That was this recording’s hidden moment of beauty. Jay’s passion.
When Oz’s lips brushed my ear, it startled me. I jerked away and shot him a glare, but he moved in closer, using a hand to hold me in place. “Do you know what would have happened had he not died today?”
I kept my eyes, my glasses, trained on Jay. I didn’t need any more trouble.
Oz switched to silent speech, apparently realizing an outward conversation would be recorded along with our observations. “He would have died tomorrow in a boating accident with his wife.”
The whispered words, facts that could only be glimpsed with the help of the strange Projector, sent shivers down my spine. My mind lost complete track of what I was supposed to be recording as Jay grabbed hold of a rope anchored to the sea floor and kicked below the surface for the last time.
“His is the only trajectory I’ve ever seen that keeps stopping no matter what. If we saved him, it would buy him another twenty-four hours. If we saved him tomorrow, he’d get another week.” Oz leaned in even closer. “It almost makes one believe in fate.”
I gave a small shake of my head and elbowed him away from me. I didn’t believe in fate. None of us did. The concept was nothing more than the result of choices made by men—by us and the people around us—and, despite the anomaly Jay Moriarty apparently presented, could always be altered.
Still, Oz’s little Projector lesson turned over and over in my mind, like a pancake flipped and flipped until both sides were burned black. I used the brain stem tattoo to search information on Jay Moriarty, a task that should have been completed before we’d left had I been paying proper attention to my studies the past couple of days. I found more than one reference to the fact that Jay, even as a boy, had felt a strange certainty that he would not live a long life.
Then again, one could argue that if he hadn’t been attracted to dangerous sports, this day might have been avoided.
Except according to Oz, Jay’s early death was predestined. It made me think of Caesarion and his belief in beings who watched our lives play out, planned from beginning to untimely end. As much as I wanted to believe, as hard as I tried and wished there was a grand design that would bring us together again in another realm, I didn’t. Couldn’t.
We stood still on the beach, moving every once in a while to shift position or wander toward the water so that no one would take note of the group of five people seemingly riveted to smooth, clear water when Jay’s body was later discovered.
A while after he’d kicked to the bottom, two other divers roamed the area. The eyeglasses shared the strangers’ eventual eyewitness accounts with me, including the fact that they’d seen Jay on the bottom but had left him there, assuming he was training.
It was sad, and interesting, but I didn’t understand why we were here. Aside from Oz’s strange and cryptic statement about fate and Levi’s obsession with the psychology behind extreme sporting, if Jay Moriarty had never been meant to live, then his death couldn’t have any lasting positive or negative impression on humanity.
Could it?
Perhaps that was today’s lesson. The overseers might have a specific aspect of today in mind, one we should have noticed. I should have been paying more attention. As usual.
We left before Jay’s friends sent out the search party that would recover his body. It wouldn’t look right for the five of us to be in the same spot, morning to night. People would remember that, once this day became memorable to them, and despite the ancient Egyptian tale about dark ones showing up in the pages of history, we’d been trained to take every effort to ensure no Historians accidentally appeared in Earth Before’s history books.
Silence accompanied our group on the way back up the beach. We’d witnessed the death of a boy of only twenty-two, and even though it wasn’t violent or horrifying like so many of our observations, this unsettled me, too. Perhaps it was the idea that we could be so fully alive and present one moment and gone the next. That the smallest choices could change everything.
A small group of people—two girls, four boys, all young—sat around a crackling fire at the edge of the beach, books embossed with the title Holy Bible opened in their laps. They looked as though they might be seminary students of some kind, based on their serious expressions and the fact that they sat on a gorgeous beach to read religious texts instead of enjoying the sun or water. One of the boys read aloud in a pleasing tone that helped ease my mounting tension.
“So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
He continued, his voice fading as we passed by, making our way back to the secluded coconut trees. The words sounded right, and yet they didn’t. My mind played with the verses, trying to figure out why they felt wrong. My brain stem tattoo was no help—every version of the Bible it searched came back with the passage read exactly like the boy had intoned it moments ago, yet my memory, which had always been excellent, insisted it was off.
As we gathered together inside the blue bubble, waiting for our return trip, it hit me. The passage had been missing something—the words “be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.”
My mouth went dry and my knees buckled, causing Analeigh to reach out a hand to steady me and Oz to raise a sharp look my direction.
All I could think was that since my brain stem tat hadn’t been able to find any texts with the correct wording, they were missing from the historical record.
Which meant someone, sometime, had purposely taken them out.
Chapter Twenty-Six