Dark Oracle by Alayna Williams

her throat. They all knew this to be true, but none had spoken of it. None of them would dare.
    The Pythia’s ruby lips curved upward. A fracture of light blistered through the apple of her cheek, as if her skin was a paper-thin vessel holding a great and terrible light. The light cast shadows of her eyelashes below her brow, giving the illusion that a spidery creature clawed through her eye socket, trying to escape that burning within.
    The fire blazed out and stung Adrienne. With a crackle, it licked and bubbled the skin of her jacket. The smell of scorched flesh filled the air; Sophia couldn’t tell whether it was all leather or partly living skin. Adrienne snarled and fled to the waves to quench the burn.
    “Very good, Sophia.” The Pythia smiled serenely, as the fire subsided. “You did exactly as I expected you would, as I foresaw. You are bringing Juliane’s daughter back to me.”
    Sophia’s eyes slid to the waves, where Adrianne held her arm, hissing, in the whitecaps. Such hatred in the girl’s glare. . . Sophia knew Adrianne would not give up the role of Pythia without a fight.
    And she feared what that meant for Tara.

Chapter Four
    T ARA RUBBED her wet hair with a thin motel towel. Her hair felt dry as straw, and her skin was scrubbed beet-red. The army had decontaminated her within an inch of her life before she’d been cleared to leave the site. She felt raw all over from the humiliating experience of being scrubbed with a cold car wash brush in the decon tent. She’d emerged smelling like lemon dish soap. Though it hurt, her first impulse when she’d gotten to the motel was to scrub that artificial smell from her body with a warm shower.
    Through the steam in the mirror, she could see the scars traveling up over her collarbone like lightning, across her chest, where they puckered beneath her left breast. They crossed over her hipbone like a vine, clawed up her right arm. One thigh was dotted in a rippling white scar, as if a stone had been cast on a still pond, disturbing the surface. The scars went deep; Tara had been told she would never have children. Though that had never been in her life plans, she still hated the Gardener for taking that right away from her.
    Tara never really looked closely at the scars. Looking brought too many feelings: helplessness, anger, fear. The wounds were long past the point of hurting. They simply felt stiff, as if there were laces wound around her ribs she couldn’t take off.
    The decontamination officers had looked at her with pity when they asked her to strip out of the white Tyvek suit and get into the shower. Tara did as she was told. There was a moment of silence as she stepped into the orange tent, teeth chattering from the cold. The decon officers surrounded her like plastic-swathed ghosts, but one of them worked up the nerve to ask.
    “What on earth happened to you, hon?” The woman tried to be gentle as she ran the plastic brush over her back.
    Tara had stared forward, had considered refusing to respond. But she did answer, shivering, teeth clattering as the hose blasted her, summoning all the false bravado she could. “You should see the other guy.”
    They took her camera away from her, but not before she’d had time on the walk back from the field to tuck the sliver of a memory card inside her cheek. The decon officers (the “doffers,” they called themselves) didn’t even suspect her of chewing gum.
    She did have to put up a fight about the watch. Tara had slipped Magnusson’s watch on her wrist, insisting it was hers. Her father’s watch. An heirloom. The doffers took it away from her, but the woman who had asked her about her scars slipped it back to her on the way out. Pity did have its currency.
    They kept the rest of her clothes and sent her out in a blue paper suit that zipped up the front. In her peripheral vision she thought she spied Corvus, but he walked away too quickly, probably imagining synchrotron radiation crawling up his pant