of course it had. The Dark One had taken her brother from her. That she would fight him had been an inevitability not even worth discussing. But there was too much truth in what Sibyl had said for Sloane to deny it. It had been a battle worth fighting, but that didn’t mean it was Sloane’s. For ten years she had been jiggling her knee, waiting for something to make sense, for something new to happen. But until now, it had been too terrible to consider that there might be another fight in front of her and that it might be hers in a way the other had not.
“Why, exactly, have you come to see me?” Sibyl said.
“I was brought to Genetrix against my will by Aelia and Nero and . . . whoever else,” Sloane said. “They told us the Resurrectionist was destroying our world along with Genetrix, and they wouldn’t let us go home until we killed him for them. But Mox . . .” She frowned. “I just want to know what’s real.”
“What’s real.” Sibyl sighed and stood. “If we’re going to talk about what’s real, we’ll need whiskey.”
The first thing Sibyl did was put on a record: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, by Simon and Garfunkel. The plucking of the guitar was eerie in the dim living room, its furniture so old that the fabric on the seats was threadbare. The low pink sofa creaked when Mox sat on it; he looked like an adult perched on a child-size stool. The air had crackled around him when he walked into the room, and Sibyl had told him, sharply, to keep himself under control. It had no effect; Mox just scowled.
Sibyl went into the kitchen to pour whiskey, and as they waited for her to return, Sloane browsed her bookshelves. There were no books on them, just a vast collection of National Geographics and knitting magazines. There were porcelain figurines, too, of ballet dancers and stretching cats and hot-air balloons. It was as if Sibyl had seen an encyclopedia entry about what belonged in a grandmother’s house and had replicated it exactly, down to the doilies on the mahogany coffee table.
When the second song on the album started to play, Sloane snorted. “You really like to wrap yourself in clichés, don’t you?” she said to Sibyl when the woman returned with three tumblers of whiskey.
Sibyl smiled. “The song discusses patterns repeating themselves,” Sibyl said. “I thought you would both appreciate the sentiment.”
Sloane sipped the whiskey, which was like swallowing a mouthful of smoke. Her eyes watered as she tried to stifle a cough. Sibyl, on the other hand, downed half her glass at once, then sat in the recliner next to the record player to watch the record spin.
“This is a gift I didn’t choose and didn’t want,” Sibyl said after a while. “I was two years old when the Tenebris Incident occurred, and fourteen when I began to go into trances. They were frightening—I myself didn’t remember them, but I was told I spoke in riddles, as if possessed. And people avoided me once my ramblings began to come true. No one wants to know their future, not really.” She sipped the whiskey, and Sloane perched on the arm of the couch, where the pink fabric was torn and some of the stuffing was hanging out.
“It was an uncommon gift even among the magically adept—and even more uncommon was the large scale of my predictions. They pertained to world events. The outcomes of battles, natural disasters, the passage of laws. And eventually . . . the end of everything. I have a recording of it, actually.” She stood and set the tumbler down on the table next to the record player. She lifted the needle from the record, then opened a nearby cabinet and searched through a large basket of cassette tapes. Sloane wasn’t close enough to read the labels, but they were homemade, curling at the edges.
Sibyl found the right tape and took it to a little cassette player in a corner of the room, on a shelf next to the National Geographics. There was a high whine as the tape rewound. Sloane drank more of her whiskey and tried not to look at Mox.
Sibyl pressed Play and stood before the cassette player like she was standing at an altar. The recording crackled and popped at first, then steadied, a voice taking shape.
“It will be,” the voice said, low and strange, “the end of Genetrix.