Body of Stars by Laura Walter (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

Office of the Future, we had to be careful. We couldn’t lead public charges against the crisis of abductions or the weak protections girls had compared to their kidnappers. Instead, we had to work covertly, making incremental efforts toward change. Our professors told us to think of our work like planting wildflower seeds. The seeds themselves were tiny, innocuous, and invisible once tucked into soil, and the person who planted them would be long gone before the first sprout pushed to the surface. It took time for the seedlings to grow to maturity, but if granted the right combination of sun and rain and patience, they’d one day flourish, covering the earth with color.

It was a lovely image, but I didn’t want to make gradual, minuscule changes. I wanted girls and women to have better lives. I wanted the impossible: to upend the powers of fate. I wanted my predictions gone, erased, so I could move blankly through the future. So I could unlearn the truth of what was coming for my brother.

When I reached the cemetery, I paused to take in the gravestones of past professors and staff, the silent stretch of the otherworld. Maybe I was looking at things the wrong way. In the end, what was marked on my body did not matter. One day I’d join the dead, my bones laid in the earth. Just like Miles. Just like everyone.

In the older part of the cemetery, the headstones were made of marble instead of granite. While some of the engravings had faded or discolored beyond recognition, the marking patterns memorialized on the stones were still visible. I approached a cracked tombstone and ran my hand over its cold surface. Eloise Bethany Jenkins, born in the springtime and only forty-one years old when she passed. Her memorial marking—two large star-shaped marks offset by a trio of smaller dots at the top—represented fidelity.

When a woman died, it was tradition for her family members to select a representative marking pattern to include on her gravestone. I touched Eloise’s constellation, feeling where the stone had been chiseled away for its creation. Fidelity would follow her forever. As women, we understood our memorial markings would remain a part of us even after our deaths—as if they mattered more than our skin, our breathing bodies, our entire lives.

I remained in the cemetery for a long time, thinking about the passage of time, and fate, and failure. That long-ago night in the alley, Miles tried to save me by better understanding my fate. He was clumsy about it, and wrong, and he failed—but all of this could also be said of how I’d reacted to the prediction of his death. We were two siblings on the opposite sides of a coin, forever connected yet held apart. Brother and sister. Heads or stars.

*   *   *

By the time I doubled back to the academic hall, my International Texts class was nearly over, but I wasn’t worried. Professor Reed surely knew about the tarot by then and would understand that I might need time to myself. I slipped into my seat as she wrapped up a discussion of a foreign edition of Mapping the Future that included an addendum relating to gender expression.

Gender expression was not a term the Office of the Future would ever deign to define, much less codify in an addendum. This edition, however, was from a far-flung country in the north, a country so liberal that people born in female bodies who identified as men could have their markings stricken from the official record. Likewise, those born biologically as men were free to tattoo marking patterns on their bodies to express their identities as women. Anyone whose gender expression was not strictly binary, meanwhile, could choose to what extent predictions played a role in their lives, if at all. This approach was so progressive, so vastly different from what I’d known growing up, that I was still absorbing its implications.

I’d taken many classes on the mountain, from criminal justice to statistics, geometry, and interpretation theory, but this class had proved the most challenging. Most of us had grown up only learning about the worst policies of other nations; the more progressive laws elsewhere were largely a mystery. This class showed us more definitively how the rest of the world didn’t necessarily mirror the ways of our own nation, and that ideas that seemed frightening or confusing within our culture could have merit elsewhere.

“For same-sex relationships, it’s simpler,” Professor Reed continued. “In this edition, there is no mention of whether romantic marking patterns refer to one sex or another. This, too, is a departure from our authoritative text.”

I glanced toward Carmen and Jacqueline, who’d begun dating the year before. Whenever I saw them together, happy and unconcerned with how the outside world might view their relationship, I thought of Marie. I wanted my friend to experience this same level of freedom and love one day.

Marie hadn’t written me in months, and it had been even longer since I’d heard from Cassandra. This was the way of the mountain, we were told. Some friendships from home might feel distant over time, but that didn’t mean they were over. Once we returned, our professors assured us, those relationships could resume with some time and effort.

I didn’t want to think about going home, not even if it meant seeing Cassandra and Marie or living with my family again. Not even if I found a way to pretend that Miles wasn’t dangerously close to leaving us for good.

“Celeste.” Professor Reed was standing before my desk. “Are you all right?”

I looked up. The other girls were starting to mill out of the classroom—was class over already?—while my professor waited patiently before me. She wore a silk lavender blouse that brought out the honey-colored markings on her neck and clavicle, markings that glowed against the deep hue of her skin.

“I’m fine.” I forced a smile. She obviously knew about the tarot, how my stolen markings had entered the market,