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to Ketamine, but were much weaker, and in combination with other elements. Jeremy once hoped he’d be able to synthesize the herbs, but Nostradamus and the Obscure Masters were too clever for that. He’d been given just enough to accomplish his initiation task.
    How many doses were left in the bag? Ten? Should be plenty.
    Carried by the steam, a bitter almond smell rose to his nose. Impatient, he took a sip and scalded his tongue. His body shivered, but Jeremy refused to give in to the pain. It was, after all, all about control. Whoever kept it the longest got the most toys.
    Cup in hand, he headed back upstairs. Before returning to his own room, he checked in on his parents. They lay in a beautiful king-size Tempur-Pedic bed that conformed to the exact shape of their bodies. They were right next to each other, covered by satin sheets, heads and hair resting on satin pillowcases. Their teacups lay atop a neatly folded New York Times on Father’s bed table. Jeremy pictured Father placing them there carefully, the way he did everything, arranging things perfectly before taking what he thought would just be a little nap.
    The long fingers of Mother’s artist’s hands were above the sheet, intertwined peacefully above her navel. Father’s skin was placid. The worry wrinkles in his face had all but disappeared. They seemed much younger, too, both perfectly peaceful, perfectly perfect.
    And dead.
    Dead, dead, dead.
    As if they had ever existed to begin with.
    Jeremy took another sip. A slight dizziness washed his senses, numbing him to the liquid’s heat. As he returned to his room, he gulped the rest and placed the empty cup on the chessboard and sat in front of the huge picture window with its grand city view.
    When he next inhaled, he also felt himself exhale. And though he worked to slow his breathing, he couldn’t be sure if it was the breath he was taking that slowed, the one he’d just taken, or the one he was about to take.
    This also was an effect of the tea. A special tea, centuries old.
    He didn’t think he’d been lucky to find it, only that it was the end of a logical sequence of events, the result of all his hard work, his achievements, his hours of study and exercise.
    Of course to the un initiated, it all would’ve looked like an accident, especially the way he opened his locker on the first day of junior year and just found the old library book of prophecies by Nostradamus lying there as if left by a careless student. At the time, even he thought it was an accident. He was going to return it to the school library, try to earn some points with the staff, but something about it intrigued him, and he found himself poring over the age-yellowed pages.
    At the time, Jeremy Gronson didn’t believe for a second that those silly little poems predicted the future, but his parents had insisted he do an extra-credit assignment for probabilities and statistics class, and the book had given him an idea. Nostradamus was famous, world-famous. If Jeremy could understand how his poems worked, why they appealed to so many people, he figured he could design a computer program to generate equally appealing predictions.
    That would net him an A-plus for sure. And just in case his program really did wind up predicting the future, he could use it to invest in the stock market and achieve financial freedom from his parents by the time he graduated.
    At the time, he thought that last part was just a fantasy. Nevertheless, he studied the Nostradamus quatrains the way he studied everything else, the way his late tutor, Mr. Chabbers, had made him study: completely, thoroughly, doggedly. He looked not so much at the words, but searched for similarities, patterns, a formula.
    Months later, he found one, but not at all the sort he expected. The predictions actually contained a code, based on equidistant letter sequences. If you took all of Nostradamus’s quatrains, ordered in the way he had