I trotted at her side on the way to her office like one of her trained white coats while she filled me in. She’d been working on some Envisioner calibrations, asking it all the usual questions, and when she asked the machine how she’d die, again—and that still completely weirded me out—she said the answer had changed. Goodbye, embolism at age 68. According to the box she now had a year to live, give or take a few months.

Not just her, either. Close to three billion around the world, thanks to the ease of international travel and open borders and the potency of some virus that won’t want to die even in the face of all the drugs that governments will throw at it.

Wildfires raged deep in my guts, burning me from the inside out.

“I think I connected to the machine and told it to change the future it predicted,” I said.

“What do you mean connected to?”

“Like—talked to it. Maybe like Figueiredo would,” I told her. “It said that Yusuf was going to die in the attack. And then I told it to save him.”

“Well, can you tell it to send a plague that wipes out a quarter of humanity somewhere else?”

“I can try.”

Kaori scattered the few researchers in the Theater with a curt leave, and when we were alone again, she pointed to the Envisioner.

I didn’t need to be told. I pressed my hands against the facets by one of the screens and closed my eyes, reaching out with my mind. I tried to empty my head and find some after-yoga stillness, but that’s like telling yourself not to think about oranges and now all you can picture is a giant orange rolling down a rocky incline at you. I didn’t feel any of the threads nearby, vibrating like possibilities, only the cool facets of the box.

“It’s not like I’m flicking a light switch,” I said. “Before it was life-or-death.”

Her annoyed sigh into her two-way radio rustled like the air-conditioning vents above. “Would somebody please get Dr. Hassan here?”

*   *   *

I’d like to think a lot of our time together was genuine because Kaori liked that I didn’t give a shit about her genius and was more into her detached sense of humor and the way she’d honk like a like a goose with laughter when her mask slipped off. I know the same receptors in her brain that calculated the world in a trillion undulating points of data also blunted her emotions, but I really do remember seeing her smile at me and Yusuf during some margarita club night when she could tell she didn’t get some in-joke or look shared between us. She seemed happy for us, really.

Which is why it was even more of a surprise that she pulled a gun.