"I tried." Syssi sighed. "Last night, the night before that, and the one before that. I sat in Allegra's room and tried to summon a vision of Khiann."
Allegra amplified Syssi's gift just by being nearby. It didn't always work, but when it did, the visions were stronger and clearer than what Syssi usually achieved without her. The problem was that Allegra couldn't amplify what wasn't there.
"What happened?" Amanda glanced at her. "The wellspring dried up?"
"It would seem so. The Fates gave me nothing. Not even a flicker of anything. I sat there for an hour each night and got absolutely nothing."
"Maybe you were too anxious to relax your mind enough. You care too much."
"It's possible." Syssi stared out the window at the familiar landscape scrolling past. "It's disturbing. When I was trying to find out about Khiann before, the visions came. Not always what I asked for, they were either fragmented and confusing or showed me something else, but they came. Now there's just silence. I don't know what that means."
"It might not mean anything," Amanda said, trying to sound optimistic, either for Syssi's sake or her own. "Your visions have always been unpredictable. Sometimes they come when you summon them, sometimes they show up uninvited in the most awkward moments, and sometimes they don't come at all, no matter how hard you try."
"I know. But the timing is terrible."
"The timing is always bad. That's the Fates' specialty."
They lapsed into silence, and Syssi let herself sink into the rhythm of the drive. The canyon road narrowed as they approached the village, the trees thickening on either side.
"Big trees!" Allegra announced from the back seat.
Syssi wondered how much she'd understood from her conversation with Amanda. She'd been so quiet that Syssi had forgotten she was there.
"Big trees," she agreed.
"Dark," Allegra said as they entered the tunnel leading to the village. "Echo."
"Yes, sweetie. It's dark in the tunnel, and the engine noise echoes off the walls."
Amanda parked in her usual spot in the underground garage, and the instant the engine stopped, Evie woke up.
"Mama, nack!" she demanded.
"Told you." Amanda produced two large crackers from her bag and handed one to each girl. "That should tide them over until we get home."
They extracted the girls from their car seats, loaded them into their respective strollers, and as they emerged from the glass pavilion, Allegra pointed at things along the way, pausing between bites of cracker to narrate the world around her. Evie just watched silently and nibbled on her snack.
"Arezoo is probably at the new store, helping her mother and her aunts with the move. If we want to talk to her, we should stop there." Amanda angled her stroller toward the path that led behind the office building. "Besides, I want to see how it looks now compared to the old location."
"I was thinking the same thing. Soraya said they were hoping to transfer everything today."
The new grocery store had been completed a few days ago. It was a serious upgrade to their old location that had been too small for their needs. The converted residential house where Soraya and her sisters had crammed shelves into every room and turned the living room into a checkout counter had been charming in a scrappy, make-do-with-what-you-have kind of way, but it had also been impractical, and everyone was relieved to have a real store at last.
The path behind the office building wound down a slope toward a strip of flat land that had been carved from the mountainside. The structure seemed to grow out of the office building's basement, but it was an optical illusion since the office building had none. It had clean lines, a practical layout, and large windows that let in natural light. Construction debris still littered the path on both sides: stray boards, bits of plastic sheeting, and an abandoned bucket.
Syssi navigated Allegra's stroller around a pile of gravel.
"Watch that board," she called to Amanda, who was ahead of her.
"I see it." Amanda wheeled Evie's stroller around the offending plank. "They really need to clean this up. Someone's going to trip and break an ankle, especially those who are transporting things from the old location."
"The children," Syssi said. "Between Soraya and her sisters, they have their own clan."
The kids were still human and awaiting transition, which meant that their ankles were decidedly more fragile than those of immortals.
They found a cluster of people standing in front of the store, all staring upward at the sign above the entrance.
Pearl.
