The oracle’s attention never shifted. I closed my eyes and drew in a calming breath. Why not? Now was as good a time as any to practice Sydney’s meditation techniques. And I could certainly use inner peace.
I drew in another deep breath, focusing on how it filled my lungs, how it streamed out of my nostrils. I pictured it colored like the light, red air being changed to blue inside me so it made a long indigo streamer that swirled away into the distance. It was a fun image…and I was getting distracted already. I drew in another breath and focused on the air brushing my forearms and my face. There were no fans in the store, and the air was generally still, but within the oracle, breezes occasionally moved. The air was warm and strawberry-scented, and if I relaxed enough, I could feel it stirring the fine hairs on my arms.
I let myself feel that for a while, then shifted my attention to my sense of the oracle. It still wasn’t paying me any attention—no, that was wrong, I could feel its notice like a tingling tickle across my skin that wasn’t dispelled by the warm breaths of air. I embraced the feeling and focused on it until that sensation filled my whole world. It was like sinking into a beanbag, if beanbags were filled with shaving cream instead of pellets. The deeper I sank into meditation, the more aware I became of the oracle’s presence and the more I distanced myself from my awareness of my own body.
The oracle drew nearer, observing me like a cat approaches a new ball of string. I felt an unexpected warmth creep over me, not so hot as to be painful, but comfortable like the sun on a clear spring day. My excitement rose as the oracle focused all its attention on me. I felt closer to it than ever before, close enough to understand its thoughts—
My concentration snapped. Suddenly the warmth was gone, and the oracle had withdrawn to somewhere nearby, its attention once more elsewhere. I scowled and opened my eyes. That had nearly been something interesting.
I went back to the counter and scrawled NO AUGURY on the paper. If only the oracle would explain—but it never did. I hoped its lack of response meant something positive, like that there was nothing to worry about. Or that whatever happened, it believed I was strong enough to deal with it without its direct guidance.
13
Viv and Wallach showed up around 4:30, just as the Ambrosite rush had trickled to nothing. Viv greeted me cheerily, but I knew her well enough to recognize when she was feeling a little down. “Anything wrong?” I said.
“No, of course not,” Viv replied. She smiled broadly and said, “This is the most interesting job I’ve ever had, and I include those two weeks I was a pearl diver.”
Wallach, on the other hand, didn’t conceal his scowl. “Let’s hope this augury is more successful,” he said, handing me a torn piece of paper.
“Wasn’t the last one? I thought you said you could see how it related to your work.” The augury request read How should the anchors be connected?
Wallach scowled more deeply. “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s move this along. I still have work to do.”
Stung and a little confused by his irritability, I made my escape into the oracle. I was used to Wallach’s occasional grumpiness, but that had always been directed at a recalcitrant problem, not at a person, and now he seemed upset with me as well as with the oracle. The light was blue-tinged, not red, so at least I’d be able to present him with something to focus his irritation on.
I rounded a corner and found the augury, another slim paperback—no, another Animorphs book. The Threat. “Weird,” I said. When I opened the cover, I got another surprise: this one was for me again. “This is really strange,” I said. “What do you have in mind, I wonder?”
Instantly, the oracle’s presence bore down on me, painfully sharp instead of the usual slow pressure. I cried out and tried to wrench away from it, but the pain followed me. “Stop!” I shouted. “What do you want? Why can’t you just speak?”
The pain lessened from a spike jabbing my shoulder to a pinprick. Warn, I thought. Danger.
“You could have just said that. Warn Mr. Wallach? What danger?”
Warn. Danger. The anchor vanishes. The oracle’s presence disappeared.
I rubbed my shoulder and rotated it to ease the lingering pain. That had been slightly less cryptic, but if it could tell me what warning to give, why had it also given me an augury? Unless the augury wasn’t like the previous one, and was actually for me. I’d have to study it and find out.
I headed for the exit and then remembered I hadn’t received an augury for Wallach. There must be one, or the light wouldn’t have been blue. Sighing, I set off in search of another tiny blue star.
When I found it, it wasn’t so tiny. It was another fat hardcover book you could bring down a pigeon with. The title was in huge red letters across the cover: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I set the Animorphs book on top of it and returned to the store’s front.
“Here you are,” I said to Wallach, handing him the big book. “$3500. I hope you don’t have to read the whole thing. That’s a long one.”
“Ms. Haley interprets the auguries,” Wallach said. He handed the book to Viv, who pretended to groan under its weight and then offered Judy several tubes of sanguinis sapiens.
“There’s one other thing, Mr. Wallach,” I said. “I received an augury yesterday about your work. It was a warning.”
Wallach’s eyes widened. “A warning? About what?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s about your new project. Something about how it’s too good to be true? And the oracle spoke to me now and repeated the warning. It said, ‘the anchor vanishes.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
The old scientist’s face cleared. “I already know about that. I don’t see why the oracle wants to give me a warning about dangers I’m already aware of.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said, feeling a little defensive of the oracle, as if he’d called its competence into question. “But I don’t think you should dismiss the warning.”
“Of course not,” Wallach said with a smile too paternalistic to be anything but insulting.
I suppressed an angry retort and said, “Good luck with your augury.”
Viv looked like she wanted to say something, but just hefted the enormous book and followed Wallach out the door.
“Did that seem weird to you?” I asked Judy, who’d silently taken payment from Viv and now lined up the tubes of raw magic on the counter.
“No weirder than anything Mr. Wallach does,” Judy said.
“I mean that he was so dismissive of the oracle’s warning. Most people, if they hear the oracle’s spoken to me, get all flustered.”
“He’s not most people.” Judy swept up the vials in both hands and headed for the basement. I flipped through the Animorphs book and wished I remembered the series better. Fighting alien invaders in secret, using magical powers—all right, technology, but it might as well have been magic. The back cover copy mentioned a new Animorph who started out as a help, but became dangerous when he began breaking rules. If it applied to Wallach’s new project, this combined with the first book suggested strongly that whatever Wallach was inventing to shift our reality would have unexpected, negative effects.