Green Jack Read online

  Chapter 10

  Jane

  “What is wrong with you?” Kiri asked, exasperated. “You’ve been staring at your food for half an hour. You’re not turning Feral, about to read chewed up old chicken bones for omens, are you?”

  Jane tore her gaze away from her plate. Most of the other students in the Common Room around them were trying desperately to use their magic to find the missing Green Jack. There were rumours of instant graduation into the Order, rewards from the Directorate, a job at the main Cella. Blake was inhaling the smoke of burning sage and other questionable substances. All it seemed to be doing was creating a foul odour.

  “You’re not, are you?” Kiri pressed. “Because I don’t think you’d get extra credit for that. You know how they feel about the Ferals.”

  “It’s not that. I’m just thinking.”

  Kiri rolled her eyes. “Your grades are better than almost anyone else’s. You don’t need to think outside class. Or chase a Green Jack.”

  “I guess.” It was easier to let her believe that. The truth was, all Jane could see was the Garden, the baby nurseries with their leaf-green walls, her blood being analyzed even now deep inside the Directorate laboratories. “I’m going to go for a run,” she told Kiri, standing up suddenly. She caught her cup before it toppled off the table. “This place is crazy and I need to relax.”

  “Running is not relaxing,” Kiri grimaced. “Just one of the many reasons you’re not normal, Highgate.”

  She had to smile. “Coming from you, Solomon?”

  “Takes one to know one.” She gathered her books and her embroidered bag. “I’m going to go study in my room. Smells like feet in here.” She let her bag swing from her shoulder and hit Asher in the face. He cursed and made a grab for her but she’d already danced out of the door, laughing. The red bird someone had released to read patterns in its flight made a panicked lunge for the window, knocking itself out. One of the Oracles complained about her reading: the constant and confusing taste of a spice she couldn’t place. Someone else was painting crocuses but she didn’t know why.

  Jane went to her dorm room to change into running clothes. The top of her spine throbbed with warning. She rolled her shoulders, trying to ignore the pain. There were books on numen poisoning and ancient magic on her desk, for all the good it did her. But numen had to be about something more than growing seeds and divining crop rotations. Before the Green Jacks came, very few people had believed in magic and they’d mostly been dismissed as being religious, crazy, or both. It was still such a new science. No one knew where the next breakthrough might come from: laboratory, Collegium, or Woodwife. There were museums of course, and stories told on Festival days, but so much information was lost after the Cataclysms. The books that had survived from earlier days treated Green Jacks and numen as fiction.

  She pushed her desk chair under the vent, unscrewed the cover and slipped the books inside. Her research material wasn’t illegal exactly, but it would attract more attention.

  And she had all the attention she could handle.

  The door slammed open. Her essay on the symbolism of black doves in ancient Greek divination floated off the desk to the ground. “You have to come down to the Common Room,” Kiri demanded, dragging Jane down the hall. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” Everyone in the Common Room was excited, talking too fast, placing bets.

  “I should have guessed,” Kiri shook her head. “Your mother must have done it.”

  “Done what?” Anxiety fluttered in her chest.

  “Let me through,” Kiri shoved through the crowd, tugging Jane behind her. Students parted, some smiling, some sneering. They stopped in front of the wide screen set into the wall. The usual Directorate-approved shows played. All other feeds were blocked and taken down with extreme prejudice. Sometimes a Greencoat video snuck through, but never for very long. Most Oracles agreed that by the end of the year there might not be any satellite signals at all, even for the Directorate. Already, the signals were weaker.

  “Kiri, what are we watching?” Jane asked.

  “Just wait,” Kiri said. “It will play again in a minute.”

  The trailer was only a few minutes long, glossy as an advertisement for protein paste cakes. The light was hazy and romantic. There was green grass, gardens, rows of perfect houses, soft music. Jane recognized them with a start, dread uncurling in her stomach like a sleeping snake woken by the sound of mice. A man spoke in a resonant voice that oozed confidence and charm.“ The Garden… where every winner has the glory and honour of serving you. Vote for your favourite!”

  The recruits pre-marked for the Garden flashed one after the other. Personal data followed: ages, proud family names, inoffensive hobbies. Jane didn’t recognize most of them, until her own face stared back at her.

  A pink moon.

  “Jane Highgate is studying at the Collegium to be an Oracle. She is proud and excited to serve the Directorate and hopes to find true love.”

  She didn’t know where they had gotten the footage, when they’d even filmed her. She was jogging through the Enclave, offering omens on the steps of the Cella in the Rings, dancing in a beaded dress. Shots of the candy-coloured tulip beds and gleaming windows of The Garden followed. Numen burned the back of her neck. Pink moon, church steeple.

  Asher was next, much to his surprise and fury. She heard him yelling in the hall, but it seemed very far away. Her vision narrowed to the flash of lights and colours in front of her. She couldn’t tell anyone about the Amphitheatre, the lack of Green Jacks, Cartimandua’s cold and calculating presence. Somehow she had to pretend this was just one of her mother’s plots. And convince Kiri there was no slipping out of this particular noose.

  The video looped, playing again and again.

  Pink moon, red dust, green blood.