modesty, but that seemed to whisper and move with a life of its own. A floral shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, even in the heat, and her hair was pulled back into a tight steel-gray bun. Her nose was like a hawk’s beak behind half-moon glasses, her hands, covered in their strange black tattoos, hung at her sides. Everyone cheered when she drifted out to us. But she raised a hand and the crowd went silent.
“Dearest friends,” she said, and her clear, sharp voice seemed to crackle with power. “We are gathered here tonight, on this anniversary of the Great Storm of 1935, to mourn the passing of our loved ones. But just as we have found a haven in the great experiment that is Elysium, our loved ones have gone on to their great reward. We remain strong and united, no matter what the future may bring.”
Lucy shifted beside me, and I caught a whiff of her perfume—yes, perfume, though who knew where she’d gotten it; even in Elysium, Lucy always made it a point to smell nice.
“… so while we grieve their passing just as we grieve our own in these threadbare days before the Judgment,” Mother Morevna was saying, “we must be mindful of where we are, where they are: Elysium. A good, peaceful home for all.”
The crowd began to applaud, but Mother Morevna held up her hand.
“Also, it is of importance that I announce tonight I will be choosing a Successor, a young person who will learn the ways of magic and diplomacy, so as to preserve the society we have created for future generations.”
At this, there was a low rumbling in the crowd as everyone turned to the people near them to see if they could make any sense of it. A Successor? Successor with a big S—that’s how she’d said it, right? She had never done anything like this before. But who here held the power that Mother Morevna did? Who here could ever hope to measure up to her?
I turned, scanned the crowd. Out of all my classmates, I couldn’t think of many girls who were anything like Mother Morevna, who were so fearless and quick-acting and, well… magic. Lucy, maybe. She certainly had her own way of doing things, but magic?
Mother Morevna pulled her black pendant from her blouse—the one she had found the Dowsing Well with. She wound the chain around her hand once, then held it up, where it shone in the light. The pendant pointed straight out into the air, in the direction of the audience.
“And now,” she said, “I will find her.”
As we watched, Mother Morevna stepped down from the platform, holding the pendant out as it strained forward, against the chain like a dog on a leash, leading her. She walked several feet into the crowd, then stopped in front of Anna McComber, a red-haired white girl a year older than me. She looked over her shoulder at her mother; Anna’s face was pale and terrified. Mother Morevna said something to the black pendant—I couldn’t tell what—and it went limp again in her hand. Then she raised it over Anna’s head. It hung still for a moment; slowly, it began to swing from side to side, and somehow I knew it meant no.
Mother Morevna looked at Anna for a moment, then moved on past her as the pendulum went taut again: a black arrow pointing into the crowd. Anna’s mother gathered Anna up and held her close, but her eyes were on Mother Morevna.
Mother Morevna’s pendulum led her farther, into the west side of the crowd. She stopped again, in front of a Black girl two years younger than me, Georgia Fuller. I saw a few older white men exchange glances as Mother Morevna held the pendulum over Georgia’s head. I wondered if Lucy saw them.
“She’s wearing my lipstick,” Lucy said when Georgia turned her head away from the pendulum. “Petal Pink.”
“Petal Pink doesn’t look like that on me,” I said.
“Not everything’s for white girls,” said Lucy.
The pendulum over Georgia’s head swung back and forth, back and forth. Mother Morevna dismissed Georgia and moved on through the crowd for a few more feet before stopping at another girl. She held her pendulum over her head, then kept moving when the pendulum, once more, gave her a no.
“She’s coming this way,” Lucy said. And she was. My stomach lurched. Mother Morevna was moving through the crowd, her eyes following where her pendulum led. I could see the