The Burnt Sugar Stench

Wendy N. Wagner

I couldn’t tell how long the man in the black jacket had been slapping my face—except I knew my face hurt a lot, and that suggested a lot of slapping. I pushed myself upright on jelly arms, my head scraping on a wall too rough to be my apartment. For that matter, it was raining. It didn’t rain in my apartment.

“The fuck am I?”

“You awake now?” The man gave me another slap. “Come on, Takas.”

Maybe he was a cop. Cops were always calling you by your last name, like my middle school vice principal. I giggled a little at that.

“What the hell are you on?” He yanked my arm. “We got to get out of here.”

I pulled free and let my arm fall back to my side. At least I was wearing a jacket, the new pink Columbia raincoat my mom had sent me for Valentine’s Day. She never bought sweets for holidays, understandably. I licked my lips, still tasting of the future and artificial cherries. “Go away.”

He grabbed my arm again and hoisted me to my feet. “Come on, Takas. We don’t have much time.”

A shot echoed down the alley, and the pieces of the present fell into place around me, and I let him half-carry me to his car. If he was a cop, I needed his help.

***

You’d think law enforcement would be more interested in the services of a twenty-year-old clairvoyant, but my biggest customers were organized crime. The Raskolnikovs kept me pretty much on retainer. I used to work with a few other gangs before the war dried them up, but since high school I’ve been exclusive to the Russians. They didn’t seem to mind scheduling their sessions around my classes at PSU.

They came to do business at my studio apartment. I could have rented a space somewhere else, but in my line of work, there wasn’t much point. They’d find me if they wanted to. Even if I went fully off-grid, there were still other fortune tellers who could find me if they really tried. And they would try. Being the best meant stepping on a lot of toes.

The cop must have known something about my work. He kept giving me little side-glances as he drove. The city looked different from the inside of a car, instead of on foot or from the steamy confines of public transit. The Central Eastside Industrial District looked edgy and hip, the bums tucked behind alleys too small for a Ford Taurus. You couldn’t even smell the river in here, the dank mud-stink of high water. I let my head fall back on the headrest, every muscle jellied from what I’d been working on back there in that alley.

Had it worked? I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to remember what happened when I touched my fingers to the white sheet of space-time, hiding the future in its folds.

“Why do the Raskolnikovs want you so much? And why is the Del Rios gang after you?”

A faint accent hid inside his vowels. I hadn’t noticed that back in the alley. I gave him another looking-over. With the future peeling back from my eyes, I could appreciate his cheekbones and long eyelashes much better. If he wasn’t an import model, his parents were.

“What’s your name?”

“What?” He stared at me for a second. “Aguilar. Detective Aguilar.”

“Your mom named you ‘detective’?”

“We don’t have time for you to play cute. I’ve got a missing girl in a shipping container set to blow, and at least two witnesses claim you know where she is. We’ve got less than an hour to save her and stop a gang war that’s gonna rip apart this city. So start talking!”

“Missing girl.” I could see the video in my mind’s eye, the girl tied to the stool, her blond hair no longer set in beauty pageant curls but only hanging limply around her bruised face. The Raskolnikovs had made me watch it fourteen times. “Rayna Raskolnikov.” In the video, a digital clock sat about a foot away from the stool, its red digits running toward midnight.

“Yeah. The Raskolnikov heiress.”

He stopped at a light, staring at me. I looked back at him, and saw lightning flicker on the other side of the driver’s side window. Black lightning, as apocalyptic as a nuclear strike.

The fog in my head cleared. I was moving into the future now, and the past was starting to make sense. Whatever I’d set in motion before, I hadn’t finished it.

“I’m going to need candy,” I said. “Lots of it.”

***

I grabbed one of the baskets sitting beside the front door. I was probably the first person in the history of this Plaid Pantry to ever use one. The clerk even put down his copy of Guns and Ammo to watch me head into the candy aisle.

Aguilar stepped around me. “What’s this about?”

In the corner of my eye, the beer cooler bulged and flexed. A bottle of Zima exploded on the shelf. Aguilar shot it a confused look and turned back to me, his hand closing on my arm. The signs I’d seen hadn’t told me the end of the world was going to come this fast.

I swallowed down guilt. Imagine destroying the world to make drug dealers a few more bucks. That’s what I’d done, me and every fortune teller in Portland.

I shook off Aguilar’s grip and pulled every package of Warheads off the rack. “Check the fruit candies. Anything super sour is a contender.” I snatched up the last Sour Patch Kids package. “There. Special edition Skittles.”

He picked up one package. I pushed him aside and grabbed up the other three packages in the case. Another box was tucked behind them; I took the whole thing.

If I was at home, I’d go straight for the pure stuff, but we didn’t have time to head back to East County. I cut over to the drinks case, looking for the funny little bottles marketed for eight-year-old boys. There was always something, usually a blue lemonade or fruit punch packed into something with a shark’s head for a lid. I turned over a bottle shaped like a grenade. Malic acid sat proudly as the third ingredient. I took two bottles.

“You got cash?”

“I can use my debit card.” He handed the basket to the checkout guy, who looked from Aguilar to me and back again. I could see the judgments going back and forth like ping pong balls behind his eyes: tweaker, john, college student, pornographer. None of them added up, not with my nerdy glasses and Aguilar’s general atmosphere of stick-up-the-ass.

“What are you waiting for?” I snapped. “And yes, we’ll need a bag.”

He offered the bag to Aguilar, and I snatched it out of his hand. Took a second of fumbling to find the grenade drink and then downed it as we walked out the door. The malic acid hit the hinges of my jaw like a burst of porcupine quills.

We got back in the car. I opened the first packet of Warheads.

“I’m gonna be in the future soon,” I explained. “It’ll be messy, but I need you to just keep driving. Go wherever I tell you.” I wished I didn’t need to chew the sticky stuff, but it made the acid enter my system that much faster.

My stomach churned around the candy. I hadn’t had much real food the last two days, not since the Del Rios had issued their ultimatum.

“It’s not drugs,” I explained. “It started out that way, I guess, but then the Raskolnikovs started going to fortune tellers. You ever notice how many fortune tellers Portland has?”

Aguilar didn’t answer. Could a man like him believe me? He looked ordinary enough, his clothes middle class, his haircut better than Supercuts. People above the poverty line didn’t see the gang wars the rest of us did.

But he was a cop. He had to have seen the changes and wondered what caused them.

“I don’t know what it is, but the Portland metro area has about twice as many fortune tellers as your average town. Palm readers, tarot readers. Clairvoyants like me. And more than a quarter of those diviners are the real deal.”

“Sure.” The disbelief dripped off his voice.

I ripped open a packet of Skittles. “Gang violence has changed, hasn’t it? How often has Portland registered a drive-by or a street fight? It was zero last year, wasn’t it? That’s because of us. Because we looked into the future and told people where to be to cut off shipments of drugs and guns. We told people where there’d be a police sting or a rival ambush. We fortune tellers, we served the drug dealers—but we made this city safer.”

His eyes flicked toward my face and then back to the view out the window. He kind of wanted to believe me. Of course he did. It’s human nature to hope divination works. Why else do people keep going to astrologers and buying tarot cards? Every single member of our species is desperate to push back the folds of time and see what’s waiting for them.

“The Raskolnikovs swallowed up the rest of the Russian street gangs,” I explained. “Mostly because of my mother. Before she got out of town, she was their chief seer.”

“What happened to her?”

Prescience twinged someplace in my gut. “Get on the freeway up here.” I shifted in my seat, trying to get comfortable again. I remembered his question. “Diabetes.”

“If she ate like you, I can see why.”

“It’s the malic acid,” I explained. “For us, it pierces the veil between this time and the next.”

A wave of it ran over me, the world disappearing behind a fog. The shipping container. It sat on the edge of an empty lot, blackberry vines growing over the back half. The debris of an abandoned homeless camp lay in heaps around it. Could have been anywhere in the outer ring of Portland streets—anyplace out of sight of the core where rich people nibbled avocado toast and tourists stood in endless lines for ice cream—but the lights behind it told me enough to make a decision.

“She’s off Sandy someplace. Not too far from the airport.”

“If you’re lying, you’ll be spending a long, long time in jail,” he warned.

“It’s true. We just have to find her in”—I checked the clock—“twenty minutes.”

He spun the wheel harder than he needed, sending me sprawling against the Taurus’s door. The east side flew by on either side of us, the quiet lights of the Parkview neighborhood a soft blur. I had grown up out here, grabbing donuts at Annie’s with my friends, taking the bus to the pool over on Glisan. I had always felt safe. My mom would look into my future every morning and give me explicit directions to keep me out of danger. I wished she was here now, her soft bulk welcoming me to rest my head. If she was here, I could step away from all of this and just go do my calculus homework.

But she was two hundred miles away from here, working at a new age bookstore in Ashland, a slender version of herself that neither of us had ever seen in her future. She had begged me to come with her. Southern Oregon University didn’t suck. I could graduate from there just as well as Portland State.

But of course, I couldn’t. If I had gone to SOU, the world would already be over. The thing about Portland having twice the number of fortune tellers meant there were twice as many people fiddling about with space-time, pushing holes in the fabric to peek through. And once the Del Rios and the Raskolnikovs realized their power depended on a constant view of the future, the fortune telling business stopped spending their time luring in rubes with incense and love potions and started spending more time actually looking into the future.

The bad news is that space-time isn’t as resilient as we thought it was. It only looked like a sturdy brocade, hefty curtains like the ones your grandmother bought to block out the view of the neighbor’s house. The fabric of space-time is closer to gauze, flimsy and delicate. And what lay on the other side of it was far more dangerous than a bad view.

I reached for the second bottle of the malic acid grenade, even though I desperately didn’t want to. Looking into the future risked making the holes in reality bigger, but doing nothing wouldn’t stop the unraveling.

“So what? You’re looking into the future right now? Do you see us saving Rayna?”

“I’ve been seeing what happens if she blows up. I saw it a year ago, because it’s the nexus of all of this. If I’d been able to work for the Del Rios, I would have begged them not to take Rayna. The Raskolnikovs have put every fortune teller in the metro area to work finding her, and it’s a disaster.”

“Why?” The curiosity on his face was real. He was no longer playing along. Somehow I was reaching him.

There was a convenience store up ahead, and something about its sign looked uncomfortably familiar. I opened another bag of Warheads. “Do you know what happens when I look into the future? When any clairvoyant looks into the future?”

“What? Oh, shit, what’s wrong?”

The shakes were so powerful I had to grab the dashboard to stay upright. The future fell over me so thickly I couldn’t even see the street ahead. “Turn left.”

He began to slow the Taurus. But if we passed this turn, we’d never get back to Rayna. Never.

“Left! Now!”

A horn screamed. The car’s wheels hit the curb and we rocked, hard, and for a second I thought our momentum would flip us over. Death breathed stickily down my neck.

And then we were safe on the shittiest road in all of northeast Portland, the pavement barely a memory, the gravel beneath more pothole than surface. Even though the only light came from the blue security light over the convenience store’s dumpster, I could see enough to know we’d found the place.

“That’s it.”

Aguilar pulled up into the lot, the lights of the Taurus playing on the face of the boxcar. A heavy-duty chain secured its door, the metal the only shiny or clean thing in miles. A car pulled in behind us, one of those sleek little models gangsters liked for street racing. Aguilar reached for the gun in his shoulder holster. “You stay in the car.”

I grabbed his arm. “No, it’s not—”

Safe, I meant to say, I think, but the explosion rocked the Taurus so hard my seatback slammed the air out of my body. Aguilar’s head hit the steering wheel and he slumped forward.

I reached for my seatbelt. A smell like scorched cotton candy filled the air. This wasn’t the explosion Aguilar had been worried about: we still had seven minutes before the timer on the C4 in the railcar was set to blow. This explosion was something else entirely. This explosion was mine.

I got out of the car.

“Stop!” a voice shouted. I ignored it. All I could see was the woman waiting for me in front of the shipping container.

A shot resounded, loud enough to make my ears ring, and a bullet ricocheted off the shipping container’s door. The woman beckoned to me with one knobbed finger. I took a step toward her. I figured I had about five minutes to fix all of this before time itself stopped existing.

Gunfire sounded behind me. I could hear Aguilar bellowing something, but I didn’t pay him any attention. I couldn’t stop staring at her .

A white bob framed her round, only lightly wrinkled face. Red-framed glasses, hipster huge, were more chic than geek. She wore a black linen dress that could have come straight out of the J. Crew catalog.

“You’re a lot classier than I expected,” I admitted. “And not nearly as chubby.”

She rolled her eyes as she reached for my hand. It felt strange to be holding hands with my future self. Her fingers dug into mine as we both craned back our heads.

The fabric of time hung in shreds above the boxcar. A luminous blackness protruded through the gaps, ribbons of lightning crackling and hissing. Something moved between bolts of lightning, something whose pincers clicked and clacked like an army of spiders.

“Takas! What the hell are you doing? And who’s the old lady?”

Aguilar ran past me, gun in one hand, bolt-cutters in the other. He didn’t see the horror hanging over his head.

“Just get the girl!” one of me shouted, or maybe both.

Thunder sounded loud enough to vibrate my heart inside my chest. He was already fighting with the bolt cutters.

The thing began to crawl out of the black. Its claws tore at the ribbons of time, tearing at the fabric of reality, widening its passage. Behind it, its kin screamed and hissed encouragement. Reality had held them back for eons, and we stupid fortune tellers had invited them in.

And I was the worst of them. The strongest of them. I’d almost single-handedly ended the gang wars simply by giving the Raskolnikovs so much information no one could compete with them. After I’d had my first vision of this railcar blowing a hole into space and time, I started looking for ways to fix things. But nothing I did helped.

So I did the most dangerous thing someone like me could do: reached through the veil of the future and begged myself for help.

No wonder Aguilar had found me passed out in an alley. The explosion over the shipping container was just one small manifestation of the energy I’d used—I was lucky I hadn’t killed myself.

Future Me dug her fingernails into my skin, pulling me out of my pity party. Her free hand raised a mesh bag.

“We’ll need this!”

She had to shout to be heard over the thunder and the screeching. The door to the shipping container stood open, and I could see Aguilar doing something with the explosives sitting behind Rayna Raskolnikov. Some of the screeching came from the girl. I could hear sirens in the distance, and maybe gunfire.

I wrenched my eyes back to the mesh bag. The bottles inside were actually glowing, the liquid a seething yellow like a bad dream. She tossed me one. The lid was, of course, shaped like a shark.

As one, we tossed back the super-sour drink. The malic acid threatened to rip my jaw off my face, and capsaicin burned along with the sour. My mind shot out the top of my head, slamming into my future self’s and twisting into a braid of power.

Our energy, phosphorescent yellow, shot out at the purple claw, still hacking at space-time. Chitin snapped. The creature screamed, its pain echoing through the world in waves of shock and terror. Its voice was a color: a purple nearly ultraviolet. My body, barely connected to the thinking part of me, clutched at my eyes as they burned and stung from the hideousness of the light.

“Come on,” Future Self yelled in my ear.

But I couldn’t move. I could only stare around me, blinking in pain. A man screamed as the creature’s blood, black and putrescent, rained down, searing his flesh. Aguilar must have handcuffed him to his own racing car, because now he hung from his wrist as the scorching goo spilled over him. His flesh began to smoke and sizzle.

“Come on!”

Fury spurred me back to work. We threw ourselves against the tear in space, our minds now yellow metaphysical hands seizing the torn fabric of time itself. The thing threw its weight against the gap, straining against our strength.

My future self growled. Her physical fingers dug deeper into my physical hand. Our metaphysical body grew brighter, and the sides of the tear began to pull together.

That’s when the face appeared. An eye, a single eye burning with hate and entropy and the cold of an entire life spent outside the sphere of reality. I’d never felt such emptiness, such horrible hunger. I could feel it drinking up my feelings, my memories, my very existence. My grip loosened.

“No!” Future Self wailed.

Aguilar gave a shout of fear, and I saw him standing at the entrance of the shipping container, cradling the gangster heiress in his arms. A purple arm shot out of the sky, closing on Rayna Raskolnikov and hoisting her above the ground.

“Aguilar!” I screamed.

He pulled out his revolver and fired a full six rounds into the sky.

It couldn’t have done anything. It shouldn’t have done anything. But perhaps it simply startled the thing, or perhaps Aguilar’s sheer anger and courage overwhelmed the part of it that fed on our powerlessness and fear. But it dropped Rayna and pulled back a little, and just like that, we were back in the game.

This time there was no straining. My selfs’ yellow metaphysical hands drew the edges of space-time closed with the grind and screech of curtains closing over a dirty window.

Future Self dropped my hand. “You know what to do?”

I nodded.

“Give me a boost!” she ordered Aguilar, and even though he didn’t understand what the hell she wanted, he lifted her so she could grab onto the roof of the boxcar and pull herself up.

Wind still streamed from the rip in the veil of time. It stirred her hair around her face and tugged on her linen dress. The black glow of the other reality lit up the scene like a malevolent black light. The burning yellow of our mental hands stained her hair the shade of Mountain Dew.

“Stop fucking around with time,” she shouted down at me. “And go visit your mom!”

I wanted to wave, but she was already leaping at the gap. She floated for an instant and then the hole in space-time swallowed her up. Yellow crackled. Reality gave one last, ear-shattering sonic boom as it slapped back on itself. I fell to my knees, covering my ears, hugging my chest. The boom resounded inside every bone of my body.

The rain on the back of my neck finally got me to sit up. I wiped at my nose and realized the warm wetness was blood.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Aguilar knelt beside me. The blood vessels in his right eye had all burst.

I nodded.

He glanced at Rayna, lying still in the blackberry vines. Smoke rose from her body where the thing had touched her. The air stank of burned sugar.

I ran to her side. She looked so tiny like this. So many people had spent so much of themselves to find her. I dropped to my knees and felt for her wrist.

“Is she alive?”

I pressed my fingers into her wrist. “Please, Rayna. Please.” I’d spent so much, trying to find her. I didn’t know her, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, either.

Sirens sounded all around us. Aguilar put his hand on my shoulder.

“Takas.”

I waved him away. “I’m still looking for a pulse.”

“Takas!” He yanked me to my feet. “She’s breathing. Look.”

I sagged against him. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness.”

He put his arm around me and led me back to the Taurus. Without his help, I might have collapsed.

Holy shit. I had pulled my own future self through time to help fight off invaders from another reality. I’d sewn together a hole in space-time with the power of my own brain. No wonder I was tired.

“Do I even want to know what happened just now?” He opened the car door and I nearly fell inside. “I mean, were there really two of you fighting an unspeakable spider-monster hanging out of the sky?”

“You knew that was me?”

He sank into the driver’s seat. There was a burn on his cheek like a smudge of raw purple. “Who else would wear glasses like that?”

I closed my eyes. “Wake me up when there’s real food,” I managed to whisper.

I think after that he said “Thanks for saving the world,” but by that time, I was already mostly asleep, and dreaming of anything but sour candy.