Expecting to oversleep, Junior had set an alarm for himself. For years now, he had never actually gotten to hear his phone’s buzz. He didn’t even remember what the ringtone sounded like. His future-sight didn’t turn off during sleep and thus he could subconsciously feel the moment the ringing would begin with 100 % certainty. The precog could trust his subconscious to wake him up seconds before the event.

As always, he deactivated the alarm just in time before it went off. Ren next to him kept sleeping soundly.

Within the first minute Junior stretched his sight in all directions, along all timelines available to him. For the moment, nobody had made any decision that would result in anything noteworthy. The chance of anyone bursting into his room or something of the sort was zero.

Well, no it wasn’t. Sometimes he had to remind himself that just because he couldn’t see something coming didn’t mean it was impossible. Anything that occurred with less than five percent probability was invisible to him – drowned out by the gossamer, ephemeral layers of his domain: The realm of possibility.

He got up as slowly as necessary to keep Ren’s chance of waking up below ten percent and took care not to step on any of the empty pudding cups strewn across the floor. Routinely, he checked his tablet and sifted through the flood of mail. Somehow taking the organization apart had failed to decrease the volume of messages he had to deal with. If anything he was getting more now as he wore multiple hats, having de facto taken over from the board of directors.

Most people had officially left. The bureaucracy of their terminations would be handled by external companies. He’d have to go over who was left as soon as everybody was up. He’d need every person available for the day’s main task – planning a preemptive attack on the Shadow.

Another thing he had to do was to check the stock market.

As he gazed upon the columns of numbers and diagrams, he rubbed sand from his eyes. One of his biggest investments had an eighty percent chance of crashing hard within the hour. The chance of crash plus recovery was sixty percent. He sold most of it. Since the course was currently still going up, autonomous bot nets tore the stock from Junior’s virtual grasp as soon as he offered it.

A smaller company was about to go under with ninety-five percent likelihood and nobody knew yet. It was a bit tedious to go through all his individual phantom company’s profiles and sell their shares, now that he had nobody to do it for him. But he couldn’t let himself loose ten million dollars.

He could have done more if he wanted – acquiring new stock for example. There had been a time when it had felt great to snatch a bunch of shares minutes or even seconds before their value skyrocketed. This feeling had long given way to empty routine.

Ren twisted and turned, prying his eyes open. Junior had known the precise moment before he had picked up the tablet. Sleep cycles were fairly predictable.

“Morning sunshine,” he said.

“Mrgnlb,” Ren mumbled.

“What do you want for breakfast? I don’t know if there’s anyone who can restock but for the moment anything except pudding should be left.”

“Dunno.”

Junior called up his to-do and put ‘Decide where to move (Korea?)’ on the bullet point list right between ‘Take inventory of personnel’ and ‘Plan attack on Shadow’. At the bottom was ‘Investigate Lady Luck’, which had been there for ages since he still had no idea how to find out more about her, short of stopping his heart again.

After he had slipped into his jeans and a shirt, Junior called Jason, struggling into a cardigan at the same time. If the chance of Jason picking up had not jumped to a hundred percent right away it would have meant the assistant was still asleep and Junior would have hung up before waking him.

But as it stood, Jason was already active.

“Hello, boss.”

“Good morning,” Junior said. “Can you turn on the security footage in my office? It’s a bit paranoid but I want to have an eye on all entrances until we figure out a schedule for the remaining guards. Chief Lin didn’t resign, right? And chief Wang?”

“Both still around. Not up yet.”

Junior exhaled in relieve. Losing his internal and external chiefs of operation would have been hard to make up for.

“Okay, have them in my office when they’ve finished their first cup of coffee. Is there a list of damages from the ghoul attack?”

There was a moment of quiet as Jason looked up what his clip board contained. The moment the Chinese boy made the decision to speak, Junior instantly knew what he was going to say, hearing the future echo of the boy’s voice. He let Jason say his part anyway, because it was disconcerting and confusing for people when Junior preempted their part of the conversation.

“The lobby is flooded so we can’t turn electricity back on in tract B. The grenade damage means the main staircase to the garage is not structurally sound enough to use. Tract F has lost electricity, too, but I don’t know why yet. Basically every side entrance and the doors to all four arsenals are molten shut thanks to Aron.”

“I’ll have him fix that last item when I talk to him,” Junior said. “Although, I don’t think we need all those side entrances anyway. Less ground to cover is an advantage right now. We’ll give up on anything other than tracts A, C, E, and G. Maybe keep D, too, if we need the lab.

“Understood, leader,” Jason said. “I’ll see that everything from the damaged buildings is salvaged over the course of the afternoon.”

“Thanks. See you at breakfast.”

Ren had dressed and gotten his hair in a somewhat presentable shape. Wordlessly they left for the mess hall.

***

Everybody was in the cafeteria because the common room, the entertainment room and the main break room were all in the busted tract B, narrowing down the staff’s options.

Bullet holes in the tables and walls reminded of the battle with the body snatchers, but the tables in question had been righted and the blood had been mopped up.

Good to know certain things were still getting done around the place.

There might have been literally every single person who still worked at the facility and the sight was discouraging. Basically everybody with a family had left. So had everyone old enough to retire, which was a huge chuck of employees – the organization liked to recruit people who had experience and contacts, but tried to keep its hands out of the regular job market.

Junior sent Ren ahead and quickly talked to the head of every department to get an overview about the organization’s remaining capacity. Then he got himself a steaming cup of coffee.

He also made sure Jason could send someone down into the city to restock the kitchen. Every single cook had left, but they could probably recruit among Chief Wang’s men who were trained to survive out in the wild with nothing but an open fire and some rocks to fetch a meal. They’d probably be happy to use a microwave.

Then he finally made his way to Nuest’s table, finding his reserved spot next to Ren. There were enough pastries left for him to get the kind he wanted.

Minhyun fed Aron orange slices which the American boy accepted reluctantly.

“Getting used to real food again, huh?” Junior said, trying to sound at least a tiny bit jovial.

“My food is real food,” Aron said. “I could make my own oranges if I wanted to.”

“So you just like having Minhyun force things down your throat?” Junior said, making Baekho choke on a quail egg.

The American reached across the table, waved his hand over Junior’s cup and grinned. As the leader looked down he found his coffee frozen solid. “Hey!”

Aron chewed down on an orange slice, still smiling.

Junior was about to get up and renew his beverage when the chance of Minhyun telling-off his boyfriend popped up at five percent and rapidly rose to twenty. Junior pouted and the chance jumped to forty. The leader drooped his shoulders and finally, ninety-five percent.

“Aron,” Minhyun said, “be nice.”

With a sigh, the scolded boy waved and Junior’s drink assumed its original temperature.

It seemed this was going to be a busy, though fortunately productive day. If Junior came up with a few good ideas and could rely on the help of his friends, he could get things back on track.

A familiar vibration set in – a shift in the realm of possibility. This only happened when a whole lot of probabilities changed at once. Usually as a result of somebody making a big decision, rarely from some wildly unlikely event randomly striking.

The leader dropped his cup, trembling in cold horror.

All timelines were truncated.

He was dead in four minutes, nine seconds.