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?”