"Tell me how you did it," said the man holding a gun to her head.
There was nowhere to run. Cassandra Featherberry was standing on top of the Empire State Building, looking down at the distant lights of the evening traffic one hundred stories below, mere red and yellow blurs through the torrents of wind and rain.
Needless to say, this wasn't how she expected prom to end.
The barrel of the gun twisted against her skull, forcing her closer to the edge.
"Tell me," the man growled. "Tell me how you knew!"
She closed her eyes. "Even if I do, you'll kill me anyway. I'm already dead."
"Tell me and maybe your boyfriend here survives." He kicked the boy tied and blindfolded at his feet.
"Aidan!" she gasped. "Please, don't hurt him!"
"Then tell me what I want to know!"
She faced forward again. She knew what she had to do. Gathering a trembling breath, she whispered three words, nearly lost in the storm surrounding her.
"Aidan, I'm sorry."
She turned to face the gunman and stepped backward. As she fell, she managed to glimpse, glowing in the tempest, the digits that were her only salvation. And, with the 8.81 seconds she had left, she drew upon the power she had once sworn to never again invoke.
One Week Earlier
"So, have you joined the dress group?"
"Sorry, what was that?" Cassandra apologized. "I got distracted."
"The dress group," Julianna repeated. "Everyone posts a picture of the dress they're going to buy so no two girls end up wearing the same thing." Right now, hundreds of girls were descending upon T.J. Maxx to find the outfit that would look best from the four-couple conga-line side angle parents use for backyard prom photography.
What Cassandra couldn't say was that she was distracted by the digits she saw hovering over Julianna's head.
No. She couldn't focus on that right now. It didn't matter.
"Yeah, of course," she said. "I'll upload my dress right away."
Julianna rounded her parents' granite island, which had recently been christened with one of those Spanish hams you screw into the table and shave slices off of, and peered at Cassandra suspiciously. "What's distracting you?"
"College apps," she lied.
Julianna nodded sagely. "College apps are interesting because, if you have lazy parents, it flips all the power. When they make you fill out the forms yourself, you get to learn how much they make for the first time."
"And," Cassandra said, perhaps more honestly, "I'm thinking about Aidan."
"What about him? You're going as friends, right?"
"Right, sure, but what if he feels weird going with a friend and won't say anything? You know how he is. He'd do anything if he thought… if he thought it would make me happy."
"Oh, come on!" Julianna said. "Girls can go with gay guys! That's not against the rules!"
"He's not gay," Cassandra said, but wondered if she had denied it to such an extent that it made it seem like a bad thing. She peered at Julianna's numbers again, not wanting to, but unable to stop thinking about it.
The numbers, originally indecipherable to her, were a date and a time. Specifically, "May 2nd - 10:30 AM"---in other words, about an hour ago.
"But I guess things are going well with you and Julian," she said. She almost added, "Maybe a little too well," but restrained herself.
"Well," Julianna said with a sheepish smile, "Lyra is going pretty good for him, which is great."
Although Cassandra wasn't alone in considering it vaguely disturbing for a Julianna to date a Julian, no one could deny that, as far as promising boyfriends go, she had chosen impeccably. Julian, having from an early age acquired that level of basic technical expertise that led to him being the favorite of all his teachers—he was among the best Smart Board calibrators some of those classrooms had ever seen—had blossomed into actual brilliance.
His startup, called Lyra after the constellation, the second top choice when asking ChatGPT what were the best constellations to name a startup after, was focused on creating VR-centered pre-employment training scenarios. Their website had an excellently designed pop-up asking if you consented to cookies. The cookie pop-up alone, Julian had once said, if you factored in the UXD time, had cost thousands of dollars. It actually had an icon of a cookie in it, like the dessert! And beyond the pop-up, there was a lovely About Us page showing the crew at a bowling alley, at a craft brewery, and rendered as oil paintings.
"Life is simple when VR-centered pre-employment training scenarios are simple," their site said. Julianna had once shown Cassandra how the parallax scrolling effect on the site made it feel vibrant and alive.
The idea, Julianna had explained, was that if you were applying to a job at CVS, CVS would ship you a VR device with hand controls to experience a virtual shift with specific challenges added based on the applicant. For example, a potential applicant determined to be particularly sensitive to loud noises might experience a shift in which the fire alarm was broken and therefore activated for the entire day.
"I'm happy for you," Cassandra said, and she was. She excused herself to the bathroom, Reflected in the mirror, through her own tears, above her head, was the absence of numbers.
How could she explain it to anyone?
How could she tell anyone that she had the power to see the last time a person had had sex?