Page 17 of Gifted & Talented

“Look, my dad just died,” she said. “I want some company, that’s all. And I want to know what you’re publishing, because of course I do. Because I want a chance to tell my own story. Is that so unreasonable?”

Jamie was, had always been, a good person. She was banking on it, his goodness, because goodness was predictable. It was its own kind of trap.

“Okay,” he said, which to Meredith Wren was like saying fuck me up, darling. And to that she thought yes, that sounds nice, I think I will.

8

There was a collective breath of relief when Eilidh’s plane finally touched down. Everyone applauded, which was a silly ritual at the best of times that now seemed underwhelming.

“We’ll be taxiing to the nearest gate,” said the flight attendant calmly over the speakers, “as we will require some… immediate maintenance.”

She was referring, most likely, to the carcasses of locusts that were now plastered to the full exterior of the plane, having been sucked into the engines and spat back out again, or whatever happened when a machine flew into a visibility-obscuring swarm of insects. As far as plagues went, it could have been worse. There were no crops to destroy at forty thousand feet, though Eilidh shuddered to think what might have happened below them. In any case, the world was still standing.

Inside her chest, the thing that lived there slumped down in woozy contentedness, as if unzipping its pants after a meal.

Eilidh toggled airplane mode off on her phone, resuming the use of communication and waiting for anything new. A seizure-inducing flurry of notifications on her social apps, nothing immediately pertinent to her, mostly just an attempt to persuade her to interact with the world in a way that could be successfully monetized. An ad blinked across her screen for Chirp.THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! :)

Eilidh suppressed a grimace. Having recently traded her life for whatever came of the locusts, it seemed undignified to consider punching her sister’s smug face, however briefly.

“I can’t understate that this flight was an actual circle of hell,” the weeping man (who was no longer weeping) was saying on the phone. “Like, literally, hell. I’m not sure what the signs of the apocalypse are but I’m very confident we witnessed at least three of them.”

No, thought Eilidh, one was a normal traumatic event and the other wasa plague. That was different from a full apocalypse foretelling. Thanks to the parasite, they did occasionally happen—Eilidh had been the source of an earthquake at least once over the course of her vesselhood for demon kind, though the extent of “apocalypse” versus the natural hazards of California residency remained largely indeterminate—but there had been no leveling of plains, no stars falling to earth, no sudden loss of language. She had obviously researched these things, for vocational reasons, after the first time she turned the sea red.

Although, again, Eilidh did not feel that she, personally, was making these things happen. That was the worst part, actually, and the thing she tried hardest to fight—the sense that she was not in control of these things at all. She couldn’t make sense of sequence (none that she could determine, having reread the childhood Bible story of Moses and the Pharaoh quite literally hundreds of times) or escalation (arbitrary at best), or why certain internal sensations resulted in variable atmospheric ends. All she could do was submit or reject, and sometimes even rejection did not seem to matter. Whatever was causing this, it clearly had a mind of its own, and what seemed occasionally to be a morbid sense of humor.

Eilidh’s phone did not process voicemails until after the bedraggled passengers began making their way off the plane, leaving nothing but distress in their wake. Twice Eilidh felt certain she’d heard a life-altering conversation, someone leaving his boyfriend and another promising her life to her ex. Eilidh imagined making a call to someone then herself, saying either that they belonged together or that, actually, what she really needed was freedom, she knew that now. But no, nothing life-changing came to mind.

There was, however, a missed call from Dzhuliya Aguilar, Eilidh’s father’s personal assistant—“Julia” to Thayer, who despite naming his own daughter Eilidh was unable to summon the energy for phonetic deadweight—and eventually the voicemail showed up. It didn’t count as a call from an ex-lover, though it wasn’t technically not.

“Call me back” was the extent of the message. Eilidh hit erase and dragged herself off the plane, breathing in the refreshing crispness of the evening San Francisco air.

It seemed utterly inconceivable now that she had done something as stupidly unnecessary as attend a silent retreat on the East Coast. She still maintained every intention to lie about how wonderful it had been—that much had not changed even in the face of her fragile mortality—but the temporarypeace she’d been granted for her hours of wordless reflection had fizzled out and disappeared somewhere into the fullness of her bladder, her desperation for caffeine. She wished she had not checked a bag. Carousel five, the informative bulletin board told her. God, what if she actuallyhaddied? Then there would be no need to traverse the baggage claim. There would be no need to stand there and perform the usual rituals, holding her breath (proverbially) until her baggage finally appeared. What drudgery. She collected her bag, she was a bag lady now, her worldly possessions back within the radius of her control. For this she had chanced a doomsday. It made everything seem bleak, an unwelcome change from dire. How quickly the miracle of life could become stale.

“Eilidh!”

Eilidh blinked, startled to hear the sound of her name, and realized it was Dzhuliya standing expectantly in arrivals. Dzhuliya’s dark hair, typically down and shoulder-grazing, was currently swept up in a high ponytail, her face its usual gloss of healthy, sun-kissed perfection, minus the stray instances of hormonal acne that occasionally cropped up around her chin—a reminder that perfection was largely implausible, albeit never out of the question. Dzhuliya was wearing an oversized sweatshirt, looking like the hot girl from the soccer movie Eilidh had watched twenty thousand times as a teen. No coincidence there, surely.

Eilidh had planned to order a car, but apparently her father had sent Dzhuliya to collect her. That was sweet.

“Oh, hi,” said Eilidh, suddenly feeling a bit breathless, certainly no result of Dzhuliya’s proximity—she was, if anything, a mere amicable colleague. New forms of drudgery manifested: conscientious avoidance of shop talk (everyone at Wrenfare was on edge these days, the whole office an ecosystem of excessive frequency and chattering teeth), awkward power differentials (Eilidh was, however impostorly, ranked above Dzhuliya in Wrenfare’s corporate structure despite their similarity in age), the song and dance of small talk, the quiet tension between two people who had previously fooled around, the inevitable shifting of Dzhuliya’s things from the passenger seat to the back seat so that Eilidh could find a place for her long useless legs. The cans of energy drinks likely littering the floor, protein bar wrappers that seemed to exist solely as evidence of how hard Dzhuliya Aguilar worked and how infrequently she had time to eat or rest, which naturally Eilidh would try to ignore, because to acknowledge it would be like admitting thatcapitalism was among the nightmares for which Eilidh was personally responsible. Well, maybe not responsible, but culpable, certainly. Without a doubt.

“You don’t have to run errands for my dad off the clock,” said Eilidh, ideally from a place of benevolent upper management (we’re all family here!). “I could have easily gotten a car.”

“Yes, um. I just thought you might want some company.” Dzhuliya took a deep breath, preparing to deliver some piece of news, and then apparently changed her mind. “So, how was the flight?” she said in a tone of excessive warmth, like impersonating an older, matronly relative.

“Oh, I’m dead now,” said Eilidh. “This is actually an unlikely paranormal event.”

“Ha!” said Dzhuliya. “Ha! Ha!”

Weird, thought Eilidh. They weren’t exactly friends, but neither were they usually this awkward. With the occasional—brief—highly singular—exceptions, amicability cut both ways.

“Have you heard from your sister?” Dzhuliya asked, a lingering sense of oddness to her voice. “Or your brother?”

“What, you mean since Christmas?” said Eilidh. “No. I’m pretty sure Meredith had one of her Tyche talks today.” If only she could know that so casually, as if she’d been personally informed via sisterly check-in, and not because she was subscribed to media alerts for both her siblings. “And Arthur is on the campaign trail again.” Campaign trail, ha. Given one guess, Eilidh felt sure Arthur was with Lady Philippa, the socialite Eilidh had clocked repeatedly in the background of Arthur’s grid who seemed dangerously close to aging out of It Girl–hood. Philippa must know it, too, even if Arthur didn’t (and everything about Arthur, good and bad, suggested he wouldn’t). There was a raw desperation to the @LadyPVDM content these days, something approximating thirst, which was a hefty crime on the socials. One did not want to be a Try-Hard. It was worse than supporting terrorism, a bare step above hawking MLMs. Either Philippa’s vault of blood diamonds had run dry or she could sense the looming shadow of replacement, chased down by some faceless new ingenue stepping in to play her role.

Eilidh disliked Philippa greatly, for reasons she tried not to understand.

“Ah. I see.” Dzhuliya was uncharacteristically fidgety, and kept adjusting her posture, as if something was bothering her. Every motion shiftedthe sweatshirt over, revealing a glimpse of shoulder, smooth and kissed by summer sun.

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