Eye of the Storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

if there are support groups. There probably should be.  
    Mira shrugs at me. "I've never heard of a Mediator's family seeking out their children. Ever. Makes me wonder why."
    Yet another troubling question to add to the mountain of them.  
    "So how did my mother plan to help me? Knowledge is power and all that, blah blah blah, but she certainly never came to find me." Another disturbing thought; she must have known where I was my whole life. At least the early bits. Because of the Summit infusing our tea from earliest ages with their fabulous Potion of Geographically-Triggered Barfiness, she had to know I was stuck in Tennessee. And for the first decade or so, there's only a few places in each territory where Mediators are raised and trained.  
    Asher gives me a wry smile. "At first, I don't think she really knew. But every year, that fervor she felt got stronger. She knew you were getting closer to having to hold the sword. She got obsessed. I don't think I ever blamed her for it. She held down a job, worked her way up, got promoted to head librarian in Memphis at the central library. Eve managed somehow to compartmentalize her professional life and her drive to track down every ounce of Mediator lore she could, even while using her professional resources to access her personal obsession. I helped her as much as I could. She was desperate to be ready just in case she ever saw an opening." There Asher's eyes darken, her heavy-lashed eyelids dipping. "Fifteen years after you were born, Eve stumbled across something that…changed things."
    The pregnant woman has me now. I don't know what she's about to say, and I know any guess will be farther from the mark than the Earth is from Orion's arrow.  
    "Your mother discovered a discrepancy in Mediator history. Just a small one, and one that anyone who hadn't spent fifteen years delving into every book she could find on the subject would have glossed right over." To my surprise, Asher's upper lip is shiny with perspiration. She swallows. "There was mention of a Mediator from London in the diary of a Mediator from an Incan tribe in the late nineteenth century. He had a somewhat distinctive given name and a very common last name. Eve had a memory like flypaper. The second she saw that name, she went into a frenzy, tracked down the original reference and, to her, that was enough confirmation. I tried to tell her that there could have been two people called Hephaestus Johnstone, but she wouldn't hear it. Later she dug up census records from London that showed Hephaestus vanishing between 1885's census and 1890's census, and there was no death certificate. I started to believe her. When she combed through and cross-referenced the entire London Summit's death certificates with census records for a fifty year span and confirmed that every other Mediator of Hephaestus's age had a death certificate, I stopped doubting. Your mother discovered a hole in the Mediator foundation of territories."
    "Territories," I say flatly. Asher doesn't have to tell me about that hole. Mira and I know firsthand. "If that information was findable, why hasn't anyone else made the connection?"
    "You have to understand," Asher says. "Even scholars devoted to history and the historiography of the Summit don't hold a tea light to the research Eve did. People get their Ph.D's in five or ten years. Your mother made this her full time job for almost thirty. She read journal articles, scholarly theses, dissertations of every leader in the field. She sought out primary sources wherever she could find them. And after she found that, it was enough to sow doubt for her."
    "Doubt in what, the Summit?"
    The perspiration on Asher's face is now more than a sheen. It beads on her upper lip. Mira frowns, and Evis is still standing stock-still next to me with his fingers tight on the photo album.
    Asher nods, blinking at me.  
    I get it. I've seen that look. I know where I've seen it before — on Alamea Virgili.  
    "You're