The Diviners (The Diviners, #1)

by Libba Bray

They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes.

The Misses Proctor wore their long gray hair curled like turn-of-the-century schoolgirls. The effect was odd and disconcerting, like porcelain dolls who had aged and wrinkled.

“What do they teach in schools these days? We’re going to have a nation of creationists with no grasp of history.” “Then I suppose it’s lucky you’re tutoring me.” “Yes. Well,” Will said uncertainly before settling into lecturing mode. “The Chinese Exclusion Act was a law designed to keep more Chinese from coming here once they’d finished building our railroads. They couldn’t bring their families over. They weren’t protected by our laws. They were on their own.” “Doesn’t sound terribly American.” “On the contrary, it’s very American,” Will said bitterly.

Now she saw it as just another advertisement for a life that belonged to a previous generation and held no meaning for hers.

“But Miss Proctor, that’s quite impossible,” Evie said as gently as possible. “It’s an impossible world,” Miss Lillian said, smiling. “Drink your tea, dear.”

“But those are just stories people tell,” Evie said. The headache was spreading out behind her eyes. “There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense—words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions—words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.”

She hadn’t really thought of her uncle as very human. He was more like a textbook who occasionally remembered to put on a tie.

“When the world moves forward too fast for some people, they try to pull us all back with their fear,”

trees with bark like skinned knees stood guard,

She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.