Cursing Fate

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

By the time I woke up the next morning, I had forgotten all about Recca Mann. I went through the motions of life like I did every day. Punched the alarm clock. Snapped the switch on the bare-bulb lamp teetering on the cardboard box that served as my bedside table. Rolled out of "bed," a second-hand futon mattress piled with military surplus blankets of camo-green wool. It was late spring. The stifling humidity of Atlanta summer was threatening, but hadn't arrived yet. The nights were a bit chilly. The blankets were warm, if itchy.

My head had that familiar dull ache that amateurs call a hangover. Just another morning for me. I cranked the shower up to full boil and stood under it until the water ran tepid. That used to drive Marina crazy. She had always insisted on showering ahead of me, because she knew there would be no hot water left when I was done. Didn't have to worry about that anymore.

Stepping out of the shower, I reached for a towel. I had cobbled a linen shelf in the bathroom out of two-by-fours and cinder blocks. But the shelf was empty. It was laundry day. I dripped water across the bare concrete floor and dug yesterday's towel out of the olive duffel where I stowed my dirty laundry. Then I kicked the duffel back under the rickety folding table that served as my "kitchen." The table held up a microwave oven, an electric hot plate, and an old-fashioned percolating coffee pot. I hauled the coffee pot into the bathroom to fill it. Dumped the coffee in. Set it on the hot plate to do its thing.

I did pushups on my knuckles on the cool concrete while the coffee bubbled. Then I poured a cup and opened the little apartment fridge. It contained five bottles of beer, four bottles of bourbon, and one bottle of vodka. But no cream. Whatever. I didn't mind drinking it black.

After gulping down some coffee, I grabbed my go-bag and headed up the stairs, out of the basement. It took me thirteen seconds to reset the wards and alarms on the door. I used to do it in under ten. I was getting slack.

I shot my eyes across the empty lot behind the dilapidated house. The lot was a sea of weeds growing up through ten thousand cracks in a field of ancient, gray asphalt, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence that hung like a tattered curtain. On the other side, I could see that my bug-out vehicle was still intact. My car was a shitty little hatchback that was old enough to buy booze in this state. I rarely drove it. The vehicle was purchased under a false name, and my driver's license was fake. Getting pulled over by an overzealous uniform who needed to meet a quota would be bad news. You don't use your emergency escape hatch unless it's an emergency. I walked three blocks to the bus stop.

The bus got stuck in traffic behind that new streetcar-thing they had deployed downtown. What's the point of having a streetcar if it just sits in traffic like a bus? Seems like it would have been cheaper just to buy more busses. I don't get it. Anyway, that made me late for work.

"Sorry, Billy," I said to the foreman as I punched my time card. "Bus was late again."

"Why don't you get a car like a normal person, Mack?" Billy asked.

I shrugged. "It's illegal to drink and drive. So I gave up driving."

Billy shook his head. "As long as you're sober when you're on the clock, Mack."

"Always," I said. "Even I have my standards."

I spent eight hours turning wrenches in a dark elevator shaft, and another hour on the bus getting home. I grabbed my laundry duffel, and a couple of beers from the fridge, and made the ten-minute walk to the laundromat.

I up-ended my duffel into a washing machine and shoved the quarters in. There were plenty of free machines. Only a handful of college students in the back, waiting for the dryers to finish, poking at their "smart" phones. I didn't have one, of course. When you don't want to be found, there's nothing "smart" about carrying a homing beacon everywhere you go.

It always makes me shake my head, in those cop shows, when they're like, "You gotta keep him talking until we're done tracing the call!" That was true back in the days when you had to talk to a woman named Mable or Madge to connect a call. With cell phones, you don't even have to be using the phone for them to track you. The damn things are constantly radioing back to the nearby towers, so the central network knows how to route calls to them. If your phone is on, they've already got your location within a mile or two. If you're within range of two towers — which is anywhere in America outside the Grand Canyon, probably — then anyone who passed high school trig class could pin you within about a hundred meters. All you need to know is which phone belongs to which person, and hello, Big Brother.

Of course, tracking people that way is illegal. But the Seers Guild doesn't care about any laws except the ones they create. And they're only interested in enforcing them, not following them. It's hard enough hiding from an organization where half the members can either read minds or see the future. I'm not going to make it easier for them by letting them use technology as well as magic.

I parked myself on the plastic seat and twisted the top off a long-neck. The magazines on the table were all women's stuff. A couple were in Spanish, which I had never managed to pick up. Others had headlines promising to tell me how to lose ten pounds, determine whether I was a summer or an autumn, or give me the inside scoop on this season's hottest fashions.

The only fashion decision I ever had to make was "clean t-shirt or dirty t-shirt?" And since it was laundry day, one of those options was off the table.

I took a quick look around. No one was looking my way. I opened my inner eye onto the astral plane.

We "seers" earned that name because we can see higher planes of existence, above the physical plane. The lowest of those magical planes is the astral plane. It's a handy place. All living things generate an aura on the astral plane. You can learn a lot about a person by examining their aura if you know how to read them. You can get a feel for their emotional state. You can tell whether they are consciously lying. You can even tell if the person is a seer, but only if that person's inner eye is open too. That's why I was always cautious about opening mine in public.

Like most public spaces, the laundry had a dirty astral ambience. Residual glow from the hundreds of people who occupied the space over time. There was nothing interesting to see on the astral plane in this little corner.

I swapped my laundry into a dryer. Fed it some coins. Twisted the cap off my second beer. Then I moved my attention to the next plane: the Tapestry of Destiny.

Not every seer can access the Tapestry of Destiny. There are four major castes, each with its own unique abilities. The Tapestry of Destiny is only accessible to the sorcerers. Well, officially, the Guild calls people like us Fate-benders. But in the old days, bending Fate was called sorcery. The old language just sounds more eloquent to me. More magical. Less like filling out a tax form.

It's hard to describe the Tapestry to those who have never seen it. It's a different plane of reality. It doesn't obey the rules of physics. It baffles the human mind, like staring at an Escher diagram. Imagine a tree of light, where the trunk is the present, the now. The tree is your Fate. In the future, every decision you make, every decision someone else makes that affects you, is a branch on that tree. The higher you go, the more branches. The more possible Fates in your future. That's your cone of possibility. Now imagine one of those trees for every person, and every place occupied by people, all piled on top of each other, occupying the same space at the same time. That's the Tapestry of Destiny.

It is more beautiful than anything that exists on the physical plane.

The threads of Destiny are entirely symbolic, and it all seems pretty random at first. But if you are physically near the person or place that a thread represents, you can usually identify who it symbolizes. Like picking a familiar face out of a crowd. Pretty quickly, you learn how to focus on specific threads or sets of threads. To separate the interesting ones from the boring ones. To follow them through their cone of possibility and see what the future may hold for them. If you know the right spells, you can influence which future Fate becomes reality.

Reading Fates can be as entertaining as reading any novel. It's people-watching, taken to the magical extreme. One of the college students across from me, a goth girl with black lipstick and a large number of piercings, had a dramatic Fate ahead of her the next few days. I couldn't get names or faces from the Tapestry, but I could see that there was a love triangle. Jealousy. Rage. A dynamic argument. And later on, some incredible make-up s*x. I was almost jealous.

But the thought of s*x brought Marina's memory back into my mind, so I left the goth girl's thread and looked wider. I'm here to tell you, laundromats do not have interesting Fates. Murphy's Tavern was up the block. I wandered across the Tapestry toward that place thread to see what was there.

There was going to be a traffic accident at the corner in a little while. Not too serious. Nobody killed. But a couple of people's days would be ruined because someone wasn't paying attention, and someone else was in a hurry. It was a tight intersection, so a lot of people were going to be delayed by the wreck. I could see the anger and frustration rippling out from the accident, touching dozens of threads. One of them was going to be late to an important dinner, and as a result was not going to land that big deal he had been working on. Another was going to get into a big fight with her husband about picking up the kids from practice on time.

It would have been easy for me to prevent it. Just a small, magical nudge of a spell, and a driver would stop at that light instead of trying to run it. All those nasty effects could be avoided. No wreckage to clean out of the intersection. Folks would get where they were going on time. Maybe that exec would land his big deal. Maybe that mom would finally have a night where she didn't fight with her husband.

The dryer buzzed. I swung the bubble-door open and shoveled the warm pile of cotton-poly blends back into the duffel I had brought them in. Folding is for suckers. I'm not trying to impress anybody with my fashion sense. I slung the duffel over my shoulder. Dropped the empty beer bottle into the trash on the way out the door.

As I waited for the walk signal at the intersection, I remembered about the car accident. Took a quick peek at the Tapestry to make sure I wasn't about to be crushed. Then crossed.

I could have cast that spell. But the Guild always has tracers eye-balling the Tapestry, looking for seers casting spells that might be illegal, or spells that the Guild considered "taxable." This spell probably would have escaped their notice. It was tiny. There was no profit in it. But as far as the Guild knew, I was dead. I had no interest in calling attention to myself, or giving them any hint that they were mistaken.

I walked on.

A block behind me, I heard the screech of tires on asphalt. The smash of metal on metal. The tinkling sound of broken glass scattering on pavement. Gasps and curses.

One more work day that week, and then I could settle into my little bomb shelter for a long weekend bender, just me and my bourbon.

The next day, Friday, was when the bomb dropped.