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that she was okay at least. Far away from this madness and okay.
    She tried to think logically through the series of events as they had happened. Heather hadn’t been competing that night in the Nationals fencing trials and hadn’t really felt like going. She knew Cal would be there to watch Mason compete, and every time she saw Cal those days, the experience invariably left her feeling drained and justplain weary. He seemed to actually get off on torturing himself over Mason, and now that Mason and Heather had become friends, Heather couldn’t stand the drama.
    So she’d actually been studying that night in the dorm common lounge, curled up in an easy chair and reading through her biology notes. The academy had felt strangely deserted, but Heather had also felt a kind of electricity in the air—like another thunderstorm was on its way. It had made her restless.
    And then Gwen had shown up.
    A few years older than Heather, Gwendolyn Littlefield was slight and almost elfin, a girl with spiky purple hair and a startlingly pretty face. She’d stepped furtively into the common room, her eyes wide and her pupils so dilated that Heather had wondered aloud if she was stoned or something.
    Gwen assured her she was not.
    Then she’d told Heather her name.
    Gwen Littlefield was a notorious figure around campus. The first student—the only one—to ever be kicked out of Gosforth. She’d been a few years ahead of Heather, who, even though she’d heard the stories at the time, hadn’t paid much attention and so would have been hard-pressed to pick Gwen out of a police lineup—even without the bright purple dye job.
    The academy administration had tried to keep the matter quiet at the time, but it had been a little hard to—especially when the subject in question had run howling like a maniac through the halls of the school one day, frantically predicting the demise of the captain of the rowing team . . . who’d then drowned in an apparent tragic accident.
    The very next day.
    Last night, Gwen had told Heather that the rowing incident hadn’t been a coincidence. Gwen could actually glimpse into the future. And what she’d seen . . . had been terrible.
    “Why are you telling me this?” Heather had asked her. “What does this have to do with me?”
    “It has very little to do with you ,” Gwen had answered. “It has everything to do with your friend Mason.”
    She then proceeded to tell Heather that Mason was in a world of trouble. She had wanted to warn Mason directly, but apparently, Gwen’s precognitive abilities wereoccasionally a little hazy on details—she had no idea where to even begin to look for her. But Heather did. After a moment, the girls had decided that it would be far better, and require much less explanation as to why Gwen had suddenly reappeared, if Heather was the one to relay the warning to Mason.
    And so that’s what she’d done.
    Heather had gone to find Mason Starling and warn her that she was in grave, possibly mortal, danger. As a by-product of Gwen Littlefield’s grim prediction, Heather now found herself in that exact same situation. She wondered if Gwen hadn’t just managed to turn her into some kind of instrument of a self-fulfilling prophecy in an attempt to avoid the very same fate: if Heather hadn’t delayed Mason when she was leaving the Columbia U gym, maybe Rory and Tag wouldn’t have caught up with her.
    Well, it’s pretty useless to speculate on that now, isn’t it?
    Heather had found Mason. She’d delayed Mason’s departure by those precious few moments. And one of the end results was that the next thing Heather knew, she was waking up with a sore jaw in a cargo transport compartment, with Taggert Overlea half carrying her through to the passenger car of an opulent, obviously privately owned train. . . .
    And she hadn’t seen Mason again.
    She’d gathered, from ensuing events, that somehow Mason had ended up on the top of one of the train cars—presumably in an