All she needed was a word, a phrase; extrapolating the future from there. Events closest to her came across strongest. There would be no point in him asking her what was going to happen to someone on the other side of the world, she wouldn't be able to see them.

She'd described the probabilities to him once, explaining her limits after he'd asked her for some impossible piece of intelligence information when they were fighting the Jihad legion.

I'm standing at the mouth of a very large river, she'd said, at the moment when the future becomes the present; and I'm looking across the land where the water originated, seeing the first fork, and beyond that the tributaries branching away, and then the tributaries' tributaries, splitting, multiplying, ad infinitum. The far horizon gives birth to a trillion rills, all converging to the mouth, each one the source of a possible destiny. They are the Tau lines, future history. On their way towards me they clash and merge, building in strength, in probability, eradicating the wilder fringes of feasibility as they approach confluence, until they reach the mouth: the point of irrevocable certainty.

She could send her mind floating back along those streams, questing, probing for what would come. The prospect terrified her, he knew. She'd hidden that from the Army, but of course he'd seen it at once. The knowledge cost him; as the one person whose empathy allowed him to see the true extent of that dread he felt protective towards her. He was her involuntary confessor, obligated.

Way ahead of her, at the furthest extremity of each of those streams, where the flow was little more than a trickle in the dust, her death waited for her. She refused to let her mind roam far into any of the possible futures; but even that self-imposed proscription meant she lived with the mortal fear of the streams drying up, one by one, the drought inching towards her; a reality so blatant she'd never be able to shield her eldritch sight against it.

Greg thought of himself sitting in a plane as it began its long fall out of the sky; standing paralysed by fear in the middle of the road as some huge lorry bore down, brakes squealing, unable to stop in time. She had to live with the prospect of seeing that eventuality raising its head every minute of every day. Knowing that it was inevitably going to happen.

So he forgave her for going to seed. His espersense was a heavy cross. He would never have the strength to carry hers.

"Exactly," he said. "Philip Evans made it back from the grave. Can you see who's behind the blitz on his NN core?"

"Hmm." Her mind betrayed how intrigued she was. "I'll have a look." She cut a slice of almond cake and began munching, staring up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.