Lies and Prophecy (2 page)

If Julian had unnerved me, Robert made me want to laugh. The Irish accent was genuine; the courtly speech wasn't, and in any other person it would have been annoying as hell. But he took pure delight in showy behavior—a trait I blamed on his love affair with ceremonial magic—and I wouldn't dream of raining on his dramatic little parade.

“Congratulations,” I said, dumping my bag onto a chair.

He blinked. “Congratulations?”

“Deirdre.”

His blue eyes widened, then narrowed in suspicion. I laughed. “No, I did
not
peek. Liesel heard it from Michele this morning. Normal people, you know, send messages when their little sister manifests. They don't leave their friends to hear it from the rumor mill.”

Robert collapsed back into his chair, disgruntled. “I hoped to tell you in person. Unfortunately, your person was in Germany, and arrived here inconveniently late.”

“Blame Liesel. We stopped in Dusseldorf to say hi to her parents.” I shoved my bag onto the floor and sat down, while Julian headed for the serving line. I was leaving myself perilously little time to eat before PK, but Robert doted on his sister; he needed a chance to brag. “How's she doing?”

Robert's grin split his face. “Very well indeed. The doctor said—” His breath caught audibly, and his expression became a comic mix of horror and apology.

I could guess why. “Don't sweat it. I'm glad she's turned out okay.” Psi-sickness was a concern for any gifted family, all the more so because no one knew what caused it, and whom it would choose to strike. My younger brother Noah was one of the unlucky ones. But it was five years since he'd died, and I no longer broke down crying whenever the subject came up. “I hope she hasn't wreaked too much havoc.”

The tension in his shoulders drained away, but when Robert went on, his manner was more subdued. “My parents are agile enough with their gifts to suppress most of the damage, although one unpleasant nightmare broke most of the windows in her room.”

I shrugged philosophically. “It comes with the territory. At least she hasn't set the house on fire.”

“Pyrokinetics do not appear to be her havoc of choice, no. Mostly poltergeist activity, and mostly at night.”

Julian came back with a tray full of food. I eyed his selections dubiously—salad, some unappetizing preparation of chicken breast—and wondered if they were the best the dining hall had to offer. Probably. I excused myself from the table to forage for edible fare, and when I returned, Julian and Robert were discussing courses.

“You're in
what
class?” I demanded, catching the tail end of a comment Robert had made.

His eyes twinkled with unholy glee. “Lo's. Dr. Powell, with whom I worked this summer, put in a good word for me.”

“I thought Powell's specialty was feng shui.”

“It is, but they're good friends from their own college days. And since golems are a such an important field within technomagic, he offered his aid with Dr. Lo. I believe I impressed him with my maturity and control.” Robert put on a serious face.

“You? Controlled?” I rolled my eyes, and he threw a grape at me.

“Bite your tongue,” he said. “They must not learn the truth until
after
they've taught me to build a golem.”

I had a vision of Robert at the head of an army of constructs—a sorcerer's apprentice with an unseelie sense of humor. The thought made me shudder.

“What of you?” Robert asked me. “I already know what my fool of a roommate intends for himself. Pray tell me you are not likewise suicidal.”

“Grayson,” Julian said. He didn't look up from his salad, where he was apparently on a quest for healthy lettuce.

Robert looked at him, then back at me. I watched comprehension register on his face. Then he gave an abrupt bark of laughter. “Witchcraft 101! Are you at last giving up on that silliness known as the Department of Telepathic Sciences and coming over to where the real power is?”

“No,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I'm not a bloody sorcerer like you.”

“So you've said, on many occasions. And yet you choose Grayson. Your mother will be pleased.”

She would. And that was not a conversation I was looking forward to. My very sorcerous mother had been disappointed beyond words when my gifts kicked in, and a talent for ceremonial magic was conspicuously absent from them. Especially after all the effort she'd put into preparing me.

But no force in this world or any other would get me to admit that to Robert. “I did it just to shut you up,” I said instead. “Every time I tell you I don't like CM, you fold your hands and intone, ‘You know not whereof you speak'—” Julian laughed quietly. “By the time this quarter's done, I
will
know.”

“You got my accent
entirely
wrong,” Robert informed me loftily. “I would tell you to practice it, but I suspect you'll lack the time. Are you familiar with the term ‘overwork'?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's what happens when you take classes
and
waste time worrying about your friends, who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.”

Whatever response Robert would have made, it got cut short by Julian. “Kim knows what she's getting into,” he said.

A test of myself, was what. Because if I couldn't do CM, there was no point in dreaming; I'd take the obvious path, make use of the talents I
did
have, and be happy with that. Or try to.

A glimpse of the clock on the far wall distracted me. “Shit,” I said. “I've got to hurry, if I want to get to Frazer by one.”

“Frazer,” said Robert, very precisely, “is a pyrokinetics building. What torture are you submitting to there?”

“PK 310. Effect Limits.” I grinned at his appalled look. “For an explanation, apply to Julian. I've got to run.”

~

Professor Townson hadn't gotten the memo that nothing important should happen on the first day of class. “I assume you can all read the syllabus without my help,” he said, once he'd sent the file to our ports. “If you have any questions, you can ask them after class.” And without any further ado, he launched into a lecture on thermodynamics.

I was sitting with Ana and Geoff, two friends from Liesel's Wiccan circle, and trying not to ask myself whether Small-Scale Control might not have been a better choice after all. Geoff, a telekinetics major, didn't even seem to be paying attention. The way his brown fingers danced over his port looked more like he was playing a game than taking notes. My own hand ached with cramps, and class was only half over.

“We're going to see
Mindstorms
with Michele this afternoon,” Ana murmured to me, while Townson scrawled an equation on the screen that dominated the lower end of the lecture hall. “Want to come?”

It took me a moment to place the title. “Is that the one about First Manifestation?”

From the far side of Ana, Geoff gave an affirmative grunt. “And her ‘we' doesn't include me. Too many dead people, too many crazy people. Sheffield's class was bad enough.”

I would be starting that class tomorrow morning. I wondered idly if Sheffield would give extra credit for seeing the movie.

Did I
want
to see it? I remembered my grandmother's stories about living through First Manifestation as a little girl, and believed that any retelling of that history had an obligation to the truth, no matter how harsh. It was the chaos of Robert's sister Deirdre, replicated on a worldwide scale: half the adult population suddenly in possession of psychic gifts they had no idea how to control. In the weeks after that moment, before the first rush of power faded back to more manageable levels, whole cities had gone up in flames. The violence might bother Geoff, but it had to be included, or the story was a lie.

But violence wasn't a guarantee of truth. “Is it accurate?”

“Very,” Ana said. “Or so Michele says. They had a whole team of people doing postcog on Welton's old house, things like that.”

“Oh, shit.” The words came out involuntarily, and too loud; a buzz-cut Latino guy in the row ahead twisted in his seat to glare at me. I lowered my voice. “I forgot it was about Welton.”

Geoff snickered quietly. “Got a problem with our saintly founder?”

“No, I have a problem with the actor.”

“Gosselin?” Ana said in surprise. Then her eyes widened in understanding. “Because he isn't a wilder.”

The irony was that Henry Welton—geneticist, wilder, and namesake of our university—was the very man who identified the source of our gifts. His colleague Alexander Krauss designed the test to measure its genetic cause, the newly-activated sequences in previously junk DNA, but Welton realized what those genes represented, and why people treated him as if he were no longer entirely human.

He wasn't. And to a lesser extent, neither was anyone else.

The entire human species carried a genetic inheritance from the sidhe.

It was just a theory, of course. Welton, operating as much on psychic intuition as science, posited another realm—the Otherworld—that separated from ours ages ago, probably during the earliest years of the Iron Age, leaving behind no clear record of their existence. Just remnants of legends, some of them more accurate than others. The Celtic legends came the closest, and so he called the strangers of that distant past the sidhe. They interbred with humans, and after their departure their legacy spread across the planet, eventually diluting to a tiny remnant, a blip in our long chain of DNA.

You'd never guess it, looking at somebody like Geoff. His wrestler's build wasn't at all what we envisioned of the sidhe. But wilders' Krauss ratings were so high their gifts kicked in at birth, and it showed in physical ways, too. You couldn't come within ten feet of a wilder, couldn't even look at one, without knowing there was something
inhuman
about him.

As I'd just been reminded that morning. And nobody had yet invented the technomagic that could convey a presence like Julian's in a movie.

Down at the bottom of the lecture hall, Townson was saying something about convection. I hadn't caught a word of it. “Sorry,” I whispered to Ana, shaking the stiffness out of my hand. “I can't really bring myself to watch some actor in makeup pretend to be Henry Welton.”

“They could hardly get a real wilder,” she pointed out. “They're all busy with more important things than movies.”

Like being Guardians, running the government facilities that raised and trained wilder children—and in one anomalous case, going to college. I wondered what Julian thought of
Mindstorms
. Robert's doomed freshman-year attempts to find his roommate a hobby had established that movies weren't Julian's cup of tea, but he probably knew about this one. Was it an insult? Did he even care?

I had more immediate things to worry about. Fire leapt over Townson's desk. He'd conjured an asymmetrical flame into being, demonstrating how it licked against but didn't melt the block of ice in his hand. Effect limits, indeed. I wondered if he'd planned that to grab wandering attention like mine, or to scare away the faint of heart.

I wasn't so easily scared. PK didn't worry me the way Grayson's class did. My pyrokinetic abilities more or less ended at a candle's worth of flame, but I didn't need power for this, just control. And that, I could get with practice.

If I paid attention. “I know,” I said sideways to Ana, focusing on Townson and applying my stylus once more. “But I've got to unpack anyway. Let me know whether it's any good.”

Her shrug was just visible out of the corner of my eye. I wondered if she thought I was being sensitive, because of my friendship with Julian. Ana wasn't among the people on campus who had a problem with him—if she had been, Liesel wouldn't have hung out with her—but neither were the two of them more than acquaintances. I doubted she knew the full extent of the problems he'd faced when he came to Welton, and how many of them lingered even now.

Well, class wasn't the place to point it out. And if I
was
sensitive, than so be it. I had enough to keep me busy anyway, without spending an afternoon watching a fake wilder.

~

The stacks of Talman Library were standard college issue, which meant they were gloomy and full of shadows, the perfect setting for a creepy suspense flick. Despite the atmosphere, though, I liked Talman. The musty scent of books reminded me of home, and my parents' library room.

I could find my way to the divination section blindfolded, but had to check the map for the CM shelves, when I went after class the next day. They took up most of the fourth floor, row after row of books: mostly recent works, but also some pre-Manifestation antiques, useful mostly for historical interest, but occasionally applicable to modern magic. I trailed my hand down a row of spines, fingertips tingling with the faint psychic traces left behind by previous readers. Sometimes those helped me understand the texts. I could use their aid now.

The section I wanted was small, just two shelves near the floor. I spotted the familiar blue spine without having to check call numbers, and pulled it out. The old alchemical symbols for the elements decorated the cover. I wondered, as I stuffed it into my bag, whether I was making a mistake. Revisiting the past might not be my brightest idea ever.

This time when the hairs rose on the back of my neck, I anticipated the cause. I rose to my feet just as Julian walked by in the main aisle. He saw the movement and turned to face me, robbing me of the fun of startling him in revenge. “Hey,” I said, coming forward, so Julian wouldn't look at where I'd just been, and wonder what my interest was in childhood CM pedagogy.

“Kim,” he said in greeting, and scanned the shelves around us. “Extra research already? Or an assignment from Grayson?”

“Just being prepared. What about you?”