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.