“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that after seeing off our guest you sat down to drink beer in a lousy, expensive little cafe, even though you knew you were going to drive?”

“It does, but that’s the way the day went.”

“And that, at the precise moment when you suddenly decided to linger at the airport, a clairvoyant boy threw a hysterical fit right in front of your eyes?”

“Life is made up of coincidences,” I said philosophically.

“And that the plane reached Barcelona safely?”

That really knocked me back. “How?”

“The usual way. Engines roaring and wings swaying. It got there, offloaded all the people, and set off on the way back an hour ago.”

I shook my head from side to side. “Boris Ignatievich . . . of course, I’m no clairvoyant. But when I specifically check the probability of one event or another . . . The boy started howling about a catastrophe. I glanced at his aura—an uninitiated Other in a spontaneous outburst of Power. I started checking through the reality lines—the plane crashed. With a probability of ninety-eight percent. Maybe . . . well, there are no absolutely certain predictions . . . maybe those two percent came up?”

“Possibly. But how else can you interpret what happened?”

“A deliberate provocation,” I said reluctantly. “Someone pumped the boy full of Power and hung a false aura on him. It’s a well-known move—you yourself . . . Hmm. Well, then the boy has a fit of hysterics, I hear him howling and start calculating the probabilities . . . let’s assume they’ve been distorted, too.”

“With what intent?”

“To make us use our right to a first-level intervention for nothing. The plane was never going to crash, the kid is of no interest. And we, like idiots, have wasted our bullet.”

Gesar raised his finger didactically.

“But we didn’t have the right to intervene in any case!” I exclaimed.

“We did,” Gesar muttered gruffly. “We did and we do. But reserved exclusively for me. If you had come directly to me . . . I would have allowed you to intervene.”

“So that’s how it is . . .” I said. “Well . . . that really does make it look like a trick. But what about the kid?”

“A Prophet . . .” Gesar said reluctantly. “A very powerful one. And you bear no signs of having been influenced. So you’re probably right.”

“But the plane didn’t crash,” Olga said quietly.

We stopped talking for a moment.

“Prophets don’t make mistakes. The boy is a Prophet, since he made predictions about his own fate and the fate of a Higher Other. But the plane didn’t crash. You didn’t interfere in events . . .” Gesar said quietly.

That was when it hit me. “You weren’t checking if I was under some kind of influence or not,” I said. “You were checking if I saved the plane without permission.”