Devil's Due

Jazz just stared at him. Didn't reach for it. After a long enough pause that it became clear she wasn't about to comply, Lucia reached over and took it. She opened it and took out a single white sheet of folded paper.

On it was written, DO NOT ALLOW LUCIA GARZA TO CARRY THROUGH WITH THE INVESTIGATION, OF J&J ELECTROPLATING.

No letterhead, no signature. Lucia looked up at Jazz, who returned her stare without flinching. There was something fierce in her eyes.

"Did you get it, Ms. Callender?" Laskins asked.

"Yes," Jazz said. "I got it."

"Then why did you fail to follow instructions? Do you not yet understand the seriousness of the situation? When you fail to follow our instructions, people die."

"Yeah, and guess what? When we do follow your instructions, people die," Jazz said. "I'm sick of operating in the dark. No more of these mysterious bullshit messages from nowhere. You want to enlist us in your army of do-gooders, you'd better damn well convince me how holding off on busting a bunch of terrorists is doing good!"

"It's not your job to question how or why we give these instructions!" Laskins bellowed. His face had gone entirely red, so mottled Lucia was afraid he was going to clutch his chest and hit the floor.

"Bite me!" Jazz screamed. "You guys treat us like trained monkeys, and you know what? We can make our own decisions. Isn't that why we're so damn valuable to you? Because what we do matters?"

"Yes," said the thin black man, farther down the table. He'd helped himself to a cup of tea, Lucia saw. By the looks of other cups around the room, they'd also started the coffeemaker. They'd certainly made themselves thoroughly at home. "Yes, you do make your own decisions. And you have no idea how much chaos that creates, do you? Presumptions are made about how the time stream will run—they have to be made, or we'd never be able to predict any outcomes at all. You are a fulcrum upon which events turn. And when you don't do as we've asked, you upset everything."

The hausfrau next to him laughed apologetically. "You've lost them, Jeffrey." She put a plump, motherly hand over his and gave Lucia a warm smile. "You have to imagine the scope of what we're talking about, ladies. It's not just an either-or proposition. It's like the biggest pin-ball game you can imagine, with a hundred thousand balls in play, and a million flippers, each of which has a simple decision to make. Do or don't. You see, it was a simple decision we made on your behalf—don't move on the terrorist information. In co

Lucia looked around at all of them, all the quiet faces, ranging from scowls to smiles. "You're all…psychics? Like Simms?"

"Oh, no." The man called Jeffrey sipped his tea and looked put out at the question. "There are only a handful of genuine psychics in this world, you know. Fifty or so, in any generation—"

"Sixty-two as of last week," murmured an old, creaky gentleman two chairs down. He blinked at Lucia benignly from behind thick, magnifying lenses.

"Edgar, it doesn't matter. I wasn't trying to be precise, I was—"

"Precision is important," Edgar said. "I wouldn't want our new friends to think we weren't precise. My, no."

Jeffrey shot him a grim look. "As I was saying, I could give you the exact mathematical equations about how we derive the existence and location of these people, but I doubt it would mean anything to you. To put it simply, we are a kind of clearinghouse. In addition to Simms, who founded our organization, we maintain facilities in which quite a number of precognitives are housed and cared for. They give us predictions—some, as many as hundreds each day. We feed these into a sophisticated mathematical model, and from that, we see the shape of things to come. Not in detail, you understand. In generalities. The psychics themselves are specific, but in combining their prophecies you lose the—the details. You understand?"

Lucia exchanged a fast look with Jazz. Why isn't Borden here? She couldn't tell if Jazz was thinking about that; her partner looked closed and coplike, utterly unreadable. Just like McCarthy, next to her. How much of this had he heard before? How much did he believe? Not enough, obviously, if he'd finally broken with the Society and gotten himself tossed in jail for his troubles.

"Yes, I understand," she said, although she was fairly certain that she didn't. "You get hundreds of predictions a day. Somehow you create scenarios out of blending all of them together, to show you the future."

"No," Laskins said. He'd recovered some of his calm. His color was a hot pink instead of deep red, and he'd seated himself again. "Not the future. A—sketch of the future. A rough outline of it, with some details in place to give it structure and scope."

"And if you don't like what you see," McCarthy said, "you just figure out which pinball levers to push until you get what you want."

It was as if they'd forgotten he was there. All eyes turned toward him. If he felt the weight of it, he didn't let it show; he was reconfiguring a paper clip into steel origami, and he kept right on doing it.

"What they're not telling you," McCarthy continued, "is that they're all about the greater good. Excuse me, the greater good as they see it. So if a couple hundred people have to die in an upcoming terrorist attack, well, those are acceptable losses if that still takes us down the path they want us to follow."

"People die," said a young woman dressed in ill-fitting blue jeans over a skeletal frame. Her arms were frighteningly thin, as if she'd just come from a prison camp. But since her skin had a ta

"I'm sure that's a great comfort to the dead," Lucia said. "That they died for a reason."

"Everybody dies for a reason," Laskins said. "We just try to make it a better reason than random chance."

"That apply to all of you, too?" McCarthy asked. They looked surprised. "No. Didn't think so. That's just for the rank and file, right? The chorus? The spear carriers? The guy on the left, in the back row, whose name we never know? It's okay if he dies for a reason. Not if your own kid does." He got up, staring at them in bitter contempt. "I told you before, I'm not playing your game."

The gaunt woman smiled cynically. "So you've told us," she said. "Have you informed your friends that we provided the information that got you out of prison? In return for your cooperation?"

McCarthy slowly bent over and put his hands flat on the table, staring at her. If looks could kill… Lucia shuddered at what was in his face. She'd thought Gregory had the wolf in him, but this was something else again.

"I'm not working for you." He said it softly, but it was loaded with meaning. "You have no idea what it costs me, but I'm not doing it. Do you understand me? You can send me back to prison. You can kill me. You can't make me do what you want."

"I think you'll find," she said in an even softer whisper, "that it no longer matters, Mr. McCarthy. You've served your purpose. You're Chorus. You're that poor man in the back row whose name we won't remember when you die."

Silence. Lucia felt her whole body trembling with the tension of it. There was something terrible being said, something awful in Ben's face.

"What did you do?" he asked, and suddenly all that control was gone, and he was moving, moving fast, screaming. "What did you do, you bitch? You were just supposed to take care of her, you weren't supposed to—"