by Daniel Price
Hannah returned to the scene with Zack and Amanda. David lay a calming hand on the deer’s neck.
“Poor thing staggered here from the road,” he told them. “Must have been clipped by a car.”
Hannah tugged Zack’s wrist. “You have to heal her!”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You might as well try,” David said. “She’s not getting up from this.”
Zack looked to Amanda, who remained dryly pragmatic. She’d seen children die of leukemia. Her threshold for weepiness hovered high above Bambi.
“Don’t push yourself if you’re hurting.”
Zack sighed. “No. I can do it. Everyone step back.”
He closed his eyes and concentrated, enveloping the creature with his thoughts until he could feel every hair on her pelt. The others watched with fascination as her body took on a luminescent sheen. The pool of blood at her chest began to shrink and drip upward. The deer’s leg straightened and the gash closed like a zipper.
Zack fought a delirious cackle as he felt his magic at work. Suddenly, he was more than just a helpless speck in the cosmos. He was a minor deity, the Jesus of Nemeth.
Just as the deer’s last trace of injury vanished, Zack felt a painful lurch in his mind. The fawn convulsed, squealing in agony while her chest ballooned. Before Zack could curtail his temporis, the creature exploded in a torrent of blood and organs.
The sisters gasped through their covered mouths. David balked at the carnage.
“God! What happened?”
Zack stared at the corpse in stammering shock. “I don’t know. I-I just lost control. Jesus. Hannah—”
The actress sped out of the clearing in a windy streak. Amanda held Zack’s shoulder.
“She’s not mad at you. She’s just upset.”
“I don’t get it. It was working.”
“Living creatures are complex,” David offered. “Could be one of a thousand different things. It also could be worse.”
“How could it be worse?”
“You could have done it to one of us.”
The thought of Mia lying in place of the disemboweled deer made Zack queasy. He leaned on Amanda.
“I need to get out of here.”
The mood in the house was still somber at dusk, when Theo and Mia returned from the public library. As David filled them in on the incident in the woods, they listened with dark distraction, nodding along as if he were merely talking about the coming rain.
“That’s awful,” said Mia.
“Hope Zack’s okay,” said Theo.
David studied them with new concern. “Are you all right?”
The two of them had become inseparable lately, a miniature guild of augurs. They’d embroiled themselves in research in the hope of learning more about the nature of precognition. Their quest bore little fruit until three hours ago, when the future came and found them at their study table. They didn’t like what it had to say.
TWENTY-SIX
The Marietta Public Library was a daily slice of Heaven for Theo and Mia, a perfect place to hide from friends and enemies alike. The building was located fourteen miles south of Nemeth, a sleek glass ziggurat nestled between a leafy green park and the great Ohio River. Every floor had dozens of plush window seats. Portable music players were available to anyone who asked.
The pair spent their first couple of days dawdling on novels and videos, as well as the pleasure of each other’s company. Theo was amazed at how much Mia bloomed when removed from the group. She brought him to tears of laughter with her spot-on imitations of the others—Zack’s mordant sneer, David’s quizzical leer, Hannah’s flailing arms of fluster, Amanda’s furrowed brow of concern.
Mia, in turn, finally got a glimpse of Theo’s inner prodigy. The man ripped through books like he was wearing a speedsuit, displaying freakish recall of every word ingested. When she asked him his IQ, he merely shrugged and told her it fell somewhere in the space between chickens and David. She loved Theo’s humility, even if it was peppered with hints of self-loathing.
On their third day, they finally agreed to take a stab at their research mission. They were surprised to learn that Altamerica had quite a bit to say about people like them.
The temporic revolution of the late twentieth century had forever changed society’s expectations of what was and wasn’t possible. Once Father Time proved to be a more lenient parent, the concept of precognition moved away from the flaky fringe and into the collective “maybe.”
In 1981, a shrewd investor named Theodore Norment capitalized on the shift by launching Farsight Professional Augury, a chain of upscale boutiques in which customers could hear their future from courteous and attractive specialists while sipping complimentary coffee from a chaise longue.
Norment’s venture was a huge success, and soon others joined in on the propheteering. By the turn of the millennium, the concept of fortune-telling had been stripped of all mysticism and repackaged as a store-bought amenity. Anyone could claim to see the future through an innate connection to temporis. Today, there were nearly a million registered augurs in the United States. They even had their own union.
Naturally, skeptics remained. An escalating war of books had brewed between the doubters and devotees, enough to fill a wall of the library. The more Theo and Mia read into the debate, the more isolated they felt. They were living proof that the naysayers were wrong, and yet it seemed increasingly obvious that their fellow seers were just posers.
On September 30, just as the other Silvers in Nemeth witnessing the grisly demise of a poor young fawn, a portal found Mia in the library restroom. She glared at the tiny floating disc from the toilet seat, wondering if her future self was deliberately choosing awkward moments to contact her.
She caught the note as it fell, then unrolled it.
The Future of Time. Page 255. Third paragraph. Wow.
The book in question was located on the second floor. Mia’s older self neglected to mention that the author was someone she knew and detested. The Future of Time was Sterling Quint’s second best-seller, a collection of speculative musings that had been rushed to print at the peak of his fame. Though his cold and haughty prose was enough to trigger bad memories, his passage on page 255 shined a strange new light on Mia’s talent.
At the risk of lending credence to the fools and frauds of the augur trade, I’ll admit that precognition by itself is not conceptually impossible. Still, in a multiverse of infinitely branching timelines, the act of seeing one true future is about as likely as breathing just one molecule of air. A real augur, if he existed, would foresee many different outcomes for any situation, possibly even millions. If the power didn’t drive him mad, it would certainly render him useless. Every time he tossed a coin, he’d become bombarded with multiple premonitions of heads and tails, unable to discern the true outcome until it stared at him from his wrist.
Mia rejoined Theo at the study table, watching him read the passage with vacant consternation. She noticed that he’d become sluggish and distant over the past few days. She often found him skimming the same page over and over, or staring out the window with a glazed expression. Though he insisted he was fine, Mia feared he was coming down with an illness.
He closed Quint’s book and passed it back to her. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”
“Me neither. But I keep thinking back to Ramona, when I got the fifteen hundred dollars from the future. You remember that?”
Theo could hardly forget. He’d stolen off into the night with half of it. “What about it?”
“The next day we found a quarter of a million dollars in the van. That always confused me. I mean why would that Mia bother sending me cash if she knew we were about to be swimming in it?”
“So now you’re thinking she didn’t know.”
Mia nodded. “Right. Maybe she was from a differ
ent future, one where we never found the van and money.”
Theo pressed his knuckles to his lips as he fell back into his own conundrum. His foresight had gone into overdrive these past couple of days, barraging him with split-second glimpses of moments that had yet to occur. Though most of the visions were vague and benign—moving snapshots of strangers in strange places—he was particularly struck by the ones that involved Melissa Masaad. In one flash, the stalwart Dep bound Theo’s wrists in handcuffs on a crisp and cool evening. In another, she shot him in the rain. In a third, she handed him a DP-9 identification card with his name and photo. And in yet another, he rested his cheek on her taut and naked belly, feeling the flutters under her skin as she stroked his hair. Even if these were premonitions and not just figments, he couldn’t believe they were all from the same timeline.
“That’s . . .” He pressed a taut thumb to his chin. “Huh.”
“Yeah. I can barely wrap my head around it.”
“If there are an infinite number of futures and we’re just seeing one or two at a time, then what’s the point? We’re no better than guessers. We’re not even educated guessers.”
Mia puffed in bother. “I don’t know. I just know this is exactly the way David said it was. How does he always know these things?”
“He reads a lot of sci-fi. I’m still not convinced it works that way.”
“I’m thinking it does,” said a third voice.
They turned to the woman who sat two tables away, a honey-skinned blonde in a flimsy white sundress. Though she carried herself with the self-assuredness of an adult, she could have passed for a teenager with her large hazel eyes, cute waifish body, and cropped pixie haircut. Theo was intrigued by her nebulous ethnicity, an incongruous blend of European and Asian features.
The girl closed her book and approached them, standing at their table like an auditioning actress. Mia noticed the pair of watches on her right wrist. One was analog with an ornate silver band. The other was digital and cheap-looking.
She flashed the pair a pleasant smile. “Sorry. I hate to be a snooping Susie, but you two are having a very interesting discussion.”
Mia turned skittish. “We’re just messing around. You shouldn’t take us seriously.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not a psychologist. I’m probably nuttier than both of you. But I do know a thing or two about futures.” She motioned to a chair. “May I?”
Theo and Mia exchanged a wary glance before indulging her with nods.
“Cool.” She took a seat, then studied their research pile. “Well, no wonder you’re confused. These books are crap. If I really wanted to stick my nose in your business, I’d put you in touch with an experienced augur. I mean a real one.”
“Frankly, we’re not sure there are any real ones,” Theo said.
The girl grinned at him with enough mischief to make Mia suspect a flirty hidden motive.
“Oh ye of little faith. Are you familiar with the Gunther Gaia Test?”
Theo nodded. It had come up several times in research. In 1988, a wealthy skeptic named George Gunther publicly offered twenty million dollars to anyone who could correctly predict five natural disasters in the course of a calendar year. The test had become an annual lottery to the would-be augurs of America, with thousands entering each January. So far only a handful had managed to get even one forecast right, an endless source of swagger for the nonbelievers.
“Well, I have it on good authority that this year’s challenge isn’t going quite the way Gunther likes,” the girl told them. “There’s a man who entered a whopping seventeen predictions, and so far he’s been right on the money. He has four guesses left, all for the last three months of the year. I have no doubt they’ll happen too. You might want to steer clear of Tunisia this Christmas.”
Mia sat forward in rapt attention. “Who is this guy?”
“He says his name’s Merlin McGee, though I know for a fact it isn’t. Young fella. Very shy. Very cute. I’ve met him twice now. He’s the real deal. When I congratulated him on his impending wealth, he merely shrugged. He said he’s not sure if Gunther will honor the arrangement.”
“If he can truly see the future, wouldn’t he know?”
The girl tapped Mia’s hand. “I asked him the same question. You know what he told me? He said he only wished that people were as easy to predict as God.”
Theo winced as a hot knife of pain cut through his mind. The first one had hit him three days ago. Now they seemed to come every hour.
Mia held his arm. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m all right. It’s nothing.”
From her sympathetic expression, the girl clearly disagreed. “You know, there’s a health fair going on at the other side of the park. You don’t need insurance. They’ll take anyone.”
“I appreciate it, but I’m okay.”
Despite the kindness of their new acquaintance, Theo grew suspicious of her. It seemed odd that a person so friendly hadn’t offered her name by now, or asked for theirs.
Mia brandished Quint’s book to the girl. “This guy says a real augur wouldn’t know anything because he’d see every possibility at once.”
“Oh, please. There’s an expression people like to give me whenever they notice my wrist. They say, ‘A girl with two watches never knows what time it is.’ That’s bullshit.” She checked her dual timepieces. “It’s 3:30.”
“How do you know for sure?” Theo challenged.
“Because they’re synchronized. That makes me twice as sure. What Sterling Quint, God rest his missing soul, doesn’t take into account are the redundancies. You look at a million possible outcomes, you start to see repeats. From repeats come patterns. From patterns come probabilities. A true augur can look at the big quilt and see which futures have the best chances of happening.”
She tilted her head at Mia as if she suddenly just noticed her. “You have amazing hair.”
Mia fought a bashful grin. Theo remained skeptical. “It’s still guesswork though.”
“So?”
“It wouldn’t matter for coin tosses, but for life-or-death situations . . .”
The girl waved him off. “Oh, suck it up, man. You’re never going to be a good augur if you live in fear of regret.”
“Who said I wanted to become an augur?”
“You’re already an augur, Theo. You’re just not a good one.”
Now both Silvers stared at her in hot alarm. She sighed at herself.
“Shit. I didn’t want to make a whole thing of this. I don’t even know why I came here. This isn’t my battle.”
“Who are you?” Mia asked.
“I’m nobody. Just a stupid girl who can’t mind her own business. You both seem like nice people and you looked so lost. I just wanted to give you a push in the right direction and then flutter away.”
“You won’t even give us your name,” Theo griped. “Why should we believe anything you say?”
The girl shrugged. “You don’t have to believe a word, hon. Doesn’t affect me one bit. It also doesn’t change the reality of your situation. Big things are coming, whether you like it or not.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like you,” she told Theo. “You have no idea how much power you’re carrying in that stubborn brain of yours. There’s a great prophet buried in there. Now he’s clawing his way up through all that trauma and liquor damage. I wish I could tell you the process will tickle, but those headaches you’re getting are just previews. Come tomorrow, you’re really not going to like being you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What does it matter? You don’t believe me anyway.” The girl looked to Mia. “I’m hoping you’ll be a little more receptive to what I have to say. You’re a sweet and pretty girl with a sharp mind and killer hair. But one thing you’re not and never will be is an augur.”
Mia’s heart lurched. “What . . . what do you mean?”
“You don’t have the sight like me and Theo. You just have your portals, and they aren’t meant to be used the way you’re using them. It’s not your fault. Nobody told you. It’s just that there are a lot of Mias out there in the future. The stronger you get, the more of them you’ll hear from. If you’re not careful, every minute of your life will be a ticker-tape parade. I don’t think you want that.”
The thought turned Mia white. “I don’t! What do I do?”
“Talk to Peter. He’ll set you straight. The man can be a pigheaded fool sometimes, but he sure knows his portals.”
Theo eyed her cynically. “Is that what you are? A Gotham?”
“No, but I’ve met a few. They hate being called that, by the way.”
The girl rose to her feet and slung her purse over her shoulder.
“You know why Merlin McGee only predicts natural disasters? Because he’s lazy and they’re easy. They’re constants across the many branching futures, well outside our influence. It doesn’t matter which way we zig or zag. It’s still going to rain in Nemeth tomorrow.”
She fixed a heavy gaze on Theo. “Bad times are coming. First for you, then your friends. If there was a way around it, I’d tell you. You’re all just going to have to stay strong and weather the storm.”
The girl walked ten steps to the bookshelves, then took a final look at Mia.
“I really do love that hair.”
She disappeared in the aisles, leaving her new friends in quiet turmoil. Theo aimed his dull stare out the window. Mia’s gaze danced around the letters of Quint’s book jacket.
“Are you okay to drive?” she asked him, a half hour later.
“I think so.”
“Okay. I think I’d like to go home.”
