Mostly, though, she remains on watch for the worst things she’s foretold, things she predicted long, long ago. She continues to observe, looking for any sign of them and hoping to be daily disappointed.

Rain streaks off the scope and flies back inside her helmet, a torment she has grown used to. The small drops gather forces, forming rivulets. They march in columns through her flightsuit, down her nakedness underneath and out the holes she’d cut in the bottom of the suit’s feet. She holds her eyes tight to the cups as she opens the cover at the end of the cylinder, letting the compressed photons slide through the tubes and their narrow slits.

Inside the device, quanta of time and light do remarkable things. Approaching the side-by-side slits, the particles multiply, dividing and reproducing in order to pass through every gap, obeying simple but strange laws of physics. On the other side of the filter—before the photons can coalesce and continue their journey as one—they are interrupted by the woman’s eyes. They bombard her blind orbs while they’re still split apart, and thereby reveal their inner mysteries.

The woman blinks reflexively, even though her ocular nerves no longer function properly. The visions that fill her head can be seen even with her lids closed. The sights move like neutrinos, boring straight through her skull and leaving hazy images behind. She sees visions of reflected events, of some things long-ago, and many things that have not yet happened.

Not yet.

She focuses on the day’s images while another bump rocks the cabin, the shudder followed by a sheet of thick rain. The woman watches the images blur together. The visions are like overlapping transparencies; bringing just one layer into focus requires a force of will, a practiced bit of mental gymnastics. It feels as if she must squeeze her concentration like a muscle.

The visuals shimmy before forming into solid pictures, confusing at first. They’re large and jarring, hitting her like a bump in time.

Her head comes away from the seeing device with a start, her lids blinking across brown eyes with their yellow starbursts at the center. She leans forward and peers into the light once again, wary from the many false positives she’s been fooled by in the past, the many strange things that always end up being nothing. Or at the very least, a different sort of something.

She studies the images intently, focusing her perception, needing to make sure . . . but there isn’t any doubt:

The Bern.