“It’s not a Cataclysm,” Theo said.
The boy looked to Peter. “But when you wrote Mia—”
“I haven’t written that letter yet, David. Those are the words of a future me. But I know exactly why he lied. He needed you all to get here. He didn’t want you losing hope.”
Zack opened and closed his mouth three times before speaking. “What . . . what . . .”
What could possibly be worse than a Cataclysm? he wanted to ask. As the words tangled in his throat, the obvious answer rolled over him like a sickness. He fell back in his chair, white-faced.
“Oh Jesus . . .”
Amanda drank him in through moist eyes. Worse than the pain of seeing Zack catch up to her was the realization that he was the only one in the room who wasn’t touching or holding someone. She wanted to leap across the table and wrap herself around him, Esis be goddamned.
Peter kept his dark gaze on the two spooning teenagers, the ones who could still count their years on fingers and toes. At long last, Mia understood why a future self had urged her to come to New York in a strong state of mind, why she demanded they take a week to relax in blissful ignorance.
Now her mouth quivered in a bow, stuck on the same jagged word. “W-when?”
“No firm date,” said Peter. “We know it’s between four and five years, closer to five.”
She fell back into David and the cruelest of math. I’ll be eighteen. He’ll be twenty.
“How?” asked the boy, in a cracked voice.
“I don’t want to bog you down in the gruesome details. Just—”
“Same way,” Hannah told him. That was all that needed to be said.
Peter leaned forward in fresh determination. “Okay, now that you have the bad news—”
“Why does this keep happening?”
“Mia . . .”
“Why does this keep happening?!”
All Peter could offer was a somber shrug. “I don’t know the how or the why, sweetheart. My guess is that the answer’s wrapped up in those Pelletiers who brought you here. I don’t know any more about them than you do.”
“You said there was a silver lining.”
He nodded at David. “There is, but you need to bear with me while I explain it.”
“Explain what, exactly?”
“Why I’m walking funny.”
Their heavy brows furrowed at Peter. He blew a long breath through his knuckles, deliberating his words.
“There’s a unique state of consciousness that my people occasionally achieve, a place where all the branching futures stretch out before us like a great tapestry. We call it the God’s Eye, and by now one of you has become very familiar with it.”
Theo nodded skittishly, unsure where Peter was going with this. “I thought it was just for augurs.”
“Our blessings aren’t mutually exclusive,” Peter explained. “We all have a little tempis in us. A little lumis. A little foresight. We all have the chance to stumble into the God’s Eye when the right or wrong wires cross in our brains. Well, on July 24th, it was my turn. I’ll admit my stroke wasn’t the small deal I made it out to be. It actually put me in a coma for a day.”
Hannah pinched her lip in twitchy rumination. It seemed mighty odd that Theo and Peter suffered a coma at the same time, for the same duration.
“Anyway, Theo can tell you that time passes differently in the God’s Eye, if it even passes at all. I don’t know how long I spent there. Weeks. Months. Most of the details are lost to me now, like an old dream. All I remember is following the trail to the end of the world. I saw exactly what the augurs saw. I know why so many of them committed suicide.”
Mia curled against David, fighting her tears. He held her close and stroked her hair. For a moment Amanda saw the same heavy look of rue he’d worn at the Sunday mass in Evansville.
“I also remember going beyond the end,” Peter told them. “Somehow I punched through the curtain and entered this . . . I don’t even know how to describe it without sounding daft. I was floating in a cold gray void. I could see the end of every timeline—a trillion trillion points of light, all lined up flat as far as the eye can see. It was a cruel and beautiful thing, like a snowdrift or a desert, or—”
“A wall,” said Theo, through a dead-white face. Hannah could feel the new tension in his grip.
“You saw it?” she asked.
“Only in dreams,” he replied, though he knew that would change soon. He and Peter traded a dark look of understanding before the Irishman continued.
“Now I need you all to listen to me because this is the crucial part. I saw something on that wall. And I swear to you on the life of my son that I didn’t imagine it. It was truly there.”