C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

I lifted my head, cheeks puffed out, and blew a raspberry at the graveyard. “Your visions, Suzy. Do you control them? Can you call one up when you want to?” I’d be impressed as hell if she could. Precognition wasn’t one of my tricks, but if a fourteen-year-old me had been handed that particular bag, I’d have probably cowered under the bed until it went away.

Actually, that wasn’t true. At fourteen, with Coyote’s guidance in my dreams, I’d have jumped at it. I had jumped at the chance to become a shaman, albeit unknown to my waking self. I’d wanted to be special, and that wasn’t a good place for a young shaman to start from. On the other hand, I’d needed the training. Getting it in the sleeping world had covered all the bases: it prevented me from taking the darker path my bratty teenage nature would’ve dictated, while also preparing me to grow into someone worthy of the power I’d been granted. It’d been working very well, right up to the point where my older self came along and stole my teenage version’s studies for her own use. I had a lot to answer for, and much of it was to myself.

“You want me to see what else I can see, don’t you.” Suzy sounded very calm for a girl with tear tracks on her cheeks. “You want to know if I can see anything that’ll help you win whatever it is you’ve got to fight.”

“No.” Somewhere in the few seconds she’d been speaking, I aged about a thousand years. “What I want is to buy you some lunch and drive you home to Olympia where you can go back to a normal life. I don’t want to ask you to look to the future and watch people die.”

“But you’re going to anyway.”

I turned my head to study the girl. Her gaze was steady, all green and full of fire, like her grandfather’s. No fear, no anger, just the sort of resolution the young can cling to because they haven’t yet experienced loss, and can’t imagine it would ever happen to them.

Except Suzanne Quinley’d lost her whole family in one horrible afternoon, and had almost lost herself. It wasn’t bravado I saw in her eyes. It was courage. More courage, I thought, than I’d ever experienced myself.

I finally nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’m sorry, but can you See for me, Suzanne?”

“It’s okay.” She smiled, a sudden gentle thing, and put her hand over mine. “It’s okay, Officer Walker. It’s what I came here to do.”

All the color spilled out of her eyes, leaving them hideous and bone white.

I didn’t know what it was about magic that made people’s eyes go funky. The first precognitive I’d known had done the same trick, and then color had bled back in, turning the irises black with hints of blue and gold around where the pupil ought to be. Suzanne’s did that, too, only with green instead of blue. Mine apparently went gold when I used the Sight, and so had Billy’s. Weirdly, I didn’t remember the coven’s collective eyes changing color when they called up earth magic. A half-formed idea that the power’s source dictated the change settled in my brain and faded out. It hardly mattered right now. I could pursue it when I wasn’t asking a teenager to see the future on my behalf.

The clever part of me thought it’d be safer not to use the Sight on a girl reaching for the future, especially one who burned as brightly as she did by nature. The less clever part gave over to it without much consideration. Maybe it was human curiosity; maybe it was the shaman in me, hoping I could somehow help or guide her. Either way, the Sight flickered on in the same breath that Suzanne’s eyes went white, and for a little while, the whole universe stopped.

She blazed. My God, she blazed, emerald fire pouring off her so hot it turned white at its edges. The world bent toward her as though she’d become a gravity center, pulling everything askew. My breath, light stuff that it was, had no chance, and my heart began to ache as my lungs emptied. The sunspots and flares I’d seen earlier cut through time in all directions, lashing out and hauling fragments of—

Of not just the future, but possible futures. All of them, and all the possible pasts, with every decision made and every path not taken highlighted with chance and choice. Boundless chaos and unavoidable pattern tumbled together, overwhelming and inevitable all at once. Suzanne was concentrating on me, and I on her, and with both of us bound together by magic and intent, I Saw every life I might have ever led.

Moving forward from this moment, spilling literally no more than a few days into the future: Thor on his knee with a diamond ring and a nervous smile, accompanied by a rough “I thought I was going to lose you, Joanne. I’d rather not do that.” Chance and choice rushed forward from there, brief examination of a surprisingly ordinary life filled with neither great regret nor great joy, making it an easy calm course to follow. A dozen similar futures splintered around that, some taking longer to come to fruition, but all of them gentle lives, quiet paths as I helped the people around me in small ways. Making a difference without risking myself: that was the core of who I became in those worlds. I had someone to go home to, something to lose, and never strayed so far as to lose him.

My heart twisted, longing for that comfort, but at the same time those futures turned ephemeral, fading away. I’d already chosen a harder road, and the ease of a tranquil family life seemed very far away.

Backward, but not very far: Morrison standing under the July sun in his T-shirt and dark shades, arms folded over his chest as he asked, “Would you take a promotion?”

And that time, in that future-past, I whispered, “No,” closing the door on an investigative position in the force and opening one that let Captain Michael Morrison tug his shades off, stare at me incredulously, then pull me into an abrupt hug that felt as bewilderingly wrong as it did fundamentally right.

Sideways: a young man with my eyes and his father’s straight nose looked at me with utter exasperation, and that was a future that sprang up no matter what path I followed. In one branching past, I stayed in Qualla Boundary and raised my son; in one splintering future I met him again, and either way, he was a teen and I was his exasperating progenitor.

Back, back so far it wasn’t about me anymore, but my parents. Sheila Anne MacNamarra brought a three-month-old baby girl to Joseph Leroy Walkingstick, and her ruthless ability to make hard choices melted under his quick warm smile. I spirit-walked at four, in that future-past, and my imaginary friends weren’t; they were only invisible to most people. I knew Coyote for what he was, then, and the laughing girl I was got on a Greyhound bus to visit him in Nevada the summer I turned fifteen.

And some things were fated, it seemed, because that me got pregnant, too, but when her Coyote lover found out, he came east to Carolina and it was a cheerful pair of young idiots who got married at the winter solstice. They should have been broken, so badly broken, but instead when the twins came early, Ayita, the baby girl born first with so little strength, survived thanks to the healing magic that bloomed in both her parents. Aidan, always stronger, lived as well, and that future-past, in its way, came around to the exasperated teenage boy again. This time, though, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his equally exasperated sister.

Right there, right now, in the real world, fire scalded my cheeks, thin lines of heat and regret for a life I’d never so much as imagined. But then Morrison was there again, in another future I might never see, roaring like a bull as he stood his ground and fired his gun once, twice, again, until the clip emptied and he flipped it around to pistol-whip whatever was coming at him. Gary was there, too, a big old man with linebacker shoulders, crashing forward against a fog of darkness, and I knew that the woman I’d become wouldn’t have wanted to miss those two, not for anything in this world, and maybe not even for anything in any other world, either.