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

“No, she’s just weak. She says the world was set up for her to do what she did.” Angel loosened her grip on my arm and stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Those girls would have been taken anyway. We know that now, thanks to Miles.”

“We’re also working to change fate,” I said. “You saw the chart. What you and Miles and Julia are doing here can make a difference. We’re not like Chloe—we refuse to accept the world for what it is.”

“But Chloe is helping now,” Angel said. “She’s leaving her money to Julia, and to you, too. You should be thanking her.”

“I’d never thank Chloe.” My voice was shaking. I wanted to hate Angel, to hurt her, to make her feel all that Chloe had destroyed—but I couldn’t. She was a girl like the others, and she didn’t deserve the world people like Chloe had helped create.

I pulled the tarot deck out of my back pocket. I was going to show Angel how serious this was, all the destruction Chloe had brought upon us. But my hands were shaking so badly that I sent the cards flying. They scattered across the floor, dozens of exploited girls splayed near Angel’s feet.

The commotion brought Julia and Miles to the doorway. They peered out to see me crawling on the floor in the hallway, gathering cards. I was on the verge of crying.

“Mom is on her way home, Miles,” I said. The tarot cards were slippery, slick like they’d been coated in something sinister. “We have to tell her and Dad about what’s going to happen to you.”

I finally found my own card, which I held up with shaking fingers.

“See,” I said. “This prediction isn’t just ours anymore.”

Miles reached down and took the card. He might have anticipated this moment years ago, back when he was copying my markings in his notebook. Back then he knew what I did not—that I would be taken, and that my markings would cease to be my own. It had all come to pass just as he’d known it would.

“That prediction is going to come true either way,” I said. “Keeping it from them won’t prevent anything. You should know that more than anyone.”

My brother looked at me. I was crouched on the floor, loose tarot cards in my hands.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll tell them together, once Mom is home. But in the meantime, we need to work. And that includes you.”

He handed the card back to me. He gave me back myself.

The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

Across her cheeks the girl smeared lines of red mountain mud; on her thighs and collarbone she dotted the iridescent dust of crushed shells. So disguised, she began the long climb down the mountain. Behind her, the voices of her sisters drifted like mist.

Down to the foot of the mountain, across the rocky stream, through the valleys and meadows. When at last she entered the shadow of the forest, her body sang out for her old home. What beauty, what pain. She named every tree, every leaf, every patch of moss and liverwort. Every bluebell and fungus and poisonous weed. The stone in her heart was beating hard, so hard she could not ignore it. The girl sat on a rock much like the rock that had birthed her and reached into her own heart for the slice of stone. It slid out easily, a slippery beast. When she dropped it to the ground, the earth shuddered and groaned.

26

On the mountain, I read a fantasy novel about a society in which markings didn’t exist—no one could predict the future. The characters lived in a state of unknowing, waiting for everything to unfold before them without the benefit of fate or prediction.

I read that book straight through in one sitting. How bizarre, how breathtaking, to not know what would come. I’d placed a long-distance call to the humanitarian dispatch center that same day so I could talk to my mother about it. She could tell I was shaken. She kept saying, “It’s only a book, Celeste. It’s not real.” But I was unsettled. In that book, both girls and boys grew up blank. They were the same.

My mother, at that time, was working with a group of girls in another country who’d been denied education because their markings indicated they’d become homemakers. What’s the point in educating them, the teachers argued, if they won’t use their schooling? As a humanitarian, my mother fought for those girls. She brought them books, pencils, notebooks. She sounded out words with them. She taught them how to write and thus gave them the whole world of literature.

After we’d hung up, I spent a long time thinking of what my mother was doing, how she’d altered the future even slightly. Those girls would grow up to be homemakers just as their markings predicted, but they’d also be changed by their ability to read. They could, perhaps, pick up the same novel I’d just finished and imagine different worlds out there, different ways to shape the same life.

I tried to imagine a new world of my own making. I tried to imagine it back then, after speaking to my mother, and again that first night home, when I left Julia’s and walked back to my neighborhood alone. I envisioned a world where girls could go out at night, even as changelings, and where they could create their own futures without dishonorable transcripts holding them back. It was an outrageous dream, preposterous—but I lost myself in it anyway.

At home, my father was waiting for me in the living room. The lights were off except the reading lamp at the far end of the couch. He was cloaked in shadow.

“Are you ready to talk?” he asked.

I paused in the entrance to the living room. “Not yet. Not until Mom is here.”

My mother was rushing toward us on a train at that very moment. She was growing closer by the hour; I could feel