Evie is a Cassandra— she is descended from the legendary prophet whose predictions were never believed. Unbeknownst to the writers, Cassandra had a daughter. And that daughter had five of her own.

The children all possessed Cassandra’s curse— they could see the future, but if they tried to warn others about it, they wouldn’t be believed. A recipe for madness. In theory.

The gods have always been vulnerable to loopholes, and the Cassandras began to catalogue each and every one. Over the course of centuries, a network was built, and procedures were created and refined, all so that the Cassandras could put their powers to use.

Cassandras are isolated from one another, and trained to communicate in a way that gets results but avoids cognitive dissonance (CD). Their teams consist of a handler and a team of actors. The Cassandras give clues, and write in code, so as to avoid triggering the letter of the curse.

The Fates weave the future, and give the Cassandras their visions. It’s hard to understand why. The visions tend to involve significant events, but there are events that aren’t predicted. It’s difficult to tell how they choose which ones to warn the world about.

The Cassandras do the best they can with what they have. There are rules. Libraries of them, in fact. But the basics are as follows:

1. You cannot prevent the vision itself, for that is sealed in fate. If you see a man get stabbed and die, you cannot save his life. If you see someone approach a man with a knife, you can stop the stabbing. If you just see a man get stabbed, you can stop the dying. But what is seen in a vision is, effectively, the past.

2. You can never speak in person about a vision, and two Cassandras can never speak to one another. This is to avoid CD. If you’ve been trained, and know that the Cassandras speak truth, it can be overwhelming to have your brain tell you the opposite. When one Cassandra speaks to another, it’s even worse, because it’s more personal. They will fight to believe what their fellow prophet says, and fighting yourself never ends well. When reading, it’s easier to skim over something that is too close to the truth, to think that a clue that is too real is a typo. It makes it more difficult to intervene, but better than actors and handlers falling to cognitive dissonance.

3. Secrecy above everything else. The more people know about the Cassandras, the more they will resist their help.

Plot point one:

Evie is a child. She lives in the city with her handler, who helped raise her. When they are in a car crash, her handler dies, but she us rescued by another Cassandra’s actor team. It is rare for a Cassandra to have a vision about another. Evie is told she’s special. Evie would rather not be. She finds herself angry with the Fates.

Plot point two:

Evie has had a vision about a political assassination. The politician is not a good woman. In fact, she is almost directly responsible for Evie getting evicted. Evie saw her die. She knows the rules. She played the game, submitting her report to her handler, letting them decide on a course of action.

But once Evie submits her report into the record, we see that she keeps a secret, second record. Evie is going to try to save the politician. She’s in a wheelchair, so it’s not easy for her to get around. But she finds the location of the assassination.

She fails to save the woman. She always fails to save them. But no one can stop her from trying. She is caught by her handler, and lectured on her responsibilities.

Plot point three:

Evie’s gaming group wants to meet in person at a convention.

Evie receives disability and a stipend from the Cassandra organization. She doesn’t have much, but she limited her food intake for months in order to buy a gaming system. It’s her prized possession.

The group brings up the assassination. They joke about it. Evie doesn’t like that. One girl, Faith, insists that Evie should be happy. Maybe the next city counsellor would be better.

They argue about who would bother assassinating a city counsellor.

Eventually, they decide to meet at the con. Evie doesn’t know what to do. She wants to go so badly. She’s unbearably lonely. But she’s kept under a stricter isolation than even other Cassandras, in part because of her disability, and in part because they assume she’s important, or the Fates wouldn’t have sent that Cassandra a vision.

Evie resolves that she will sneak out.

Plot point four:

Evie’s visions increase in frequency and clarity. They are all about murders, which is odd. And the murders are often of relatively mundane people, which is even stranger. Evie’s handler contacts other Cassandra offices to see if this is happening everywhere.

Plot point five:

Evie is evicted. The Cassandras do not have a large budget for each individual prophet. Evie’s handler’s apartment is not accessible. To her handler’s dismay, Evie is rescued by her gamer group, and meets two of them early when she moves into Izzy and Faith’s co-op housing. She’s surprised, because she always assumed Faith hated her. The other woman is still standoffish, but clearly not used to being nice. Izzy has decided that it’s a party.

Plot point six:

Not only are other Cassandras not experiencing an increase in prophecy, but all other prophecy seems to have stopped.

Plot point seven:

Evie has a vision that the entire convention centre falls to a terrorist attack. One that, according to the rules, she could never stop. All she sees of the perpetrator is the silhouette of their body, and the golden pendant around their neck.

Faith comforts Evie after the nightmare.

Plot point eight:

Evie knows she has to stop this. The symbol on the pendant is that of Apollo, the god who originally cursed Cassandra. Evie feels more and more like these visions are more targeted than the ones usually sent by the fates. She does a deep dive into the weapons used. She has to find the perpetrator well in advance of the con.

Izzy and Faith find her files. She manages to convince them that she’s a researcher for a spy agency. This works well because it makes it easier to lie to them in a way that leads them to the truth. They become her feet on the ground. Fun and games ensue.

Plot point nine:

The Cassandra organization at large has caught on to what Evie is doing. They want it to stop, one way or another. Evie’s handler has a change of heart, and she and Faith hold off the Cassandra forces while Izzy and Evie go to try and stop the bomber.

Plot point ten:

Izzy and Evie run through the convention centre, gather last minute clues, and Evie demands that Izzy leave. Evie saw Izzy die. She didn’t see herself dying. But she needs to come up with a spy reason.

Evie has enough information. She rolls into the room with the explosives only to find Faith.

Who looks happy to see her.

“You did it,” Faith says in awe.

Evie demands an answer.

Faith, it turns out, is the daughter of Apollo. She is half god. She discovered her father’s crimes years ago and was angry with him. She changed the pattern that the fates weave to redirect visions to Evie, and has been killing people who do bad things to Evie/things Evie doesn’t like. She said she had been researching Cassandras, infiltrating their operation, and she found Evie’s private log. She saw that Evie had changed a vision. Evie once had a vision of a man being murdered, and the scene had been very clear. She hadn’t been able to save the man, but she had been in the room when it happened, changing the vision. Evie wasn’t bound by time’s limitations.

Faith expresses love. Evie cares, she hurts herself with how much she cares. But that caring worked. Evie’s vision didn’t come true. Evie changed the future the way no one ever has.

And Faith wants Evie to join her, and break the world out of the confines in which the Fates have weaves them.