The smell of the incense made him sleepy and he found it hard to focus his gaze. The fortune teller led them to a table and a metal bowl filled with viscous liquid.

Saleh held Elias’s hand as he stared into the bowl. The fortune teller began to stir the liquid with her finger.

Patterns formed.

“They distill this substance only on Jettisoned,” the fortune teller said. Her voice was low, melodious. “Just an ounce of Probability Water shipped across space from the Outer System will make a pauper out of a prince.” She laughed, low and throaty. Saleh stared at the patterns that formed.

“Each drop of water is packed with quantum processors,” the fortune teller said. “The reflection it sends shows you your future . . . futures . . . likelihoods and chances, destiny and fate. Your eyes are growing heavy. You are feeling very relaxed. Follow the sound of my voice. . . . I will count down now and you will sleep, three, two, one.”

Saleh smiled. Is that all it was? he thought. An old Mesmer routine, nothing else. He felt content, in charge of his faculties. Just a shiny prop and old-fashioned hypnotism. He felt perfectly at ease, without the need to do anything but stand there.

“Good, good,” the fortune teller said distractedly. She stirred the liquid and images burst into Saleh’s eyes. He was a bopper, hopping and slithering on the surface of Titan under the purple roiling skies; then he floated in space, with Jupiter rising, a mine taking part in the Trifala King War, watching as odd craft cruised past him; then he was farther still, a comet blazing past the strange inhabited moons of Oberon and Titania; then farther, always farther, until the sun was a tiny ball of cold light hanging in space, and in the black of the Oort he thought he saw something impossible: enormous entities the size of worlds, with tendrils of black matter pulsing and reaching far into space, and he felt their attention turn on him, and tried to flee, and was lost. . . .

“Well that’s done with,” the fortune teller said. “And you can’t say I wasn’t fair, I always carry a job through.” She moved away from the table and removed her hood. Saleh, in his trance-like state, half-saw the dark entities and half the fortune teller, but though she had removed her hood her face was still somehow hidden from him.

“Don’t worry,” she said, as though reading his mind, “you won’t remember this.” She reached for his bag and rummaged through it, and Saleh didn’t stop her, even when she extracted his one possession of value out of it. The fortune teller stared at it in interest.

“Dahab,” she said. “I forgot all about that one.”