Miss Mackey took Rose’s hands in hers and studied the palms. Rose’s hands began to feel hot and itchy. Miss Mackey let go and began to look at Jerram’s hands. While she was doing this Rose’s hands grew cool. But as soon as Miss Mackey touched them again, heat tingled up through her fingers into her arms.

“You don’t have similar palms, but then you’re not identical twins,” she said. “Look here, Rose, this is important. Do you see this triangle formed by the lines of intuition, fate and head? This means you are unusually gifted with the power to see. Students of the occult covet such a mark. And yours has no flaws. It means a very high degree of power.”

Was Rose imagining the excitement in Miss Mackey’s voice? Her fingers tightened their grip on Rose until it hurt and she had to pull away. Miss Mackey looked up, startled.

“Let’s try something else now,” she said. “It will take a certain degree of intense concentration. I have a small mark of the seer on my own palm, and I have trained myself to engage with someone of like abilities.” There was the slightest trace of pride in her voice.

She asked Rose to sit in one of two straight-backed chairs she set up facing each other in the middle of the room. She sat in the other. Their knees touched. She reached out and placed her fingertips on Rose’s temples and asked Rose to do the same to her. Rose could see the fine lines etched on the pale papery skin of Miss Mackey’s face, hidden only slightly by a dusting of powder. She looked much older up close.

They sat in silence, and Rose tried hard to concentrate, to go deeply into herself, as Miss Mackey asked. The sounds in the room were at first intrusive, then slowly faded. She felt sleepy, the way she did sometimes when she read in bed, drifting off and waking up with a start. She tried to resist; Miss Mackey wouldn’t appreciate her taking a nap. But it was so warm and … the room receded into a swirl of colors, like a kaleidoscope gone mad. A sensation of dizzy falling that was not unpleasant, just that slight catch in the stomach, like when the swing used to go too high and come back down with such force you’d think to yourself that you’d discovered the secret of life, that you couldn’t. .. couldn’t… there was cold. Blackness. Emptiness. Terrible emptiness she had never known ever. A black place without sound or sensation, taste or smell. I am me, but I am not me, she thought. I am in a sea of nothingness. It was an emptiness that was final, eternal, dead.

Where are you, Rose? someone asked.

Nowhere.

Who do you see?

Nobody.