in the Corridors. According to these,” he moved his index finger over a page with drawings that showed a male figure with three slender women relaxing under a tree and another one on the bank of a river, “they lived side by side.”

“You think he was able to corrupt a Mage?” Jonathan wondered in surprise.

“We don’t know,” Alexander shook his head, “but I think it’s more likely that they just attracted each other. I mean, that Turkish guy never meant to let out the Birdman. It still happened and they found each other afterwards.”

The group accepted this as a decent explanation.

“This is what mine says,” An began, picking up the journal from his Elder, when the group left a considerable pause. “Atoms is what we see, fields are what the world is made of. These nymphs have initially been scattered across every plane of water on the planet, but because their lives had been tied to the Child’s their entities, their particles, travelled with him to these lakes. Meaning that they have probably been here for thousands of years as well,” An concluded, reading out loud and pausing several times to translate in his head, before he spoke.

“They lived in these lakes specifically?” Juliette asked, her eyes intently on An.

“Yes, so it seems,” An answered, “but not as nymphs,” he clarified, “just as particles.”

“The drownings were never meant as punishment,” Kyle commented, still not making eye contact with any of his fellow Pupils.

“It was a sacrifice,” Amber said, looking up at Kyle.

The minds of the other sixteen Pupils suddenly filled with understanding. “What have you seen?” Nate wondered.

He had picked up the same vibes Marith had. Amber and Kyle knew more. Marith sensed that the two teenagers had received information from the Web than Lisa and Nate hadn’t.

Kyle shook his head, before speaking. “Lately my mind feels penetrated, almost raped, much different from when the Kid awakened. I’ve been having the most horrifying dreams, more realistic than reality itself, if that makes sense,” he paused, to gather his thoughts, “it’s madness. I’ve seen monsters that the writers of horror books couldn’t come up with, even on their wildest acid trips.”

“Same,” Amber shared, after some hesitation. “When I wake up I feel as if I have lost weeks of my life. I am never rested and I feel haunted, as if the things from my nightmares can be around every corner. Sometimes I think I see dark shapes moving across the walls, both at home and at school. The more disgusting and chaotic my dreams became the more I dreamt of paranormal invasions in this town.”

Pedro nodded and picked his respective diary up. “My grandfather’s writings promised some dark stuff, the kind of images you see in nightmares, not to be confused with the kind of demons you encounter during the day,” he read with a frown, “but as far as I can decipher he means to say that whatever you see at night will become a reality when the sun is up as well,” he paused, leaving through the pages, taking in some sketches and reading ahead, before translating more, “with the help of these translucent witches.”

Amber and Kyle exchanged some worried glances.

“Look!” Pedro almost exclaimed, after turning some more yellowed, crackling pages. He turned the diary around so that the group could see what he was pointing at. It appeared to be a sleeping person, next to a body of water, with an aura of stripes and stars around the resting head.

“This is how he drew Prophets,” Pedro quickly clarified, after taking in some of their faces.

“What does this all mean?” Anton wondered, not impressed by the image Pedro was showing.

“Amber and Kyle are seeing these things, because they live here, not despite of it,” Lisa explained, realising that staying away from Sweet Lake had its downsides. “What else do your grandparents say?” She asked An, Pedro and Theresa.

“This just confirms what An’s diary says,” Theresa said, peering into one of the journals she and her brother had brought. “The lives of the nymphs were tied to the life of the Kid. When they conquered him, the nymphs were scattered across all undulating fields of water on this planet by previous Chains,” she translated.

“Do you have the same dreams?” Nate asked Theresa and Meriyem.

They shook their heads, denying having seen the same horrors Amber and Kyle had.

“But you do live here…” Jonathan spoke confused.

“It’s your Hotspot, not ours,” Theresa said.

“These nightmares come to them, because they carry this town inside them,” Pedro shared ominously, quickly scanning some more drawings in the other journals. “The monsters are only inside the Prophets, when they are already inside of the area,” he finished, not fully realizing what he had just read yet.

Amber and Kyle shuddered and so did Marith. This was very bad news. This wasn’t just a new issue they had to tackle, it sounded like a disaster in the making that they had no control over.

Amber and Kyle had been able to see the future results of the tireless work of the nymphs, even though they hadn’t fully understood that until this gathering.

The information had trickled and spread through the Web towards the two Prophets like ink in a glass of water, which meant that the future - regarding the hissing shadows, the things that crawled from the dirt, up the walls and across the ceiling, to linger, to fester, to haunt - had been decided.

Lisa wondered if these prophecies had any link to their dreams about Marith, but she couldn’t possibly ask Amber that in front of Marith.

“Why is this even happening? Why a sacrifice, when the Kid was already weakened at that point?” Juliette thought out loud.

“The whole thing must benefit him somehow,” Jonathan said to himself, shaking his head.

“Remember that entanglement Pavan was talking about?” Kyle reminded.

“I think they want revenge,” Amber told the group.

James yanked off the ski glasses that he had been wearing the whole time. “Revenge cannot be their only goal,” he decided.

“Why not?”

“That would be a waste of energy.”

“Do any of the diaries say anything about how he will find a new source of energy?”

Several Pupils shook their heads. “It’s not in these ones.”

“I haven’t read my grandfather’s work yet,” Marith informed.

“We leafed through them,” Juliette said. “I specifically scanned for that kind of stuff. There was nothing there.”

“Maybe in the stolen ones,” Kyle shrugged, his arms crossed, “but as I said I read almost all of them and I never came across any information that interesting. I would have remembered that,” he assured the group.

“He doesn’t have to, right now. Marith gave him a heartbeat. Remember?” If anyone other than Theresa would have said it like that Marith would have thought the undertone was accusing her of something, but she knew Theresa was genuine.

“Yes, but he’s not at the lake house, so he’s up to something,” Joshua pondered.

“Maybe he’s camping with his nymphs.”

“Maybe he’s just hiding from us somewhere.”

“We weren’t that scary the last time we saw him,” Vanessa countered.

“What about Lucille, Jonathan?” James inquired hopeful. “She was alive when these journals were written, when the research was done…”

“I asked. She wasn’t the journaling type. Also, her and my granddad didn’t live here when the Pupils from the other Chains were visiting.”

“Pavan would have said something if he knew anything,” Marith said.

The group knew she was right. Pavan didn’t live in Sweet Lake, but he was well aware of what the Pupils were up to. He could have contacted any of them and he hadn’t. Proving there was literally zero information on how the Kid was planning to come by, probably because the Kid himself didn’t know either. His future was as unclear to him as it was to the Prophets.

“But you know who would know if there were shady trees in the area?” Jonathan suddenly asked the group with a lightbulb above his head.

“No, who?” An asked, when nobody responded.

“The birds!” He shared with an elated hand-gesture.

“The what now?” Meriyem wondered, crossing her arms.

“His grandmother,” Kyle started, “talks to birds.”

“Sure. Why not?” Meriyem said.

“They would know,” Jonathan urged with big, telling eyes.

“Okay, so we keep that as an option. That is great,” Meriyem said, with a complete lack of enthusiasm in her voice.

“What even are shady trees?”

Jonathan shrugged. “Trees without snow on them? Trees that look… I don’t know, too good to be real, I guess.”

“Maybe they emanate evil vibes,” Pedro shared, in a tone of voice that told Marith he absolutely thought that was possible.

A wave of something indefinite that gave the Runners and the Mages shivers travelled through the apartment. The Prophets froze and all six of them stared into space, in the same way Alzheimer patients and drug addicts did.

Marith knew Oracle came before them. She thought about Etienne and the things he had claimed, before William had brought him to Oracle and Anica.

I can’t read the books yet, but I can read the air, he had said. She knew that what the Prophets experienced was different from what Watchmaker and Etienne could see, but it worked in the same ineffable ways.

“Keymaker is downstairs,” Brad shared.

“It’s time,” Meriyem confirmed.