"Mama?" Anthemone called out.

"Hmm?" Her mother was a busy woman, baking away at her in the kitchen between emergency calls patched through to her home office, but when her girls shouted, she answered.

"You ever wonder if something's wrong with me?" Anthemone was average height with average abilities and an above average academic record. She wasn't special at all.

Cherise Blessed planted her hands on her wide hips and narrowed her almost-black eyes. Anthemone had her eyes and none of the rest of her beauty. None of her psychic ability either.

"Anthemone Manigault, I brought you into this world after building you day by day. Not only is there nothing wrong with you, baby; you're perfect."

But she wasn't. Anybody could see that in the silence emanating from her overactive mind. She couldn't project words, images, sound--nothing. She was silence in a loud room, all the most conspicuous for the blank spot she represented in the static.

"I don't have visions like you and daddy. Not like the twins." Her baby sisters were no kind of ordinary. They didn't know the meaning of the word, though in their defense they couldn't spell it or pronounce it anyway.

Cherise wiped her hands on her apron, sloughing off the worst of the tacky bread dough. Her mama was always baking, taking the horror of the world into body to mete out love instead. "You never needed visions to be special, An. I knew that the day you were born."

"I don't feel special," she choked out. She was going to be sixteen, the day when it was decided who she was going to be, what kind of person everyone would know she was. Cherise Blessed and Orion Manigault's powerless firstborn child. They must be so embarrassed of me.

"You don't have to feel it to be it." Anthemone accepted her mother's hug with all the desperation she was trying to bury in her gut, churning with the little food she'd been able to stomach today. Cherise was usually right, she had the gift of moderate foresight to guide her. The minutes and hours ahead played like movies in her mind's eyes, shifting with the blur and click of freewill and fate.

But this time, Anthemone wasn't so sure.

"Maybe...," she muttered, hiding her face in mom's shoulder. She felt like a kid, totally out of sorts, scared and lost.

Their world was populated by four sorts of people: precognitive psychics called seers, projective telepaths  called sayers, those people with neither ability known as Regulars, and those impervious to those abilities known nulls.  As far as Anthemone knew, she was a weak seer verging on a Regular. Unlike her telepathic mother and highly telepathic baby sisters, Anthemone was a girl walking through life blindfolded and gagged.

She was ordinary. That was the last thing she'd ever wanted to be.

*

The ensuing day passed in a haze until Anthemone's journey home from school was disrupted by an emergency psychic broadcast. She wrenched her bike to a stop on the corner of 13th and Martindale to listen to the voice inside her head:

"There will be an explosion on 13th Street in two minutes. Everyone in close proximity will die. Avoid 13th Street."

Everyone in a one-mile radius paused, heads tilted in classic listening pose, until the telepathic bulletin concluded, and then changed course accordingly. The ground vehicles in the turning lane switched on their hazard lights as their operators engaged their onboard navigators. Pedestrians jockeyed for position at the crosswalk to take the long way to 14th Street. No one missed a step in carrying on their commute.

Sirens wailed overhead as emergency crews swooped in on lighter than air 'copters to stop the deadly blast before it could begin.

Humming distractedly at the inconvenience, Anthemone followed the rerouted foot traffic and headed for home.

Another disaster averted. It must be Monday.

Anthemone's progress was slowed by the groaning crush of commuters mumbling into comms about delayed appointments. She wound carefully around the grasping couples and giggling triads crowded over the data ports in front of every other mile-high storefront. Some Gossip Seer must have predicted another celebrity divorce. She didn't know why anybody bothered promising fealty to only one when they couldn't be bothered to mean it. And when they can be caught before they've even acted.

Display windows passed faster on either of side of her as the crowd dispersed near the corner of 17th and Bissell. The dueling smells of Eau du Pur Perfume Emporium and Hanover Bakery lulled her to a stop between the two shops on Huron Bouldevard. She parked her bike on a grounded electralock rack to the left of the antiquers' place, entering her thumbprint on a keypad to register ownership.

Where to first? Anthemone snapped her fingers absently. There's always a right choice. As she took a step toward Eau du Pur, she was struck square in the teeth with a jarring pain and a sudden vision of the antique oak door swinging toward her face.

No!

Anthemone leapt back, all but colliding with a quad of Regulars she recognized from Keyworth-Day School. Shit! Why didn't I see them coming? Then again, it was rare Anthemone saw anything more useful than an untied shoe lace three seconds before she tripped. The only insight she had with her minimal ability was seconds of foresight. Like a feeling of deja vu that was basically useless.

Squeaking in mild upset and not a little mortification, Anthemone offered her apologies to her classmates and darted into the Hanover bakeshop past a harried mother dragging two whining boys out into the afternoon. The sight triggered an overexposed reel to spin in her mind. Step starting, color leaching into the ether, burning away. A ground vehicle in its death throes, coughing its final breath on this very street.

In a quick spin, Anthemone shouted after her, "Call Travel Aide. Your engine's fried."

Thirteen seconds. Her precognition was good for thirteen seconds, and that had felt like stretching her mind to its breaking point. She was barely psychic. It was embarrassing.

The woman sighed and nodded her thanks, continuing to herd her sons out onto the street. Anthemone hopped onto the modified grav stool the woman had just vacated—she could tell by the faint tinge of harried affection clouding the air. Just like home.

"Spice cake and white choc—hot, please," she directed at the apron-clad attendant manning the cash con. No sooner had the words left her mouth than a tray containing her order careened down the granite bar from the side kitchen on a conveyor belt.

"Gotta love those five-minute precogs, am I right?" He spun her tray so that it was cake first and added a metallic blue fork and napkin.

"Gotta love 'em," she chirped back and dug right in. Sugar was her lifeblood for all that she loved the other areas of the food diamond. You say pyramid, I say aim higher.

Anthemone needed a rush of pure nirvana today more than usual.

My sisters are twins, tandems. That meant their telepathy and precognition worked together to make them more powerful. Five and six, and they're better than I was at that age. Sayers were grouped by how many minds they could communicate with at once whereas seers were categorized by how far in advance they could foresee. A five-person radius with a six-minute precognitive index was shockingly good for toddlers and they might get better with time. Anthemone hadn't.

Not them. I have a good feeling about them. Her sisters were bound for greatness from birth. She knew it like she knew her own name.

She was already kicking the counter as her brain shot pain up from the tips of her suede boots up her legs in a belated reminder that foot versus rock was as one-sided a fight as they came. One second this time. Maybe half. The enhanced intuition that served her on the Lacrosse field deserted her once she'd shed her uniform.

Anthemone startled when a spindly ginger clapped in her face.

She shook her head and the vision girl vanished, only to reappear in the form of her best friend and favorite person in the universe, and best of all her real reason for ducking into the shop instead of fleeing to a Regulars' Commune to weave hemp baskets for the rest of her life. Two seconds.

Calgary Winet, better known as Cal, giggled at the spurned look on Anthemone's face.

"You look like you got trampled by a rhinoceros and didn't see it coming."

Anthemone grumbled, "Just a reminder that you're not the funny one in this relationship."

Cal swiped a dish rag over the counter. "That's not what our other friends say." Cal's Scottish drawl made her teasing hard to take personally. Usually, anyway.

"You haven't asked them." Anthemone was reasonably sure of this.

Cal shrugged. "Suit yourself. Now, for realsies, what's with the face? You haven't looked this upset since..." She trailed off, her eyes going unfocused as the future reared forth in the distance to snatch her attention. "Oh."

Anthemone stuffed another forkful of ginger-y sweetness into her pouting maw. "You're already ahead of the curve. Enlighten me."

Cal waved her off. "Take care of that headache. We have a surprise biology quiz first thing tomorrow and it's getting harder by the minute."

Frowning, Anthemone polished off the last dollop of whipped vanilla frosting to make way for white hot chocolate heaven in a teacup. "I don't have a headache."

The taller girl shrugged and bounded toward the other end of the shop to answer a request that hadn't been made yet. "You will."

Just like that, my appetite's lost. With a grunt, Anthemone paid for her snack via id band swipe and made her way swiftly home. If only the world inside were any less disappointing than the one she'd face tomorrow.

I'm about to be sixteen and the best I can do is provide roadside assistance to strangers. Some seer I've turned out to be. Sorry, mom; sorry, dad. Guess I'm just a jumped-up Regular after all.

As the scent of baked desserts and lavender fragrance dispersed and gave way to the dizzying reek of cut synthetic grass, Anthemone found even the memory of her favorite things couldn't lift her leaden spirits. They were weightier than stones.