06

THE LAST TIME MILO ALLOWED himself to be on the receiving end of a psychic reading, Arthur Piers had still been breathing.

This is the way Milo's brain works, dividing his life into two parts. Life before, and life after the accident; his memories categorising themselves into a dysfunctional Venn diagram constructed of circles that never overlap.

Set on the coffee table before him are two dark ceramic bowls filled with water—his past and his future. Like the two halves of his brain, they remain apart; two separate entities that will never meet.

Though Milo and his father had little in common, the one thing they had always shared was their lack of psychic intuition. While his mother and Valerie would spend hours interpreting tea leaves in hushed tones, Milo would sit cross-legged on the workbench in the garage with his head in a Greek mythology book while his father tinkered away at the same car for hours on end. In a way, their family had been a lot like the disjointed Venn diagram in Milo's head; the two halves of the household operating on two vastly different planes, with one of them being mostly astral and the other being everything inbetween.

"Milo," Lenore says, her lilted voice softer than usual, pulling him straight from his thoughts. She pushes a small stone across the table towards him. "You know the drill."

After a moment's hesitation, Milo takes the stone. It's smooth and barely the size of his palm. He looks to Valerie who's standing arms crossed in the archway between the kitchen and the lounge room with questions in his eyes but she answers him with an indifferent shrug. Beside him, Anais taps her foot with what could either be impatience or anticipation. The clock on the opposite wall—a slightly misshapen moon with wobbly numbers painted by an eight-year-old Milo's unsteady hand—marks each passing second with a rattling tick tick tick.

The room holds its breath as they wait for Milo to place his stone in a bowl. Pick one. It's not that hard.

He drops the stone in a bowl on the left, feeling his stomach drop with it.

Lenore leans back in her chair, the cheap wood creaking with the motion. "I think it's best we start with the past, don't you?"

Though her words form themselves as a question, Milo knows he really doesn't have a choice in the matter, so he nods.

"Same thing as always, hon. You're going to take my hand for clarity and Anais's to keep you grounded, okay?"

Milo nods again, his brain filled with so many thoughts that he can't find the right ones to put into words.

"Whenever you're ready."

Milo takes Anais's hand first, before stirring the bowl he had chosen anti-clockwise, dragging his free hand lightly across the glass-like surface of the water. He can't tell whether his hand is sweating or Anais's, but he grips tighter when he finishes stirring. This is the easy part, he thinks. You know what you're going to see, so stop freaking out.

But knowing doesn't always make it any easier.

Milo takes Lenore's hand from across the table. He hears a shifting from Valerie's direction. She's probably picking up on how much nervous energy he's giving off right now. Probably.

Milo closes his eyes for a moment, clearing his head and his thoughts. He takes a deep breath, letting the scent of sage and Lenore's musky perfume and Anais's earthy scent ground him. He opens his eyes and gazes into the dark bowl.

- ✧ -

It was raining.

Milo watched as droplets raced each other down the fogged glass of the car windscreen. Some murky jazz tune was crooning from the radio, barely audible over the rain battering against the vehicle. The sun had been absent from the sky for what could have been minutes or hours. Time felt slow.

"What's on your mind, Mi?"

This was Arthur Piers's favourite question as much as it was Milo's least favourite. What was on his mind? Even Milo wasn't quite sure.

"Nyx — goddess of the night, born from Chaos — is one of the most powerful deities in Greek myth, yet, no one talks about her nearly as much as Zeus or Hades" he says earnestly. "She's very underrated."

Arthur laughed, though not unkindly. "You need to find a new hobby."

"Like dismantling cars and putting them back together just for the fun of it?"

"Precisely," his father said. "Cars are far easier to understand than people. Or history for that matter. You can take them apart, see what's under the hood. No surprises, no debating over how they made the pyramids, no trying to interpret what people mean when they say the dress code is smart casual. Cars don't ask for much."

Milo pondered this. It struck him as a dichotomy of sorts that Arthur Piers, an avid journalist with a particular affinity for delving into the lives of others, preferred the simplicity of a motor engine over the human psyche.

"Why do you write, then?" Milo asked.

His father was silent for a beat before simply stating, "I'm also rather fond of seeking truths. You can have more than one hobby."

This answer satisfied Milo. He too was a fan of truth-seeking, with the exception of his fondness for Greek myth, which was stretch when it came to truth-telling.

Just as an upbeat saxophone solo began to blare out from the radio, the car started to cough and splutter. Milo heard his father hiss a sharp curse as the vehicle quickly lost traction on the rain-slicked road. A cacophony of screeching tires distorted jazz filled Milo's ears, but only for a moment. Time began to slip like sand through his fingers. Everything was fast and bright and pain wass an object; a knife in his side; blades against his skin.

And then there was the silence. The deafening silence that screamed of imminent death and undoing.

And then there was the radio. The crackling white noise that surrounded him. He was still fumbling through the darkness, staring into the void that spread out as far as his consciousness could see, but the muted hissing grew louder until Milo's ears were filled with it.

It began as a hushed whisper; the hissing of rain against fresh leaves, the rustling of restless forest-dwelling creatures, the old bones of a tree creaking in the wind. Milo feels time's familiar tug once more.

Wake up. Wake. Up.

- ✧ -

When Milo resurfaces, Anais is tugging at his sleeve. He blinks warily at her and she stops. He presses his thumb to his wrist.

"Sorry," she says, almost sheepishly, "You were getting too distant."

Her gaze is searching his. Milo turns away, hastily wiping his eyes with the heels of his palms.

"When you're ready Milo," Lenore says in her gentle psychologist tone, "I think we should start talking about any connections between your memories and the dreams you've been having. Then we should consider looking into your potential future."

Milo doesn't say anything because he finds that he can't. His heart is a hummingbird caught in the cage of his ribs, fluttering frantically against his chest. His muscles are tense, bracing for an impact that's already occurred. His collarbone aches. All his words have long died in his throat.

Valerie, who is no longer leaning with deliberate nonchalance but standing rigidly beneath the kitchen's archway, frowns at Milo. It's an expression derived not from spite, but concern, a look that Valerie rarely indulges in. It barely lasts more than a second, though, before she proceeds to check her nails with studied indifference.

"I say we continue this another time," she says without betraying any emotion or elaborating further.

An invisible weight lifts from Milo's slumped shoulders. He drops his head in relief, or defeat, or both, and stares at his grubby knock-off converse.

Without looking up, Milo senses an exchanged look between his mother and sister. A code between clairvoyants and females that he's been long excluded from.

"Yes, " Lenore says, voice similarly devoid of emotional influence. "That's probably for the best."

And just like that, it's over.

Except Milo knows that tonight, once again, he will dream of somebody else's blood staining his hands.