Devil's Bargain

He leaned back, eyelids lowering to hood his stare.

“You’re saying—” Borden began.

“I’m saying that you’ve ruined years of work,” Simms said, “and I’m not pleased, James, not pleased. There are ways it can be fixed, but they’ll cost me. I’m not at all looking forward to the work.”

Jazz stared at him for a few seconds of silence, then reached up and pressed the red button. Somewhere, a buzzer went off. She stood up, banging her chair into Borden’s knees, bringing him upright with her.

“What are you doing?” he blurted, frowning. Simms merely looked at her, placid and unmoving, on the other side of the glass.

“Getting the hell out of here,” she said. “I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. This guy is talking about seeing the future. Are you getting that, or does he have you so brainwashed you believe everything he says? Because frankly, Counselor, you seemed like a smarter guy than that to me.”

She slapped the red button again, impatiently. The buzzer continued to rattle somewhere outside.

Simms said, very quietly, “Don’t be foolish. I knew where to find you, Jasmine. I knew where you would be when you didn’t know you were going there. I know things about you that even your closest friends don’t know. I can recite them to you, but I doubt you’d want Counselor Borden to be privy to—”

She slapped the button again, rounded on him and leaned on the table to put her face close enough to the glass to fog it with her breath. “Save it, asshole, I’m not buying your sideshow crap. You had somebody follow me to the bar. Hell, for all I know, you had somebody switch envelopes on me just now at the police station. It’s all crap, all right? And you’re not going to convince me otherwise—”

“At precisely ten-oh-two tonight,” Simms said, “Flight eight-oh-two, the plane you will be flying back to Kansas City, will suffer an engine failure. There will be two possible outcomes. One, the plane will rapidly lose altitude and crash into a row of suburban tract homes just short of the runway. There will be two survivors, a blond woman named Kelley Walters and a businessman, Lamar Qualls. Kelley will be traveling to visit her sister in Kansas City. Lamar will be visiting the city on business, to sign a contract for a grocery-store supply chain.”

She froze, staring at him. His eyes looked pellucidly clear. Sky blue. If he was lying, he was the best liar she’d ever seen in her life. “Bullshit,” she said. But she wondered if it was. It was too specific, too definite. Liars liked to talk in generalities, not specifics that could be checked and disproved.

“Two,” Simms continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “the pilot will be able to compensate for the loss of the engine and land the plane safely, without incident. There is an eighty-two percent chance that will be the case. I hope you find that comforting.”

“So you’re giving me a doom-and-gloom prediction that won’t come true,” she said. “How convenient for you.”

“I’d say it’s more convenient for you, actually,” he said, “considering that if I’m wrong, you won’t be one of the two survivors being carried out of the wreckage.” He shrugged. “I’m not a fortune-teller. When I tell you these things, I’m simply relaying what I know to be true based on my survey of possible futures. You can act on them, or not act. But altering the future is a delicate thing. If I send someone right now to the airport, for instance, and remove a certain mechanic from duty who is about to forget to tighten a bolt, then the engine problem doesn’t occur at all. However, that sends events down another path, and I can’t always see the consequences clearly from where I stand. Sometimes changing things makes them worse.”

“What’s worse than a plane crash?” she asked.

“I assure you, you don’t want to know,” he answered, and craned his neck. “Weren’t you leaving?”

The buzzer shut down abruptly outside, and she felt a change in pressure and cool air on her back as a deputy yanked open the door behind her. It would be the easiest thing in the world to stalk out of here, leave Borden twisting in the wind.

“Don’t you know what I’ll do?” she asked him.

Simms smiled. “There are a very few people in this world who are blank slates to me,” he said. “Those people bring random action to the game. You are one, or rather, you are one now. I predicted your actions somewhat accurately up until the night Laskins sent Borden to you with the offer, but unfortunately, you have grown more opaque since then. Your decisions drive events, Jazz. Yours, and Lucia’s. That’s why we call you Leads.”

“Why?” she flung at him. “Why us? We’re not important, are we? We’re just—”

“Pawns?” Simms’s mouth stretched in a wider smile. A much more unpleasant one, to Jazz’s revulsion. “Pawns win games, you know. And I’d call you…knights. Perhaps one of you might even prove to be a queen, before this game is over.”

She balled up her fists on the cold, cracked Formica of the counter. “If you’re playing a game, who are you playing? Why can’t you stay ahead?”

“It should be obvious to you by now that I have an opponent,” he said. His eyes flicked to focus behind her. “I believe Officer Sanchez is waiting on you.”

Behind her, the deputy said, “Yeah, I am. In or out, miss. I’ve got things to do.”

She allowed herself to relax back into the chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll stay. For a while.”

She felt the guard’s shrug. “Not going anywhere,” he said, and the door clicked and locked again behind her.

Bad decision, she thought instantly, and wondered from Simms’s crazy point of view what kind of futures had just imploded or expanded. What factors had shifted.

Which was just…nuts, wasn’t it? To believe in a thing like that?

“You think you’re playing Eidolon Corporation. Right?”

Simms glanced at Borden, who leaned elbows on the narrow table beside her and said, “When Simms started trying to change the course of futures that he thought were dangerous, some people at Eidolon disagreed. Some of them for idealistic reasons, some for practical economic reasons. Eidolon is an inside-trader’s dream. When you know the course of events, imagine how much profit there is to be made…but Simms didn’t agree. So when push came to shove, Eidolon needed to lose Simms but decided that Simms’s abilities were too valuable to let go. They found somebody as backup. Somebody with similar, ah, abilities.”

“His name is Gilbert Kavanaugh,” Simms said. “Gil for short. You’d like him, he’s actually very amusing, for a psychopath.”

“And let me get this straight. You claim to be able to see the future, and you didn’t see it coming when he, what, framed you for murder?”

Simms nodded, a neat, economical motion.

“I told you. Certain people—”

“Yeah, blank slates, yadda, yadda. You can’t read his future?”

“No.”

“Or your own, I’m guessing.”

Simms’s smile was thin and discomforting. “No.”

“Or mine.”

“Not at present. There are times yours is clear, and at others, not. Like Mr. Borden’s. Like Lucia Garza’s.”

“Explain to me why you want to hire people whose actions you can’t predict. Assuming this isn’t a giant steaming pile of crap, of course.”

“Of course. Because,” Simms said very calmly, “the ones I can predict ca

“You’re delusional.”

“No.” Simms shrugged. “But I do think it is a wonder I’m not insane, don’t you?”

“Five bodies buried in your backyard say different.”

Simms stared at her for a long, long moment, and she had that sensation again, as if a floodlight had swept over her and illuminated every cell in her body, every dark thought, every secret. It made her dangerously angry.