Madame Sonora

The mind-reader of Aurelio's ten-in-one — a cold-reader and narrator

Madame Sonora — born Ada Prewitt, a name she has not answered to in fifteen years — is the mentalist of the Aurelio Bros. carnival, the woman in the spangled blindfold who “sees” what a stranger keeps in his pockets and his heart. She sees nothing supernatural and never has. She reads: the tan line of a missing ring, the way a man holds his hat, the widow’s black gone slightly green at the seams. She is the best cold-reader on the Circuit, and she has spent so long looking through people that she has quite forgotten how to be looked at.

What she wants (and needs)

Wants: the show, unbroken, rolling on to the next town — the sealed family that took in a hungry runaway and made her somebody. Keep the act, keep the road, keep the wall around her own.
Needs: to stop hiding inside Madame Sonora — to take the blindfold off, be seen by someone, and love a person more than the act that protects her.

The flaw that costs her

She trusts the act over any human being, and she will square, misdirect, and sell out almost anyone to keep the show safe and herself unseen. She reads everyone and lets no one read her — which makes her lethal at her work and hollow at the centre, and which nearly lets her do the comfortable, monstrous thing when the truth finally sits down across the table wearing a face she loves.

Voice

Wry, confessional, performing — she works the reader like a mark, dealing truth a card at a time, deadpan and precise, and only rarely dropping the patter to let something land bare. First person, past tense.

Appears in

The Blindfold Act novelette