"STARR MARIE CALAEUM, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
I force my heavy eyelids open and look around. I'm back by the Pacific beach I met my mother on so many weeks ago, but everything is different. The waves crash to the rocky shore with more force, the skies churn with storm clouds, and my mother is shaking me awake with enough force to start an earthquake.
I stare at her contorted face trying to understand her anger. "Huh?"
"Do you know the consequences of your actions? The danger you've put yourself into? WHY ARE YOU NOT MORE CAREFUL?"
"What are you talking about?" I finally spit out.
"It's that boy," my mother paces before me, muttering to herself. "It's always the boys. I should have raised you better than that, I should have—but what does it matter if you're about to risk your life anyway? How could I have stopped what had already happened? But you should have been more careful, oh why didn't you…"
I let her steam while I try to recall the last thing I remember happening. I felt the pager buzz, so Zuko was in trouble. That's the only reason the pager should have buzzed. Why is my mother so angry about it though? Shouldn't I be helping people in danger?
"Starr," my mother faces me. "Why in the world would you risk exposing yourself and the Time benders? Why would you destroy centuries and centuries of secrecy? We have stayed hidden for a reason! People would try to exploit us for their own gain…and you throw it all away for some boy?"
"He's not just some boy mother," I stand tall and proud.
"Well then, what makes him so different from any other boy?" she sneers.
How dare she? She's making Zuko sound like any other guy in New York!
"Because he gets me," I say hotly. "Because we go fantastically together!"
"Those are merely reasons to date a boy," my mother cuts me off. "I need a solid reason for you to tell him everything—everything—that our ancestors have so long kept secret."
I stand tall and look her in the eye. "Because nothing I do affects him in the least."
She looks taken aback at my answer, so I plow forward.
"He's not stopped when I freeze time; he's by my side wherever I go through time. He's always with me."
"Are you…?" she stops herself and looks doubtful. "No, you can't be. This can't possibly be happening to my own daughter!" She throws her hands to the skies, and in a flash of lightning, we're tumbling through time.
I cough as the debris of wherever we are falls into place.
"What the hell?" I ask my mother. "Where did you take us?"
My mother shushes me and digs through a trunk. I slowly turn around and I realize that I'm back in my old apartment—the one where I had my mom…at least before the fire burned everything down. We are in my parents' bedroom, surrounded by the trinkets and mementos my mom had collected over the years.
With a huff Mom turns around and shakes a scroll in my face.
"Do you know what this is? Do you?" She sounds angry, but I can see genuine fear in her eyes. "This is the prophecy of the Time Benders. Read it." She throws the scroll at the floor in front of me.
I stare at the weird jumble of words on the page for a good minute before I realize that it's in some foreign language. That's how out of it I am.
"What does this even say?" I ask.
"Directly translated to today's version of the language, it is mush," my mother says disdainfully. "But if it is translated as it was meant to be thousands of years ago, then it tells a great deal. Do you wish to hear what it says?"
I look at her worried face, begging me to say no.
"Yes."
"Very well," my mother sighs. "Here is what is says…
"'In the family of the women of time, there will be the one who changes everything. Before the Great War ends, the girl will be tested to great lengths in the mind and the heart. She will be the last of her family in the past, and destroy the line of the Time benders forever. With her will travel the boy born of destruction and hate, whom she will bring to her own Time to wreak destruction upon the world.'"
I sit back on my heals. What does that even mean?
"It might as well be your death certificate," my mother spits. "And the end of the world as we know it."
"What are you talking about?"
"Right here, Starr," my mother jabs at the paper, but her hand goes right through. "It says that you will perish in the past and bring an unstoppable force to the future. Metis predicts that one of her descendants will end herself and the world!"
"Who is Metis?" I ask. "And that can't possibly be true!" I exclaim.
My mother only laughs. "Metis is the beginning of our family line. All the proof is there, child, and I know of no one who can stop a prophecy of the gods."
I can feel my anger building. How could she? How could my own mother believe that I was a devil-child who would single-handedly destroy the world?
"It's not true!" I shout at her, but she only laughs harder. "It's not true," I whisper again to myself. I keep repeating it until my head goes fuzzy again.
"It's not true, it's not true, it's not true, it's not true…"