The Seer’s Fate
by: Christine Amsden
Prologue
From the diary of nine-year-old Danielle Hastings:
If I believed in fate, I would swear it was conspiring against me.
The week after I turn seventeen, twisters tear a path through downtown Eagle Rock. This happens down every future pathway; it’s not something I can change. When the sirens go off shortly after noon, there are people everywhere—on the streets, in the shops…I have to warn them. I send as many as possible to the Main Street Cafe, which won’t get hit, though it will be a near thing. A back window shatters there, but nothing major. Not like at the antique stores next door, and the sheriff’s station down the street, and the grocery store, and the library…
I start early, warning everyone who’ll listen to stay out of downtown. The tourists are the worst; they think I’m crazy. Yes, I know the skies are blue, but give them an hour and they’re gonna be green! When that happens, it’ll be too late.
The sheriff believes me, but he’s worried about evacuating the jail on account of this killer being in there and maybe making a break for it. He’s not wrong to worry; the guy escapes down at least ten percent of the paths stretching forward from this point. They key is that the sheriff himself has to watch the guy; he can’t hand him off to one of his deputies. I tell him so, and he seems to accept it.
On to the flower shop and the grocery store. I’m cutting it too close, and I know it. There are still tourists on the streets, the idiots, and the sirens are screaming, but there’s no help for them now. The library is my last stop, and that’s the place I’ve been avoiding.
Because Adam is there.
He’s not going to die, but a librarian will. I tell myself that’s the reason I always save the library for last—because there’s just one victim there, as opposed to dozens everywhere else—but I know that’s not true. It’s always Adam I’m avoiding. Adam, who fate is trying to throw me against.
There’s no basement in the library, and it’s going to take a direct hit, but there is no longer time to send Adam or the librarian to the Main Street Cafe. I grab the librarian, yell for Adam to join us, then duck with both of them behind the reference counter, ordering Adam to get between us and throw up a shield.
A tornado really does sound like a freight train. It’s the same observation I’ve made a few hundred times before, because this tornado always hits Eagle Rock, and always in the same pattern. It’s a fixed point in time, a rarity, at least in my experience. The only things I can change here are how I respond and who dies.
I’m beginning to think Adam is a fixed point too.
The librarian, a gray-haired woman named Natalie who puts on a great children’s story hour, screams. Debris rains down upon us, but Adam’s shield holds, as I knew it would, creating a perfect dome of safety around us.
For some reason, it’s always when she realizes she’s safe that Natalie faints.
“You saved my life,” Adam says. His voice sounds different now, older, grown up. He’s seventeen now, and he looks a lot like the men on the covers of the books my mom hides whenever I walk into the room.
“I saved her life,” I say, nodding at Natalie. “You were going to be fine.”
“I’d still like to kiss you,” he says. A stray lock of dark hair falls across his forehead while his eyes, blue as the sea, bore into mine. It’s that look, I think, that turns my brain to mush.
The next thing I know, I’m kissing him, and it’s amazing and I love it. I’ve never been kissed before on this path, in this lifetime, but I have been kissed thousands of times before in other lifetimes. Enough to know that even at seventeen, Adam’s kiss is almost magical. His lips are firm but soft, his tongue coaxing without being invasive. I open to him, and completely lose my mind.
Again.
If I’m not careful, this is going to be another one of those paths where he and I get married, have two kids, and then…pain. He always seems to cause me pain in the end.
It doesn’t have to end that way. Even from here, there are infinite paths forward. Some of those paths spin before me, dizzyingly fast, each one tempting me: “Pick me! Pick me!”
I latch onto a path down which Adam dies in his twenties, but all I see is heartache and despair. It’s like I’m broken or something. Seriously broken.
Rewind. Time to try this again.
Danielle
Some people think I know everything. As if seeing the future is a singular phenomenon instead of a cosmic, chaotic whirlwind. If there is one thing that seeing the future has taught me, it’s how little I know.
I suppose I do know a lot, especially for my age. By peeking ahead, “peering into the void,” I’ve been to college hundreds of times. I’ve taken Calculus and Physics, English Lit and Economics. French and Spanish and German and Polish.
I know how to say “You’re going to die” in a hundred languages. It’s a real conversation closer. For some reason, people just can’t accept that it’s true. But it is. You are going to die. Vas a morir. Vous allez mourir. Du wirst sterben. Umrzesz…
In retrospect, the death predictions might have been why the other kids stopped wanting to play with me. That, or telling them who was going to win every game we played. They said the games were no fun if they knew who would win. I have to agree; it is no fun. I never really got the point of games.
The other kids started playing a game with me in the fourth grade that involved one of them sneaking up behind me and yanking my hair. I always knew they were coming and stopped them, which they thought was hilarious. But what they didn’t get was that by intending to pull my hair, they did pull my hair. I had to live it a hundred times, over and over again, along the paths they created. After a few weeks, my scalp hurt, and I didn’t want to go back to school. But I couldn’t find a path down which my parents would let me stay home, not even when I explained how I could get early admission to Harvard by the age of twelve. They were of the firm, unwavering belief that a child needed to be a child.
By the time the Spring of the twisters rolled around, I was still attending public school. At least the classes—which I had literally aced in my sleep and was certain I could remaster awake—gave me time to meditate. If spending the day with my eyes unfocused and my mouth hanging slightly open hurt my underwhelming popularity, it was hard to tell.
Who needed friends anyway? Not me. Even when I tried to make friends, they hurt me and stabbed me in the back down countless paths. Better to be invisible. A silent, watching specter.
If only I didn’t sometimes feel the need to emerge from the shadows, life would be perfect.
It was Jenny Price this time. She sat next to me in English Lit and spent almost as much time zoned out as I did. The only difference was she couldn’t read the books in her head. But her failing English Lit grade wasn’t my big problem.
No, my big problem was that I couldn’t find a path down which she wasn’t dead by her own hand within six months.
She didn’t like me. As far as I could tell, she didn’t like anyone. Which, ironically, gave us something in common. I tried slapping her and telling her to snap out of it down at least a dozen paths, but that never seemed to work, so instead, I floated ahead and took some college psychology courses. Turns out, depression isn’t cured by telling someone to “snap out of it.” Damn.
People are always the most complex variable in the futures I see. They cause most of the chaos. Each choice they make, or might make, creates a new path. Billions of people times thousands of choices. It’s insanity. Even when you consider that I can only see down a future path I’m connected to—meaning I don’t know what’s going to happen to random people on the other side of the world either tomorrow, next year, or next century—it’s a lot.
Eagle Rock has a population of 20,306 full-time residents, not counting those who live in the surrounding areas. Two hundred kids in my high school class. Twenty-four hours in a day…
I’ll save you most of the math, but I’ve done it. When I meditate deeply, I can live about a month in an hour, which made my mental age just shy of six thousand by the time I turned seventeen. Sounds impressive, until you start to multiply the number of citizens in Eagle Rock by the number of decisions each one makes in a day by the number of days in a year by the tree of intersecting decisions and you get…chaos. I’ve taken graduate level statistics, and I still don’t know how to represent the math.
As I studied Jenny Price’s vacant expression, though, I thought I might have more luck defining the math than fixing her.
She was a bit repugnant, if I’m being completely honest. The worst thing about her was the smell. Seriously, she smelled bad. As in I don’t think anyone had ever discussed proper hygiene with her. Her baggy clothes were worn and dirty, her long brown hair, which needed a brush, was usually tied into a knot at the base of her neck.
The psychology courses I’d taken in the future suggested that those things were warning signs. Strange that the school psychologist had never noticed. Or the teachers. Didn’t they get training in this kind of thing?
The worst part was nobody was going to care when she died. A few would feel guilty and express the “I should have known” sentiment that never did anyone any good. But the meanest kids would just laugh and say the school smelled better now that she was gone, and many of the others would silently agree.
I felt a stab of despair, but I confess I wasn’t thinking about her. Instead, I thought about how lonely I felt most of the time and how nobody cared enough to understand me either. Well, almost nobody. I had my parents. They tried, even if they didn’t always get it. They might have been the only reason I wasn’t going down the same road as Jenny.
I had to help her, but how? I’d already spent one of her precious six months watching and meditating, coming up with nothing. I was running out of time. And not just for her.
The twisters were coming soon too.
I stayed behind after English Lit, following her from our first-period class to her second-period class on the opposite side of the school from mine. I was going to talk to her, even though this wasn’t going to work. But nothing was going to work in a single pass. This wasn’t like delaying someone after school so they wouldn’t get into a car accident or having the janitor fix the pipe before it exploded and flooded the school or warning Wil Jasper to use a condom after Homecoming.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I inhaled, sharply, and wished I hadn’t. “Want to have lunch together?”
“No.”
“How about if we hang out after school? I’ve read Great Expectations three times; maybe I can help you.”
“You actually like that book?”
“It grew on me after the first read.” I forced myself to hold firm, to pretend I didn’t already know the outcome of this conversation. Actually…I had a moment of doubt that I was having the conversation in real life. Was this another practice run? I get confused sometimes…
“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked.
No, this was definitely happening. I’d been down this exact path before, but I hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to her question yet. She didn’t buy that I liked her, or care that I was lonely too, and she flipped out when I told her I knew she was suicidal. Time to say something new…and experience a potential surprise.
“My mom told me I had to try to make a new friend this year,” I lied. “I don’t really want to because all the boys are assholes and the girls bitches, but I thought you might be okay.”
She hesitated. And in that instant, someone wolf-whistled. I had seen that part coming, unfortunately, and I braced myself for the rest of it.
“The skunk and the ice queen,” said Emily, a girl I thought deserved both titles.
Along both sides of the hallway, some of the boys began to mock-shiver. Mostly jocks, but let’s not stereotype. Plenty of hangers on and wannabes joined in. It’s amazing how many people are too cowardly to do the right thing.
I didn’t look at them; engagement always made things worse.
“Knock it off,” came a new voice—Adam Scot’s. He sometimes told them to quit harassing other people and they always listened when he did, but that didn’t make me feel anything but contempt for him. He had the power to really make them quit, if he cared.
I didn’t look at him. I never looked at him. His eyes were the window to his power, and I knew better than to let it in. I’d been seeing that future since I was nine, and I liked it no better now.
By the time I slipped past him, Jenny was gone. She’d fled as soon as the taunting began. Which was a shame, because she hadn’t shut me out as firmly as she’d done in the past—well, in the possible futures I’d seen in the past.
“Hey, Danielle,” Wil Jasper called out. “Want to go out with me sometime?”
I rolled my eyes, which was all the response his question deserved. He’d asked before, as a joke, ever since my condom warning, which he must have taken to heart since Emily wasn’t pregnant right now. Those two had long-since stopped seeing one another, but Wil’s intentions remained vindictive. As if embarrassment was the worst thing that could have happened to him.
I didn’t have to wonder what would happen if I ever took him up on his “date” offer—sometimes he stood me up and made a big joke out of it, other times he worked a little too hard to get in my pants. It all seemed to depend upon what bets were placed and what dares were issued.
Like I said…who needs friends?