How much time would be lost filling page after page?
“Too much.” Meg reached behind her for the door. Had to go back to the office, to the familiar.
“Wait right there.” Lorne hurried over to a spin rack near the counter. He quickly selected a handful of items, then returned, holding them out to her. “Postcards. A picture on the front.” He turned one over. “And blank on the other side. You put a stamp in this corner, and the person’s address here.” He pointed to the two places. “The other half is where you write a message. Confined space.”
Confined space. The words should have conjured up an image of something she should hate. Instead, she felt relief.
Meg took the postcards. “I owe you money.”
“Just take the cards today.” Lorne opened the door for her, a gesture she understood meant she was supposed to leave. “We’ll settle up later. Besides, it sounds like you’ve got a delivery,” he added as they both heard the sound of a van’s side door sliding open, then closing a moment later.
Meg hurried back to the office and reached the Private doorway in time to watch Jake pick up a pen with his beak and offer it to the deliveryman. The man nodded to Meg, took the pen from Jake, and made a notation on the paper attached to her clipboard.
A deliveryman dropping off packages. Familiar. Jake playing the pen game. Familiar.
She looked at the postcards in her hands, fascinated by the photographs of Talulah Falls. All that water pouring over the edge of the world, creating mist and rainbows.
Something new. A confined experience.
Meg dashed to the table in the sorting room and laid out the five postcards, picture side up. Three of them were of Talulah Falls. One was a deer half shrouded by a mist rising from the ground. And the last one . . . Big red rocks rising out of the ground, their tops flat.
Plateaus.
A fizz of excitement filled her. Plateau. Resting place. Stable place where things could stay the same for a while, giving the mind a chance to catch up.
Was that why, after doing so much and absorbing so much, she was struggling now? Living in the Courtyard, she absorbed more images and information in a day than she would have seen in a week at the compound. And even in the compound, although no one would have told the girls why it was done that way, there would be one week of new images, and then the next week they would look at things they had seen before.
Plateau. Resting place. She had done some of that instinctively, reaching for a magazine she’d perused before instead of looking at the new issue. But she hadn’t done enough of it because she hadn’t considered how important it was to stop before she reached overload. From now on, she would give herself more resting places.
And if she needed those resting places, so did the other girls—especially the girls who hadn’t chosen to live in the outside world.
Meg picked up the phone in the sorting room and called Merri Lee. “Merri? I figured out another bit we need to put in the Guide.”
CHAPTER 12
Firesday, Maius 11
Steve Ferryman drove out to the Gardner farm. The Simple Life folk didn’t have telephones in their houses, and they sure didn’t own digital cameras. Or any kind of camera, for that matter.
Would a drawing work as a reference for a blood prophet? Something he needed to ask.
After talking with Simon Wolfgard yesterday, he had taken his personal camera to the B and B where the five young cassandra sangue were staying and took pictures of each of the bedrooms—after he and several other men helped Margaret and Lara, the B and B’s owners, clear the rooms of everything that wasn’t considered essential or part of the room itself. He even took pictures of rooms the girls wouldn’t normally see, like the laundry room. Then he took pictures of the outside of the building and the surrounding land—parking lot, grass, gardens, anything he could think of. While he did that, Roger Czerneda, armed with the village’s new digital crime scene camera, took pictures of the village shops and public buildings, including the medical center, inside and out.
No one in Ferryman’s Landing understood why looking at images instead of the real thing made such a difference to the girls, but it did. And understanding that no change was a small change for these girls helped the adults cope with helping the girls.
“Seeing life secondhand so it doesn’t interfere with some damn prophecy,” he muttered. Of course, anyone who hadn’t seen Meg Corbyn not only functioning but thriving in the tsunami of sensory input that came with being the Human Liaison for the Lakeside Courtyard could understandably conclude that these girls needed a restricted, almost sterile environment in order to stay sane.
But they didn’t need sterile. They just needed help adjusting to a world full of sensation. And they needed that help because they’d been trained to see the world as images.
Gods, he hoped that was true.
The B and B was a stopgap solution to housing the cassandra sangue. He had people working as hard and fast as possible to design and build a home for these girls that would give them a chance to thrive.
And the urgency wasn’t just to save the five girls who were here. The girls who were cassandra sangue originally came from his own people, the Intuits—people who had such a finely honed sense of the world around them that they knew when something around them might turn good or bad. Some of them could sense a change in the weather before there was any discernible indication. Other Intuits had a sense for animals, knowing when to buy an animal overlooked by everyone else and when to walk away from a deal. Discriminated against and persecuted by humans who didn’t want to deal with people who had such a sharp internal gauge, the Intuits had fled into the wild country and made their own bargains with the Others.
Now some Intuits worked as consultants for the terra indigene, listening as humans made a proposal to acquire more land, more minerals, more water, more of whatever they wanted that day. Some proposals were honest and sound and would benefit at least some of the terra indigene as well as humans. But other proposals offered nothing that the terra indigene would want.
Even with that sharp internal gauge, his people had made some bad mistakes in their dealings with other kinds of humans. Generations ago, they had handed over daughters who saw visions and made prophecies when their skin was cut in any way—girls who were driven insane by the things they saw and cut themselves for the euphoria that clouded their minds and made them feel good.
Having discovered what had been done to those girls during all the years since then, Intuit settlements throughout Thaisia were offering to take in the cassandra sangue and care for them as best they could.
They needed to learn because the gift, or curse, of prophecy was starting to reappear in Intuit families. Last year, the Sledgeman family here on Great Island had lost a teenage girl who had begun cutting—and threw herself in the Talulah River to escape from visions no one had understood until it was too late.
Yesterday he had typed up the things Simon had told him and e-mailed the information to the network of Intuit settlements in the Northeast Region. Some of them must have been connected to settlements in other parts of Thaisia. By the time he’d returned to download the photos and print out copies for Margaret and Lara to use as a reference, he’d received so many e-mail messages and calls begging for more information and help, he hadn’t known what to do. He’d called his mother, Rachel, and Penny Sledgeman, his friend Jerry’s wife, to help reply to the e-mail and return phone calls. As the mayor of Ferryman’s Landing, he requested a meeting with Simon Wolfgard—and wasn’t surprised to learn that Wolfgard wasn’t returning calls.