The night he found out what Divine Sense could not do began, like most bad nights, with a good idea.
It was Wednesday. He'd gone to Priya's Wednesday bookkeeping club, an ironic monthly meeting of SIU staff in the back of a Long Island City bar, and stayed longer than he meant to. It had been a good evening. There had been dumplings. Priya had done an impression of Fitch saying bandwidth that made him laugh so hard a woman at the next table had turned around. On the way out, she'd knocked her shoulder against his arm and said, "See? You can be a person," and he'd walked to the train with a warmth in his chest that he chose not to examine.
So he was not, at eleven-fifteen, expecting to be hunted.
The train dropped him at Junction Boulevard. The walk to Owen's apartment was six blocks through streets he could now navigate in his sleep: past a shuttered bodega, a laundromat with a single flickering neon sign, a row of two-story houses with plastic chairs on their porches. It was a warm night. Somewhere a radio was playing a slow bolero. The sky was the flat orange-gray of a city that never got properly dark.
He was thinking about Murdock. He was thinking about the card in his wallet, and Fitch's email, and the hollow sound of the word no in his own mouth.
Then the thread pulled.
NOTICE. URGENCY: HIGH. DISTANCE: 22 M.
He stopped mid-stride. It was not the soft nudge of a person in distress. It was a sharp, hard, frightened pull.
DIRECTION: RIGHT. DISTANCE: 18 M.
There was an alley between a hardware store and a shuttered pharmacy. It was narrow, walled with brick, lit by a single caged bulb. He couldn't see into it. But he felt the thread pointing there like a needle.
Don't, said Owen's instincts. Call 911. Walk away.
He took out his phone and dialed with his thumb, moving toward the mouth of the alley, keeping to the shadows. It rang twice, and a bored operator answered. "Nine-one-one, what's the address of your emergency?"
"There's a possible robbery in progress," he said, low. "Behind the hardware store on Fortieth, near Junction. I can't see it. I think—"
He heard a voice, thin and high and terrified, from inside the alley. "Please. Please, I've got nothing. Take the phone. Take it."
"—I think someone's being mugged. Please send someone now."
"Sir, stay on the line—"
He didn't. He put the phone in his pocket and closed his eyes and let the sense open.
It came slowly, painfully, with a low pulse of pressure behind his left eye. Three meters. Five. Nine. The alley resolved in his mind like a diagram drawn in gold: a narrow slot between brick walls, ten meters long, a dumpster, a fire escape, a stack of broken pallets. And in the middle of it, three figures.
One was small, curled against the wall. A delivery worker, by the shape of the insulated bag on his back. He was breathing in short, frightened gasps, his hands raised.
One was standing over him, right arm extended, something long and thin held low against the thigh. A knife. The sense picked it out clearly, a blade of cold in the dark.
And one was standing at the mouth of the alley, just behind the corner, watching the street. A lookout. He was twelve feet from Dev.
Two of them, he thought. Two of them, at least. One with a blade.
He could still walk away.
He didn't.
The plan, if it could be called that, was about three seconds long.
He stepped out into the mouth of the alley in plain sight and said, loudly, "I called the cops. They're two minutes out."
The lookout spun. He was nineteen, maybe twenty, in a black hoodie, and his eyes went huge. Behind him, the man with the knife turned slowly, and Dev felt him through the sense like a shadow detaching from a wall.
"Yeah?" said the man. His voice was low and easy, without hurry. He was thirty or so, heavyset, unshaven. "Then you got two minutes to mind your own business."
"Let him go."
"Or what?"
He didn't have an answer to that. That was the honest truth. He had a power that told him where a knife was. He did not have a power that could do anything about it.
Wrong tool, he thought, with strange, distant clarity. I brought a stethoscope to a fistfight.
The man with the knife smiled. He took a step forward. The delivery worker scrambled sideways along the wall.
"Run," Dev said, to the delivery worker. "Go."
"Nobody's running," the man said.
The lookout moved. Dev felt him through the sense, rather than saw him: a quick, lunging shape from the left, closing at speed. Dev twisted. A fist whistled past his ear, close enough to feel the wind. He stumbled and grabbed at the wall.
I can see them, he thought, dazed. I can see them before they hit me.
He slid sideways as the man with the knife lunged. The blade cut a cold arc through the air where his ribs had been. The sense screamed at him, a bright bell of left, low, now. He dropped, and the second slash went over his head with a shrill hiss.
For a few seconds, it worked. He dodged. He ducked. He twisted away from a kick and stumbled over a pallet and rolled to his feet. He was fighting blind and perfectly, every movement anticipated, every blow half a second early. He wasn't winning. He was surviving. It was the most extraordinary thing he had ever done, and it was terrifying.
Then the headache hit.
It came all at once, a white spike behind his left eye, and the sense flickered. The gold outlines wavered and blurred. For one long, horrible moment, he lost the man with the knife.
The bottle came out of the dark. He never saw it. It was the lookout, who'd circled behind him, and it caught Dev across the back of the head with a dull, wet crack. The world went white and then black and then a slow, spinning gray. His knees hit the ground. Something warm ran down the back of his neck.
"Stupid," said the man with the knife, not angry, just tired. "Stupid, stupid. You know you could've just walked?"
A boot hit Dev's ribs. He curled around it. A second boot hit his stomach. He tasted blood, and it was his own. Somewhere far away he heard the delivery worker sobbing.
Twenty seconds, he thought, through a haze. The cops said two minutes.
He tried to reach for the sense. It gave a weak, sputtering flicker, like a match in a wind, and the pain in his skull spiked so hard that he vomited onto the alley floor.
"Look at that," said the lookout, with a nervous laugh. "He's a mess."
"Take his wallet."
Hands were in his jacket. He felt his wallet go, his phone, his keys. He felt his glasses come off his face and something crunch beneath a boot. He couldn't see. He could barely move. Somewhere at the back of his ringing skull, one clear cold thought was still going:
You have one thing they don't. You've got an audience.
He reached out, not with the sense, but with his voice, and screamed.
"FIRE!"
It came out cracked and enormous. It echoed off the brick like a gunshot. Dev screamed it again, and again, the oldest trick in the city, the word that gets doors opened when help does not. "FIRE! FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!"
A window went up somewhere above. Then another. A light came on. A man's voice yelled something in Spanish.
"Shit," said the lookout. "Shit, shit, go—"
The boots stopped. The hands left his pockets. He heard footsteps, running, fading toward the far end of the alley. A door slammed.
Then, blessedly, the wail of a siren, rising in the distance.
He lay on the wet concrete for a long time. The alley smelled of garbage and rain and blood. His face throbbed. His ribs felt like a bag of broken glass. Somewhere very close to him, the delivery worker was crying softly, in a rhythmic, exhausted, relieved way.
A hand touched his shoulder, small and trembling.
"Sir? Sir, are you okay?"
He opened one eye. The world was a blur. He could make out a young man, a boy really, twenty at most, thin and dark-skinned in a bright yellow jacket, kneeling beside him. He was holding Dev's shattered glasses in one hand. The lens was cracked clean through.
"You saved me," the boy said. "You... you didn't have to. They were going to..."
"They took your phone?"
"They didn't get it. I threw it in the dumpster when they came." The boy laughed unsteadily. "I'm not stupid."
"That's good," Dev croaked. "You're not... stupid."
He tried to sit up. The world spun. The boy caught his arm and steadied him.
The siren wailed into the street. A pair of blue and red lights washed across the wet bricks. Footsteps pounded. Voices shouted.
"What's your name?" Dev managed.
"Ismael."
"Ismael. Go to the cops. Tell them what happened. Tell them there were two of them. Big one, thirty, heavy. Younger one, maybe nineteen, black hoodie."
"I will."
"Good."
He lay back. It was not a triumphant moment. It was the low, hurting, humiliated silence of a man who'd found out exactly how small his tools were.
I can see the blade, he thought. I can't stop it.
The line drew itself in gold across his failing vision.
VERIFICATION COMPLETE.
BENEFICIAL ACT: INTERVENTION IN ARMED ROBBERY.
HARM PREVENTED: HIGH (PROBABLE SERIOUS INJURY).
COST TO CLAIMANT: PHYSICAL INJURY (MODERATE), PERSONAL PROPERTY (LOSS), SUSTAINED USE OF ENDOWMENT, SUSTAINED FEAR.
MOTIVE: CLEAN.
MERIT AWARDED: +38.
MERIT: 164 / 100.
"Great," Dev said, aloud, to the broken sky. "That's great."
THE LEDGER NOTES THAT THE CLAIMANT USED AN UNCONVENTIONAL TOOL.
He blinked. "The scream?"
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S TOOLS.
IT NOTES THAT THEY WERE EFFECTIVE.
He laughed, then coughed, then laughed again, and lay in the alley in the flashing light, with the boy's hand still on his arm, and wondered if this was what it felt like when the universe was impressed.
The paramedics cleaned his scalp, wrapped his ribs, and told him he needed a scan, which he refused. The police took his statement, twice. Ismael gave his own, and hugged Dev before they let him go, with the total lack of embarrassment of the very young.
It was two-thirty in the morning when he finally got back to Owen's apartment. The door was locked; his keys were gone. He had to wake the super. The super, a bleary man named Mr. Petrakis, looked at his face and said, "Jesus, Owen," and let him in with a spare set without another word.
He climbed the stairs one at a time. He got the door open. He stood in the dark, in the smell of dal and old carpet, and listened to the refrigerator hum.
He sat down on the floor, right there in the hall, with his back against the wall.
You could have been killed, he thought. You could have died a second time. And underneath it, a colder thought, one he'd been trying not to think since he'd woken in the alley. And if you'd died in Owen's body, what would have happened to Owen?
His hands were shaking.
"Ledger."
YES.
"I'm spending it."
THE LEDGER RECOMMENDS THE CLAIMANT REST.
"I'm spending it. Convert one hundred."
THE CLAIMANT IS INJURED. THE CLAIMANT'S JUDGMENT MAY BE IMPAIRED.
"I know."
THE LEDGER RECOMMENDS—
"I'm not doing it because I'm angry." He put his head against the wall. "I'm doing it because I just found out I can see the knife, and I can't do anything about it. I'm doing it because there'll be a next time. Convert it."
A very long pause. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere on the street a car went by, headlights sliding across the ceiling.
CONVERSION AUTHORIZED.
MERIT: 64 / 100.
DRAW TICKETS: 1.
He sat in the dark and felt it settle in his awareness, warm and small. A second coin.
"Tomorrow," he said, to no one. "When I can see straight."
THE LEDGER APPROVES.