“You threw up,” Brian said. “I cleaned it off with a wet towel.”
“My hero.” She rubbed her eyes, looked at him. He hadn’t shaved since they departed Seattle. His lip was puffy, crusted with dried blood. She reached out, hovered her fingertips over the lip. “What happened?”
“I ran into a wall,” Brian said. “She’s right over there.” He pointed.
Olivia carefully turned her head. Dee sat on the other bed, her back propped against the wall, holding a plastic cup of Chablis. Her filter mask lay on the bedside table, like one bra cup severed from its twin.
“Hey, no hard feelings,” Dee said.
Brian touched his puffy lip and winced. “Easy for you to say.”
In Aleppo, Olivia had gotten him killed. She had screwed up. Now she had a second chance, and she wouldn’t screw up again. Next time she was in the halo, she would scrutinize all her moves, calculate the collateral repercussions—find a way to preserve the future and Brian. There had to be another way of heading off the variola attack. She knew the move existed because it had to exist.
Or did she know only that she wanted it to exist?
What’s the first rule of relationship club? Don’t let the salesman through the door.
A toilet flushed, the faucet ran, and Alvaro emerged from the bathroom. “Dee, you have to keep your mask on.” His was still in place.
“These two aren’t even sick.”
“We don’t know who’s a carrier and who isn’t. We don’t know what’s in the air around us right now.” He gave Olivia an appraising look. “So, you’re better?”
“Still shaky. But yes, I’m better.”
Alvaro sat on the chair, glanced at his watch. “In the morning, you can try the link again. If that doesn’t work, I want you to take us to this Javadi person and his bunker. We can’t go anywhere tonight. There’s a curfew.”
Olivia pointed at the TV. “Can we have the news?”
“No.”
Surprised, Olivia asked, “Why not?”
“It’s pointless.”
She laughed, which hurt her head, so she stopped. “That’s your opinion. Your uninformed opinion.”
Alvaro shrugged. “I don’t watch the news, okay? It’s endless talk and depressing video. Most of it isn’t accurate, anyway.”
The idea of someone, especially during a worldwide emergency, not wanting to see the news—Olivia couldn’t begin to fathom it. Being cut off from the steady flow of information, for even these few days, was like denying her water, or air. “Turn the lights out and crawl under the covers?”
“Whatever they’re saying, it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow the crisis won’t exist. And if it does, the media won’t fix it. It’s all lies, or it’s information they want you to have, not the information that matters.”
“Whatever. I’ll get it on my IsnGlas.”
Dee said, “Alvaro spent half his life at Sanctuary, since he was a kid. They isolate the future Shepherd so the world doesn’t contaminate him.”
“The world doesn’t contaminate people,” Brian said. “That’s like saying the ocean contaminates fish.”
Olivia picked up her tablet but didn’t boot it. “The ocean does contaminate fish. Ever hear of mercury poisoning?”
“That’s not what she’s talking about.”
“I got plenty of the world,” Alvaro said, “before I went to Sanctuary. And it’s not like the old days. Even when I was in Sanctuary, I got out, traveled. Jacob showed me the world I was eventually going to be responsible for.”
Olivia put her tablet aside. “How old were you when they took you to the ranch?”
“Thirteen.”
“Alvaro’s family is a big deal in Society history.” Dee sounded a little drunk. “Jacob was honoring that when he chose him. In 1943, Alvaro’s grandfather saved the world.” She toasted Alvaro with her plastic cup. He made an annoyed face and waved away the honor.
“Weird,” Brian said. “I thought it was the Allies who kicked Hitler’s butt. Assuming that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Tell him,” Dee said.
“Why bother?” Alvaro yawned, chin down, rubbing his eyes. “He doesn’t believe us anyway.”
Olivia adjusted to a more comfortable position on the bed. “Then tell me.”
Alvaro lifted his head. After a moment, he said, “All right. First, what happened at Sanctuary, it has historical context. There has always been a struggle for dominance inside the Society. It’s factional, and it goes back to the beginning.” He paused, pulled off his filter mask. “I feel like a fool wearing this thing when nobody else is.” He tossed it toward the bed. It landed on Dee’s foot.
“And when was that?” Olivia asked. “The beginning.”
“Third century AD. The first Shepherd was a Roman soldier named Decius. Unlike most of his class, he was educated and a follower of the Mithraic cult, at least until he broke away and started his own sect. We know about him because of the scroll record he left.”
“What about the factions?” Olivia said.
“One believes the halo should only be used at crisis points, and then as minimally as possible—to limit the butterfly effect. It should be easy. The machine is keyed to crisis points. The other faction, it has a looser definition of ‘crisis.’ They believe it’s all right to manipulate probability streams for other reasons. Material gain, for instance. Basically, in our time, Faction One is represented by Jacob and me, and Faction Two is represented by Andrew and Emilio.”
Brian sat on the bed beside Olivia. “Wait a minute. Emilio’s your cousin, so wouldn’t it also honor your grandfather if he got picked to be the whatever-it-is?”
Dee snorted.
“Exactly the opposite,” Alvaro said. “From the 1920s to 1944, a Shepherd named Ellis Beekman headed the Society. Back then, Sanctuary wasn’t a rundown ranch in Idaho. It was a Teutonic compound in Prussia. It was luxurious. Beekman was known for making probability choices that financially benefited the Society, often at the expense of innocent bystanders. In the twentieth century, the consequences of self-serving probability choices became exaggerated.”
“Because?” Olivia said.
“The interconnectedness of the world. And later, the big weapons, the world-destroying weapons. It was Beekman who manipulated the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 and caused a worldwide economic depression. He then used the Society’s cash reserves to buy shares cheap and build a stock portfolio that later generated millions. A lot of people got hurt by the Depression, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that was nothing compared to what came next. Adolf Hitler gained power because of Shepherd Beekman. See, we needed another world war to bring the US out of the Depression and make all those stocks valuable again. The Society was also heavily invested in Krupp, the German arms manufacturer. You see how this works?”
“Sounds like a recipe for creating crisis points,” Olivia said.
“Exactly. Beekman always thought he had it under control. But misusing the halo so much caused a terrific strain. A brain embolism killed him. My grandfather, who wasn’t the official successor, was the only one present when Beekman died. The link migrated.”
“And your granddad saved the world,” Dee said.
Alvaro shrugged. “He made a probability choice that prevented Nazi scientists from completing their nuclear weapons program ahead of the Allies. A team of Norwegian saboteurs successfully attacked a fortress in Vemork, Norway, where the Germans were conducting heavy-water experiments. But in the most likely probability end point, the saboteurs failed, the weapons program continued uninterrupted, and Germany won the war.”
“Tell her the other one,” Dee said.
Olivia noticed that a skeptical grin had crept onto Brian’s lips. He wasn’t buying any of this. Of course, it all sounded ridiculous. But Olivia had seen the halo. Brian hadn’t.
“Grandfather Abelard chose a probability that prevented nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kh
rushchev could have gone either way. Abelard nudged him, made sure the right person had his ear at the right time.”
Brian made a noise that wasn’t quite derisive. It could have been mistaken for a sniffle, some dust in the air.
“When Grandfather died there was a traditional ceremony, an orderly migration of the link to Jacob.”
“And Jacob put the photographer in Elián González’s bedroom,” Olivia said.
“What?” Brian looked confused, like he’d missed an episode of a Netflix series. Confused . . . and maybe past his bullshit threshold.
“Apparently,” Olivia said, “we needed the Iraq War.”
“This is where I check out.” Brian grabbed the Burgundy, uncorked it with the cheap corkscrew he’d purchased when he bought the wine. There were no more plastic cups, so he drank directly from the bottle. Judging by the face he pulled, he might have just swigged straight lemon juice. Brian wasn’t a wine drinker, not even when the wine was good.
Olivia asked, “Who built the probability machine, and why?” She knew part of the answer from the previous probability stream, when Alvaro claimed the machine came from the future. She wanted to see if he gave the same answer now.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Naturally,” Brian said.
Alvaro shot him an annoyed look. “It’s not an arbitrary decision. The Society started as a splinter cult, after it broke away from Mithraism, which had been around for hundreds of years all over the Roman Empire. The Society kept some of the Mithraic traditions—rituals and rites of initiation.” He looked at Olivia. “The Elders wanted you to recite the parable—that’s an example. The original members of the Society built their temple underground, beneath an existing religious structure, the same way Mithraic temples were sometimes built beneath Christian churches.”
“And nobody has any idea where the machine came from,” Brian said, like he was saying, What a convenient load of horseshit. Olivia decided sarcasm didn’t suit him, though he was pretty good at it.
“We know,” Alvaro said. “But you’re an outsider. Olivia is an outsider, too. Anyway, besides the Shepherd, his successor, and the Elders, no one—even in the Society—knows the whole truth.”
“Well, here’s to you.” Brian raised the wine to his lips, thought better of it, and put the bottle decisively on the floor. “Holy men, or men who think they’re holy. That never works out.”
Alvaro gave him another annoyed look. “No one said anything about holy men.”
“You just said—”
“What I just said happened a long time ago. The Society evolved.”
Olivia cleared her throat, “It did feel like a religious cult, except for the physics references, words like ‘superposition’ and ‘end point.’”
“The Society isn’t a cult anymore,” Alvaro said. “And the machine is a real machine.”
Brian frowned. “Probability streams, superpositions. The words are meaningless. You might as well call it magic.”
“The words aren’t meaningless. They’re new words, mathematical words derived from chaos theory to describe old effects connected to the probability machine.”
Brian goaded him. “So if it’s not a religious cult, what’s the right name for it?”
Olivia was less and less happy with this side of Brian. She said, “Anyway, it looked more like a demented Kiwanis meeting than a religious cult.”
Dee laughed. “That’s dead-on. Testosterone city.”
Alvaro stood and paced over to the window. He pushed the curtain aside and looked at the parking lot. “You’re head of ranch security. That’s not a subservient role.”
“The Elders like my military police background, and they’re short on experienced security people. As soon as a man turns up who can do my job, he’ll do it. Andrew and the others begrudge me the position. I guess it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
Alvaro turned away from the window and looked at Dee with his sleep-deprived raccoon eyes. “Let’s stop talking and get some rest.”
“It’s all bullshit anyway,” Brian said.
Olivia sighed. “Bri, it’s real. I don’t know how, but the probability machine is real. I’ve seen it work. Before I made a choice in the halo, the world was different. Variola wasn’t as widespread. Maybe there were deaths, but not in the millions. Martial law hadn’t been imposed. Our whole drive from Seattle happened differently. Christ, we were even in a different motel. I have both memories in my head. I mean right now, as we’re sitting here.” Olivia closed her eyes briefly. “Please don’t look at me like you wish you could give me a pill to make my bad thoughts go away.”
Brian winced. “I wasn’t thinking that.”
“But?”
“But I only remember the drive one way. I only remember everything one way.”
Alvaro said, “We all see the world one way. Olivia is linked, so she remembers more than one probability. Jacob, too—or at least he remembers the one previous probability, the one he chose himself.”
Brian looked like he was about to get argumentative about it. Olivia squeezed his leg. “Bri, let it go. I need to sleep now.”
“I’m sorry, sure.”
She lay back and closed her eyes. Tomorrow she had to go again into the halo, and she dreaded it. Despite that, soon she fell into troubled sleep.
Twenty-One
Voices lured Olivia out of sleep. She sat up, rubbing her eyes. The room smelled like wine and road sweat. Which is what you got with four people, thirty hours in two cars, and one unused shower. Brian slept next to her, his shoes off and his legs drawn up. His glasses sat on the table next to Dee’s filter mask. Brian did his not-quite-snoring thing, the sound of air whistling through a narrow passage. Alvaro and Dee lay on the other bed. The room was dark, but not dead-of-night dark. Daylight seeped around the heavy curtains. The voices came from outside.
Olivia quietly swung her legs off the bed and stood up. She felt a little unsteady but her headache was gone. The unsteady part was probably because she was so hungry. As for headaches, she needed to locate caffeine before her body remembered what it was missing. She stepped around the beds and pulled the curtain aside just enough to see out. The morning light hurt her eyes. Across the street, where traffic was moving again, Trigger’s, a diner, was open for business.
A Volkswagen Current was parked in front of the motel office. A girl sat in the passenger seat. She had short blond hair and looked no older than twenty. She drew on a vapor pipe like an asthmatic sucking a medical inhaler. White mist hung around her face.
The voices came from two men standing outside the office. One of them Olivia recognized as part of her new memory scaffold: the motel’s desk clerk, the same guy who had checked them into their room. She had seen him briefly yesterday, when he insisted she and Brian both sign the register. He was somewhere between thirty and fifty, wearing a red polo shirt, his hair like wispy corn silk teased across his scalp. The other man was probably a couple of inches over six feet, and middle-aged. He wore a shiny sport coat over a button-down shirt with the tails hanging out.
Both men wore filter masks.
“I already told you,” the tall man said, “I don’t have a credit card. I don’t have cash. I don’t have anything—because I don’t have my fucking wallet.” He looked like he wanted to kick the desk clerk across the parking lot.
The clerk replied, though Olivia couldn’t hear what he said, and waved his hands at the tall guy in a shooing-away gesture. The tall man shook his head, disgusted, and returned to his car. The blond girl didn’t look at him. The Volkswagen backed out angrily and joined the traffic heading into Chicago. The desk clerk remained in the doorway, looking in Olivia’s direction. Not at Olivia, but in her direction. After a moment, he started to walk toward their room.
Behind her, Dee said, “What’s going on out there?”
Olivia turned away from the window. “Some kind of argument.”
Voices inside the room did what voices outside the
room had failed to do. Alvaro woke so abruptly it was as if someone had poked him with a sharp stick. He half fell off the bed, looking around wildly. Focusing on Olivia, he said, “You’re up.”
“Uh-huh.”
Brian rolled out of sleep and groped for his glasses, knocking them onto the floor. “What’s happening?” He hung over the edge of the bed, retrieved his frames, and pushed them onto his face.
“Nothing,” Olivia said. “We’re going to breakfast.”
Alvaro shook his head. Apparently he had a different idea about that. Right on cue, somebody knocked on the door, loudly, and Olivia snatched it open. The desk clerk stood in the frame. He looked past her.
“You got four people in there.”
“Yes. Our friends showed up late.”
“You can’t have four people without paying for four people.”
Olivia said over her shoulder, “Alvaro? The man needs money.”
Alvaro, looking disheveled, pawed his wallet out of his hip pocket.
“Is that your pickup?” the manager asked.
“Yes.”
“I almost had it towed.”
Alvaro nodded. “Okay, thanks for not doing that. How much do I owe?”
“No, no, no. In the office.”
Alvaro seemed confused.
“You have to register, which you should have done last night. Everything legal and up front. Way things are, my ducks have to be in a row. Everybody’s ducks have to be in a row.”
Olivia was already pulling on her shoes. “We’ll meet you at the diner. Brian, let’s go.”
“Wait—” Alvaro was like somebody who’d let the dog’s leash slip out of his hand.
Dee, standing up and appearing anything but confused, said, “I’ll go with them.”
It was as if someone had forgotten to turn Trigger’s on. Half a dozen people sat scattered around the diner that could have accommodated twenty times as many. Most of them stared at phones and tablets. Little villages of projected news tickers and talking heads glimmered on tabletops while plates of food went ignored and cups of coffee gave up ghosts of cooling steam.
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