She reached out and took the orb in her hand. But I need to know.
Jade checked her watch again. Like her, the diver’s chronograph had picked up a few scars over the last few years. The stainless steel casing was scratched and the blue paint on the fixed bezel was chipped in a few places, but the sapphire crystal covering the blue watch face with the bright red sweep hands was clear and unmarred. It reminded her of another crystal she had looked into once, long, long ago.
He was late.
Professor was late. Strange how she still thought of him as Professor after all these years. After everything they had been through, everything they had made together, everything they had lost, he was still Professor.
And he was late. That wasn’t like him. She hoped he had merely been delayed by a detour to get around the riots, and not caught up in them.
Even from ten blocks away, the acrid smell of the smoke burned in her nostrils. Maybe the wind was blowing the fumes through the concrete canyons, or maybe the wildfire of violence had escaped containment and was now racing south, toward this bastion of wealth and power. Not that there was any danger here. The rioters would never reach this place, not with all the troops deployed throughout the city, and she hoped they had the good sense not to try.
“Jade!”
She turned in the direction of the hissed whisper and saw him, standing at the corner of the building. He wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Even without the hoodie covering his head, shadowing his features — she had actually gotten used to that silly fedora, and now she found herself acutely aware of its absence — he would have looked out of place here. Still, there was something about his presence, the way he moved, that made him seem almost invisible.
She smiled. It was good to see him again, in spite of the circumstances. “You made it.”
He nodded. “I think you’re right about this. About everything that’s happened.”
“How do we stop it?”
“You already know the answer to that,” he said. “The real question is, can we?”
Jade felt a knot of fear settle in her gut. He was right. “Have you got a plan?”
“You mean a better plan than go in with guns blazing?” He shook his head.
She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. This was bigger than just the two of them, but there wasn’t anyone else left now. All their friends were gone.
How did things get this bad?
She knew the answer to that, too.
My fault.
“She probably already knows we’re coming,” Professor said.
Jade nodded soberly. “But there’s something she doesn’t know.”
“What’s that?”
“How it ends.”
“Jade?”
Jade blinked and looked around. Where am I? She spotted Professor, but he looked different, younger, without the scar.
I remember this. Yet, it was an old memory, like something from a dream. Her eyes slid sideways and she saw….
The universe abruptly synchronized and she realized what had happened. This was the reality and all of those things that she now remembered so vividly were nothing but distant possible futures.
“Jade?” Professor repeated. “You okay?”
She nodded slowly, unable to tear her stare away from….
Ophelia leaned forward, her eyes alight with hope and anticipation. “What did you see?”
Jade shook her head. “Nothing.”
After two fruitless hours, Jade gave up on the hoped-for oblivion of sleep. She pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts and headed up to the deck to get some fresh air. The tropical night was warm and humid, but not uncomfortably so. The stars were startlingly visible despite the bright lights that illuminated the deck and shone out over the water, and a nearly full moon hung almost directly overhead.
The moon made her think about their goal, but also called to mind Professor’s theory about the added influence of tidal forces on the dark matter fields. Dorion had explained it to her on the flight from London. The Delphic oracle had only spoken on one day each month, when a half moon would have been visible in the sky during daylight hours. He had suggested that perhaps at other times, the alignment of earth, moon and sun might combine to negate the dark matter field, but there was another possibility, a simpler one to Jade’s way of thinking. The moon’s gravity complemented the dark matter field, and that effect was strongest when the moon was overhead. Perhaps that was why so many ancient cultures had worshipped the moon; perhaps they had known that, in addition to helping them mark the turning of the seasons, the moon might also reveal possible futures.
Maybe the knowledge of those possible futures, even at a subconscious level, lay at the heart of all the anecdotal reports about strange behavior during the full moon. There was a reason, after all, that insane people were called lunatics.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
She started reflexively, but it was Professor’s voice and she knew there was no cause for alarm. She turned and found him sitting in a deck chair, likewise gazing into the sky. “Guess I’m not used to being rocked in my bed all night long,” she lied. “What about you?”
“Stargazing. To be honest, I’m not exactly sold on the accuracy of this ship’s GPS navigation system.”
“You think it will happen again?”
He shrugged. “It’s like when you know something’s wrong with your car, but when you take it to the mechanic, everything runs fine. No one’s given a good explanation for why it started acting up, so the problem hasn’t been fixed.”
She was about to ask him for his opinion on what that cause might be, but realized she already knew the answer. “You think there’s another saboteur on board?”
“The thought has crossed my mind. Despite what Ophelia’s brother told her, the Norfolk Group hasn’t given up, and I don’t think they’ll stop now. It’s just a matter of time before they try again. They’ll probably wait until we get where going to make their next move, but…” Another shrug. “Better safe than sorry.” He stared at her appraisingly. “You saw something, didn’t you? Something you don’t want to tell the others?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Just like when you saw Hodges’ robot blowing up and killing us all was nothing?”
She put her hands on her hips in what she hoped looked like a sufficiently irritated pose. “As you’ll recall, that didn’t happen. These visions…premonitions…whatever you want to call them, are just possibilities, and when you get right down to it, we can imagine those for ourselves without magic or dark matter or whatever.”
“Fair enough. So what did you see?”
She pulled another chair up next to him and settled into it. “If you had the power to see possible futures, how would you use it?”
“Winning lotto numbers. Sports betting.” He said it with a grin. “But that word ‘possible’ kind of throws a monkey wrench in the works. So, I guess I’d look for things that aren’t subject to random variations.”