Chains and Memory by Marie Brennan

the intern’s capable of.” That part was obvious.
    The locker was less to keep anyone from stealing my cards, more to keep them shielded from outside influence. Companies like FAR practiced a vastly higher level of psychic hygiene than I’d ever bothered with at college. Then again, nobody at Welton had ever asked me to produce a statistical analysis of the probabilities I sensed, either. They saved that kind of thing for the grad students.
    I took my cards out of their silver-lined alcove and grabbed a map of the United States on my way to one of the divination rooms. I would save the pendulum and the planchette for after lunch, when I buckled down to try and get regional detail, but for now the map could stand in for the querent. These kinds of impersonal questions were much harder to get a read on — and truth be told, even if I hadn’t formed an ambition to become a Guardian, FAR’s line of work was not the kind of divination I wanted to do. It was just too abstract. But the experience was valuable, and I enjoyed the challenge of bending my mind in new directions.
    All the standard divination rooms were permanently shielded against the outside world. Even the best-built shields, though, got weakened by doors opening and people passing through, so there was a framework built into the walls and windows that made it easy to add a second layer once I was inside. Then, just for practice, I constructed a third layer, this one without the framework to assist. It was the main thing Julian had been able to teach me, after studying it so intensively with Grayson.
    FAR wasn’t paying me to conduct shielding practice, though. I laid out the map and my cards, then opened the file and read it through properly.
    The client’s name was missing, but that was no surprise; Adam routinely stripped out identifying information, in case it might bias the reading. This particular file was especially short on concrete details, though. They hadn’t provided a list of specific substances they were worried about — or if they had, Adam had redacted that, too. Probably it had never been there to begin with. They were more interested in effect trends, the kinds of experiences or results people were going to be seeking. I frowned at that. Without individual drugs to use as focal points, it was going to be damned hard to separate chemically-induced effects from the broader social trends of the nation.
    Well, I had told Adam I would try. I sat cross-legged on the floor and meditated for a time, focusing on the thrill and danger of the illicit; that would at least help me filter out some of the psychic noise. I probably should have spent some time researching the topic before coming in here. No doubt Adam had noticed my failure to do so. I’d have to make up for that during lunch, before I dug into the statistical details.
    Those thoughts weren’t helping me at all. I cleared my mind, focusing instead on my breathing. What mattered was the gift, more than anything else. My precognitive instincts, and my ability to listen to them.
    When I felt ready, I pulled the Moon from the deck to be my significator, then shuffled, cut, and began to lay the cards out.
    For a reading like this, where I’d been given a minimal amount of context, I liked to use a Wheel layout. I’d chosen the Moon as my significator because of its associations with illusion, change, madness, and more; it seemed an appropriate match for a drug-related question. Around it I set the first four cards: the nine of swords to the left, the two of pentacles reversed to the right, and then the six of pentacles reversed above, and the five of pentacles below.
    The two of pentacles worried me the moment I laid it down. I didn’t know yet what kind of trouble we were looking at, but the right-hand position stood for the near future, and that card said things were going to come crashing down pretty fast. Pentacles also indicated money, so