Etched in Bone

To: Jackson Wolfgard

We found Meg. She sprained her ankle and has to use crutches for a while. Her brain is a little strange right now, but she’ll get better. Tell Hope her vision drawing helped the police pack find the bad human’s car, so Meg wasn’t lost very long.

—Simon

Dear Meg,

Steve Ferryman and a woman named Sally Esposito came to see me at the Gardners’ farm yesterday. They told me you had been abducted, but you were missing for a few hours at the most, and you’re safely back at the Lakeside Courtyard now. They told me the man had cut you across old scars and had made the new cuts too close and too deep so they reopened while you were captive. They said you’ve been having “episodes.”

I have “episodes.” I guess that’s why they wanted to talk to me. When I told them what I could remember about the times when old and new prophecies collided—and continue to collide even now, even when I haven’t made a new cut—Sally Esposito said it sounded like whenever something provided a trigger that unlocked some of the memories of old prophecies, my mind spewed out the images in a dreamlike jumble—a visual hairball I cough up to feel better. (She didn’t say “spew” or “hairball”; she used nicer words, but it amounted to the same thing.)

But there is something I didn’t tell them. Something you need to know. Those episodes show me terrible and terrifying things. Bizarre things, like a huge chicken with a cow’s legs and a goat’s head. Images that got stuck together because, while the parts belong to animals, the whole doesn’t make sense. A jumble, like Sally Esposito said. But since I came to live at the farm with the Gardners, whenever I have one of those episodes, there is always one image that appears every time, whole and unchanging. For me it’s the image of someone handing me a jar of honey. I saw that image when I was still in the compound, and it was something Lorna Gardner did the first day I came to stay with them.

I think you have a constant thing too, something you can trust when you’re not sure what is real and what is a vision. You know what it is. You recognize the symbol for it. Hold on to your talisman until you heal. You’re strong, Meg. You won’t have these episodes forever. And, hopefully, neither will I.

Your friend,

Jean