On the teeming road to the Belle Harbor side of Belleton where Keyworth-Day stood in its red brick and double-paned glass glory, she became convinced. I want to be a seer so bad I'm making it all up. I didn't dream Hanover because I couldn't have, it wasn't there.

The cornies will be giving me the guessing eye for months over that. Just what I wanted for the big day.

If Anthemone's spirits flagged as she parked and locked her bike at the covered trans-port beside the school, there wasn't anybody but herself to blame. Eye on the prize, Manigault.

Padukone's Progressive Sight Blindness is a disease afflicting seers of 48+ hour precognitive range who find their powers progressively blunted in clarity and eventually range. Has been linked to the suspected null capabilities of certain members of the population who are neither subject to the influence of Sayers nor visible in the purview of Seers.

Anthemone had memorized the e-presentations on telepathic and precognitive neurological conditions from her lecture notes. Intuition don't fail me now. Suffice it to say, her head was a mess of mixed images, and her stomach to the brim full of disgruntled butterflies.

Her band id vibrated against her pulse point.

A message?

She tapped the molded titanium surface and its fade from innocuous brushed metal to a translucent glass screen.

Food?

Coming now. The greenie?

The best chow in the prison system. Skip the line, I got yours.

Anthemone swiped the band back to its default display qnd made for the towering glass and steel Victorian greenhouse that served as commissary for the Keyworth-Day School. The panes on every entry door were made up of repurposed stained-glass windows fashioned into the blue and ivory sigil of the school. The rest were a bevy of reflective mirrors shining the sunlight into sleepy eyes and likely blinding some poor idiot who'd had the audacity to ignore the flight restrictions in the school's airspace. The beauty of the thing was such that the regional government had favored authorizing a no-fly zone over altering the glowing, hazardous face of the place where the students broke bread together.

It casts a spell over just about anyone. Anthemone would be lying if she tried to say she was immune to its influence.

She passed through the front doors, letting the muted glow of sunlight seeping in from the domed roof toward the back allay her insistent worries.

Singh's Psycho-Motor Disassociation (SPMD) is a condition resulting from excessive deleterious sensory stimulation as a result of excessive sayerstic compulsion. There is also limited evidence that precognitive blocking may be linked to Singh's. Those suffering from SPMD are prone to blinding headache, blurry primary vision, distorted precognitive or extrasensory perception, erratic behavior (potentially violent), eventually leading many to lapse into a persistent vegetative state of varying degrees of severity. The prevalence of SPMD was 2% in 2017 but grew to 20% during the years of the Precognitive Conflicts, only to decrease to 7% once the conflict had concluded. Contrary to popular belief, studies have yet to reveal a significant association between government and insurgent war efforts and SPMD prevalence among the populations under study.

Anthemone rubbed her temple. She was somewhat certain her numbers were off, but she knew the numbers with two and seven in them were vital ones that Tanaka was sure to enquire about. Their instructor had trained as a historian well before he had turned his love of biological mechanisms to human life. He called it 'the natural history of how we stay alive' and peppered his science lectures with a variety of relevant historical factoids to put disorders and normal conditions into their proper context.

Suze will mock me to the end of my life if I don't ace this exam—like she doesn't have an advantage over me here! Suzu Tanaka was the current secretary of the Junior Historians League that Anthemone was part of. She was also Instructor Tanaka's brilliant daughter who had a mind like a bear trap rather than the sieve Anthemone so often felt like she herself had been saddled with.

"Manigault, have a bite?" A short stocky olive-skinned boy from her math class extended a half-eaten French toast stick at her from one of the trellis-vine café tables he was occupying with friends.

Anthemone eyed Inigo Watkins in his boys' rugby team jersey. She liked Inigo well enough on his own, she supposed; it was his teammates watching with bated breath from behind him that made her edge an inch farther out of reach. Note to self: never take a drink from him, or anything else, for that matter.

In uniform he and his teammates were no more dangerous than their name implied. Keyworth-Day Boys Rugby. Out of uniform, everyone knew who they really were. They were the boys' handle of the K-D Seer-Sayerist Society, an organization that was perfectly harmless to people—so long as those people weren't Regulars. She had dreamt about joining in grade school and secondary school, buoyed by the talk of camaraderie and mutual understanding. She'd held tight to that dream right up until she understood what the S-S Society was truly about. Supremacists didn't tend to be fond of people who looked like her. The feeling's mutual.

Anthemone bristled at the smirk on midfielder Tillerman Head's face, try as she might not to show her ire.

"None for me, I'm all right. Enjoy yourselves. You deserve it after that win over Faeton Heath last weekend."

Those seemed to be the magic words as Inigo bowed gallantly and let her go past him. That didn't stop the boys from breaking out in hoots underscored by whispers Anthemone tried valiantly to pretend she didn't hear.

It's a wonder Regulars bother coming here with them around. They're always up to another new trick.

Anthemone hunched over her bag, drawing it in front of her as if it could shield her from judgments she had forgotten she would have to face. That the daughter of a sayer and a seer would come out a Regular wasn't entirely unheard of. Geneticists hadn't yet unlocked what specific factors influence the development of Sight or Speech, only the patterns under which they emerged. Less was understood about the evolutionary conceit behind skipped generations. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that Anthemone's children, should the idea of motherhood someday cease to mortify her, would be sayers and seers both.

After stopping to greet a couple of other classmates, Anthemone scooted to the green space of the greenhouse where she and Cal routinely wiled away the brief minutes of freedom before class began.

She found Cal straddling a pebble bench in the greenhouse commons. She had a canister of breakfast drink in each hand and a sugared cake hanging from her teeth. Anthemone stopped to watch her best friend balance her burdens. Cal eventually resorted to tossing her head back like a performing sea lion to keep from chomping her bite to ruins and dropping the rest.

"Why didn't you tell me you joined the circus as a show seal? I'd have come to see you clap."

Anthemone was suddenly left to grapple with drinks and a second cake from nowhere, not to mention miscellaneous covered fruit containers, whilst Cal huffed.

"Whoa, what's all this? Where were you even hiding this?"

"Pocket universe storage technology. You wouldn't understand."

"We can't all be physics wigs, Calgary."

There were very few things Calgary Winet couldn't be good at if she were in the mood to try her hand at it. Thank god she's not interested in LAX or I'd have never made the team.

Cal took a ginormous bite of her jam-soaked scone, and proceeded as usual. "You're getting all formal on me, what's that about it?"

"Nothing. What's the fruit?" She unburdened herself of three things to help herself to one. "Dragon fruit. Calling it."

"You can't call the shared booty, birthday girl—and don't you think I've forgotten about that."

Anthemone feigned obliviousness. "We're sharing booty? Cal, honey, I thought you'd never ask."

"Haha, bighead. Eat your dragon fruit."

The two of them ummm'd and aww'd over the variety of fruits Cal had lifted from the produce section of the self-checkout section of the commissary. They had a shared habit of failing to eat before big exams and neither were excited at the prospect of a gluco-crash mid-test.

Anthemone set her spine against the line of Cal's side using her as a backrest. She's buff enough, Anthemone thought though not unkindly. Growing into her looks or not, if her best friend had ever had an awkward phase nobody could spot it.

"Enough dripping on me. Where've you been?"

Anthemone sucked her juice-covered fingers to keep from talking.

"An?" She made a pinched face and dug around her bag for her sanitizer. Anthemone used it when prompted. Cal was nobody's clean freak mother; it was spit she hated with a passion Anthemone usually reserved for bad referee calls during LAX matches.

"I went to the perfume shop."

Cal broke the hermetic seal on her almond milk substitute and downed a hearty gulp. She had a mustache when she lowered the canister that just about blended into her skin.

"The psychic blast woke me up before sunrise this morning. You?"

"Earlier."

"Did you get a double-barrel of 'em? I only heard the one."

"Maybe my dad was amplifying?" Her father tended to broadcast errant images when he was especially exhausted and his control was low. Could that be it? Just a little telepathic backwash...gross.

"Poor dat. I couldn't stand more than one of those blasts a day. I usually can't settle down after one; two throws me completely. Too much feedback."

The connection between seers and sayers had become enshrined in global culture following the Precog Conflicts. The ten-year, inter-continental war had come close to wiping out both sub-populations twenty years ago, and each subset was partially to blame for the attempted destruction of the other. Regulars of every conceivable political affiliation had conscripted seers and sayers to do their bidding to turn the tide in their favor. Due to the nature of Sight and Speech, neither side had maintained the upper hand for long. Sight compelled Speech and Speech Sight. That was the crux of the matter, and that was the biological imperative that political aspiration could not overcome. Thousands upon thousands of seers and sayers died in the time it took anybody to realize as much. What remained was a partnership so prized, the protection of its sanctity became a tenet of the new world order. Seers saw and sayers said—and so it was.

"Did you hear anything about Efram? The blast said it would be deadly. I wager Fire P&I didn't get there in time."

Anthemone opted not to get into her suspicions about their friend yet. "Huron Boulevard's a disaster area. Anti-grav machines are all that's keeping the store intact, and I guess the stores on either side. You saw about Hanover's?"

Cal pulled a face. "Did I ever? That's me out of a job for a year probably. So much for Christmas money. The boss doesn't know if he even wants to rebuild. He's all nerved up like it's 2009 again."

Declan Hanover had been a peacekeeper for the United Nations, whose sole duty had been to safeguard civilians and humanitarian aid workers stationed in hot zones. It was a rare occurrence to hear him tell of his exploits in Prague or Crimea, Panama, or Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, Anthemone and a great many others would pull up a chair to listen for as long as he could find the words. The first symptom of conflict, he would say, was strife. But the first sign of war, that was easier and by far the more frightening. The first sign of war was people disappearing without a trace and nobody caring enough to question why.

That's what they count on.

"It was sort of funny when the blast hit." Anthemone wavered on her double-meaning. "I mean, it was almost like I felt it, sleeping and all." She popped a cube of dragon fruit flesh into her mouth to savor the taste. Better than bile but anything would be. "I had to see what happened."

"Be glad you didn't feel it. Visions like that'll sear the lashes off your eyelids."

Anthemone tugged on her tingling ear. How it burned in the recycled air.

"Better something than nothing."

"Stop it, Anthemone. You try too hard to be something you're not. You know I hate it when you do it."

Anthemone shoved her temperamental self in a hole. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You don't have to be a seer to love somebody, Anthemone. You think you do and you don't. Look at me and you. You don't have to be all hocus-pocus. It's okay with me."

Anthemone figured that was meant as a palliative. Cal hadn't cared much one way or another who was Regular and who wasn't. She had Sight enough for an insular social butterfly.

"Maybe I wanna be all hocus-pocus."

"And I want eyebrows like yours without having to pluck. We can't all get our way."

That didn't stop Anthemone from sometimes feeling like the unnecessary sidekick in her best friend's award-winning life story.

"Thanks."

Once she'd pilfered a squirt of Cal's cleanser, Anthemone pulled out her pad, intent on doing some last minute studying for biology. Her earlier study sessions seemed a lifetime away. Carré's Aphasia. What do I know? She was drawing a blank but for the leering grin of the person she would bet her life had been Efram's lab the night before. What doesn't make sense is why Efram himself wasn't there to stop him. Her friend's penchant for mischief was eclipsed only by his preoccupation with safety. The perfumery was his life.

"You need to keep up with the clock. The test is in five minutes and you've been reviewing module four for ten minutes."

"I'm just checking."

"Stop checking. You either know it or you don't."

Anthemone grunted, burying her nose in module five now. Here is what matters. Wherever he is, Efram will still be there after my exam.

"Quiz time," Cal announced, diverting Anthemone from her introspection. "Kopernich's synesthesia?"

"Kopernich's synesthesia is considered to be a byproduct of the antiquated 'precognition by signs'. It is a condition in which a sayer—as designated by the International Sayer-Seer Diagnostic Guidelines—receives precognitive signals on the basis of some primary sensory experience, such as taste or touch."

"Is sight considered a catalyst for Kopernique synesthetes?"

"Kopernique synesthesia excludes sight due to the complex nature of the relationship between primary sight and foresight. Why is sense of smell excluded?"

"Sense of smell is currently excluded from the diagnostic criteria of Kopernich's synesthesia as neurological research has yet to account for how olfactory memory impacts incipient precognition."

"Correctamundo."

The first-period chime sounded throughout the commissary. Those desperately studying for Tanaka's exam were distinguishable by the anguished grimaces marring their faces; that and the mad dashes they made for the nearest exits.

Some birthday.

"I feel like I should be offering up some kind of motivational speech to get us by."

Anthemone hoisted Calgary up off the bench and intoned as gravely as she dared, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends."

Cal bumped their shoulders together.

"Not what I would have picked, but it'll do." Cal hooked her arm over Anthemone's shoulder. "Lay on, MacDuff."

Their fair-weather sanguinity lasted all of five seconds before they yielded to nerves and sprinted pell-mell out of the commissary.

Anthemone lost five seconds twisting back to gather her slate and book bag. Calgary undoubtedly earned a detention for the litter that had spilled off her lap. There wasn't time to be a concerned citizen when every precious second counted.

"You're always dragging...me...around," Anthemone panted, her lungs paining her something awful after her sprinter's stamina had been exhausted.

"That's my job." As though sensing Anthemone's flagging energies, she grabbed for her arm. "Bloody hell, run faster."

"We can't all be long...distance...running champions." That actually hurts. I need an oxygen immersion. Where's my bubble?

"I told you to try out for the team."

"Life's humiliating enough. Don't help."

The sea of students didn't part for them until they pushed, so push they did, hopping down the steps in a staggered pair, trotting down the zig-zag stone path cutting through the blue-green transplanted grass, and bolting for the scarlet doors to the Keyworth-Day School.

The two flights of stairs they regularly traversed in minutes seemed to take days with the congestion of other students lingering.

Anthemone got a bruise on her arm from being shoved into one of the bannisters by another Tanaka victim. She caught Cal's arm when another hasty classmate about knocked her down a flight of stairs.

They arrived to the classroom, each a perspiring, hyperventilating horror show in nice clothes.

Instructor Tanaka stepped from behind his frosted glass podium to greet them.

"You're just in time."