Cal woke from her stupor to pull out a bag of salted walnuts to share. Anthemone propped her tab on its stand with one hand and snacked with the other.

"You're you reading the prophet papers. Not usually your thing, innit?" she asked, teasing.

Only every other day, she thought, but shrugged instead of voicing the thought. "I like to keep up."

"I see, you see/we see everything; I see, you see/we see everything; but can you stop what you see from happening; that what I see/ you see everything."

She hates me secretly, I know it.

"You're gonna get that stupid song stuck in my head," Anthemone complained.

"You need more stupid songs in your head, but not this one. This one's perfect. You should give The Antediluvians a chance."

"I'm good."

"They sing about prophetesses...and seers and soothsayers and—"

"You just said the same thing three times." There were historic distinctions but those didn't mean much in the modern era.

"As many times as it takes to make you listen, I'll say it. I got an all-acc pass plus-one. You're my plus-one."

"What if I don't want to go?" They went just about everywhere together. This was at most a token protest on her end.

"You wouldn't break my heart and desert me in my hour of musical need. You're a better friend than I am."

"That was a sick and twisted reverse guilt trip. I hope you're proud of yourself."

Cal flashed her smile. "I am. I'd like to thank my mother and also my mum for teaching me to manipulate people so well whilst keeping my halo nice and shiny."

"Which one of us is the weirdo again?"

"You don't want me to answer that."

Anthemone refused to dignify that statement with a reply.

"Bah. If you're ignoring me, I'm eating. Bring you back something?"

"Potatoes."

"Done and done."

Let's leave the seer-non-seer question alone. Let's say I had a reliable vision. Why would I?

Anthemone accessed the file on her year-seven report on the prophet Cassandra.

The information came back to her as she reviewed it.

Precognitives, referred to henceforth as Seers, have the capacity for unlimited vision; however, most are more attuned to the preconceived happenings of places and people they know well. There's a chemical familiarity in what we know that our brains are attuned to.

It may not have been Efram Anthemone was attuned to, but the perfume shop where she had made a multitude of happy memories. It was both. I couldn't have loved the place without the man who made it feel like home. Just as she wouldn't love Troijan Street if it lacked her family. There wouldn't be any meaning in that place for her.

Cal set down her overloaded tray and threw a wobbly leg over her chair to straddle it.

"What's got you so invested over there, egg head?"

The usual: the impossible. Cal was one of a few people who would understand what Anthemone meant by that.

"I was just thinking...why didn't anybody see it coming?"

At Cal's blank look, she rushed to clarify. I switched topics on her again.

"The perfumery explosion. Sorry. I mean, it's in the shopping district. They have dedicated seers, and they stopped a bomb just the other day, they could have stopped this. Why didn't they?"

Cal thumped Anthemone's knuckles with a Spork as she reached to steal one of Cal's steak fries, shoving a single shell bowl of mash and gravy toward her. Anthemone pouted to no effect.

"It wasn't a bomb, ya numpty. That was a gas leak."

"Says who?"

"Sayeth the Prophet Pages you think I didn't see you eyeing." Cal flicked a nail at Anthemone's tab. "Finish your reading."

Anthemone scrolled back to the previous day's precog write-up. According to the Forward Times, a hired Belleton commercial district seer had predicted the explosion that might have rocked 13th street three hours before fire intervention services were summoned to the scene. The seer in question, Noor Al-Boulos, reported difficulty pinpointing the exact location of the impending disaster in her initial vision, which was later clarified by a second burst of foreknowledge.

Anthemone frowned. "That's weird, it doesn't say anything about a gas leak."

Cal popped what remained of a carrot stick in her mouth. "You sure? I just read that this morning." She flipped open the cover on her slate to toggle her own browser. "Yeah, it says it, just here." She spun the tablet towards Anthemone and left her to compare the two.

Gas leak explosion in Belleton commercial district circumvented by regional seer Haluk "James" Yilmaz and sayer Wallis Filipek. No casualties.

"That's not a prophet report, that's a news headline."

"Does the same job."

"Maybe," Anthemone granted, unwilling to argue the point just now. She scrolled between the two screens simultaneously, noting odd discrepancies in the daily entries. Anthemone received copies of the daily seer warnings that downloaded automatically to her private server. Since discovering her inchoate seer abilities in grade school, she'd been fascinated with understanding precognition. This had led to her reading as many scientific journals and published articles as she could get her hands on and comprehend, on the subject. When she'd exhausted school libraries and online translations of foreign-language international databases, she'd taken to reading extended reports of the daily telepathic bulletins everyone received when needed. She hadn't taken editing into a count. On the right, she had her own personal collection of psychic reports dating back months, and on the left, Cal's displayed the public archive.

Why are they this different? Most even name different seers.

Although it was possible for multiple seers to predict the same events, sayers only distributed psychic bulletins on the basis of one, and this was the Seer of Record, or so her mom had explained. A matter of temporality, she'd called it. In order to track any sudden changes in ensuing events, only the initial Seer of Record's predictions were noted in official documents.

"I know you're into this stuff, An, but I promise you it's not that interesting."

Cal had suffered her first bout of foresight at age four when she'd shoved Anthemone down a set of bleacher steps to stop her from taking a fatal baseball to the temple. Anthemone had broken her wrist and made a friend for life in the same minute. Cal was a mid-range seer whose visions tended to involve those closest to her, or those who would be. She'd known Anthemone was set to die before they'd even met. She didn't see much luxury in knowing the future, said it made her crabby. And it does.

Anthemone marked another entry where the recorded seer's name had been exchanged for another. The accounts were about the same save for the few minor details altered. A mention of a gas leak was added here, talk of a defective battpack appeared there. What was most puzzling to her was the gradual replacement of commercial and civilian seers with the Government Issue variety. Huh. I should ask mom about that. Her records still reflected the originals. And look at the dates of posting. Those aren't just post-edits, those are new entries on the same topics.

Cal swiped her slate from under Anthemone's hand.

"Hey!" She grasped ineffectually for the lost object only for Cal to hold it above her head like the looming Amazon she was.

"We have Physics. Geek out on your own time, spongehead."

Anthemone wasn't one to give up that easily. She climbed on the ivy-and-rose rod iron chair to reach for it a second time.

"You suck like a sucking thing. Give it." She swiped for it and Cal danced merrily out of arm's reach. Witch!

"Not a chance, munchkin. Let's go, we're late already and I don't want to miss another quiz for Balmain. Not even for you." Calgary tossed their garbage on her way out, leaving Anthemone to grab her bag and scamper out of the commissary after her leggier friend.

Anthemone pushed through the post-lunch crush to catch up. Cal was waiting, checking her band tempus app, tossing her titian 'fro and generally putting on a show of impatience. Anthemone propped her chin on her shoulder.

"Come on, admit it. You love me."

"Shut it, girly. You know I do." Cal dragged her toward the nearest stairwell.

"Nailed it."

...

Anthemone idly tapped the non-sensor bezel of her terminal as she waited for Instructor Balmain to say something worth noting for anyone with a less than genius-level IQ. Calgary was, naturally, tapping furiously at her display, bringing up graphical projections Anthemone didn't know were producible on school systems. If that girl's a hacker and I find out she's been holding out on me, we'll be having so many words.

Last night's dream remained on her mind. She hesitated to call it a vision since it had occurred during a sayer blast. She'd been known to hear warnings while sleeping and dream about them. This could just be another false alarm.

False alarm, harbinger, or omen. Something happened and somebody knows what. The registry doesn't change for less than a congressional vote. At least, it wasn't supposed to. They saw the explosion but not soon enough to stop it. Why not?

Flicking her gaze to the left and right of her, she saw that her fellow students were too busy pretending to pay attention to the Balmain's physics babble to pay attention to her. She discreetly accessed the seer archives to give them a second look, only to come up short when she encountered an error screen on the homepage.

CANNOT ACCESS. ACCESS TO THE NATIONAL SEER/SAYER ADVISORY NETWORK IS PROHIBITED. CANNOT ACCESS.

Anthemone in eleven years of Belleton schools had yet to meet a system which considered NSSAN a threat. Why bother blocking something that bothers no one and is a help to most?

She tried to reason the matter out. Because it's a distraction. We don't need it during classes and any info we need, the sayers will send. Simple.

The thing was, it had never been blocked before. Anthemone had whiled away many a dull class talk skimming for interesting predictions on the wire. And that was sadly no longer an option.

That's not normal.

It was like the world had chosen her sixteenth birthday to go all wonky.

Anthemone sniffed, indignant at how out of sorts her special day was turning out to be.

"Do you have a comment on, Ms. Manigault," Instructor Balmain paused her lecture to ask.

Anthemone gasped, casting around for words to fill the increasingly awkward silence. "Uh, no, no. I was just thinking."

"Very loudly, it turns out. Oiling the gears of the mind makes for a bit less squeaking."

"I understand."

"Good. Perhaps you can explain the concept to your classmates. Newton's Second Law could be considered a simplistic classic mechanical interpretation of Newton's Law of Gravitation. Explain what the two have in common and how they differ."

"Uh...I...um."

Valerie Balmain leaned in easy repose against the podium.

Calgary raised her hand. So did Jackie Wa, a fellow girls' LAXer and Seer-Sayerist flunkie. God, it must be bad, then.

"Nobody is going to answer this except for the esteemed Miss Manigault. There are no substitutions for class participation. Please, explain what Newton's Second Law and Law of Gravitation have in common and then what they do not have in common."

Anthemone's burning face began to sweat.

"I'd recommend consulting the plasma board for the relevant equations." Instructor Balmain propped her head on her hands, like she was willing to wait the rest of the day for Anthemone to answer her.

Anthemone scanned them quickly.

"They're both force-mass equations."

"Very good, Ms. Manigault. Now, what don't they share?"

"One's a difference equation, the Gravitation one, and that one uses G." She thought back frantically. "That's the gravitational constant. Newton's Second doesn't require that."

"Precisely. Well done." With that, Instructor Balmain carried on her lecture, having thoroughly made her point. 'Listen to me,' she had said not in so many words.

Anthemone heard her loud and clear.