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 different 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.”

“Yeah.”

They left the library in grim silence, without looking back. They didn’t need foresight to know that they wouldn’t return here. They’d already learned more than they wanted to know.

—

The grandfather clock ticked away as the Silvers sat behind the remnants of their supper. Ten elbows rested on the dining room table, ten fists propping five chins. Only Theo sat slouched in his chair. He wished Mia hadn’t told the others about the girl with two watches.

“She’s either a skilled augur herself or a time traveler,” David surmised. “I can’t see how else she’d profess to know about Theo’s potential.”

Amanda peered at David’s plate, still half-filled with boiled peas. The sisters had initially tried to prepare more elaborate vegan dishes for him. He never took more than a few polite bites before returning to his vegetable piles.

“And we’re absolutely sure this woman wasn’t Esis?” Zack asked.

David squinted at Mia. “Describe her in detail.”

“I don’t know. She was thin. Pretty. Short.”

“No,” said David.

“No,” said Amanda. “Esis is not short.”

The cartoonist shrugged in grim surrender. After exploding a deer today, he wasn’t confident in his opinion about anything.

Hannah sat back in her chair and seethed. In the four hours since the death of the fawn, her melancholy had turned into something hard and prickly. She found herself despising everyone at the table for reasons of little merit. She hated David for his stupid vegan diet. She hated Mia for her inexhaustible sweetness. She hated Zack and Amanda for not screwing like rabbits already. She hated Theo for all the usual reasons.

At the moment, she hated the fact that her companions were all brilliant in one way or another, and yet none of them considered the obvious.

“She’s an actress.”

The others glanced up at her with blank expressions. She met their gazes one by one.

“Evan’s messing with us again, only this time by proxy. He hired that woman. Coached her through and through. And now once again we’re all dancing to his tune, wondering if up is down, left is right. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.”

The clock ticked five more times before David broke the silence.

“That’s a very solid theory.”

Zack nodded. “I’ve been wondering why we haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“I don’t know,” said Mia, her nervous eyes fixed on Theo. “I’m hoping it’s all a lie.”

Hannah peered across the table and was surprised by the tender smile Theo shined at her. He didn’t think she was right at all, but she killed the discussion and he loved her for it.

At five minutes to midnight, Hannah made a drowsy trip to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She crossed into the darkened living room and jumped at the shadowy figure in the easy chair.

“Just me,” Theo croaked.

She pressed her chest. “Jesus. You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry.”

She turned on the lamp and faced Theo from the sofa. His eyes were dark. He slumped against the cushions as if he were boneless.

“Are you okay? You don’t look good.”

Theo couldn’t help but grin. Hannah never looked better in her snug white tank top and panties, her bed-tousled hair. While the angel on his shoulder plotted a course of emotional reconciliation, the devil in his sweatpants insisted he was a few deft moves away from couch sex.

“I’m okay,” he assured her. “For now.”

“So you think that girl was telling the truth.”

“I know she was. I see it now, clear as day. Right after breakfast, I’m going to get a nosebleed. Then a splitting headache. By noon, I’ll barely know where I am.”

Hannah sat forward. “God, Theo. Are you sure this isn’t some self-fulfilling, psychosomatic thing?”

“Yup.”

“That’s crazy. You were talking about infinite futures at dinner. How can this be so certain?”

“Well, there’s some wiggle room on the nosebleed.”

“This isn’t funny. I’m worried about you.”

“I know. I can see that. I have to say it’s kind of nice, all things considered.”

Hannah shot a hot breath at the floor, then matched his lazy stance.

“I’ve been pretty pathetic, haven’t I? Taking two weeks to get over a one-week fling.”

“Well, I certainly haven’t helped.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’ve been angry just for the sake of being angry. Hell, I got mad at you all over again today when that poor fawn died.”

“How was that my fault? I wasn’t even there.”

“Exactly. I was upset and I needed someone to screw me numb. I’m not like my sister. I can’t just draw on inner strength. I don’t have any.”

“That’s not true.”

“I don’t know. Feels like it. So while I understand your reasons for the breakup, and even agree with them in retrospect, I’m still mad that you took away my crutch.”

Theo struggled to stay noble, even as he ripped the clothes off her mental image.

“I’m sorry I can’t handle the kind of relationship you want, Hannah. Sorry for both of us. I’m looking at you now and I’m thinking about what’s coming. I wish I could screw us both numb.”

The grandfather clock chimed in the midnight hour, heralding the official start of October. By the twelfth echoing ring, Hannah clenched her jaw in tense resolve.

“First thing tomorrow, I’ll go to the pharmacy with Amanda. Get you a ton of painkillers.”

“They won’t help.”

“Well, we’ll try, goddamn it. Just because it’s destined to happen doesn’t mean we can’t fight it.”

Once again, she was surprised by Theo’s thin and tender smile, out of place given the situation.

“Yesterday I had a snapshot premonition of you and me,” he told her. “We were sitting just like this, chatting away at midnight in our sweatpants and underwear.”

“Is that why you came down here?”

“No. This was somewhere else. Some house on an army base. You looked a bit older. My guess is that it’s still a good four years away.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It’s nice to know there’s at least one future out there where you and I are still alive in four years. Still friends.”

Hannah glumly stared out the window, listening to the owls.

“Friends. Strange word to use for any of us. I can barely separate you guys from Amanda anymore. It’s like you’re all my siblings now. Even you, as screwed up as that sounds.”

The two of them sat in silence for another long moment. Hannah rubbed her eyes.

“You’re a good man, Theo. You’re a good man and I love you and I really hope you’re wrong about tomorrow. You don’t deserve it.”

The augur breathed a long sigh of surrender. It seemed a cruel joke of the universe that the easiest things to predict were the ones that couldn’t be prevented. The pain. The rain. The natural disasters. And yet he couldn’t help but disagree with Hannah’s last sentiment. The girl with two watches had attributed alcohol damage as a primary cause of his neurological crisis. That made it his fault, which strangely made it easier to accept. For once there was justice, there was balance, there was karma in the situation. Theo planned to wield it like an umbrella. Like Hannah’s screwed-up love, he’d carry the blame with him, all the way through the storm.

—

Everything happened as foretold. At 5:02 in the morning, the sky over Nemeth offered ten seconds of warning drizzle before coming down in sheets. Dawn arrived in the form of a hundred lightning flashes.

At 9:20, Theo glanced down at his eggs and noticed a fresh drop of blood, another warning drizzle. He pressed a napkin to his nose, then looked to his troubled friends.

“Shit.”

The pain hit him like a cyclone. His muscles turned to liquid and he fell out of his chair. By the time David carried him to the couch, he’d lost all sense of time and place.

Theo lay on his back, writhing on the cushions like an uneasy dreamer. He was only marginally aware of the conversations that occurred around him, the feminine hands that comforted him in turns. While Mia stroked his fingers with sisterly affection and Amanda tended to him with clinical diligence, it was Hannah’s intimate caress that brought him back to the present. He lifted the damp cloth from his brow and tossed her a bleary stare.

“What time is it . . . ?”

She checked the grandfather clock. “Quarter after one. How you holding up?”

“Worse than anything I ever felt. I wanna . . . I wanna die.”

Hannah squeezed his hand. “Oh, sweetie. Just hang in there. The pain won’t last.”

“It’s not the pain . . .”

“What do you mean?”

Amanda rushed into the room and pulled at Hannah’s shoulder. “Let me look at him.”

“Just a second. We’re talking.” She looked to Theo. “What do you mean? Are you having visions?”

“I’m not just seeing,” he moaned. “I’m feeling. I keep feeling you guys . . . dying. Over and over. I feel Zack’s blood all over me. God. I can smell it.”

He seized Amanda’s arm, his eyes red and cracked. “I can’t take it. You have to knock me out. I don’t care how you do it. Just knock me out. Please.”

Amanda rooted through their pile of store-bought painkillers, then fed him the one with the drowsiest side effects. He gradually drifted off to sleep. Judging by his somnolent moans and cries, it seemed the future followed him there.

The next forty-eight hours passed like weeks for the sympathetic Silvers. By the morning of Sunday, October 3, they were all as pale and unrested as Theo.

They sat around the living room in a dreary daze, watching David jab the fireplace with a metal poker. Hannah cradled Theo’s head in her lap as he twitched in restless half slumber. Nobody thought he was getting better.

Hannah spoke in a hoarse and weary rasp. “We need to do something. He can’t take another day of this.”

“I’ll go to the drugstore,” Zack offered. “See if there’s something else.”

Amanda curled up with Mia on the love seat, absently stroking her hair. “We’ve been there twice. It’s all the same weak stuff. He needs a prescription-strength remedy.”

“We’re back on this,” David complained.

“Yes, we’re back on this. I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking him to Marietta.”

Yesterday, during their umpteenth discussion of Theo’s plight, Mia shared the information that the girl with two watches had given her about the local health fair. Amanda confirmed by phone that it was still going on and that anyone was welcome to bring their untreated ailments.

Even as she’d broached the idea, Mia wasn’t sure it was a good one. David had a stronger opinion on the matter.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me last time . . .”

Amanda sighed at him. “I heard you, David. I understand your concern. But a health fair isn’t the same as a hospital. There’s no reason to assume it’s being monitored.”

“It’s a place where fugitives are likely to seek treatment. Of course it’s being monitored. You might as well phone the Deps now and tell them you’re coming.”

“David, I’ve worked at these things—”

“On another world.”

“They’re understaffed, overcrowded, and wildly disorganized. Even you wouldn’t be able to find us in that chaos.”

“You’re willing to bet your freedom on this?”

“I am,” said Hannah.

“I am,” said Amanda. She looked at her sister. “You’re not going.”

“Bullshit. You think you can lift him by yourself? Your arms are like pipe cleaners.”

Amanda shook her head. “We can’t carry him in. He’ll have to walk. I can get him there.”

“I’ll go with you,” Mia said. “I know the way.”

“No.”

“Hell, no,” Zack uttered.

David chuckled with bleak derision. “Like lemmings off a cliff.”

“What do you suggest we do instead?” Hannah asked.

“You know what I suggest. We could be there by nightfall.”

She flicked a brusque hand. “Of course. I should’ve guessed. Peter, Peter, Peter. Your magic-bean solution for everything.”

“He may know the nature of Theo’s illness. He may have a cure.”

“Or he could be a trap,” Amanda countered. “Or a Pelletier. Or he might not be there at all. We’re not ready to face the next step, David. Not with Theo like this.”

David threw a pleading look at Zack. “Are you going to help me here? Or are you relishing the thought of a smaller group?”

The cartoonist exhaled from his easy chair, splitting his pity between Theo and David. The boy’s rational insights were consistently drowned out by the emotional concerns of the majority. Clearly he was about to be outvoted again.

Zack looked to Amanda. “For what it’s worth, I agree with him. You’re taking an insane risk for a bunch of pills you might not even get. I mean without ID—”

“I’m bringing a sick man and a fat wad of cash. That’ll be enough.”

“And if they give you a written prescription?”

“They should have samples. I’ll ask for extra. I’ll pay through the nose if I have to.”

Zack shrugged with hopeless uncertainty. “Well, you know that scene better than I do. I’m just telling you where I stand. That said, if I were the one in Theo’s shoes, I wouldn’t want this put to a group vote. It’s his pain and your risk. It should be his decision and yours.”

Amanda leaned back on the couch and looked to Hannah’s lap. In all the hubbub, nobody had noticed until now that Theo was awake. He fixed a dull gaze at the ceiling.

“Did you hear all that?” Amanda asked.

“I heard enough.”

“What do you think?”

He barely had the space for thoughts. Over the last two days, the future had been thrown in a blender and funneled into him. He’d progressed beyond fretting over individual images and now worried about the patterns. Hannah kept suffering at the cruel hands of Evan. Zack kept dying at the tempic hands of Esis. The skyline of San Francisco kept crumbling in a distant cloud of dust.

Between all the flashes and glimpses, Theo detected a hint of a much larger problem, a lingering shade of despair in the minds of his elder selves. It always stayed the same from future to future. The only merciful aspect of his ordeal was that he never stayed in one place long enough to see the true shape of it. Theo didn’t consider himself a particularly strong or brave man. He was willing to take any risk, any detour to avoid the awful thing ahead of him.

“I can walk,” he said, in a weak and jagged voice. “I can go.”

—

Amanda’s preconception of the health fair was generous in hindsight. The admission line was a hundred-yard backlog of impoverished treatment-seekers, all as surly and grim as the weather itself. Volunteer organizers in white rain slickers floated around them like angry ghosts, shouting incomprehensible orders. A line cutter provoked a fistfight, causing a human domino topple that ended ten feet shy of Amanda and Theo.

After snaking through the rain for sixty-eight minutes, they finally reached the admission tent. Amanda filled the reception clerk’s ear with an elaborate tale of muggings and lost wallets before learning that ID was required only for those who wished to waive the hundred-dollar entry fee. She paid the money so cheerfully that the clerk wondered why she even bothered with the sob story.

Amanda led Theo to the waiting room tent and sat him down in a folding chair, rubbing his back as he rested his face in his palms. She nervously glanced around for cameras, then jumped in her seat when she spotted an elderly man reading a magazine with her own tempic fist on the cover. In the center of the shot, Zack winced in purple-faced agony while Amanda’s giant fingers dangled him from a hotel balcony, cracking ribs.

And you wonder why he’s been so cold to you, she thought.

They waited in silence for thirty more minutes, until a young and anxious nurse led them to a small private tent. An hour passed without anyone checking on them, then another. Every time Amanda flagged a staffer, she received a shrug and a jittery assurance that a doctor was coming.

“I don’t like this,” Theo moaned from the cot. “Something’s wrong.”

“I told you these places were disorganized.”

“No. I don’t like this. We need to get out of here.”

She parted the curtain and peered at the waiting room tent across the way. Just five minutes ago, it had been packed with patients. Now all the chairs were empty.

Her fingers curled in tension. “God. I think you’re right.”

Theo struggled to a sitting position. “Shit! Shit! I didn’t see it in time!”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s too late. They’re here.”

“Theo, what—”

“Hold your breath!”

A glass ball the size of an orange rolled through the doorway and exploded in white smoke. While Theo covered his mouth and nose, Amanda breathed a pungent gas that tasted like nail polish remover. Her senses went topsy-turvy. The tempic walls of every tent rippled like liquid for four eerie seconds, until the widow fell unconscious to the grass.

Half-blind, mindless, Theo fled the tent. He only made it a few feet before he was tackled to the ground by three men in black fiber armor. They subdued him like spiders, rolling him around and binding his limbs in sticky white string. Six arms hoisted him above the ground and strapped him to a floating gurney.

Theo looked at his captors—over a dozen armed agents, all wearing the same protective gear. Their faces were obscured by long white gas masks with dark eyeholes. They looked frighteningly surreal, hulking black panthers with possum heads.

Soon the slimmest figure approached and removed her mask. Even with rain in his eyes, Theo had no trouble recognizing the dreadlocked woman in front of him. His lips curled in a feeble smile.

“Melissa Masaad.”

Though the Deps within earshot all traded baffled looks, Melissa wasn’t entirely shocked to hear her quarry say her name. She’d seen the man’s work in two different states. It was because of him that she now believed in augurs.

“Hello, Theo.”

He muttered something under his breath before falling unconscious. Melissa looked to her team in confusion.

“Did you hear that?”

“No, ma’am. I couldn’t make it out.”

Neither could she. The part she heard was nonsensical. She could have sworn she heard him say “private school.”

Disturbed, Melissa wiped the rain from her face. “Take him to the hospital. Call me the minute you learn what’s wrong with him.”

A trio of agents emerged from the tent with Amanda strapped to a stretcher. Even in her unconscious state, the other Deps kept their rifles fixed on her. No one wanted to take any chances.

Melissa approached the gurney and checked her prisoner’s pulse. After four weeks of chasing ghosts, it was a marvelous thing to finally touch the real Amanda Given.

She rooted through Amanda’s pockets, procuring a handphone. The tiny light flashed green in announcement of a new text message from David’s phone.

We haven’t heard from you in a while. Is everything all right?

Melissa smiled. She’d just captured two dangerous criminals without spilling a drop of blood. Now she had the tool that would lead her to the rest of the group. Everything was more than all right. It was a beautiful day.