The weird thing about looking at someone and seeing their self laid bare in front of you for Hasibe, like this, is that it's not actually weird. It feels terribly natural, with an emphasis on terrible--she lacks any sense that this is something unusual, at least not by the standards of what she is. It's not so much seeing the future as the patterns of how not just people but the universe works, even this universe, with what is wearing at its seams (and she knows, now, what the fault is, what is waiting).

The biggest pattern she sees is that everyone is on borrowed time. It's not new, not even to humans, of course; there's waiting mortality for everything and everyone, even the ancient immortals floating around this city. They're all going to end, extinguished like licks of flame in the dark, more fragile than their power and age let them believe. Their energy goes out of them and into something else. This shell, too, will go someday, but she's not ready to let it leave her yet.

Once, she chose a card from a Tarot deck for herself, and no one understood why it was the Tower, this creature of calamity. It was because after this calamity you had to reinvent, to become again, as she'd done so many times before. The person that Ilde and the others know never really existed in the sense that one becomes who they are naturally, an easy result of their environment and social pressures: the thing that became Hasibe chose herself, her names, her identity. She crafted it, and it's given her a certain resilience. This is what is underneath.

In Ilde she sees many things: a little child in Italy, the hole that should be filled by an absent mother, her father's charms and weaknesses. She can see what comes next, too.

"You'll be okay," Hasi says. "After this. You should start thinking of names."

It's never too soon.