Brianna Acero and the Second One's Return

39. My crazy theory may not be so crazy

Kalen and I sit on the small leather sofa in the little library that is situated right next to the common rooms. It's only got a couple of sofas and a table, surrounded by tall bookshelves, groaning under the weight of thousands of books. But not many of the trainees are into reading, so it usually isn't very busy. In front of us, a fire crackles in a fireplace large enough for a person to stand in. Warmth reaches out and wraps us in its comfortable embrace. Kalen and I are alone, as we flip through the pages of my three times great grandfather's journal.

By what I've read so far, it sounds like he got his Gift when he was twenty-two, his mother having died three years prior.

"It started with the headaches," he wrote, "and then suddenly those headaches turned into hallucinations, except the hallucinations came true. Imagine my surprise when, enjoying my morning walk, an image pops into my head, showing me that my sister was going to get married and, two days later, she tells the whole family that she is engaged".

According to this, he could see the future while he was awake. That's interesting, seeing as up until now I always passed out right before I saw anything. I wonder if once I have more control over my Gift I will be able to stay conscious during my visions. For now, I just have to hope that someone is around when I go into 'oracle mode', to make sure that I don't take a nasty spill.

Kalen gets up from the sofa, stretching his muscles as he goes.

"Stay there," he says, disappearing in between the rows of shelves.

As if I would go anywhere. I try not to notice how the loss of his constant presence makes my heart twist uncomfortably, focusing instead on the task at hand.

My eyes gloss over the same paragraph several times in an attempt to decipher my grandad's sloppy handwriting, now faded to a pale gray. I find a chapter where he talks about how he started to expect when his visions would occur, and how he could force them.

"If I want to think of a certain year, it's hard. There are so many changes that might happen between now and then that the future may never be what I see in my head. But if I focus on a certain individual, their paths are more limited. There are only so many possible outcomes, and so I started focusing on people."

That's what I had been trying to do so far, but nothing worked. Daniel has helped me with my inner voice, so that I no longer have to ignore my attacker, because that plan would probably backfire eventually. Now, I could focus on their movements and still have someone, my future self probably, in my head telling me what was going to happen. But when I try to focus on our rogue Elite, nothing happens. It could be because I don't know who he is, but the same thing happens when I try to find Simon Says, and I know him all too well.

"I usually use a picture, or something of value to the person. If I've never actually met the person in question, I think of things they might be doing. Like one of my clients, who asked me to locate her missing husband. I never met the man, but after she told me what he liked to do or where she thought he could be, I found him at a bar two towns over. I hated to tell her that there was another woman with him, and they seemed to be more than just acquaintances."

I smile down at the little journal. I learned a few chapters back that my great great great grandfather was a local fortune teller. Sometimes he told people what he really saw, other times, he told them what they wanted to hear. I particularly liked the story where a man came into his stall, raging on about how the end of the world was near, and great great great grandad just told him that on the supposed day of the end, he saw the man sitting in an underground bunker while the rest of the world went on above him.

The cushion I'm sitting on sinks a bit as Kalen returns to his spot next to me. He's holding a large book titled History of the Old and New World and is flipping through the pages with a purpose.