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

I tried to smile down at him, but it came out more like a frown; I could not control my expression. I felt everything inside of me was roiling, uncontainable. “There was always something different about you, Miles, ever since we were kids. You were beyond your years, beyond your gender, beyond yourself.”

“No.” Miles clapped Mapping the Future shut and looked up at me. “I was never the one who was different. It was you.”

“I refuse—” I began, but then I stopped. His death could not be refused, my body’s predictions could not be refused, our history and our future could not be refused. I knew this. Miles had known it already for years.

How unbelievable the future was, how vast. One moment I was gathering wild strawberries and the next I was allowing my brother to read my childhood markings. I was gazing with wonder at my newly changed body and I was riding a train into the mountains. I was holding a MISSING GIRL poster and I was being led into a dark basement. I was a girl and then I was a changeling. I was a sister and then I was not.

“Celeste.” He waved a hand in front of my face. “Where’d you go?”

I blinked. Miles was still sitting on the couch, still studying me. Still alive.

“Please don’t do that again,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Abandon me. It’s like you disappeared, even though you’re standing right there.” He balanced Mapping the Future in his hands, as if testing the weight of all the future, of every last possibility in the world.

The doorbell rang. We both glanced toward the entryway.

“It must be another girl for a reading,” I said. “You should go upstairs, just in case.”

We never knew when the Office of the Future might send someone else. We had to protect ourselves and our work. That meant my brother could never answer the door. He had to hide, which meant he had to leave me, again and again.

With some reluctance, he stood and headed upstairs. Once he was gone, I went to the front door and pulled it open to stare into the face of a girl so young and frightened she reminded me of myself.

*   *   *

I was forced to send the girl away that night. Accepting clients after hours could raise suspicion; the neighbors would notice if girls were coming and leaving after normal business hours, especially in the dark when changelings were not meant to be out.

Fortunately, this girl was local and could easily return another time. Sometimes, girls showed up late at night after traveling for days. It was too risky for us to host them, so we made a list of sympathizers who might help. Marie’s mother was at the top of the list. She’d hosted three girls so far, giving them a safe place to stay while they attended our classes. She also remained true to her word by sending Marie our way once she was back.

Marie had arrived on her own the first time. When I entered the parlor and saw her, I could only stop and stare. She was different. She had passed to adulthood and was no longer the girl I remembered but a young woman, her future unfamiliar to me. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked if I could touch the constellation of markings at her throat.

“If you’d like,” Marie had said.

I came closer, my fingertips grazing her neck. The pattern there foretold of a temperament that would remain steady, honest, and kind.

“I don’t need these markings to know who you are,” I told her. “Even if we weren’t friends it would be clear. Even if you were a stranger.”

“But we are friends.” She gently pulled away. “And we’ll never be strangers, Celeste.”

With time, Marie began bringing Louise with her, a slight girl who’d earned a full scholarship to study history. She and Marie had met the year before, during a university visit. Louise proved herself to be trustworthy, a calming presence for the most anxious girls, so she joined in on our studies. We were Miles’s pupils, a small circle of women he could trust. We had to study in the evening, after hours, sometimes breaking our own rule by asking one or two girls to stay behind so we could read them.

On a humid August night, we all gathered in the examination room. Two girls waited there for us: one from my Support and Action class, and another who took the Body and Mind class. One marked for abduction, one not.

Miles looked at the two girls with disappointment. “This isn’t a large enough sample size.”

“We have no way of knowing whether we’re being watched,” Julia told him. “Keeping even two girls late is enough of a risk.”

My brother was holding a copy of the new addendum, which he rolled into a tight tube. “The whole point of this is to train others to read. It’s going to take forever at this rate, and we’re running out of time. My birthday is six weeks away.” He turned to me when he said this. We shared the same birthday. We operated on the same clock, our bodies ticking in the same rhythms.

“Better slow than not at all,” Julia said.

“Then we need to widen our reach and teach others,” he countered. “As many as possible.”

At the time, Julia and I were Miles’s best students. Our mother, Marie, and Louise were also making progress. Angel, meanwhile, was exploring other roles in Julia’s business. Only days after Angel had passed out of her changeling period that summer, Chloe died, alone and in the middle of the night in the hospital. In the wake of Chloe’s death, Angel’s interest in interpretation waned, and she gravitated instead to the behind-the-scenes work. She made appointments, arranged our schedule, and kept our records in order in case we were audited. Julia told Miles not to push her, not to push any of us—that we each had a role to play.

“We’re wasting time by arguing.”