Derive by Jamie Magee Read Free Book Online Page A

me, trying to line us up, trying to find a reason why we were here today, but the visions she was showing me manifested a past we had not yet lived. I was witnessing a story that had not happened, seeing the consequence before the action.
    “Did you witness this?” I breathed. I had to figure out how to stop this.
    “He showed me.”
    “Who?”
    “I don ’t…” She was trembling now. I released her hands and slowly moved my hands up her arms, trying to comfort her. She sighed as if she found some kind of relief from the confusion. “He was an older man. I was sitting with him beside a shore before a fall of water or something. I saw all of this, I felt all of this…this life.”
    “Did he take you there? Do you remember where you were before that?”
    She moved her head from side to side. “Nothing. I…I remember becoming anxious because I didn’t like what I saw. I begged him to help me change it.”
    “Did he put a price before you?” I knew of many dark things on the other side of The Fall, and if any one of them had cursed her, cursed us, I had no idea what I would do—but I would not be sane. That much was certain.
    “No, not at all.” She smiled a little. “He told me…he said we were the solution.”
    “To what?”
    “I don’t know. I argued with him. I know that I did. I told him that it was cruel, that it made no sense for me to search so fiercely for someone I had never met, for me to endure such horrible things for the mere idea of someone.”
    I raised one brow. Logic was telling me the same thing, but the urgent way our souls were pulling each other together at that moment was arguing that fact.
    Before I walked into this room, she was an angel I wanted to know; now after seeing all of that, she was a lover that I knew better than my own soul.
    “He said that he would remedy that.”
    “Remedy?”
    She nodded once. “He said he was going to give us the rare gift.” Her eyes glassed over. “The rarest gift of all…entering a life with all the emotions and lessons, with only one task.” Her voice quaked. “Not forgetting them.”
    “I’m not going to forget you,” I swore without a thought.
    One lonely tear rolled down her cheek. As it glided down her porcelain skin, I could swear I felt a blade slicing through my heart. That was the underlying issue in each image she gave me. She was searching endlessly for me, knowing what my energy felt like, knowing I was hers, and I was blind. I was lost.
    “Three days. He said that three days would bind us. He said we would feel the end before the beginning ever came.” She reached to wipe away a second wayward tear.
    What was so frustrating was that I could not see the time she witnessed this. I could not see or hear the man that had forecast this future that was played out as if it were a past before my eyes.
    “Did he seem cruel to you? Did he use words or statements that could be seen in more than one way—did he tell you to do something to avoid this?”
    “I was at peace with him. If it wasn ’t for that, I would have far more fear for what I saw, what I felt. His words were simple and few. He never asked me for anything or told me what to do to avoid all of this. He just gave me the three days, the emotions.”
    I glanced away. Three days. That wasn ’t enough time. I felt defensive and protective all at once. I felt like a starving man that had had a feast laid before him and was told not to touch it.
    “What else did he say?”
    Heat flamed her cheeks as she cast her stare away from me.
    “I…I questioned how I could show you what was before you, how I could convince you that we were one.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “He told me that just as the soul is divided, created, and just before they become one once again, they know who the other is without the foundation of time, reason, and logic.”
    Logic, my own personal evil…
    We knew the end, and we knew if we felt such a gripping ending, then the fight to get to