“Mm-hmm,” Will said.
The Jets kicked their extra point, and the Raiders took possession again.
A dark splash, red at the edges where it wasn’t as thick.
Will stood, grabbing the notebook and tucking it under his arm.
“Where are you going?” Victoria asked.
“I’ll be back in a sec, don’t worry. We’ve got a bet, remember?”
“I very much do.”
Will walked quickly to the back of the bar. He slipped into the men’s room and locked the door. He put his hands on eitherside of the sink’s cold porcelain and looked into the mottled mirror.
A cloudy, utterly ordinary reflection stared back: late twenties, scruffy, underemployed. But of course, the cover wasn’tthe book. He hadn’t been ordinary for a while now.
Another cheer from the bar. Will couldn’t see the TV, but he knew what had happened. The Jets had forced a fumble and ranit in for another touchdown. The bar was going nuts, and a gorgeous girl was starting to think that maybe she actually hadmet the Oracle that night. He could have her, and every other woman in the place. He could have the entire bar, if he wantedit. It would only cost him about ten words per person.
Will closed his eyes. He rolled the notebook into a cylinder and squeezed it with both hands, his knuckles turning white.
Good decisions, and bad decisions.
“Goddammit,” he said.
Will realized he’d left his coat draped over his barstool. Stupid.
He slipped out of the men’s room, risking one glance back into the bar. The beautiful Victoria was staring at the television,clapping as the Jets prepared to kick the extra point. They’d make it. Up by four.
The bar had a back exit near the kitchen. Will stepped outside, feeling the air spike his lungs as soon as he took a breath.He walked out into the night, not looking back.
Chapter 2
Leigh Shore stared down at her salad. She’d allowed herself some excesses. Croutons, cheese, sliced-up bits of fried chicken,the good dressing (which they should just call pudding and be done with it). Almost fifteen bucks’ worth of moral supportvia the build-your-own bar. She’d managed maybe two bites.
Leigh pushed her fork into her salad and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. She crumpled it and dropped it on her tray. Reflexively,she grabbed her phone and swiped it open. A Reddit thread popped up on her screen, with a single post pinned to the top.
At the top of the page, two short sentences:
TOMORROW IS TODAY.
THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN.
Below that, a list: twenty brief descriptions of events, none longer than a few sentences. Each was accompanied by a date,spread over a period of about six months. This list was all over the web—every news aggregator site maintained its own copy,each with its attendant thread of thousands of comments beneath it—but the Reddit post was the place it had first appeared,via a link to an anonymously posted pastebin.
The Site. Everyone knew what you meant when you said it.
Leigh scrolled to the bottom of the list. Nothing had changed in the five minutes since she last performed exactly this samemaneuver. She looked up from her phone. Around the café, roughly eight out of ten people were on their phones. She saw theSite on at least two of those screens, just in her eye line right at that moment.
Leigh clicked away and pulled up her e-mail. Nothing—or at least not the e-mail she was waiting for.
She hesitated, frowning, then pulled up another document on her screen—an article, her article—about three thousand words,nicely supplemented with images, links . . . everything the discerning readers of Urbanity.com expected in their content.
The article was about the Site. Leigh could have chosen anything. But the Site was . . . fascinating. Ever since its appearance,it felt like the only thing that really mattered. The only puzzle worth solving.
She’d been in line at a Starbucks when her phone had buzzed with a text—a link, sent to her by her friend Kimmy Tong. Clickingthrough, not understanding why Kimmy thought this was worth her time. Giving her order, then googling around a little bitwhile she waited for her latte, realizing what the Site was actually claiming to be, and just . . . staring at it. Readingit, over and over again. Not hearing her name when the barista called it, until he all but shouted it right in her face withthe bitchiest possible inflection.
The Site emerged into the public consciousness so quickly it was like a UFO appearing over Washington. From one day to thenext—one hour, it seemed, as she remembered it—it became the only thing anyone could talk about.
Twenty events, all accompanied by dates. The first two had already happened by the time the Site went viral, but the restall were slated to occur in the future. Since then four more of those dates had passed, and on each, the event on the Siteoccurred, exactly as it described. Or more accurately, predicted—by an unknown person, presence, supercomputer, or alien thathad become known as the Oracle, in the same way that the Site had become the Site.
Leigh continued scanning the text of her article, doing one last check for sense and typos. She had chosen to write aboutthe Oracle precisely because the subject had already been so exhaustively covered. A strategic thing. If she could bring somenew angles, new interpretations, then it was almost more impressive than writing about something less familiar.
She thought she might have pulled it off—she’d tried to get into the Oracle’s head in a way that most articles didn’t seemto attempt, ignoring any discussion of the effect of the Site’s prophecies on the world and focusing more on how they mightaffect the prophet. That was the idea, at least. She’d read the piece too many times to be sure what it was actually aboutanymore—but her intentions were good.
Leigh’s current beat at Urbanity.com was “city culture”—shorthand for list-based clickbait about New York’s clubs and showsand celebrity squabbles and the best bagels in Brooklyn. Urbanity did produce some actual reportage—not much, but a little,in some of the other sections—and her Oracle article
