If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late by Pseudonymous Bosch

house, being grounded often means losing privileges of various kinds. The problem for Cass’s mother was that Cass didn’t seem to mind having things taken away. Or at least she didn’t let on if she did. (Cass knew she was going to be punished; she figured she should just grin and bear it.)
    They were in the kitchen when her mother set down the rules — Cass eating cereal at the counter, her mother opening, and then slamming shut, cabinet doors at random.
    The conversation went something like this:
    Mom: “And there will be no extracurricular activities of any kind!” Slam.
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “I’m taking away your cell phone!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “And no television!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “No Internet!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “Nothing fun whatsoever!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “And no dessert!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “No Thai food — not even pad thai!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “OK, fine — then no dinner at all!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “All you get is gruel!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “I’m taking away your bed!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “You’ll sleep on the floor in chains!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “Fine!”
    Cass: “Fine.”
    Mom: “Fine! Fine! Fine! Is that all you can say? Fine — then you know what, you can just leave this house right now! And don’t come back!”
    Cass: “So then you mean I’m not grounded?”
    Mom: “Oh, you are so grounded! You can’t believe how grounded you are! You’re not leaving this house ever!”
    The transition from screaming fight to mutual mother-daughter silent treatment was nearly instantaneous. An unrelenting quiet fell over the house like a miserable spell of weather. And it seemed it would never lift.
    They both sought distraction wherever they could find it — anything to relieve the tedium that overtook their household.
    Before Cass was grounded, when salespeople had called, Cass’s mother always hung up or shouted a few choice invectives into the phone; now she engaged salespeople in long conversations about the weather in India or the Philippines or Macao, while Cass tried to eavesdrop and pick up information about the world without letting her face show any interest.
    In an effort to make her time more productive, Cass pretended being grounded was a Terces Society survivalist training exercise.
    Although her mother never made good on her threat to take away her bed, Cass slept on the floor anyway. What food she ate she ate standing up — and with her hands. And in her spare time, she taught herself the entire alphabet in Morse code: she didn’t want to be caught unawares the next time Max-Ernest tapped her on the shoulder with an emergency message.
    Indeed, she became so proficient at Morse code that she decided that from here on in, all Morse communications with Max-Ernest should be backward:
Esrom code,
they could call it.
    That is, if she ever got to communicate with Max-Ernest again.
    One evening after dinner, not long after the grounding began, Cass told her mother — truthfully — that she was going upstairs to study. What she didn’t tell her mother was that she meant
study the Sound Prism.
    She sat on her bed and turned it around in her hand, tracing the silver band with her finger and peering into the hundreds of little holes. How was this ball of sound supposed to help her find the homunculus? Was it as simple as listening until she heard him? How would she recognize the homunculus’s voice when she did?
    If he even had a voice.
    Suddenly, she overheard her mother talking. The walls in their house were quite thick, and normally any sounds coming from downstairs were muffled and unintelligible. But Cass could hear her as plainly as if they were in the same room:
    “I always meant to tell her,”
her mother was saying,
“but it never seemed like the right time. And now she’s getting older, and I’m so afraid of losing her. . . . I know she’s a smart girl — she’ll figure it