‘What?’ A cold finger of recognition ran down my spine.

‘Fireball! Quick, before they’re too near!’

‘You said “batter up”.’ The words on Demus’s piece of paper. Coincidence, surely?

John tapped his finger before the leading orcs. ‘Come on, Nicodemus. Fireball! It’s what we brought a mage with us for in the first place.’

I blinked. ‘OK. I’ll detonate it at the back of the hall.’

Elton nodded. ‘Roll the damage.’

I picked up a six-sided die. If you asked the rest of them to roll six dice, they’d grab a handful. Me, I liked to do it one at a time. I tossed it out.

‘Four.’ Elton started to keep tally.

‘I knew that . . .’ The first number on Demus’s note.

‘Knew what?’ Mia asked.

‘That I was going to roll a four.’

‘Big deal.’ John snorted.

‘No, really. I knew it was going to be a four.’

‘If your party trick is guessing one of six numbers, then you need a new trick.’ John picked up a twenty-sided die. ‘Impress me, hat-man!’

‘Seventeen,’ I said, almost sure it wouldn’t be.

John let the die go. A D20 is almost a ball. Technically it’s an icosahedron, but it rolls like a ball. It kept going until it fetched up against Mia’s newly acquired rulebook. ‘Seventeen!’ she exclaimed. ‘Cool!’

‘Yeah. Good guess.’ John shrugged. ‘Do it again.’ And he set his other D20 rolling.

‘Seventeen again,’ I said.

And it was.

‘Shit.’ John sat up straight. ‘What’re the odds?’

‘One in four hundred,’ Simon answered, unimpressed. ‘Get on and roll the damage.’

‘Six,’ I said, and tossed out another D6. It landed on six.

That gave even Simon pause. He gave me a flat look and scooped up three D12, clutching them in his fist. ‘What will these be?’

‘One, two, then eleven.’

Simon dropped them one after the other. One, two, then eleven.

‘What are the odds now?’ Mia breathed.

‘One in four million, one hundred and forty-seven thousand, two hundred,’ Simon said with a frown. ‘Which means it’s a trick. How are you doing this, Nick?’

I shrugged and tossed out three more six-sided dice. ‘Three, five, three.’ Then I took out Demus’s piece of paper and unfolded it for them. The numbers were all there, written down in order.

‘Do it again!’ Elton demanded.

‘I can’t. That’s all I’ve got.’ I threw out the last die of the forgotten damage. ‘Six,’ I hoped. It was a four.

‘All you’ve got?’ Mia asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What’s it say there?’ Elton came round from the game master’s side of the table, leaving the seat of his authority. He picked up the paper. ‘Shit! Batter up. That’s what you said, ain’t it, John? Batter up? You in on this, too? All of you got weighted dice or some shit?’ He snatched up the last couple of dice I’d thrown.

John leaned over to squint at the paper. ‘Holy crap . . . I said that . . . You wrote it down just then!’

‘How?’ I shook my head. ‘My stalker gave me that last Saturday.’

‘This is nonsense.’ Simon banged the table. ‘This isn’t real.’

It seemed a bold claim for someone who five minutes ago was wholly invested in blowing up orcs, but I had a lot of sympathy for his point of view. ‘Look, I don’t know how he did it.’

‘The guy who hit Michael Devis . . . he knew what those dice would roll?’ John ran his fingers into his hair, clutching his head as if he might squeeze some sense into the situation. ‘You know this is all mental right?’

‘I know.’ It made having cancer seem almost everyday.

‘So what do we do?’ Elton asked.

‘See if any of the orcs are still alive.’ Simon tapped the table.

I ignored him. ‘I don’t know. What can we do?’

‘Go out and find this guy!’ Elton smacked fist into palm. ‘And . . .’

‘And what?’ Mia stood up. ‘Smack him around for knowing the future? Like that makes sense. Anyway . . . he’d know you were coming.’

‘Nick!’ Simon’s mum calling up the stairs. ‘Your mother just went by, looking for a parking space.’

‘I better go.’ I started heaping stuff into my bag. I had plenty of time. Mother was a terrible parker and the roads round Simon’s were always jammed. But I wanted to be out of there. I felt sick again, and I wanted space for my own astonishment, rather than demands from the rest of them that I sort out their disbelief.

A few moments later, I was hobbling down the stairs. Behind me, John stood at the window, staring out, still too bewildered to object. Elton was rolling the dice over and over. Shaking them near his ear. Simon stayed seated, biting his lip and staring at the table hard enough to bore holes in it.

‘Wait up.’ Mia followed me down the stairs. ‘That was a trick. Right?’

‘I wish it was.’ I reached the door and called back down the hallway. ‘Thanks, Mrs Brett!’

‘But . . .’ Mia pursued me out into the cold and grabbed my arm to hold me back. ‘Otherwise it’s just crazy.’

I shook my head. ‘From what I’ve been reading, the whole universe is built from crazy. Hopefully Demus will show up again and explain it all . . .’

‘Demus? That’s the guy?’

‘Yeah . . .’ I glanced up and down the street. No sign of Mother, or the Chrysler Avenger she’d been refusing to let die with dignity these past ten years. ‘Listen. Could you . . . you know . . . get me more of that stuff? It really does help.’

Mia frowned, raising a hand to her bruised cheekbone. ‘More? Are you feeding it to the dog?’

‘I’ll pay, of course.’ I still had a fair bit left. Mostly, I had just wanted her to come round again. Now I’d gone and made it awkward. ‘Never mind.’ Though I did mind. The idea of being without the resin did feel a little frightening. I needed a barrier between me and my treacherous body right now.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not a problem. I’ll hook you up.’

‘Nick!’ Mother beckoning me from the corner. ‘Nick!’

‘Gotta go.’ I gave Mia an apologetic look.

‘See you.’

And off I went, my mind full of her smile when any sane person would be too busy freaking out about bald stalkers with magic powers.

CHAPTER 7

‘You’ve concluded that the many worlds interpretation, which, FYI, is correct by the way, is incompatible with time travel.’

Demus came from behind the bench and sat at the other end from me, room for a third person in between. Richmond Park lay before us, an early morning mist hiding the frost-laden grass, except where the ground rose in slight ridges, forming islands in a white and undulating sea. I hadn’t come looking for him, but I had thought that he might find me. He was something of a magician after all.

He was right. I had concluded that. ‘If every moment, an infinity of different worlds are branching from this one to accommodate all possibilities . . . then that’s an infinite number of worlds from where time travellers could come back to this one. And since there aren’t an infinity of time travellers arriving every moment, then either the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is wrong . . . or time travel is impossible.’

I felt suddenly much sicker in Demus’s presence, nausea pulsing in me. There seemed to be some sort of physical pressure, as if the space between us were overfull. Out of the corner of my eye I saw white shapes, phantoms like those I’d run through that night in the park. They were all around me, rising from the mist.

‘Ignore those. They’re just echoes. They’ll die away,’ Demus said. ‘There’s some sort of resonance between us, creating temporal anomalies, and it gets worse when we get closer. I’ve been waiting for it to wear off. My calculations suggested it would be much shorter lived. Think of it like a build-up of static electricity. I’ve been approaching you in stages, letting it leak away, rather than just walking straight up to you and letting the sparks fly.’ He reached his bandaged right hand toward me and immediately the phantom images around us grew stronger, my nausea more intense. He drew his arm back, frowning.

‘So all those weird déjà vu things that have been happening, all those ghosts in the park, all of it . . . that was all you? It all happened because you were close by?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why just for me? Why didn’t anyone else see those things?’

‘I think you might have already guessed that, Nick. You’re taking this very calmly for someone who hasn’t. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.’

‘But—’

‘Now, as I was saying, there are two reasons why we’re not being crushed under a vast mass of time travellers right now.’ Demus dug into his pocket. ‘Biscuit?’ He held out an orange flavour Club Bar. My favourite.

‘No.’

He shrugged and started to unwrap it for himself rather clumsily.