Our next unexpected guest arrives a couple hours later. I’m surveying the edge of the street with Beaker and Pete the elderly neighbour, of all people, looking at where we might build a fence, when a puttering dirt bike pulls up. I share a quick glance with Beaker but Pete is already cooing over the bike. A moment later, my worries are cast away when the person pulls off the full helmet.

  Pete’s surprise is vocal.

  “Wing!” I say, brightening at the sight of the petite woman I met at the Town Hall.

  “Hi, Jane,” she replies, her smile kind but her words a little stiff.

  And then I remember her closeness with Sutherland. “Did he tell you where to find him?” I ask, though there’s a laugh to it. It’ll be weird to get used to, wondering if anything is ever truly a coincidence again.

  She tucks her helmet under her arm, still straddling the bike, one foot planted on the ground for stability. “He sure did.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you all the same,” I say, before making quick introductions. Beaker and Wing stare at each other for an extra second. Pete is a second away from asking to take the bike for a ride when Beaker finally says, “I recognize you from the meeting.”

  “I recognize you, too,” Wing replies immediately.

  “No one recognizes me,” Pete says.

  “And we’re all friends here,” I add, wondering where the tension is coming from. “Do you want me to take you to him?” I ask Wing.

  “Who are they talking about?” Pete asks. No one answers him.

  “Is he still comatose?” Wing asks, in a way that’s so nonchalant and flippant that it takes me a second to recover.

  “Oh, that guy,” Pete answers himself. I guess he heard about that.

  But Wing has noticed the surprise in my reaction—in our reactions—and chuckles. “Sorry. I had warning that it would likely be the case.”

  “He knew that he’d come to us unconscious?” I ask, a little surprised.

  Wing nods before shrugging off a small backpack that I barely noticed her wearing a moment ago. She unzips it, reaches in, and pulls out a small envelope. It has my name on the front in that same slanted handwriting that I recognize as Sutherland’s. I sigh.

  “He knows everything. Might as well get used to it,” Wing says with a chuckle. “And this is his preferred mode of conversation.”

  The note inside is brief:

  I’ll awaken when the time is right. Don’t fret. Tell your healer she doesn’t need to cluck quite so loud.

  My opinion, should you care for it, is to go toward the hydrant.

  —Sutherland

  I feel myself go rigid at the note. Sure, the comment about Nancy clucking gives me pause, but it’s that second line that grabs me by the throat. One time when I was a kid, we dog-sat for one of my dad’s coworkers. He was an adorable little corgi, who begged my dad for cheese and liked to use my mom’s slippers as a pillow. I spent a lot of time that week playing tug-of-war and fetch, or taking him on strolls through the neighbourhood. Since my street is a circle, it was a really easy route.

  When we talked about taking these walks, we developed a little shorthand: if we turned left when leaving the hose, we were going toward the mailboxes. If we turned right, we were going toward the hydrant.

  Reading those words in Sutherland’s note brings me back a couple decades, laughing with my parents at the silly turns of phrases that we used well into my teenage years.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Did my future self say something about it to him, which is how he knew to put it in his note? The whole thing makes my head spin and my heart hurt a little, so I shove the letter back into the envelope and give my attention back to Wing. She and Beaker are watching each other cautiously. I have no idea what to make of that, so I ignore it. “Would you like to see him at least?” I ask her.

  “What about our fencing project?” Pete asks.

  Wing tears her eyes away from Beaker and give Pete all her attention, for the first time. The elderly gentleman, now that he’s being perceived the way he is, suddenly falters for words. “I’ll tell you what, Pete. Let me go say a quick hi to my friend and then you can tell me all about your fence.”

  Pete grins at that. “Not sure what saying hi to someone who’s out cold is going to do, but that sounds like a plan to me! Come on, I’ll show you the way.” And with a wave of his hand, he goes sauntering off without a care in the world.

  Funny guy. I’m glad Gigi has him and Portia to keep her company.

  Wing looks over at me and I gesture to Pete’s retreating form. “He’ll show you the way,” I repeat, laughing at the exasperation on the other woman’s face. She sighs, but she slings her leg off her bike and walks it along after Pete.

  A moment later, I turn on Beaker. “Why the hostility?”

  He feigns innocence. “What hostility?”

  I look back at where Pete and Wing are still visible in the distance, and then turn back to him.

  “Uggghh. There’s no hostility. I just… I don’t love it. Sutherland Beverly being here. His lackeys coming to find him.”

  “Is this because you got called out when you tried to leave the Town Hall?”

  He lifts a hand and scratches the back of his neck. “It’s not not because of that.”

  “That wasn’t even Sutherland!” I point out. It was Richard Maxwell.”

  “I know,” Beaker says quickly. As he goes on, his voice speeds up. “But, if Sutherland is a pre-cog, then he knew it was coming, and he could have stopped Richard before he did that, therefore not having to call us out, and therefore not giving Savannah a lot of anxiety.” It sounds like he’s been hanging onto this for a while now.

  “Is she okay now?” I ask, my immediate concern being for my friend.

  Beaker’s smile tells me he appreciates where that concern is. “Sure. As okay as she can be, I guess.”

  “Then maybe it had to happen for a reason,” I say. I might be making this all up, but if I can help reassure him and Savannah a little, I’ll take the opportunity. “If Richard hadn’t tried to run the meeting first, if you guys hadn’t gotten up and gotten called out, then I wouldn’t have recognized you when you stopped me at my car afterwards. If I hadn’t recognized you, I might have been less willing to chat about the whole thing, and I might not have learned about your magic and I might not have invited you home.” I give a shrug. “Maybe it all had to work the way it did to get us to this point.”

  Beaker’s usually easy grin is gone, a small crease in his forehead as he thinks through my theory. He nods, long and slow. “This point, where we can take care of him while he’s unconscious.”

  “This point,” I offer, “where we can be talking about building a fence around our homes, with a magical ability you’ve been able to level up.”

  I see the moment my comment lands and he accepts the way it’s all happened. “We’ll have to take the good with the bad, I guess,” he says.

  “That’s unfair,” I say, already turning to head up the street.

  “Fine.” Beaker follows my lead and steps beside me while we head after Pete and Wing. “We’ll take the good with the less-good.”

  “That’s… I’ll allow that.”

  ***

  We meet up with the rest at Sutherland’s house. He’s still unconscious, of course, but Wing tells him that she made it anyways. I wonder if he heard her with his, you know, physical ears. Or his magical precognitive ones.

  This will never stop being weird.

  But then Wing turns back to us in the room. “What was this about a fence?” she asks, and off we go again.

  Except I listen to Sutherland’s note. I suggest that we head the opposite direction down the street and see if we can figure out where best to place the fence, if there’s any houses that might make more sense to leave outside. The group is me, Wing, Beaker, Pete, and Nancy—she gets up from her armchair when we go to leave and asks to join us.

  “You don’t want to stay here?” I ask. “Not that I don’t want you to come along.”

  “There’s no point in just sitting here. I’m just watching him lie there, fussing with his blankets. I feel like the most obnoxious mother hen, clucking away.”

  My spine stiffens. ‘Tell your healer she doesn’t need to cluck quite so loud,’ Sutherland wrote. “Then I think you joining us is a great idea,” I tell her.

  Stupid Sutherland.

  And so off we go. We reach the end of the street and I point out to Nancy where I met the man with the light magic, who taught me about the monster’s ashing. We head further up the street, and as we pass this one house, I remember another encounter from while I was off wandering the neighbourhood at night. When I headed into this backyard to find out what the voices where coming from the yard next door.

  It’s like thinking about them brought them into being.

  One second, I’m looking through a broken down gate into a backyard.

  A moment later, a trio of animals appear in the opening. They stand on their back paws, cocking their heads at the group of us humans.

  Then the one in front opens its maw. “Whatcha lookin’ at!?”

  It’s the talking opossum.