“But I’m not,” he insisted. “If both those events represent this timeline, killing me has no effect—if they were alive right now, then not killing me would guarantee their deaths.”

“There is something in what he says,” admitted Landen.

“But both those events do not represent one timeline. I can only think that we are seeing two timelines at once, with all events. Your murder is in their timeline, and their murder is in your timeline. Once a timeline is taken out, all will revert to as it should be.”

“Wow,” said Landen, clearly impressed with my explanation.

“Smart girls give me the horn too,” said Gavin sadly. “But they always ignore me. Tuesday ignores me.”

“Maybe you should try washing,” I said, “and keeping a civil tongue in your head.”

“Will that work?”

“Probably not in your case, but it’s certainly worth a try.”

He nodded reflectively. He responded well to straight talking, so I tried a different approach.

“Gavin, how did you turn out to be such a nasty piece of work?”

He shrugged. “I could blame my parents, but that’s just whiny victim bullshit. Some people are just naturally unpleasant. I’ve known for a long time that I’m something of a shit. I tried for years to hide it, but it never worked, so in the end I decided to just go with it, and see where it led me. What’s your excuse?”

We just laughed this time at his impertinence, and, surprisingly, he laughed, too.

“Okay,” he said, “what’s the deal tomorrow? Do I conveniently reveal my soft underbelly for that toe-rag Friday to gut, or do I run?”

“We don’t know,” said Landen, “but Friday is at this moment attempting to find out more. He thinks there might have been sixteen Destiny Aware ex-timeworkers and not fifteen.”

“How will that make a difference?”

“Someone may know something that we don’t. For it to be murder, then there has to be a motive. Without that, he can’t kill you.”

“So I should do nothing?”

“If you can.”

There was a pause.

“Why are you here anyway?” asked Landen. “Shouldn’t you be in school or breaking windows or pushing over grannies or something?”

“I’m a freelance mathematician,” he said loftily, “offering my unique services to those either too stupid or too lazy to work it out for themselves. Do you want to see something seriously batshit cool?”

“Okay.”

He took a grubby piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a three-digit number. Landen and I stared at it for a moment.

“It’s an even prime number,”1 he announced. “It’s been lying there unnoticed since the dawn of math, and I found it. Archimedes, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Newton—they all missed it. How dumb were they?”