The Oracle Year(98)

He told her about the walk into traffic in Montevideo, and other attempts like it, things he had kept to himself. He called them tests of the Site’s control. That wasn’t what they were.

He gave her, at last, details about the Oracle safe house waiting in the west—a cabin hidden in the mountains, bought, prepared, and stocked by Hamza and Miko in anticipation of a day when Will’s identity might be blown. It wasn’t connected to any of their other accounts or identities, which meant that if he could just get there, he could put the pieces together—come to understand the Site’s plan from a place of blessed anonymity. Figure out his part in all the terrible things the Site had done and decide what the Oracle could do about them. Will’s vaunted plan—the driving force for their trip west—at the end, it wasn’t some huge, complex machination that would magically turn everything around. He just wanted to feel safe.

The Oracle spoke for more than an hour, there in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn in Toledo, Ohio, as the sun set and the sky turned dark. Leigh just listened. When he stopped, she put her hand on his, letting it stay there for a moment.

Leigh started the car and left the parking lot, driving until she found a liquor store, where she purchased too much alcohol. Then back to the Hampton Inn, where a room was obtained for cash, and too much alcohol was consumed by both of them, and they kept talking.

She came to understand that Will hated that the Site had saved them at the Laundromat. It wasn’t benevolent—it was a sign of the Site’s casual power over him, a message that all his struggle, all his pain—it had been anticipated, it was part of the plan. The Site put Will in danger, and then it saved him from it, each time the message getting stronger that Will should just lie down, surrender, let it all happen.

The Oracle lived in constant anticipation of the next horrible thing the Site would do, mixed with the knowledge that if he had just kept his mouth shut in the beginning, if he hadn’t become the Oracle, then it would never have happened. It was a contradiction he could not reconcile. The Site was in control, but yet, somehow, the choices all belonged to Will, from the start. No one had forced him to do anything—but he’d done it all.

The causality of it escaped him. The why of his own existence completely incomprehensible and impossible to ignore.

She remembered Will drunkenly suggesting an idea to her, a way to subvert the Site’s plan, or at least do something good for the world with the Oracle’s influence. She remembered her drunken, enthusiastic agreement. Him pulling out one of his burner phones and fiddling with it for a while, laughing.

Her enthusiastic, clumsy pass, which Will, to his credit, deflected. More drinking, and finally not sleep but a span of darkness, unawareness, each in their own bed.

Now, morning, and Leigh was a desert.

She heard Will sit on the bed opposite her.

“Awake?” he said, his voice soft.

Leigh raised a hand off the sheets, not wanting to risk opening her eyes.

“I have a glass of water here, and a cup of room coffee,” Will said. “It’s terrible, tastes like chemicals and poison, but I can’t go out to get anything better. I had two Advils, too—I had to take one, I’m sorry, but the other’s next to the water, if you need it.”

“I do,” Leigh said.

She rolled onto her side, taking the water and ibuprofen first, drinking the whole glass. Then the coffee, and her first sip confirmed Will’s description—chemicals and poison. But better than nothing.

“I need to get back on the road,” the Oracle said. “Are you coming with me?”

Leigh looked at him, just a man, and not just a man at all, trying to save the world.

“Yes,” she said. “You deserve my help. You deserve everyone’s help, but I want to be clear about something. There’s a . . . mercenary angle to this for me. I’m sorry that you’ve had to endure so much, but that’s not the only reason I want to stay. I want the rest of the story. For me.”

“Obviously,” Will said. “I’m not an idiot.”

Leigh braced herself and sat up, her head pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

“How do you keep going?” she asked. “If it were me, I might just . . . hide, I guess.”

Will closed his hands around his coffee cup, staring down into it.

“I could do that, but then I’d just be surrendering. At least this way I’m still making choices. I’m still trying. I’m still me. The minute I stop, that ends. I’m just a tool for the Site. Maybe it’s an illusion, but it’s what I have.”

He glanced at the small table between the two beds, noticing a cell phone, facedown. He frowned.

“Do you remember me using that last night?” he said. “It’s one of my last phones.”

“Yeah,” Leigh said, “but I don’t remember what for.”

He picked it up, turning it over.

“Me neither. I need to get rid of it, but let me just see what I—”

Will swiped the phone’s screen. He stared at it, his frown deepening.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

“What?” Leigh said. “What did you do?”

He turned the screen so Leigh could see it.

On it, a prediction, in the same format as all the others on the Site: