“Hi, Levi.”

He frowned. “Ethan? Why now?” He looked down at the floor. “Guy’s already kicked it. Don’t really need your help anymore, unless you know how to close the Gates.”

“No, sorry.”

“Fuckin’ precogs. Why’re you calling?” Levi eyed the old man’s corpse. He gave it an idle kick. “He’s not coming back to life, is he?”

There was a pause. The voice took a deep breath.

“Wait! Alpha’s coming back to life!” Levi guessed.

“No, Levi. I…perhaps it’s best to see for yourself. The door behind the man. Open it.”

Levi looked around. “Behind…Oh. There.” He opened the door.

Buckets, brooms, mops. A tile floor, about six large tiles in length. Tools, tangled up on racks. Levi took in the small closet and shrugged. “A closet? You trying to reveal that you’re gay?”

Ethan laughed. “No, no. Pry up the tiles.”

Glancing around, Levi found a rake. He edged the steel tines under a crack, where the tiles didn’t quite seam together right, and pulled the tile up.

A white skull stared back at him. Dank hair still tangled around its head, the jaw hanging open.

“Whoa. Old man killed someone?” Levi asked.

“Look closer.”

Levi leaned in.

Brown, slightly wavy hair fell around the head, to about the jaw. A chunk of the skeleton’s bangs were dyed blue.

He blinked. “Your hair’s dyed blue, too, isn’t it?”

“Not ‘too.’ That’s me.”

“Holy shit, the phone’s haunted!” Levi shouted, startled.

“Calm down. Nothing is haunted. I recorded all this when I was alive. I…am a perfect precog, after all.”

Levi squinted. “Didn’t you say it wasn’t all going according to your plan? How could you adapt, if you were dead?”

“I didn’t. But while I was alive…now, for me, in the past, for you—no matter how I planned this going, you always did something strange and threw me off. My powers—well, it doesn’t matter if you know. I can see what happens in the future, but only after I record a message, and only for what happens up to the moment I record a message, until I record the next message. I had to re-record so many of these messages.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Levi squinted, thinking. He moved his hand around, trying to keep track of it. “So basically, once you record a message, you can see how the world would respond to your previous message.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Damn, so you have to re-record two messages every time to see what’s going to happen next—the message I’ll respond to, and the next one, that allows you to see how I’ll respond to that. Must’ve been hell.”

“You have no idea.”

“Yeah, but I bet you just recorded the second message as ‘yeah’ and then went back and fixed the first, right?”

“…” Dead silence.

“You didn’t think of that, huh.”

“God! I hate that I didn’t think of that!”

Levi laughed. “Man. It’s wild how I’m talking to a dead man. I’ve done weirder shit, I guess.”

“Yeah. Hey, I have to go. I only have so much time before I…you know. My death is—I saw it coming a long time ago. It’s one of the few things I can see that breaks the rules of my powers. I don’t know why. Just…always been there. Waiting for me. Getting closer and closer.”

“Honestly, can’t relate,” Levi said, shrugging.

A snort. “Didn’t expect you to. Hey, um…tell Fira I’m okay. Tell her I went somewhere else, somewhere safe. Let her keep thinking she’s an escapee from an Exclusion Zone, and that’s it. I, um. I don’t want her to worry.”

“Right. Wait, hold on a second. Why did you know there was going to be a crisis, if your powers are recordings-based?” Levi asked.

Ethan took a deep breath. “You’ve been wondering why I didn’t talk to Fira, right? It’s because I left her a message ten years in the future, before I understood how my powers worked, and I saw a wasteland. Everything that came to pass flashed before my eyes. I just sat there, twitching, for half an hour or so as it all zoomed by at hyperspeed. The doctor thought I was having a seizure.” He chuckled, then grew serious again. “Once I send a message, I can go back to the previous message I sent… but I can’t send a new message from before I sent that first one. I can’t talk to her. Not for another ten years.”

“Damn. That sucks. For real, though.”

“Yeah. But I’m fortunate that I was able to see everything to come, and protect her from it.” Ethan sighed. “I’ll miss you, Levi.”

“What do you mean? We’ve still got ten sweet years together,” Levi said.

Ethan hung up.

Levi looked at the phone, then snorted under his breath. “Yeah, that’s how I’d react to ten years of Levi, too.”

He lowered his phone and looked at the corpse on the ground. “Don’t think that’s worth any points, so I’ll leave it. The Apostles should fall apart without him. They didn’t strike me as a group with strong independent cohesion, so much as a cult following one crazy charismatic guy. This loser didn’t strike me as charismatic, but what the hell do I know? I think I’m charismatic.”

Yawning, he walked out of the lab, wandering back toward the entrance. At the sound of continuing battle, he paused, then walked the other way. There’s gotta be more than one way out of here.

Down the hallway, he was rewarded with the back entrance. Levi slid out. A Gate churned just outside the door, but no monsters emerged at the moment. He gave it a look, then looked down, examining the dirt for tracks. “Nothing? That’s concerning.”

Purple light flashed in the sky. Levi looked up, craning his neck. A giant bird not unlike the one that had gotten stuck in Alpha’s Central Tower earlier fought against a woman in all purple.

“Ah, there we are. Amethyst has it handled.” Nodding to himself, he walked away.