Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

Professor Reed did not smile back. Instead, with an air of gravity, she placed a piece of paper on my desk.

“Please, join me in my office,” she said. “We’ll have a chat.”

I stared at her. As long as I maintained eye contact, I could ignore that paper—the formal business letter with the Office of the Future’s embossed red square at the top. The kind of letter Professor Reed received from her network of sources and that she only showed me whenever she had news about Miles.

The letter that I understood might have the power to change everything around me once more.

The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

The girl journeyed out of the wood. Halfway across a meadow, she stumbled and fell to her knees. There in the meadow grass she found her: a sister, small as a teacup, curled inside the heart of a daisy.

She scooped up her sister and carried on. She found another sister in the muddy ditch along a dirt road, and then a pair of twins who came pouring out of a tin watering can. By the time the girl reached the sandy dunes of the sea, she was plucking up sisters faster than she could carry them.

The girl and her sisters made their home on a mountaintop. During the day they played in the glittering dirt, letting the wind catch and lift their bodies like paper. At night they spread stardust under their eyes and played firefly. They chewed the rubbery tentacles of mushrooms and brewed berries into wine, and at night they slept together on a speckled bed of lichen and moss.

One morning, the girl woke to find a raspberry thorn wedged into her thumb. She yanked it out, put the wound to her lips. In that taste of blood she caught a flash of her return to the woods. How her body was swallowed by the shadow of trees. How she was made to reckon with the place from which she’d come.

23

Professor Reed rested her elbows on the desk and pushed her glasses onto her forehead. I sat across from her, facing the vast, arched windows that overlooked the orchard and hummingbird feeders.

“The timing is not ideal, I know,” Professor Reed said. “First the tarot, now this. I apologize for that.”

The letter was in my hands, but I was afraid to read it. If I ignored my brother’s fate, that fate might never arrive. This kind of denial was the only way I could thrive on the mountain, the only way I could allow myself to be so removed from Miles while his life grew closer to its end.

Professor Reed nodded at the letter. “They’re preparing to take action, I’m afraid.”

I finally made myself look at the letter, to read every last one of its stiff, businesslike words. It was a photocopy of a cease-and-desist notice from the Office of the Future, addressed to Miles. It demanded that he stop conducting unlicensed interpretations immediately.

“That’s just a draft,” she continued. “I’m not sure when they’ll finalize and send it.”

As the head of faculty, Professor Reed was the only person at the Mountain School who knew all my secrets. She had copies of my full government file, including the maps of both my adult and juvenile markings. She knew about the prediction on my left side. She knew that Miles could tell when a girl was predicted to be taken. She knew it all, and yet she never shared it with anyone. Privacy was cherished on the mountain, as was trust—and I’d always trusted Professor Reed, as much as I trusted my own mother.

“They’ll issue a separate letter to Julia, too, though my source couldn’t obtain a copy of that one,” she added. “I imagine they’ll threaten to close her business if she continues to allow an unlicensed interpreter to work with her. Naturally, your brother will have no luck procuring a license.”

Professor Reed pulled out the file on my brother. Inside, I knew, were copies of the letters he had sent the Office of the Future in the last year. In those letters, he explained his system for determining whether a juvenile girl was predicted to be taken. He requested an official revision to Mapping the Future, as well as special dispensation to conduct professional readings on his own. Every one of his requests was denied.

“My other contacts indicate that your brother’s work is becoming known, at least regionally,” Professor Reed continued. “The more girls he reads, the farther word spreads. He and Julia are attracting more and more clients.”

I already knew this. Miles and I stayed in close contact through letters, and I tried, as best I could, to share what I was learning on the mountain and to give him a broader perspective of what life was like for survivors. On the mountain, we even went so far as to call it the afterlife, the years of our altered futures stretching out like the vast unknown.

My brother also needed to sharpen his skills, to hone his abilities to an art form. He conducted plenty of readings, but it wasn’t enough—he wasn’t enough. He was starting to come up against his limits as a man, in terms of both how much the girls trusted him and how he couldn’t fully grasp what they were enduring.

I skimmed the cease-and-desist notice again. “I don’t understand why the Office of the Future refuses to acknowledge Miles’s work. It’s as though they want girls to be hurt.”

“Change is difficult, Celeste. Historically, the Office of the Future has been slow to acknowledge new findings. But it’s also about control. They can better control what they already understand. When it comes to markings, any new information is a threat to everything—to fate, to how our world works. In any case, your brother’s expectations regarding the rate of change may be overly ambitious. The future shifts gradually—so gradually it’s hard to tell it’s changing at all.”

“Like glaciers.” We’d been studying the ice age