by Emma Savant
“That does not sound like the action of a friend,” the Oracle said.
I wished I could go back in time, just long enough to leave before this conversation started. Why was I asking the Oracle about this? She was a leader of the Glimmering world, not an advice columnist for socially awkward teenagers.
“Imogen’s not a bad person,” I said. “She’s just really selfish sometimes. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
Was I, though? She’d made out with a guy she knew I liked. Even for Imogen—reckless, boy-crazy Imogen—that was low. And then she hadn’t told me about it. My blood flashed hot.
“I don’t want to give up on our friendship over something like this,” I said. “But I can’t even think about her without wanting to scream.”
“Your restraint is admirable,” the Oracle said, “if not entirely warranted. Allow me to tell you a little about Imogen Dann.”
“You know her?” I said.
“I am the Oracle,” she said, and I wanted to kick myself. “I see every Glimmer in this city.”
I fell silent and waited.
“Imogen Dann has many secrets,” the Oracle said.
Her voice grew quiet and her rippling pale face was still and intense under the curtain of water.
“She cheated on her Proctor Exam, did you know?” She paused to let this sink in, then continued. “She believed she would not be accepted to Institut Glänzen with anything but exemplary scores, so she made sure she got them.”
She let out a big sigh, as if she’d been watching Imogen and had felt personally invested.
“It’s unfortunate. She would have been accepted on her own merits. As for your friend Lucas, she has had her eye on him for months. She invited him to her house the moment she heard he was unattached. You can see how things went from there. Her attempts at gaining his interest have been especially effective as she’s been glamouring him for some time now to see her as being particularly beautiful. Again, she did not need the help, but insecurity certainly breeds overachievement, doesn’t it?”
I’d hadn’t checked to see if she was glamouring him lately. I’d thought we were all friends. It had never occurred to me to wonder.
“You may try to brush aside her actions out of your friendship for her, but deep down you know: He was interested in you. It could have developed into something.” Her words faded to almost a whisper. “You were friends with this boy for many years. You know it could have been more.”
I rubbed my arm, uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t pin down.
“How do you know all that?” I said. Even for the Oracle, that was a lot of detail.
She laughed, a low sound that made the base of my spine prickle.
“It is my business to know,” she said, which didn’t answer the question.
She gazed out at me from behind the waterfall, still and snow-pale.
“You will not want to take my advice,” she said. “But allow me to give it to you anyway. Your supposed friend has betrayed you. Often, the only way to convey the full unacceptability of a behavior is to return it in kind. I have told you secrets about Imogen Dann. You may use them as you wish.”
That couldn’t be right. But she continued, her words sharp and strong. “Only then can there be balance in your world,” she said.
Balance was everything. Balance was the thing the Oracle preserved above all others. Imogen had turned on me; now, I had to turn on her if our relationship—our lives—were to keep the status quo.
Amani wouldn’t have given me that advice, I thought.
But then, how did I know what advice she would have given? Every time we’d met, we’d talked about her job or the person who had it out for the Humdrums. It wasn’t like we were friends.
Maybe Amani would be telling me the same thing right now.
Imogen had done something selfish and cruel, but wouldn’t returning the favor make me just as bad? A handful of worn-out truisms about “taking the high road” and “turning the other cheek” flitted through my head, until they were interrupted by the Oracle.
“I look forward to your choices with interest,” she said. “You interest me, Olivia Feye.”
I frowned. That couldn’t be right, either.
“Why?” I said.
“You have a perspective not shared by others in our world,” she said. “You enjoy the Humdrums. You are not blinded by your allegiance to the Glimmering world; on the contrary, I believe you could learn to see clearly the advantages and threats the Hums pose to our community. The role of the Humdrums in our city has been called into question of late.”
“I know,” I said. The Oracle’s faint rippling eyebrows knitted together. “I’ve heard things have been going on with the… the Humdrums,” I said.
I bit my lip. How much could I tell her?
“I’ve heard rumors that some people don’t want them in the city,” I said.
She watched me closely, shadowed eyes dark but unmoving.
“Indeed,” she said after a moment. “You understand more than I anticipated. As I said, I watch you with interest.”
And with that unnerving pronouncement, her face rippled away out of sight. The Fountain went back to being a fountain, full of nothing but cold rushing water and the faint reflections of street lamps.
Chapter Nine
The next afternoon, I skipped final period. I had to think, and I couldn’t do it in the crushing halls of a high school where I risked running into my former best friend at any moment.
The bell rang when I pushed open the door to Pumpkin Spice. But that was the only noise. The café was quiet. The only person here was a college-aged wizard who worked weekdays when Elle was at school. He sat behind the counter with a textbook propped on his lap.
He jumped up as soon as I reached the counter. “What can I get for you?” he said.
I glanced at the menu behind him, written in glittering gold on a background the dark green of a pumpkin stem.
“Chili cocoa,” I said.
“You got it.”
I took my drink to a small table and waited. A drizzly rain started outside.
I couldn’t get the Oracle out of my head. She knew something, that was for sure, and I didn’t know if she’d learned it from Queen Amani or on her own.
But she wouldn’t need to learn it from Queen Amani. If she was watching our lives down to the details of Imogen’s Proctor Exam and my opinions on Humdrums, nothing could be hidden from her.
If that was the case, then she already knew who was attacking the Humdrums, and she wasn’t telling.
Any other day, I might have shivered and worried about the fate of the Humdrum world. But today, Imogen burned through my thoughts, turning everything else to smoke.
Tendrils of rage snaked down the veins in my arms and made my hands hot enough that my cocoa gave off a curl of steam every time I touched it. If the Oracle was right, and Imogen had cheated, I knew all I needed to know.
Anyone who could cheat on an exam and their best friend all in the same month wasn’t worth my time.
Stop thinking about her, Feye, I mentally ordered. Move on with your life.
How could she be so stupid? It wasn’t like cheating on a Proctor Exam wouldn’t have consequences. If word got out, she’d never make it into any school, let alone Institut Glänzen. She’d probably lose her job. And Imogen would care about something like that.
But maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she just got off on the thrill of lying to people.
I pulled out my phone to text her. My fingers were like hammers on the screen.
Olivia: What is wrong with you?!
I hit Send. Immediately, a sense of regret flooded me. I was stupid for even wasting my time.
My cocoa steamed.
The bell rang and I looked up to see Elle. She shook her head, tossing damp blond hair out of her eyes, and called across to the guy behind the counter, “Hey, toss a tray of scones in the oven to warm, would you?”
Then she saw me. She slid into th
e chair opposite me without waiting for an invitation.
“What’s wrong with you?”
That was Elle, always cutting straight to the chase.
I couldn’t get the words to form. Too many of them clamored around my mind and in my mouth. Stringing them into sentences was impossible.
“What?” Elle said. The spot between her eyebrows creased. “Hey, are you okay?”
No, I was not okay. Nothing about anything was okay.
“Hello?”
“Imogen and Lucas are dating,” I blurted.
And then the back of my throat started closing up and a hot prickling started behind my eyes. I stared at my cup. I was not going to burst into tears in the middle of this café like a child.
“Shit,” Elle said.
It was the right answer. I laughed. The prickling faded.
“Are you serious?” she said. Her eyes were like two cups of steaming coffee, round and brown and vaguely caffeinated. “When? What happened?”
I opened my mouth to tell her, but she glanced up at the pumpkin-shaped clock on the wall behind the counter and interrupted.
“Listen, it’s almost time for the after-school rush,” she said. “Come talk to me while I work. Logan’s getting off in five minutes and Cortney’s going to be late today.”
“You want some help?” I said. “Unless I’d be in the way.”
“I would freaking love some help,” she said. “Cortney’s at the eye doctor and who knows how long that’s going to take.”
I stood and followed Elle to the counter.
“She getting glasses?”
“Who knows,” Elle said. “She says her vision gets blurry when she reads, but I’m not totally sure she can read.”
Despite her tone, I felt the begrudging affection underneath. Cortney and Elle were stepsisters, and Elle had come to that union kicking and screaming. But they’d gotten used to each other.
Elle led me behind the counter and handed me an orange apron to tie around my waist. She pointed around at the bottles and dark green canisters that littered the counter.
“Sorry, I swear we’ll talk through this in a minute. Right now, listen up. Italian syrups, seltzer, carbonated Fountain of Youth water, cream, fairy dust,” she said, her finger jabbing with each new item. “The mini fridge under the counter has apple spritzers from a Tree of Life. Nonalcoholic, obviously, but I have a policy that we only sell one of those per customer per day. Two in a row would probably land you in the hospital.”
The number of bottles overwhelmed me, and I was glad. Being overwhelmed by anything that wasn’t Imogen or the Humdrum attacker was a relief.
Elle pulled a crystal bottle with a flame-colored stopper out from behind a stack of paper cups.
“Dragon tears,” she said. “I use them for keeping drinks hot, but careful or you’ll get burned.”
She directed me to a laminated card that listed recipes and instructions for Italian sodas, fairy dust sodas, and mocktails.
“You put dragon tears in fairy dust sodas?” I said.
“Gross, right?” she said. “That’s what I thought until I tried it.”
The bell on the door jingled as two girls came in with backpacks. I got their muffins out of the glass-fronted case while Elle whipped up their drinks. Once they were sitting at one of the tables, Elle leaned against the counter.
“So,” she said. “Imogen and Lucas.”
I explained the whole story as quickly as I could. I liked him, he seemed to like me, he got dumped, Imogen said to wait, and then—
“They were right there in the lobby, and he kissed her.”
Elle winced. “Ouch,” she said.
“Yeah, and then I asked her—”
I was interrupted by customers, who wanted mochas and blueberry sodas. I made the soda while Elle kept one eye on me.
“So I asked her—”
And then we were interrupted again, and it was another hour before I could finish the sentence. I couldn’t believe how crazy it felt behind the counter, or how cool Elle was in the middle of it. She whipped out drinks and joked with customers and calculated change in her head like there was nothing to it. Meanwhile, I kept reading the wrong lines on the recipe card and had to re-make someone’s drink twice because I couldn’t keep the fairy dust from clumping as soon as it hit the seltzer.
Finally, the place was full of contented Glimmers sipping beverages and nibbling on pastries.
Elle turned to me.
“Okay, so you asked her about it.”
“And she said he’d been telling her all about Aubrey and that talking to her ‘helped him.’”
The words alone made me want to gag. How cloying could she get?
“I’m sure her glamours didn’t hurt,” I muttered.
“She’d been glamouring him?”
I thought about pointing out that Elle wasn’t one to talk, seeing as how, once she’d learned about her Glimmering heritage, she’d spent the next several months manipulating everyone she knew with charms. Unlike Imogen, though, Elle had learned her lesson.
“Probably for a while,” I said. “And then they hooked up.”
Elle’s eyes flashed.
“Like, how hooked up?” Elle said.
“Just kissing,” I said quickly.
“But still,” Elle said.
We fell silent. At least I didn’t have to explain to her what was wrong about all this. She’d grasped in seconds what Imogen probably still hadn’t figured out.
The bell on the door rang and I looked up, poised to jump back into action. But it was just Cortney, Elle’s Humdrum stepsister, whose normally sky-high enthusiasm had doubled since she’d learned about the Glimmering world. She came behind the counter and put on an apron.
“Olivia!” she said, as soon as she saw me. “Oh my gosh, hi! How are you?”
Everything that came out of her mouth was about twice as enthusiastic as it needed to be.
“I’m good,” I lied. “Just helping out for a couple of hours.”
“Super fab!”
She leaned in to give me a quick hug and then went back into the larger room, where she started clearing drinks and napkins from tables. She stopped to flirt with a couple of guys sitting near the window.
“She is such a child,” Elle said. “Okay, so what are you going to do about all this?”
I wiped a dribble of syrup off the counter.
“I already went to the Oracle,” I said.
“Wow,” she said. “Gutsy move, kid.”
“I’m an idiot,” I said. “It was ridiculous. I know.”
“Not ridiculous, just bold. What’d she say?”
I let out a long sigh. The air seemed more than ready to escape from me, and I didn’t blame it. I wished I could run away from the thoughts fizzing in my head, too.
“She seems kind of… revenge-y,” I said. “She told me some stuff about Imogen and said I could do whatever I wanted with it.”
Elle’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Weird.”
For some reason, I didn’t like Elle saying exactly what I’d been thinking.
“She must have a reason,” I said.
“I guess,” Elle said. “That’s terrible advice, though.”
“She can’t give terrible advice,” I said. “She’s the Oracle.”
Elle hadn’t even been in our world a year yet. No one who’d been around longer would say something like that and be serious.
And yet.
“Are you sure you didn’t, like, misunderstand her or something?” Elle said.
“Maybe?” I said.
I tapped the counter with my fingernail. It made a satisfying clicking sound and sent a tiny jolt of sensation up my hand with every tap.
“No,” I corrected. “She was pretty clear. But it makes sense, when you think about it. Her job is to keep balance in our world.”
“Like, an eye for an eye kind of stuff?” Elle said. “That’s messed up.”
“That’s w
hat holds our world together,” I said.
My tone was too sharp, and she held her hands up.
“Hey, I’m not arguing,” she said. “It’s your world. I still don’t get how half of this works. It’s just weird.”
Cortney came back behind the counter, a stack of cups balanced in each hand. She disappeared behind the curtain that led to the small kitchen.
My phone buzzed. My stomach twisted.
Imogen.
I reached for it, wishing I hadn’t texted her.
Amani: Our friend Eris just released a swarm of fairies into a brand-new Humdrum apartment complex. Just fyi.
Not Imogen, then. But also not good news.
Technically, the horrible little creatures were called hex moths, but everyone called them fairies since they looked so much like my race. They had our human figures and the wings our species had lost to evolution thousands of years ago, but they were nothing but pests, half as bright as most household pets and a thousand times as mean. As far as I was concerned, the dust that constantly fell from their wings was the only good thing about them. And their bites were nasty. A whole swarm of them in a building of Humdrums could mean disaster.
“What’s wrong?” Elle said.
“I just got a Glimmering news alert,” I said, which was not exactly a lie. “A fairy swarm just invaded some apartments downtown.”
“Keep tearing down old buildings and they have to find a new home, same as anyone,” she said. “Just another reason for people to be upset about all the historic homes people are destroying out of capitalistic greed.”
And then she was off, talking about gentrification and social stratification and evil corporations.
As she talked, I sent Amani a quick message back.
Olivia: Thanks for the update. I’ll keep an ear out for any gossip. Any news on who we’re dealing with?
Calling the two of us “we” felt weird, but I kept it in and hit Send. Amani wanted me, after all. She wouldn’t get offended or think I was getting above myself.
Probably.
We might not exactly be friends, but our meeting in the garden had been nice. The garden itself was amazing, and I’d liked talking with Amani.
And then, like an idiot, I’d gone and suggested that Imogen should be her heir. Freaking Imogen. I shouldn’t have even mentioned Imogen, let alone suggested she—of all the dishonest, unreliable people—should be selected as the leader of the Glimmering world.
