Free Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) by Anna Silver Page A

standing over your shoulder telling you to breathe when you get a vision. Why are we doing all this?”
    “Because at first it doesn’t come easy. You have to relax enough to find the space inside yourself where anything can be. When you dream, it happens naturally but when you’re awake, you have to practice overcoming those obstacles and learn to shift your consciousness from this world to that one. Once you’ve done that a few times, it will come easier and easier and you can drop into that relaxed state any time you need to. Sometimes it will just come over you. But right now, you don’t even know what you’re looking for. What you’re asking is like asking why you can’t go straight to being best friends with someone you’ve never even met.”
    London scowled at Tora.
    “Sorry,” Tora offered. “Bad analogy. Just trust me and try to relax. When—when his face comes up, don’t resist. Let it be…and then push past it.”
    “If you’re so great at this, why don’t you do it?” London snapped.
    Tora pinched the bridge of her nose. “Because I only know how to look into the Astral for answers, that’s where I see the visions. I can’t affect it like you can.” Tora looked at her and fatigue was etched into the fine lines framing her face. “I think being Otherborn is what makes that possible in the rest of you.”
    “Okay, fine. Let’s go again,” London agreed, but she wasn’t at all convinced Tora actually knew what she was doing.
    “Just…think about the song. The one you wrote with Rye.” Tora’s face brightened a little as she hit on this notion.
    “Not helping…” London bristled. By now, even Tora knew the story about their song, Pauly’s warning, and then his death.
    “Don’t think about
him
, think about what it felt like to do something New—to create. Something in you relaxed. And something else in you opened up, and just like that, something New came through.”
    London tried to slip back to that place in her memory, a space of sheer joy like she’d never known before, of limitlessness. Really, it had been more like the song wrote itself. Like they just heard it, picked it out of the swarm of sounds and melodies that ever had and ever would exist. When it was done, it was hard to believe it was New at all. It had come so easily. How could that be wrong? Be criminal?
    “This road dead ends into another one,” Kim said from the driver’s seat. He leaned forward as if he could see farther ahead that way. “It’s paved.”
    “How paved?” London asked, shaken from her memory.
    “You know—
paved
paved. Not totally fresh but pretty good for the fringes of Ag.” The truck slowed. “I don’t know which way to go.”
    “Go left,” Zen told him. “That’s west. We’re probably screwed either way.”
    “Great,” London muttered.
    Tora reached for her. “Concentrate. We might not have much time. This could be your last chance. Now relax.”
    “Oh, okay. Because telling me we’re out of time and it’s my last chance is sooo relaxing.” London fisted her hands in her lap. But then she took a breath and did as Tora asked. Breathing in and out. Closing off everything that was a distraction. Opening herself to that same feeling she’d known only once before.
    She could feel Tora in front of her, her green eyes like chisels chipping away at her defenses. Relaxing like this meant letting the Seer in all the way. That’s why Tora said she would have to trust her. London would have to let her guard down to succeed.
    She took another breath and allowed her shoulders to slump. Feeling her jaw slacken, she backed deeper into herself. Let the Seer follow her here. She wouldn’t find any more than she already knew—a broken heart.
    That’s when his face appeared again, as she’d seen it on the screen. This time, she didn’t resist. She studied it, no matter how much it pained her. His hair was longer now. Where it had once stuck up in messy spikes, it fell straight