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

in something bigger, too—that the maps of fate were open to gentle revision if we only reimagined them. A road might be erased and redrawn a few degrees to the left, or an obstacle removed from the route. As girls, we were taught that our fates were set and any change was impossible, but that was a lie. I could feel the truth through my fingers as I worked.

The rest of the day passed in a haze. Eventually, Miles and I walked home together. We had dinner with our father, a meal he’d made from the garden. Then we waited. We’d planned on going to the station to meet the train, but it must have been ahead of schedule. Our mother showed up in a taxi, its headlights glaring through our front window as it pulled into our driveway.

I stood to the side of the window and watched my mother emerge from the car. Her heels made dull, jarring sounds on the paving stones as she walked toward the house. Miles and my father hurried to the front door to greet her, but I remained by the window.

“Home at last,” my mother said as she crossed the threshold. She dropped her bag and embraced Miles. I witnessed it, the final moment before I cracked the world apart for her.

When my mother let go of Miles, I finally moved toward her, drawn by a potent combination of instinct and memory and love. She engulfed me in a hug and we clung to each other for a long time. I could feel her heart beating, which reminded me of hugging Cassandra as a changeling—two female bodies connected to each other and to the larger, mysterious forces of life.

*   *   *

“I have to show you something,” I told my mother when we finally pulled away. “It’s serious.”

She and my father both faced me with weariness, patience, love. They waited as if they’d known this was coming. I steadied myself, then pulled up the hem of my shirt to reveal the prediction on my ribs. The marking pattern that foretold the death of their son.

I held my shirt and breath and waited. A long beat of silence followed. I closed my eyes and waited more. My mother was the one to step forward and trace my markings. She did so with caution, as if she thought they could spark into flame. My father did not touch my skin. He did not say a word.

After what felt like a long time, I lowered my shirt and wrapped my arms around my chest. I pressed hard, as if trying to contain the whole of the future inside my body.

*   *   *

Like my abduction, like other traumas of its kind, the conversation that followed left me with few concrete memories. One minute our parents thought our family was whole, and the next, I tore it down by revealing Miles’s fate. A family wasn’t a static, solid thing as I had once assumed. Instead it was moveable, breathable, breakable. It would expand to make room for the coming loss, and it would also collapse on itself under the weight of grief.

“We’re here now,” our mother kept saying. We sat on the couch, all four of us, crammed together thigh to thigh. “This is not the future,” she went on. “This is right now, this instant, and we’re together.”

She was right, but then time never stopped, and the future never ceased advancing. It was inescapable—and yet I continued to blame myself for the fate that awaited my brother and our entire family.

I apologized once and then again until my father asked me to stop.

“You had no control over this,” he told me. “What is marked on your body, what is fated, is nothing you could prevent. You have no reason to be ashamed.”

“But I separated Mom from Miles.” I felt wrung out, emptied. My throat was scratchy, my eyes swollen. “I sent her off to become a humanitarian so I could go to the Mountain School.”

My mother turned my way. Already she looked at me differently, like I was all she had left. “This is a shock,” she admitted. “I wish I’d had the full story back then. But I don’t regret becoming a humanitarian. My job didn’t just benefit you, Celeste. I helped girls. I had a purpose.”

“Exactly,” Miles added. “Which is why we’re working with Julia—we want to help girls. We want to change the future. That is our purpose.”

Purpose wouldn’t keep my brother with us. But as my mother had said, we were all together in that moment. Four bodies pressed on a couch. Hearts beating, lungs expanding. One day, Miles would be gone, my family contracted until I found my husband—because I’d marry eventually, just as my markings predicted.

In that moment, however, we were still a family. Mother and father, brother and sister. As it had always been. As it would never be again.

*   *   *

The next day, Miles and I took a brief break from our work to stay at home. Our father spent hours cooking for us. He made soups and casseroles and breads and a blueberry pie. He said, in fact, that cooking was the only way he could take his mind off the news about Miles—news he said he couldn’t ever accept.

“You will,” Miles told him. “It seems unbelievable now, but one day, the fact of my absence will be just that: a fact. One day you won’t believe that you never knew it.”

That was my older brother, so calmly philosophical about his own death, while I’d had nightmares all the previous night. I dreamed of Miles hit by a car, plugged into machines in a hospital, falling down a great crack that opened in the earth at his feet. My anxiety would only grow, I knew, as our shared birthday drew closer in the coming months. Miles was fated to lose his life sometime in his twentieth year—it could be only days after he turned twenty, or it could be