a man playing with another man’s innards like they were mah-jongg tiles.
She remembered Darlington’s shock when he’d realized she could not only see ghosts without the help of any potion or spell but see them in color. He’d been weirdly furious. She’d enjoyed that.
“What kinds of color?” he’d asked, sliding his feet off the coffee table, his heavy black boots thunking on the slatted floor of the parlor at Il Bastone.
“Just color. Like an old Polaroid. Why? What do you see?”
“They look gray,” he’d snapped. “That’s why they’re called Grays.”
She’d shrugged, knowing her nonchalance would make Darlington even angrier. “It isn’t a big deal.”
“Not to you,” he’d muttered, and stomped away. He’d spent the rest of the day in the training room, working up a cranky sweat.
She’d felt smug at the time, glad not everything came so easily to him. But now, moving in a circle around the perimeter of the theater, checking the little chalk markings made at every compass point, she just felt jittery and unprepared. That was the way she’d felt since she’d taken her first step on campus. No, before that. From the time Dean Sandow had sat down beside her hospital bed, tapped the handcuffs on her wrist with his nicotine-stained fingers, and said, “We are offering you an opportunity.” But that was the old Alex. The Alex of Hellie and Len. Yale Alex had never worn handcuffs, never gotten into a fight, never fucked a stranger in a bathroom to make up her boyfriend’s vig. Yale Alex struggled but didn’t complain. She was a good girl trying to keep up.
And failing. She should have been here early to observe the making of the signs and ensure the circle was secure. Grays as old as the ones hovering on the tiered benches above didn’t tend to make trouble even when drawn by blood, but prognostications were big magic and her job was to verify that the Bonesmen followed proper procedures, stayed cautious. She was playacting, though. She’d spent the previous night cramming, trying to memorize the correct signs and proportions of chalk, charcoal, and bone. She’d made flash cards, for fuck’s sake, and forced herself to shuffle through them in between bouts of Joseph Conrad.
Alex thought the markings looked okay, but she knew her signs of protection about as well as her modern British novels. When she’d attended the fall-quarter prognostication with Darlington, had she really paid attention? No. She’d been too busy sucking on ginger candy, reeling from the strangeness of it all, and praying she wouldn’t humiliate herself by puking. She’d thought she had plenty of time to learn with Darlington looking over her shoulder. But they’d both been wrong about that.
“Voorhoofd!” the Haruspex called, and one of the Bonesmen darted forward. Melinda? Miranda? Alex couldn’t remember the redhead’s name, only that she was in an all-female a cappella group called Whim ’n Rhythm. The girl patted the Haruspex’s forehead with a white cloth and melted back into the group.
Alex tried not to look at the man on the table, but her eyes darted to his face anyway. Michael Reyes, age forty-eight, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Would Reyes remember any of it when he woke? When he tried to tell someone would they just call him crazy? Alex knew exactly what that was like. It could be me on that table.
“The Bonesmen like them as nuts as possible,” Darlington had told her. “They think it makes for better predictions.” When she’d asked him why, he’d just said, “The crazier the victima, the closer to God.”
“Is that true?”
“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed,” he’d quoted. Then he’d shrugged. “Their bank balances say yes.”
“And we’re okay with this?” Alex had asked Darlington. “With people getting cut open so Chauncey can redecorate his summer home?”
“Never met a Chauncey,” he’d said. “Still hoping.” Then he’d paused, standing in the armory, his face grave. “Nothing is going to stop this. Too many powerful people rely on what the societies can do. Before Lethe existed, no one was keeping watch. So you can make futile bleating noises in protest and lose your scholarship, or you can stay here, do your job, and do the most good you can.”
Even then, she’d wondered if that was only part of the story, if Darlington’s desire to know everything bound him to Lethe just as surely as any sense of duty. But she’d stayed quiet then and she intended to stay quiet now.
Michael Reyes had been found in