11.
I sat in the passenger seat of the car heading down that Alabama back road, stunned. I’d seen Jamie Barton just a few months ago. She’d helped me escape from Scotland, helped save my life at a time when I wondered if I had any friends left. She’d been one of a couple of handfuls of people who’d put their lives on the line facing off against the strongest metahuman on the damned planet to help save my life.
Now she was possibly dead, and I didn’t have a damned clue what had happened.
“What the hell?” I asked, directing it to Cassidy.
She glanced up at me. “I’m looking.” And she drove her gaze down again.
I looked at Harry, who sat with pursed lips staring into the distance. “What do you know about this?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t really know this Gravity gal.”
“It’s just Gravity now,” I said. “And I don’t care if you know her—do you know what happened?”
“I’ve been sitting here with you this whole time,” Harry said, turning to favor me with a boyish grin. “How would I—no, I don’t have an iota of an idea. I’d need to know this lady to be able to look into her future.”
My mind raced. “What about my future?”
He paused, just waiting. I wondered why, but after he didn’t speak, I lost patience. “Because I’m going to try and contact her, of course.”
“Of course you are,” Harry said. “How?”
“I don’t know, a phone call,” I said, my already exhausted patience somehow finding a further level of exhaustion to sink to. Post Marathon status, maybe. About to yell, “Nike! Nike!” before collapsing dead.
“I’m sure that’d be satisfying,” Harry said, “but what are the reasons you can’t do that—and what are the reasons you shouldn’t?”
I squinted at him, and he smiled. “What is this, twenty questions?”
“See, this is something you learn after a little time spent gazing the future,” Harry said, settling back, still paying most of his attention to me and not the road ahead. “I could have this whole conversation in advance of you by three whole sentences. I know everything you could possibly say—”
“Pine—” I started to interrupt.
“—apple,” he finished.
“—Sol,” I said spitefully. I totally had meant pineapple.
“So I could go ahead and skip most of our conversations,” Harry said, and he nudged the empty scotch bottle with an elbow, “just head you off in a way you’d never realize you’d even been … let’s call it ‘handled’—”
“Wh—”
“Because ‘manipulated’ is an ugly word,” Harry said. “That’s why.” He looked at me knowingly. “I could head you off at every conversational pass. I know what you’re going to say before you say it. Even the crazy stuff like—”
“Bene—” Cassidy piped up from the back.
“—ficient,” Harry finished for her.
“Mal—” she started to say.
“—volio,” Harry said.
“Very good,” Cassidy said coolly, then went back to typing.
“But if I have one side of the conversation, always,” Harry said, “it’s not really a conversation, is it? So, yeah, I play twenty questions with you. Fifty questions, or a hundred questions, even—and when I’m doing that, know that it’s not because I’m being a giant, throbbing hemorrhoid.” He cracked a grin. Charming. Damn him. “It’s because I actually do want to have a conversation with you, and because I don’t want to be a dick and act like I’m reading your mind when I’m really just excluding you from our talk by jumping ahead of you in time. Because doing that means I’m the only one learning anything in our conversation, and that seems unfair to you.”
“I want to know where you learned charm, Harry,” I said, after giving his little explanation a moment to digest. It sat well with me.
“Why?” He smirked. “You wouldn’t take any advice I have to give you in that area, would you?”
I grunted. He was right about that, too. “Fine. I want to talk to Gravity.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know what happened to her,” I said.
“Read a paper,” he said. “Or just wait for Cassidy to find video of the incident in question. It’s on the net and she’s zeroing in on it as we speak.”
“Interesting,” Cassidy said as I tossed a look over my shoulder. She’d paused for a quarter second and now she dove back into her computer, tapping even more furiously.
“I’d still like to hear it from Jamie’s own voice,” I said.
“And what happens when your voice gets heard over the airwaves?” Harry asked. “Or however they work those cell phones?”
“It’s—” Cassidy started
“It’s a little too complex for me, Cassidy,” Harry said. “Just illustrating a point.” I blinked; he’d shut her down without being rude about it and simultaneously complimented her intelligence without being hammer-on-the-head obvious about it. I looked at Cassidy out of the corner of my eye and she nodded a little appreciatively.
Damn, Harry Graves was slick.
“The NSA would intercept my call from a cell phone,” I said. “Voiceprint analysis. And they’d pounce on me after they traced the call.”
“Let’s say they didn’t,” Harry went on, “because Cassidy is brilliant at that sort of thing, obscuring phone calls—”
“Thank you,” Cassidy said, and in her voice I heard … gratification?
Like, genuine … pleasure?
I didn’t recall ever hearing that from Cassidy before. Ever.
“—let’s say you got away free and clear. And Jamie Barton gave you … a long and florid explanation that never made the press.” He settled a hand on the wheel, gently guiding it, still not looking at the damned road. “What would you be giving your enemies?”
“A recorded call,” I said, and then I got it. “They’d know I was after this guy.”
Harry’s smile brightened. “Probably not the greatest idea to give the feds a big, blinking arrow telling them which direction you’re going.”
No, that wasn’t a good idea. At all. “What about—” I started to ask.
“Don’t assume that just because Jamie Barton fought this guy,” Harry said, “that she knows what he wants. She doesn’t. He’s mysterious. And my sense is, he’s going to remain that way until such time as he decides not to be anymore.”
I sat there in the silence, and my stomach turned a good flip over, either from the scotch or the worry now afflicting it. “Do you know what he wants?”
Harry just shook his head. “Too many branching paths. The farther out I look, the less likely I get the right scenario.”
“Excuse me, what?” Cassidy asked, leaning forward.
Harry took a breath. “It’s like this, Cassidy—my view of the future is a series of forks in the road. I can see the probabilities associated with each path. It’s 99 percent likely that Sienna is about to say, ‘Porcupine scuttlebutt,’ for instance,” and he looked at me.
“Porcupine scuttlebutt,” I said lamely, because … yeah, I’d been about to say it. For the sake of randomness.
“That’s immediate,” Harry said. “That’s easy. Only a one percent chance she wasn’t going to say it—I mean, I’m rounding, it was more 98.5% to 1.3%, with the remainder going toward other, extremely unlikely possibilities—me pulling over the car and successfully initiating an orgy, for instance—”
I slapped him on the arm, and he didn’t dodge. Probably because I didn’t put much sting in it. “Very low odds. Below zero.”
“Not below zero,” he said, still smirking, “but threading that needle successfully in order to buck those odds is in the incredibly thin percentages. Near enough to impossible as to make it not worth my time to try. A shift in the winds is enough to kill it, and not only kill it but to do so prejudicially, meaning you toss my ass out on the side of the road for the attempt. Right, Eilish?”
“Jaysus,” Eilish said, stirring. I hadn’t even known she was awake.
“The immediate future is easy,” Harry said again. “But the next decision after that, the percentages are less sure. They get clearer up until the moment the decision is made, and the event happens. Even minor, unnoticeable events have an effect. You’re talking to someone you like, you’re plucking up your courage to ask them something—maybe to go to dinner. The wind shifts, suddenly you smell bread from a bakery down the way.” His voice was smooth, soothing. “It reminds me you of when your mother used to cook cinnamon rolls when you were a kid. It pauses the conversation for a second; you lose the thought. You pick up again and go in a different direction. The moment is lost, the opportunity missed—you go on, and never come back down that road.”
“I miss my mother’s cinnamon rolls,” Cassidy said, a little stricken, from the backseat.
“The next moment another choice comes up,” Harry said, “more split odds. For every decision I leap over, the path forks. Again and again. After a while, I pass so many forks that I can’t keep track of them all anymore. No one could, unless they had Cassidy’s brain.” She made a mollified sound from behind him. “I can look forward a little. A lot, if I really sit and concentrate for a while.” His face twitched slightly. “But the probabilities that I get everything right? They fade the more decisions I leap over. Sometimes, external events insert themselves into your life no matter what you’re doing here. For example—Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going to die no matter what I did on the morning of April 12, 1945. Things were going to change in the US after December 6th, 1941 whether I called the War Department and warned them what was coming the next morning or not. My small decisions were not going to influence that—they were going to influence me. So … I don’t know about your friend Jamie Barton. I don’t know about this guy that you’re chasing, either. I can look ahead, but clarity escapes those moments because every choice you make in the next few days affects what happens when you come to them. Your frame of mind when you get there,” he not-subtly nudged the empty scotch bottle again, “the questions you ask when you face him—if you face him—determine the outcome, determine what he says, whether you get to the bottom of what he wants. So I’ve got no answer for you. You’ll have to find this one for yourself when the right moment arrives.”
“But I do try and face him?” I asked, fighting against the hangover. A little worry was gnawing in the pit of my stomach, some small thing tearing at me, wondering …
What the hell was I doing?
Why was I going in the direction that I was?
“Lot of decisions ahead,” Harry said, and now his smile was not nearly so charming. It was more …
Reserved. Hesitant.
Scared?
I pondered that question, and his answer, as we rolled on through the Alabama night, silence fallen over us as I stumbled on in my own uncertainty for a few miles, wondering why I was doing this thing at all.