wait.
A small African-American woman appears from a back hallway, wiping her hands on a towel that’s stuck into the waistband of her jeans. She has on the standard Berkeley black fleece jacket, but her hair is a mass of tiny braids, each with a bead or shell on the end that makes a faint clacking sound as she walks.
“Come on in,” she says as she approaches us. “Put your stuff down anywhere. You must be Cole—so glad you could come! I’m Janine.”
Her energy is so warm and welcoming that I can’t help but relax a little. “Thanks,” I say.
Janine grabs my right hand in both of hers, as much to feel the vibrations as a greeting, I suspect. As she touches me, I get a strong sense of excitement and confidence from her.
“Janine!” Griffon’s voice has a touch of irritation in it. “Leave her alone. She just got here.”
She unclasps my hand, and the feelings immediately vanish. “Settle down, Grif. No harm in trying.” A look of concern crosses her face. “How’s your head? Griffon told me about last night.”
I glance at him, wondering what else he told her. “It’s better, thanks.”
“Are you hungry?” she asks, leading the way back to the kitchen. “It’s going to take me awhile to get it all together, but I’ve got some snacks laid out on the island.”
We follow her back into a brightly lit kitchen dominated by a huge, stainless-steel stove that’s covered with steaming pots. Loud hip-hop music is coming from a small iPod in the corner. “I picked up some samosas at Vic’s,” she says, indicating the fried dumplings laid out on the wooden island top. “We’re not having Indian, but I’ll use any excuse to get samosas from there. Grif, why don’t you grab the plate and go into the front room? I’ll call you when it’s time to set the table.”
Griffon leads me to the living room, which is almost dwarfed by a shiny black baby grand piano. He sets the plate on the coffee table, while I sit on the piano bench and let my fingers wander gently over some of the keys. I don’t know much about piano, but even I can tell that this is an expensive instrument.
“Do you play piano too?” he asks, sitting down beside me.
I poke a key so that one lonely note hangs in the air. “No,” I say. “Kat did for a while. It’s funny; other than the cello, I’m not all that musical. Mom tried to get me to take piano lessons when I was little, but I wasn’t that into it.”
“Hmm. Guess that rules out you being a concert pianist in another life.”
“What, like if I played piano before, then I probably could now?”
“Sure. That’s the way it usually works.”
I stare at him, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it on my own. “You mean, the reason I just ‘know’ how to play the cello is because I learned in another lifetime?”
Griffon gets up off the bench and walks toward the food. “Probably,” he says. “You learn something in one lifetime and you carry it over into the next, sometimes subconsciously. You probably played cello before, and there is enough of a break in your memories that allowed that knowledge to slip through. Bam—instant prodigy.”
A feeling of dread starts to grow in my stomach. It makes so much sense. As far back as I can remember, it felt like I just knew how to play, and all I had to do was train my body to match the ability I had inside. “So it doesn’t have anything to do with talent or hard work? It’s just memory?” It suddenly feels like my whole life has been a lie. The fact that I could play always seemed like magic. I don’t understand it, and in a lot of ways I don’t really want to, because somehow understanding it might make it suddenly vanish. But now it’s like the curtain has been pulled back, and there’s an angry little man at the controls. It’s not magic at all.
Griffon sees the look on my face. “Memory isn’t everything,” he says. “You still have to have the passion and the discipline to bring that memory forward in this lifetime.”
“But it’s not real,” I say. “It’s like I’ve been cheating this whole time.”
Griffon smiles. “Is it any more cheating than when you didn’t know the truth? When you just knew that you could pick up a bow and the notes flew like magic from your hands into the cello?” He looks at my hands and frowns. “Using what you’ve learned in each lifetime isn’t cheating. It’s what makes you special.”
Except I don’t feel special. I feel like a fake.
“So tell me what you know about this Akhet cellist,” Janine says as she passes me a bowl full of rosemary- scented potatoes. It’s a little disconcerting the way she says it as casually as other people ask about your day at school. How was English? Did you do okay on your test? Do you really think that you wronged Veronique in a past life and she’s out to get you?
“I don’t know all that much,” I admit. I spoon some potatoes onto my already loaded plate and pass the bowl to Griffon. I’ve never had such amazing vegetarian food before—it’s so good that I don’t miss the slab of meat that would have gone along with it at my house. I carefully pick the tomatoes out of my salad and put them on the side of my plate, hoping she won’t notice. If it was the last food on earth, I wouldn’t eat a tomato, but I don’t want to insult Janine. “She’s just one of my cello students.”
Janine doesn’t look surprised about Griffon being involved in my life. The way they interact reminds me more of roommates than mother and son—like there aren’t all that many secrets between them. “But you’ve never felt anything from her? No signs of danger, no uneasy feelings?”
“There have been some memories when I’m with her,” I say, not really wanting to admit to anyone, even myself, that Alessandra and Veronique might be connected. It makes Griffon’s theory that much more possible.
Griffon puts his fork down. “There have been? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t really connect the two of them before. I’ve had visions of being a cellist. I think I’m from Italy, but we’re in San Francisco. There’s another girl there, a little older than me. Her name is Alessandra. But this is where it doesn’t make any sense: in everything I’ve seen, she’s really nice to me. We’re friends. If Veronique really is Alessandra, I’m not seeing anything dangerous at all.” I picture Alessandra onstage with her cello. “But if Alessandra could play cello so well in that lifetime, why can’t Veronique play it in this one? Wouldn’t she carry that with her like you said?”
“Maybe she can,” he says. “Maybe she really can play, and is just pretending she can’t to stay close to you.”
“I think I’d be able to tell,” I say. Veronique is getting better, but I don’t think anyone can fake it that well.
“Not everything comes through every time,” he says. “Especially if you’re still a young Akhet. If she’s not Iawi, it’s possible that she didn’t bring that ability with her in this lifetime. Not likely, but possible.”
Janine chews thoughtfully and then glances at Griffon. “So you think she’s Shewi?”
Griffon shrugs his shoulders. “Not Shewi. She didn’t feel like a new Akhet. Rogue, maybe. She’s definitely hiding something. Something to do with Cole.”
“What do you mean, ‘rogue’?” I ask, trying to keep up with the conversation.
“Rogue Akhet aren’t part of the Sekhem, the organization most older, Iawi Akhet belong to.”
“What’s that? Some sort of Akhet secret society?” This was sounding more and more like an Indiana Jones movie.
“Sort of. It’s … it’s more like a way to organize what we’re all here to do,” Griffon says. “The ways we give back. Fix things.”
“Like what things?” I ask. Janine and Griffon exchange glances across the table.
“Everything,” Janine finally says. “Everything that humans have helped screw up over the millennia—hunger, poverty, disease, climate change. Anything that threatens our continued existence. Each Akhet becomes specialized over time, using the skills they have to keep improving and working on a specific issue through each lifetime. As your abilities increase, your responsibility to the Sekhem increases.” She spears another potato with her fork. “In any case, Griffon isn’t usually wrong about these things.”
“But how do I find out what Veronique wants?” I say, growing uneasy with the conversation. “And more importantly, what can I do about it?”
“It’s hard to say,” she says. “Sometimes rogue Akhet just want to disrupt your life. Throw some trouble into
