26.
Sienna
We passed through Kentucky quickly, and on into southern Illinois about an hour later. I was at the wheel and not hating it, surprisingly. I’d never been a huge fan of driving, preferring to let others just chauffeur me around like I was a big shot. It wasn’t as though I weren’t capable of driving. I was reasonably smart, possessed the dexterity of a superpowered person, and had reflexes that would have rivaled an AI-guided machine.
But there was just something about driving I didn’t care for. Maybe, as a total control freak, it was one of the few opportunities I got to just yield control and trust the person next to me to not get me killed. Which was a big ask in some cases. Admittedly, it was pretty funny that I, being such a deeply in-control person, would want to surrender control in such a way, but—
I blinked as I thought about that. Had I known that about myself before Rose had ripped out those memories? Maybe. I couldn’t recall actively thinking about my control freakery before. And certainly not as it pertained to driving. It was a strange thing, trusting people so little in other ways and yet immediately trusting them to take control in the instance of basically the number one cause of unnatural death in the country.
“Hm,” I muttered to myself, enjoying the quiet for once. Eilish was staring out the window, a look of barely veiled awe on her face as we drove through endless, flat fields. Cassidy was still tapping away at the keyboard, having not said anything for a long while, and Harry …
Harry was in the passenger seat. He shifted, trying to put his head against the window in a way that was comfortable (I assumed, having gone through the same thing only hours earlier) and failing.
“Trouble sleeping?” I asked as he shifted again and made another sound of displeasure.
“Now that you mention it … yes,” he said, arms folded tightly in front of him.
“Guilty conscience?” I asked with a little bit of a prickly, taunting air.
“My conscience is perfectly fine, thanks for asking,” he said. “I think it has more to do with this uncomfortable car.”
“Yeah, I guess windows weren’t made to be great pillows,” I said. “I just figured you had something on your mind that you’d yet to hit me with. Some super insight from the future or about my past that you were just waiting to—y’know, knock the pegs out from under me with in a little while. Keep me off balance.”
“I think you’re plenty unbalanced as it is.” He was smirking again. The bastard.
“Haha,” I said, with no actual humor. “You have to admit, if you were being honest, that you don’t exactly seem like you’re making a great effort not to knock me flat in this whole business.”
“Lots of people make a lot more effort than I do to actually knock you over,” he said. “And whether you want to believe it or not, Sienna … I’m on your side in this. And I am trying to help you.”
I burned a little within. “Fine. Okay.” I let it go, because … well, annoyingly, I actually did sort of believe he was trying to help me. Frustrating as I found him.
“The future is in flux right now,” Harry said, trying to stretch his neck. “The near future, I mean. And, actually, the far future, too. Consequences are coming, with the chance to ripple through … well … with a chance for a long rippling effect.” He rubbed his forehead. “The problem is, there’s so much going on it’s like sensory overload. So many things are happening. It’s overwhelming.”
“Does that happen often?” I asked.
“Not really, no,” Harry said, rubbing his face, shading his eyes from the sun—and from me. “Not when I’m just walking around living life.”
“What are you doing now, if not walking around and living life?” I asked. “Trying to sleep and occasionally eat and—whatever else you do. Drink and gamble, I guess?”
“I do like to drink and gamble some,” he said with a nod. “But I’m not living life right this minute, Sienna.” He still didn’t look at me. “I’m trying to keep an eye on the future.”
I frowned, turning the wheel to move us back into the right lane in order to let a BMW doing about 90 zoom past. “But you can’t see your own future.”
He paused, hand still over his eyes. “No.”
“So …” I pursed my lips. “Whose future are you looking into?” He didn’t stir. “Mine?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, and it was a slow exhalation of air that followed his words.
“Is there sex in my future?” I asked, white-knuckling the wheel. “Because it feels like there should be sex in my future. It’s kinda been a while.”
Harry let out a little chuckle. “Yes, Sienna, there is sex in your future.”
I stared straight ahead and reddened a little. Whew. Hopefully it’d pair well with that happiness he’d promised me earlier. “Good.”
“What about mine?” Eilish asked, leaning forward in the back seat. “Is there sex in my future?”
Harry seemed to think about it for a moment. “Not anytime soon.” He tiled his head to look back at her, faint smile perking the corner of his lips. “Guess you’re probably sorry you passed up on that orgy opportunity now, huh?”
“You’re just a second-rate fortune teller,” Eilish said, slumping back in the seat and doing a little blushing of her own. “I could get my rocks off if I wanted to. You don’t know.”
“And that’s the point of my powers,” Harry said. “Probabilities change. I can see a certain spectrum of them, but it doesn’t mean some wild-ass, out-of-left-field shit doesn’t show up at the last minute and change everything. I’ve been blindsided by wacky, unbelievable things I didn’t see coming more than a few times.”
“But I thought you could at least see those wild probabilities?” I asked.
“I can—sorta,” Harry said. “It’s like …” He blinked, apparently trying to find the right analogy. “I don’t know … the big ones dominate the scene—it’s like a landscape. I might not see that tiny shrub in the background until I get closer, you know? Because the lake view is commanding my attention, and past it, that forest edging up on the foreground. So I miss the bush in the background.”
“Way to come through with the Bob Ross explanation of your powers,” I said. “You don’t have to tell anyone about that shrub; it can be your little secret.”
“I have no idea who Bob Ross is,” Eilish said.
“Anyway …” Harry said. “That’s how it works.”
“I would have figured you’d see it all,” I said, like someone had let a little of the air out of my balloon. “Like … seeing the future would give you some sense of warm certainty.” I glanced at him, head now back against the window again. “I figured you’d sleep like a baby.”
“I think sleeplessness is worse for a Cassandra,” Harry said.
“But … you know how it’s most likely to turn out,” I said. “So … shouldn’t that eliminate the fear? Knowing that—in the end—it’ll all be all right?”
“There’s always fear, Sienna,” he said, “because I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, exactly. I just know the clearest probabilities, and they get narrower and narrower until there’s only one left. And yes, I can sometimes see beyond to the big events, the ones that shake the world—or redefine it, but … that’s not the end, usually.” His smile was quicksilver, it appeared so quickly and then lost all its joy just as fast. “We don’t end until we die, after all.”
“That’s … so very glum,” Eilish said.
“But … that’s why there’s always fear,” Harry said. “Because there’s always another trouble coming until the end.” His eyes glinted, then widened. “Sienna—”
“Whoa,” Cassidy said, and somehow I knew that whatever Harry had been about to say had been related to Cassidy’s sudden outburst.
“What is it?” I asked, watching Harry’s jaw lock out of the corner of my eye. Uh oh.
“Looks like our enemy just showed up in Minneapolis,” Cassidy said as we crested a small hill that looked out over what appeared to be hundreds of miles of Illinois. She thrust her laptop forward, and I was treated to a view of a picture that looked like airport tarmac, with a burning plane in the background, orange flames and white snow, brown grass exposed where the heat had melted the snow away.
“Jeez,” I muttered. “Is Reed on scene yet?”
There was silence, just for a second, and I realized Cassidy had stopped talking.
Before I could turn and see what the problem was, I felt Harry’s hand on the wheel, guiding it, and I stared at him blankly for just a second before it hit me.
Reed.
He was …
“No,” I whispered, and I took my hands off the wheel. “Not …” I looked at the laptop screen, and there were … bodies … arranged around the tarmac like— “No,” I said again. “They can’t be—”
But with damning certainty, I stared at it as Harry guided the wheel toward the side of the road, and we drifted to a stop, my foot off the pedal, my ability to do anything but stare at the picture of my fallen friends, shadows on the tarmac, as we coasted to a stop on the side of the freeway.