Benjamin clapped as Cassandra poured another cup of cider into the sink and watched it disappear down the drain. It was a morning ritual that had begun when they’d moved into the dorms together and Cassandra had spent the first night pacing the room while Emily and Benjamin tried to sleep.

  Something that Emily called an “intervention” had been sprung upon Cassandra soon after. This had led to Cassandra’s grudging admission that she hadn’t slept a single night since her first cup of cider. Emily and Benjamin had then dragged Cassandra to the office of the Master of Mind where she had been given a mind pebble to place under her pillow every night for the next few months.

  Now, every morning, Cassandra woke to find a glowing cup of cider on her bedside table, placed there by Emily in the middle of the night. And every morning, she was amazed to find she did not crave it enough to immediately gulp it down. She always took it with her to the sink and poured it down, letting the stimulant pebble clatter into the stone basin. Each pebble represented a day without cider, a night with real dreams – another drum beat in the rhythm that was normal for humanity, and had been since the dawn of the species. The jar was almost full.

  Today, only Benjamin was there to clap. “Emily’s retaking her exam this morning,” he reminded her.

  Cassandra looked around the room as she brushed her teeth. Emily’s side of the room was a mess of books, papers, and pebbles. Fake-Orion was nowhere to be seen and rarely was these days – almost as if he had been a cider-induced hallucination. Almost.

  “A little birdy told me something about Johnson City,” he said, pointing to the blue pebble in his ear.

  Cassandra spat toothpaste and rinsed as fast as she could. The “little birdy” was an eavesdropping pebble that Cassandra had buried in the soil of a potted plant in one of the conference rooms in the Hall of Language two weeks ago. It was configured to record and summarize anything related to Johnson City, and Benjamin liked to get up early and listen for anything interesting that had happened overnight.

  “Good news or bad news?” she said.

  Benjamin hesitated so long that his stomach gurgled.

  “Sounds bad,” she said, glancing down.

  He rubbed his belly sheepishly. “I talked to the Master of Life about it, and she assigned me a bunch of reading about the lactase enzyme.”

  “I mean the news,” Cassandra said. “Your stomach only growls when you’re nervous.”

  “Really?” he said, with a gurgle, as if he and his stomach were both surprised. He then hastened to say, “Your brother left home with two other kids from Johnson City. No one’s seen them for two days.”

  Suddenly fake-Orion was there, sitting on Emily’s bunk, observing thoughtfully.

  “How do you know?” said Cassandra.

  “There's someone from the military on the inside,” he said. “I overheard Nessassa and MoLa being briefed by one of the Pentagon guys.”

  A few weeks ago, Emily had started making up nicknames for the four Masters, and now everyone in her class was using them. “I need to go talk to MoLa,” she said, pulling her robe from a pile of laundry near her bed.

  She was out the door before Benjamin could say anything. In the hallway, she walked directly into Emily. “Where are you going?” she said as Cassandra pushed past her and kept moving. “I failed my exam again,” Emily called out. “Not that anyone cares!” Cassandra couldn’t think of anything to say. A moment later, she was in the sunny courtyard, the fresh sea wind punching her in the face.

  ***

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  MoLa’s main office was the single imposing cubical in the center of the Hall of Language, surrounded by a sea of smaller cubicles. But when Cassandra saw that there was a line of people waiting there and that one of his Head Scribes was manning his desk, she ducked into a narrow hallway and began making her way to his secondary office.

  This one was through a humble door in the back of a large room called the “unsorted archives.” She traversed a maze of massive shelves stocked with wooden barrels. Each was so swollen with pebbles that it looked ready to burst. Supposedly, the Master of Language liked to relax himself by organizing the place one pebble at a time – a side-project that, if Emily could be trusted, he had been working at for the last thousand years.

  She didn’t need to knock at the door; it just opened with a creak and admitted her into a room not much bigger than her dorm room, and even more sparsely furnished. There were a few boxes and an ancient chest – surfaces on which various pebbles glowed. The air was filled with what seemed to be smoke, though there were no candles or incense. As Cassandra stepped inside, the smoke coalesced into a figure in the center of the room.

  “Cassandra,” said the Master of Language, scratching his potato of a nose with one hand and rubbing sleep from his eyes with the other. “Sorry. I was napping.”

  Cassandra wasn’t sure whether to be more surprised that he’d been napping or that he was apologizing for it. “You said I could come see you any time, right?” said Cassandra.

  He swept a cluster of pebbles off of a box and indicated that she should sit. By the time she had done so, she looked up to see that he was offering her a steaming cup of cider.

  Her hand reached out for it even as her mouth said, “I’m trying to quit.”

  The cup vanished as the MoLa gave a grim nod. “Probably for the best,” he said. “I tried transcending sleep once. Didn’t stick.” He fuzzed around the edges and seemed about to say more, but then he just sat on a box opposite her. “What can I do for you, Cassandra?”

  “My brother left home,” she said.

  He feigned surprise and said, “Oh? Did a little birdy tell you that?”

  She felt her ears get warm and instinctively looked around for fake-Orion, the one who’d encouraged her to bug the conference rooms in the first place. He was nowhere to be found.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell Nessassa. I’d have done the same thing.”

  It wasn’t the first time Cassandra found herself wanting to ask what the Master of Language thought about the whole situation – Nessassa, the apocalypse, his own ongoing demotion. All she knew was that a few weeks ago, the other Masters had voted once again to extend Nessassa’s tenure as Fortress’s official leader, citing her track record of success at rooting out the connected twins, keeping the peace, and stabilizing the post-apocalyptic geopolitical situation.

  “If he’s left home,” said Cassandra. “Maybe we could find him. Bring him here, you know?” The Master of Language mulled this over, chewing on the inside of his own lip. After several seconds of this, Cassandra went on. “He’ll probably head to the refugee camp south of Johnson City. We could use the portal network to take a team to Billings and then make an expedition north through the Wilderness.”

  The bemused smile on the Master of Language’s face didn’t bode well. She’d learned long ago that when adults thought her ideas were cute or adorable, it wasn’t good.

  “If you’re worried about the free will thing,” said Cassandra, “I might be able to talk him into it.”

  “Problem is,” said the Master of Language, “an expedition north from Billings would need Nessassa’s approval. And, sadly, I think she has different priorities.”

  “I thought we were part of a prophecy,” she said. “The chosen ones or whatever.”

  The Master of Language gave her the kind of look that adults give when they’re about to tell you that things are too complicated for you to understand. That you’ll find out when you’re older. She felt her ears burning preemptively. When the Master of Language finally sighed and spoke, he said, “Nessassa and I have different interpretations of the Master of Virtue’s prophecies where the Rot is concerned. I’ve been strictly forbidden from talking about it with you.”

  Cassandra got up to leave.

  “However,” said the Master of Virtue, “I don’t take orders well. So… how long do you have?”

  Cassandra checked her watch. “I’m supposed to be in the Hall of Maps for class in twenty minutes.”

  “The story spans approximately ten thousand years,” he said. “It may take longer than twenty minutes.”

  “I could tell them I’m sick?” said Cassandra, heart racing.

  “Good idea,” he said. “Bring a backpack, too. Just in case.”