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Sam was leaving all that behind like a memory. He was zooming through time, catching tiny slivers of history. Moments unfolded around him, revolutions and rebellions, protests and philosophies, quiet longings and giant leaps of progress, and dreams, dreams, dreams. So many dreams. They were endless, a stardust fuel reborn into the hearts of the people again and again. Also infinite was the quest for power, the capacity for violence.
Dreams. And suffering. And blood.
Sam squirmed against the knowledge of this as it flooded through him, threaded to the dreams until it was impossible to separate them from one another. For every moment Sam witnessed, there were hundreds more passing quietly by. These moments fractured, dividing like cells so that they could be played out to different ends. In one scenario, someone died. In another, they lived. An action brought peace; that same action brought terror. All these moments had millions more living inside them, universes upon universes. Little futures playing out. Fading. Splitting into other futures. Death and rebirth. So much energy. Sam could feel it threaded through him and back out into every one of those futures, those moments. It was dizzying.
“So much energy.” Sam didn’t know if he’d thought it or said it. He was losing the edges of himself.
“It’s you.” Miss Addie was framed in the doorway of a white clapboard church. “Tell Theta—the binding spell. Tell her—”
The universe split.
Miss Addie was in an open coffin on its way to the graveyard. She lay perfectly still, like the dead, but Sam could hear her screaming inside his head and he knew she was very much alive.
Split.
Sergei. His mother. Sergei, I must show you something.
A moment opened like the petals on a flower: Sam was a boy at Hopeful Harbor and his mother had her hands on either side of his head. She was angry. At him? No. But she was angry. And afraid. Something had happened to make her afraid.
“My love, forget what you know. Do not see,” she whispered, and she brushed her thumbs against his temples and it all went away.
Sergei. His mother’s voice. Now? Yes, now. Here.
From here on, no more forgetting. Keep awake, my love. Use your gift to stay safe.
Split.
A white buffalo was born. It slithered into weary grass that reached up to welcome its promise. The land held its breath for hope, waiting for the animal to make its first cries.
Breathe, Sam thought. Breathe!
Another moment came, followed by another. A woman with red hair and green eyes. He’d seen her once before. At the post office. An Englishwoman. But she was younger here. The redheaded woman pressed her body against a majestic tree. “In some realm, we shall be together,” she promised. “I will free you, my love.” The world split. The same woman was reaching into the tree and pulling out a dark-haired man like the midwife to a hard birth. He was falling into her arms, gulping for air through all that muck, and she was crying.
Split.
Sam was with Evie, happy in her arms, and she was laughing.
Split.
Evie was just out of reach, and he was screaming at her to stop, to come back. Why?
Sam wanted to follow that future to see where it led because it frightened him.
The universe split again into a fluttering of wings.
There was something familiar about the woman standing before him, her voice a thick rasp. “Listen to me. Quick now. You must break the cycle. Tell Memphis to heal the breach.”
Memphis. This was Memphis’s mother.
“Break the cycle,” Sam repeated. “How?”
“Sam?” Marlowe’s voice. “What’s that about a circle?”
The cells of time divided again. One moment did not split into other futures, though. It was stuck, like a phonograph needle hiccuping in the same groove, playing the same line of a song over and over. That moment pulled Sam toward it, brightening and expanding, pulsing like a heartbeat. A song punched through the colorful swirl of gases of time and space to reach him now:
“Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.…”
He was at the edge of a foggy soldiers’ camp. The song came from a record spinning around on an old Victrola perched atop a tree stump.
