“Can’t we do a Seeming? I hate giving lectures over the phone.”

“No, Mama, we’re driving,” Alice said into the speakerphone. “Pretend we’re competent adults that don’t need pop-up books to learn.”

Mama Martinez grumbled something in Spanish. The front area of the car was even more cramped with Ida leaning forward between the seats so she could hear the phone. Bogo had his nose pressed up against the crack in the window, but one of his ears was cocked back towards the phone. Seems even the not-dog was interested in a crash course in divination.

We heard Mama say something in Spanish and a child's voice replied with a whine. Mama shooed off whoever was there and returned to the phone. “So what do you want to know?” Mama asked after she settled.

“Can you track someone with divination?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mama replied.

There was silence as we waited for her to continue. Alice made a frustrated sound. “Mom!”

“Ay, niña, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Mama Martinez said with some laughter in her voice. “Let an old woman entertain herself once in a while.” There were some muffled sounds as the background noise on the other line diminished, followed by a closed door. “I’d prefer to have this conversation where I can’t be overheard, but the bathroom will have to do.”

Must not get great reception in the basement.

“Why do you think you’re being tracked by divination?” Mama asked with a groan. I imagined her sitting down on something and getting comfortable.

“Divination impressions in a sympathetic aura reading, for one,” I said. “Second, I was told by a member of Elysium that I’m coming up a lot in divination.”

“He was Summoned, mama,” Alice interjected. You could hear the stress she put on the word. “Right in front of us in the fucking parking lot.”

“Oh,” Mama Martinez said. “Dios mío. Well yes, okay, that would do it. So you want to block divination? You’re shit out of luck if you want to block Elysium.”

“How does divination work?” I asked instead. Maybe with more knowledge a solution would present itself. “I haven’t studied much about it.”

I heard a deep inhale and knew she was gearing up for a lecture. I checked Bogo and knew from his body language that we had a long way to go yet so settled in to absorb the information.

“Divination is a more mechanical pursuit than most people think,” Mama Martinez said. “No one can see the future because the future hasn’t happened yet for us. There are some theories that beings from higher dimensions live outside of time and can move through it like how we move through a three-dimensional space, but that doesn’t apply to us humans so we’ll ignore that and focus on what we know works.”

As she spoke, her voice faded in and out slightly, and I got the impression she was gesturing with the hand that was holding her phone. I could hear her fine with my improved ears but Ida was having to focus to pick things up.

“To understand divination, you have to understand time. What is time? Time is a measurement. Time is a measurement of distance traveled. ‘One second’ is a unit of measurement that measures how far matter moves in relation to the viewer. How can one see the future if the future is based on quintillions of variations of movement, each movement affecting other movements and setting off even more variations which set off more variations, etcetera.

“So how does divination work? Basically, you build a predictive model in the astral of the area you want to divine, set your parameters, and hope your model is good at guessing where the matter is going to end up. The longer you do it, the more refined your model becomes, the better your results.

“We use the astral because the astral is a pure mental plane and energy there doesn’t behave like energy here. As far as we can tell it’s completely possible to make something from nothing in the astral and space doesn’t really seem to exist there. If you’ve ever been there you know that if you want to go somewhere, you just end up there without any real effort. Wizards, magicians, and demigods have gone insane trying to figure out the astral… But I’m getting off topic.”

She grunted as she (I presume) shifted her seat. I checked on Bogo to make sure he was still calm.

“Because we have to use the astral to get around the power needed to map around staggering amounts of mass in constant motion, there are a few quirks to divination that pop up every now and then. One of them I believe Colm here fell victim to.

“The astral tends to cling to people with power, or people around the periphery of power, or even just things that have or are around power. And because the astral is purely mental, time there is also wishy-washy. Thus you can get people that show up in divination that won’t do anything for ten, twenty, thirty years, or even a century. But because what they do or what they are involved in is so impactful, the echoes of it wash through the astral and mess with our predictive models. This is where prophecy comes from.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Diviners use these ‘future-echos’ as a keystone to base their predictions on, as they act as a point of reference for where things will be. The problem is that these ‘future-echos’ don’t always happen because the future is never set in stone. There were some three hundred prophesies thrown out the window the second Nagasaki was nuked. Surprisingly few people saw that coming.”

“But these ‘future-echos’ can be accurate?” I asked.

“Very much so,” Mama Martinez confirmed. “Probably more often than not, but I haven’t made a great study of it to say with any certainty.”

Mama was interrupted by a knock on the door. There was an exchange in Spanish that I couldn’t follow. “I’ll be right back,” Mama said after the other person had left. “I need to help Carmen corral the little ones.”

I went over what she said, some things falling into place. First, I might have a strong astral presence because of my silent passenger. The Orphan had said it was a sliver of myself from another reality. If the me from that reality was as powerful as I was inclined to believe, it could create the astral ‘clingy-ness’ that Maria was talking about. I was also directly linked to a powerful being in the form of Alice’s ‘gran,’ known to myself as the demoness Trix. A lot of my non-magical powers were from deals with her. Those deals likely left a psychic imprint on me in the astral. Or not. My education into the astral was only a goddamned year old. I wish I could sit in my room for another five years and get the education I needed. But back on topic:

I was also the focus of another powerful entity, the Doorman. The only reason I had become as powerful as I have is because of the things attention. If our confrontation was inevitable, would that create an astral backlash? Or echo?

I rubbed my temples, careful not to cut myself with my nails. Incognito Mode would solve these problems, but it would likely accelerate the transformation I was undergoing. I also had a suspicion that some of my more irrational decisions on the ship stemmed from being cut off from the astral. I didn’t know much about the astral, but what I did know is that a mind without its connection to the plane of thought was more erratic and prone to developing psychosis.

Maybe I could modify the spell? Instead of cutting me off from the astral, put a bottleneck on it? I ran the idea by Alice.

“Sounds plausible,” Alice said. “But I don’t know. I only know enough about the astral to make my mental magic work and to protect against other telepaths. Luckily we have an expert on the line who will hopefully come back.”

The call dropped.

I glanced back at Ida and shared a look with her.

“We’ll call her back in a minute,” Alice said.

I gave Bogo a pat on his side and tried not to devolve into a worried mess as the desert passed by.

* * *

“Sorry that took so long,” Maria said once we got her back on the phone ten minutes later. “Julio cut his arm on the fence and it needed to be cleaned properly. Where were we?”

We were headed into a canyon that would lead into Santa Clarita, I was afraid we’d lose reception once we were in. “How to defend against divination.”

“Right! So, defending against divination is basically the task of tricking the astral into giving incorrect data or completely removing data from the astral. The latter is incredibly more dangerous so most practitioners just feed false info into the astral.”

“Similar to mundane counter-intelligence tactics, then,” I said.

“In abstract, yes. In practice, it involves a lot of elaborate magic and mental gymnastics. I can handle the magic on my end but you’ll need to do the mental exercises that leave the false trails. I’ll send Alice some notes so you can begin.”

“Thanks, mama,” Alice said.

“Thank you, Maria,” I said sincerely. “I really mean it.”

“De nada,” Maria said. “You find your brother and bring him back to us. We’ll keep you all safer than Fort Knox.”

We ended the call and continued down the road for a while. It was Ida that broke the silence.

“It’s really irritating being the only one who can’t do magic,” she said.

The comment caught me off guard. Then I slapped my forehead. “Remind me when we stop for the night,” I said. “I have a primer on beginning magic theory to give you.”

“But I can’t do magic,” Ida said hesitantly.

“Neither could I at one point,” I said, turning and giving her a smile. “From what I’ve been told, everyone in Alice’s direct family can do magic and some people who marry into the family pick it up after a while. There’s more to it than just education, but you’ve been around magical shenanigans enough that I think there might be a shot at you picking it up.”

I saw her warming up to the idea. “At the very least,” I continued. “We can give you a magical foundation so you don't feel left out when we go all magic nerd. I could also use your insights on a few things I'm making. I’ve been trying to make an amulet that repels bullets but I can’t get the thing to only target bullets. Keeps randomly destroying insects or fans in my house. I think it’s targeting other fast-moving objects.”

“Yeah, people have been trying to make bulletproof enchantments since the invention of guns,” Alice chimed in. “The problem is that to stop a bullet, you have to apply the same amount of force it's exerting at the proper angle or it’ll disintegrate into harmful fragments or ricochet. Shield spells are the way to go.”

She glanced at me before returning her attention to the road. “Though that trick with the telekinesis was something I hadn’t seen before. How did you do it?”

“The first one I came up with was a layer about a foot thick with the consistency of water, and another, thinner layer behind it that was as hard as I could make it without getting a headache. I watched a lot of ballistics videos on youtube and it turns out water stops bullets really well,” I gave Bogo a scratch behind his ears and he leaned into my hand as much as he could without taking his nose away from the window. “But that was too hard to maintain over time and the area I needed to cover. Then some weeks later I read an article on aerogel and it gave me the idea to form a layer of telekinesis with a porous texture, and for some reason that was much easier to maintain. Doesn’t work as well against rifle rounds but good enough against small arms fire.”

“Easier to deflect the energy,” Ida said. “Tanks armor is fashioned in angles so that the energy is diverted to the side. For that matter, if you can make a texture like aerogel, can you not also simulate the weave of Kevlar and disperse the energy that way?”

“First, I was worried about ricochets,” I said. “Second… the Kevlar thing never occurred to me.”

Ida sat back with an amused smirk. “You might be good at magic, but you always approach solutions from strange directions.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said, my ears burning.

After that I lapsed into thought, going over the incognito spell in my mind and trying to isolate the part of it that cut off the astral. If the mental exercises Maria was sending over were too difficult or time-consuming, I may need to find alternate means of hiding my tracks. Being ambushed once had cost me a few days of memories. If they had been competent, we would all be dead.

With that warm thought, I rolled the problems of the day around as we drew closer to LA.