The dressing room was too quiet. Claire knocked on the door. “Miranda? Hey, come out and take a look at this. Tell me if it’s too much.”

Miranda peeked around the edge, face gone ghost pale. Her eyes were dark, with that blank stare that people found so weird.

She was having one of her things. A vision.

“It has blood on it,” she said. “You shouldn’t buy it if it has blood on it.”

Claire looked down. The top was perfectly clean. “Mir—”

Miranda suddenly opened the door. She had on one of the tops she’d been trying on, and Claire had a hurried impression that it looked totally good on her, but the girl was focused on something else entirely. She grabbed up all of the clothes, headed straight for the counter, and said, “I need this one, this one, and the one I have on.” She put the buy pile down and then handed over the other one. “I just can’t see myself in this, though.”

Claire realized she meant that literally. As in, Miranda had looked into her future and couldn’t see herself actually wearing that top. Bizarre. The shopkeeper didn’t seem to get it, though—why would she?—and named her price. Miranda paid, and Claire barely had time to dig out five bucks for the pink-and-white top she had on before Miranda grabbed her arm and said, “We have to go. Hurry.”

“But—”

“Now!”

Miranda hurried her outside, down the sidewalk, and then quickly turned her left, into an alley between two buildings. “Hide there,” she said, and pointed. “Right there. Don’t come out, Claire. Don’t come out for anything. You understand? It’s okay. It’s going to be okay, but not if you come out.”

“Miranda, what in the hell—?”

Miranda’s face was chalk white now, but very determined. She looked down at herself and said, in a sad sort of voice, “It’s completely cute, isn’t it? This shirt?”

“Yes, it’s perfect. But what are you—?”

“Hush.” Miranda turned toward the mouth of the alley and pointed again into the shadows behind some trash cans. “Don’t come out!”

“Wait. What happens if I do?”

“I die,” Miranda said very simply. “Hide.”

Claire didn’t like it, but there was something utterly sure about what Miranda had just said, and for all that Claire didn’t believe in psychic predictions and that sort of stuff, she couldn’t deny that there was something about Miranda. Something weird and powerful, at times.

So she pressed herself into the shadows.

For a long few seconds, nothing happened, and then she heard footsteps. Confident high-heel taps that echoed off the bricks, then slowed and came to a stop.

“I saw you come in here,” said Gina’s voice. “Freak. Hiding in dark alleys now? What’s that about? You live in a Dumpster? Not that I’d be surprised.”

Miranda didn’t answer. Claire almost stepped out, because Gina was alone, and anyway, there was no way she was going to let Miranda face her down alone, no matter what Mir had said about it.

As if the girl knew what she was thinking, her hand moved behind her back and made a pushing motion. Stay there.

And Claire did. She didn’t like it, but she did.

“You’re going to hit me,” Miranda said. “You’re going to break my nose.”

“Damn straight,” Gina said. She sounded lazy and happy, as if she was enjoying all this. “You’re lucky that’s all I want to do. If you move, if you fight back, you’re going to get it worse. Understand?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “I understand. If I don’t let you hit me, you’re going to kill me.”

Claire actually felt a tremor of chill run through her, like a wave, because there was just no doubt in Miranda’s voice at all. It wasn’t scared. It was just…factual, as if she’d already seen it happen.

“You’re smarter than you look, you spaced-out nutcase. So, yeah. Let me break your nose, and I’ll let you walk away. You fight, and it gets worse and the knife comes out. We’re clear?”

“Yes.”

Claire tried to move again, because she knew with a nightmarish certainty what was going to happen and that she had to do something, had to, but again, Miranda made that stay put motion.

“It’s okay,” Miranda said in an eerily empty, remote voice. “It’s not going to hurt that bad.”

“Bullshit,” Gina said, and she must have hit her, because Claire heard the wet crunch of the punch and Miranda’s thin little cry, and then the sound of a body falling.

Gina laughed. Claire pushed off from the wall, but it was too late. Gina was walking off, humming to herself while she went. If she hadn’t been wearing high heels, she’d have been skipping.

Miranda was getting up already, holding her broken, bleeding nose in one hand. Claire, angry and shocked, trembling with the sudden rush of frustrated adrenaline, started to go after Gina, but Mir grabbed her and shook her head furiously—and as she did, some of the blood gushing from her nose spattered Claire’s new pink-and-white shirt. Claire didn’t care at all. She crouched down next to the girl, helping her stand and holding her steady.

“That bitch!” Claire said. “You stay here. I’ll—”

“No!” Miranda said. Her voice was muffled and small, but her eyes were wide and fierce. “It’s the best thing. It’s only my nose. She’d kill us.”

“Then we’re calling the cops. I am not letting her get away with this….”

“Oh, don’t worry. She won’t,” Miranda said. And beneath the blood, Claire was almost sure she smiled. “She’s going to get in her car and drive real fast, and in two minutes she’s going to run a red light. And then she’s going to get hit by a big truck. My nose will set straight. She’s going to the hospital, and she’ll be there for a while.”

Claire stared at her, this little, fragile girl with her bloody face and scary smile. Finally she said, slowly, “Mir, did you plan for that to happen?”

“No,” Miranda said. “But sometimes it just happens the right way after all. It wouldn’t have been right if you’d come to help me, though. She’d have stabbed me, right here, and then you, and she’d have died, too, but later and a lot worse. Amelie wouldn’t have liked it.”

It was fascinating and freaky, but Claire believed her. Every weird and scary word of it. She shook it off, with difficulty, and took Miranda back into the resale shop, where the clerk got her cleaned off, packed her nose with tissue, and even helped Claire sponge off the blood from her shirt.

As she did, Claire heard the distant sound of a car horn, then a crash, and then silence. She looked over at Miranda, who’d tilted her head back to slow the bleeding, and Miranda glanced back and shrugged.

“Karma,” she said. “It’s a bitch.”

Miranda was dead right about Gina, not that Claire had any doubts; the accident was the talk of Morganville for days, and opinions were mostly on the “yay, finally” side of the scale. Gina had earned her suffering, not that Claire took much pleasure in it. She’d be weeks in the hospital and months in rehabilitation for the broken legs.

Miranda showed up the next morning for coffee, and the morning after, as if it had been planned that way. She probably saw it as inevitable, which it was, once she started showing up. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Eve thought it was weird, but she accepted it the way she accepted most things. It wasn’t that she disliked Miranda; she just didn’t know what to make of her, Claire thought. And she was fascinated by Miranda’s psychic abilities.

Though she was just as shocked and fascinated by the spectacular bruises on Miranda’s face and around her eyes. Double black eyes, and a swollen nose that had been reset at the hospital. “You look awful,” Eve said on the second morning. “What color is that? Eggplant? You look like a special effect, Mir.” She poured Miranda a cup of coffee and set out the milk and sugar.

“It’s okay,” Miranda said. Her voice sounded a little muffled and congested, but she was smiling. “It’s just a bruise. Nothing much.”