varied enormously because so often the dreams, voices, automatic writing, or symbolic images required interpretation.
Ruben’s form of precognition was by far the most common—a simple, quiet knowing that arrived without fanfare and almost always concerned the near future. It was also generally the least accurate. “Hunch” precogs could easily mistake their own thoughts or projections for the working of their Gift. At least half the time, and usually more, that’s what happened.
But not with him. Ruben always knew the difference. He didn’t understand why others didn’t. Sometimes the information his Gift provided was so muddled as to be useless—the specifics of the future were wonderfully malleable when a patterner wasn’t meddling with the present—but he could always tell the difference between knowing and eavesdropping on the noise in his own head.
Two things were common to all precogs, however. They all occasionally experienced a different form of their Gift. A trance precog might have a strong hunch, or a huncher have a true dream. And—for reasons that were often debated, never proven—they were usually blind to their own futures.
Usually. Not always.
Behind him, his lady, the love of his life, rolled onto her back and began to snore softly.
Love and sorrow rose and swirled in him, leaving him giddy and filled with tears. He was alive now. Now was the time that truly mattered . . . an odd concept for a precog, he supposed, but true. He couldn’t act, think, feel in the future or in the past. Only in this moment.
Was it terribly selfish of him to hold tight to this one secret? Probably. He had told one person about his recurring dream—his second-in-command in the Shadow Unit. But not Deb. Not his beautiful, wondrous Deb.
Twenty years ago Deb had asked him if he’d ever seen his own death. They’d just been dating then, but he’d known he would ask her to marry him. That hadn’t been precognition, but the soaring dream of his heart. He’d told her “no” back then, quite truthfully . . . but added that if he ever did, he would tell no one. Not even her. Ruben marveled that his younger self—so often wrong about so much—had been so nearly right about that.
He’d had the practical discussions with her. Given his heart attack, that had been necessary. But those discussions came with a large and lustrous “if.” He couldn’t take that “if” away from her, though he knew it was wrong.
Four times now he’d dreamed of pain, terrible pain, the kind that eats thoughts and strength and life. He never remembered much about the dream, but his body did. When he’d had the heart attack, its kinetic memory had awakened, telling him this was the pain he’d previewed in a dream.
He’d expected to die. He hadn’t.
He hadn’t stopped having the dream, either.
Any dream he had that often, through so many changes of course, meant the events it depicted were not to be stopped by any conceivable branchings in the possibilities. His dream always ended the same way: in cessation. Not darkness or some version of the fabled tunnel, but a blankness his waking mind couldn’t conjure or reconstruct.
Tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, his body would be crushed by pain. It would end. And Ruben would find out what lay on the other side of the small, dark door that everyone passes through alone.
He would miss her so much.
EIGHT
ON Sunday, Lily did not brood. Much. She called her parents because she was supposed to, and that was okay—she enjoyed talking to her dad—but it left her churned up. Ruben’s scenarios would have her family living under some weird military dictatorship a year from now.
If they lived.
Rule called Toby and she talked to him awhile, too. Math still sucked, but quadratic equations were kinda cool. Toby was being homeschooled by a retired teacher, but Isen’s cook/ housekeeper, Carl, was teaching him quadratic equations. Which sounded like math to Lily, but not, apparently, to Toby.
He still couldn’t decide on an instrument, but the oboe was okay, so he’d stick with it awhile. He and Johnny were going rock climbing—of course with an adult, and anyway Granddad wasn’t really mad about the other day, but Toby did not want to be stuck with a bodyguard all the time, so he’d agreed he wouldn’t do that anymore. And Dirty Harry was doing great. He’d established his territory in spite of the dogs that ran loose at Clanhome. He’d cowed several of them, but there was a German shepherd mix