The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (excerpt)

Lilellia was dreaming of a newborn infant when her pager went off. It was a healthy child with a healthy pair of lungs, which it was exercising with gusto. Despite its squalling, or perhaps because of it, it gave Lilellia a profound feeling of peace to hold it in her arms. Then the infant's cries became the pager's electronic wail, and Lilellia woke. She woke all at once, from dream to urgent reality, like flipping a switch. She didn't need to read the pager's code to know why it was hollering at her. Today was the day. Today was her final exam, the first real live test of her education and abilities. She could not screw this up. Her career was on the line, and her entire future. Not to mention Kellen and the baby—but if Lilellia let herself think of them beyond what was necessary, she'd panic. So she didn't. She threw on clothes, grabbed her go bag, and pelted headlong from her dorm room.

As she bolted through the warren of streets and hallways that was the Royal Medical Academy, she realized that her dream had been a foretelling, her first since arriving here. She cursed. She'd thought, when she'd begun her apprenticeship, that she'd left foretellings behind with all her parents' rules and expectations, that she'd outgrown them along with the hated collection of baby dolls she'd pitched in the trash upon moving out. But the memory of that newborn infant had physicality and weight, as though she could pick it up and hold it, and compulsion, as though she must. All foretellings felt like that, like a package she was supposed to have delivered yesterday. Every time she passed someone in the passageways, she had to clench her teeth to keep from shouting, "It will be born alive and healthy! Everything will be all right!"

At least it was a good foretelling. No doom or gloom today....