Zachary Rawlins: The Anathema

“If you say so, though I still think using Katya is a bad idea. She’s unpredictable at best. However, that’s your call. So, you and I are going to hang back and watch things develop?”

“No, silly boy,” Anastasia scolded, sitting back down behind her desk, which always made her look younger than she actually was. “We do what we do best. We make friends.”

The girl on the other side of the table from Emily was built like a bird, with sharp features and wrist bones like sticks on her neatly folded arms. Her skin was an even, lustrous brown, her hair cut short and fashionable, almost boyish, and she had small, round spectacles that hung precariously from her nose. Chandi Tuesday was often mistaken, Emily knew, for an Indian, but she was in fact from Abu Dhabi.

“Emily Muir,” she said in a clipped British accent, with a smile that seemed as perfunctory as a fold at the end of a toilet paper roll in a gas station bathroom. “ So good of you to come.”

Emily was too flustered to do anything but nod, smile, and take the proffered chair. Chandi kept her waiting while she made a show of reviewing the files in front of her. Emily knew that she must have read them already — in fact, Chandi Tuesday had such a reputation for exhaustive preparation that she would not have been surprised if the girl already knew them by heart.

Emily tried looking for her halo, and saw nothing, as she had expected. Chandi Tuesday was an F-Class Operator, and rumors hinted at the potential for M-Class in her future. Emily didn’t need to peak at the contents of the reports on the desk to know what they contained.

“I have reviewed your reports in regards to Alexander Warner,” Chandi said, still looking down at the papers in front of her. “And I have a few questions I’d like to ask you. That is,” she asked, glancing up briefly, “if you aren’t too busy?”

“No, not at all,” Emily said dishonestly, running one hand through her still damp hair. She had been showering when the summons had arrived, and she hadn’t taken the time to dry off before running over here. She would regret it later, of course. Her hair, if not dried properly, became insufferably poufy. “What would you like to know, Miss Tuesday?”

“The two of you seem to spend considerable time together,” Chandi said, running one finger along a line of text. “But, it is not entirely clear to me whether or not the two of you have developed a romantic relationship. Tell me, what progress have you made?”

“Well,” Emily said, fluttering her hands in front of her, “as you said, we spend a lot of time together…”

“Then you aren’t dating Alexander Warner?”

Emily hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head reluctantly.

“Not exactly. But we have been seeing a lot of each other! I have been tutoring him for homeroom, and we eat breakfast and dinner together almost every day. We’ve been on dates, and I’ve had him over to my house.”

Chandi Tuesday raised one pencil-thin eyebrow, so that it peaked out from behind her ridiculously mousey glasses.

“Then your relationship is a physical one, yes?”

“Not yet,” Emily admitted, biting her lip. “It’s not exactly easy. Alex is very shy, and he’s never had a girlfriend before, so he isn’t exactly sure what to do, and…”

Chandi raised up a hand to interrupt her.

“You are telling me that it is difficult to convince this boy to sleep with you?”

“Y-yes,” Emily said, her cheeks burning. “I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true. I have been trying.”

“Really?” Chandi said, looking skeptical. “I don’t mean to argue, but it seems a bit odd that a girl of your charms would have so many difficulties with such an average boy. In my experience, most girls have to try fairly hard to avoid male attention.”

Emily stared at the ground in front of her, blushing and feeling ugly, useless, and very, very angry with the condescending, sanctimonious girl in front of her. She wondered bitterly if Chandi’s marching orders had ever included having sex with someone she had only just met.

“As much as I hate to suggest such a thing,” Chandi said, not sounding as if she hated it very much. “Perhaps it is simply an issue of personal attraction? Is it possible that you are simply not Alexander Warner’s type?”

Emily blushed ever more furiously, and wished desperately for a hole she could crawl in, a meteor to strike the building, a fire to break out — anything to get her away from the office and this horrible conversation. She could see her chances of staying at the Academy dwindling in front of her while they talked, and her mind scrambled desperately for defenses, excuses, rationales that would keep her here.

“I am certain that he does,” Emily insisted, feeling ashamed. “But things with Alex are complicated.”

“Be that as it may,” Chandi said, frowning. “We are here to deal with complicated situations, yes? Now, could you tell me who this ‘Eerie’ person is, and why her last name doesn’t appear in any of my files?”

Emily’s heart had already sunk, but at the mention of that girl’s name, her heart seemed to fall right through the floorboards, and she was not sure where it stopped. Emily wondered who had ratted her out, and if there was any way at all for her to stay at the Academy, after this. The thought of returning to her home a failure was poisonous, but once the idea entered her mind, it spread like wildfire, sapping her of her poise and confidence.

“Eerie is a changeling. I don’t know if she even has a last name,” Emily said, more bitterly than she intended. “She is our classmate, and also friends with Alex.”

“I see,” Chandi noted primly. “Then, perhaps the changeling is the ‘complication’ in the situation? Warner appears to spend a fair amount of time with her, not to mention that strange business in San Francisco.”

Emily fought the urge to hang her head, blinked back the stinging tears from her eyes. She was not, she decided, giving Tuesday the satisfaction of breaking down. If she were going to cry, it would not be here.

“Eerie is interested in Alex, I suppose. She’s certainly managed to get my way several times. However, she’s a Changeling — she is not, well… sane or normal. She’s not even human! I can’t imagine that Alex would fall for her.”

“She is your rival for Alexander Warner’s attentions, then?”

“You don’t understand, Miss Tuesday…”

Again, Chandi interrupted her with that annoyingly confident and solicitous smile.

“Let me tell you what I do understand, Miss Muir, and you can correct me when I am mistaken.”

She flipped quickly through the pages in front of her, settling her finger on a specific line, but Emily did not believe for a minute that she had actually had to look it up. The files were a prop, nothing more. After all, Chandi Tuesday was a precognitive.

Emily didn’t know much about how precognition worked on a practical level. Like everyone else at the Academy, she had studied probability grids and matrices in homeroom, and she understood the basic theory. As Vivik had explained patiently to her one cram session, precognition wasn’t so different from empathy, in that every precognitive had a different way to perceiving possible futures. Some precognitives experienced visions like ancient Catholic saints, often in the throes of epileptic seizures. Others had prophetic dreams, and woke screaming and crying over potential tragedies, still years away and uncertain. Perhaps the most coveted were precognitives who used a codified system of visualization techniques, perceiving potential futures as a tangle of threads, a pattern of multicolored lights, or even as wholly fictional roadmaps. With one important consistency — precognitives did not actually see the future, but rather various possible futures.