The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(137)
“That’s awful,” said Mia.
“Hope Zack’s okay,” said Theo.
David studied them with new concern. “Are you all right?”
The two of them had become inseparable lately, a miniature guild of augurs. They’d embroiled themselves in research in the hope of learning more about the nature of precognition. Their quest bore little fruit until three hours ago, when the future came and found them at their study table. They didn’t like what it had to say.
TWENTY-SIX
The Marietta Public Library was a daily slice of Heaven for Theo and Mia, a perfect place to hide from friends and enemies alike. The building was located fourteen miles south of Nemeth, a sleek glass ziggurat nestled between a leafy green park and the great Ohio River. Every floor had dozens of plush window seats. Portable music players were available to anyone who asked.
The pair spent their first couple of days dawdling on novels and videos, as well as the pleasure of each other’s company. Theo was amazed at how much Mia bloomed when removed from the group. She brought him to tears of laughter with her spot-on imitations of the others—Zack’s mordant sneer, David’s quizzical leer, Hannah’s flailing arms of fluster, Amanda’s furrowed brow of concern.
Mia, in turn, finally got a glimpse of Theo’s inner prodigy. The man ripped through books like he was wearing a speedsuit, displaying freakish recall of every word ingested. When she asked him his IQ, he merely shrugged and told her it fell somewhere in the space between chickens and David. She loved Theo’s humility, even if it was peppered with hints of self-loathing.
On their third day, they finally agreed to take a stab at their research mission. They were surprised to learn that Altamerica had quite a bit to say about people like them.
The temporic revolution of the late twentieth century had forever changed society’s expectations of what was and wasn’t possible. Once Father Time proved to be a more lenient parent, the concept of precognition moved away from the flaky fringe and into the collective “maybe.”
In 1981, a shrewd investor named Theodore Norment capitalized on the shift by launching Farsight Professional Augury, a chain of upscale boutiques in which customers could hear their future from courteous and attractive specialists while sipping complimentary coffee from a chaise longue.
Norment’s venture was a huge success, and soon others joined in on the propheteering. By the turn of the millennium, the concept of fortune-telling had been stripped of all mysticism and repackaged as a store-bought amenity. Anyone could claim to see the future through an innate connection to temporis. Today, there were nearly a million registered augurs in the United States. They even had their own union.
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.”