Last Call

The disc beneath the champagne tower activated with a sound that wasn't a sound—a low, thrumming vibration that Penelope felt in her fillings, her molars, the small bones of her inner ear, and somewhere considerably deeper and considerably less anatomically convenient.

Then the screaming started.

Not the polite, champagne-sipping kind of screaming that Hexenburg's psychic elite might deploy at a gala—more the unrestrained, psychic-feedback-loop variety. The Celestial Atrium's projected constellations went haywire, stars streaking across the painted ceiling in jagged, meaningless trajectories, as if the sky itself were having a panic attack. Madame Levasso, Hexenburg's third-highest-rated clairvoyant, dropped her champagne flute and began weeping into the ice sculpture. A man in a tailored charcoal suit collapsed against the canapé table, clutching his head and moaning about a stock market crash in 2031. Someone near the string quartet was shouting, over and over, that they'd misplaced their keys.

Penelope knew exactly how they felt.

Because the wave hit her like a freight train made of triviality.

Visions slammed into her consciousness in rapid-fire bursts—no narrative structure, no apocalyptic weight, just an unrelenting cascade of the magnificently inconsequential. A paper cut. A stubbed toe. A missed bus. A jammed printer. A dropped fork. A misdialed phone number. An umbrella turning inside out. Each one arrived with the force of a prophecy ten times its scope, reverberating through her skull with agonizing clarity. She staggered, caught herself on the nearest highboy table, and narrowly avoided being decapitated by a flying canapé.

"Penelope!" Sebastian's hand closed around her arm—firm, steady, anchoring. His face was pale but composed, his too-still gaze sweeping the chaos with surgical precision. "Can you hear me?"

"I can hear everything," she gasped. "Someone's going to lose a wallet on Thursday. A blue wallet. Left pocket, probably—definitely left pocket. There's a receipt in it, I think for soup—" She doubled over, nearly retching. "Someone else is going to get a papercut. A significant papercut. Very significant. On the—on the left thumb—"

"The disc." Sebastian's voice cut through the noise, dropping to that register she refused to examine. "It's amplifying psychic output across the entire building. Everyone with any sensitivity is being flooded. I can—" He stopped, and something flickered across his angular features that might have been guilt or might have been relief. "I can feel it pressing, but it can't get in. My gift isn't..." He paused. "Strong enough to latch onto."

The irony was so sharp it could have cut glass. Sebastian Crowe, whose visions were quietly eroding, whose clarity was dimming like a sunset he couldn't stop—was the only psychic in the room still standing because the amplifier had nothing to amplify. His degradation was his armor.

"Lucky you," Penelope managed, straightening up. Another vision cracked through her: a woman in Hexenburg's financial district would trip on a curb tomorrow at exactly 2:47 PM. The vision was so vivid she could taste the woman's peppermint gum. "I'm getting—I'm getting everything. Every useless, pathetic—" She broke off as a vision of a malfunctioning vending machine nearly knocked her sideways. "—misfortune in a fifty-block radius. It's like being trapped in a dryer full of bad luck."

Sebastian's grip tightened on her arm. "Listen to me. The disc has a control panel—I saw the casing when the tower shifted. It's underneath, behind the base structure. If we can reach it—" A vision of someone losing a sock in a laundromat hit Penelope so hard she bit her tongue. Sebastian steadied her with an ease that suggested he'd spent considerable time calculating exactly how to hold her upright, which was either chivalrous or clinical, and she didn't have the bandwidth to decide which.

"There," he said, nodding toward the champagne tower. The structure was trembling now, flutes clinking in a hysterical windchime chorus. The dark disc beneath pulsed with visible energy—a shimmering, oily distortion in the air, like heat rising off asphalt.

"We'll never get through that crowd," Penelope said. The Atrium had devolved into full pandemonium. Psychics were stumbling, screaming, seizing. The string quartet had abandoned their instruments. A woman in pearls was prophesying, at considerable volume, that her hydrangeas would die next week.

"Then we go around." Sebastian's eyes met hers, and in them she saw the thing he never let anyone see—the quiet, desperate sadness of a man watching his own light go out. "Can you walk?"

"I can barely think."

"Thinking is overrated. Walk."

He pulled her forward, and Penelope stumbled after him, visions crashing against her mind like waves against a cliff she was rapidly becoming.

They made it twelve steps before she stopped dead.

Because the vision that hit her wasn't like the others. It was precise—razor-sharp, immediate, and impossible to ignore. She saw her own foot. Her left foot. She saw it connect with the leg of an abandoned chair at precisely the angle required to stub her smallest toe. She felt the pain before it happened—a phantom ache in her pinky toe, insistent, directional.

Left, the vision whispered. Go left.

"This way." Penelope pulled free of Sebastian's grip and turned left, ducking beneath a collapsing banner of the Divination Regulatory Council's insignia. Sebastian followed without question, which was either trust or desperation.

Three steps later: another vision. A white napkin, drifting to the floor. She saw her own hand reaching for it, fingers brushing linen—and the motion carried her body downward, ducking beneath a tray that a panicked waiter sent sailing through the space where her head had been.

"Did you just—" Sebastian began.

"Napkin," she said, already moving. "I know. It sounds insane. But I think—I think they're instructions."

Understanding lit his features like a struck match. "The visions. They're not random—they're sequential."

"They're always sequential," Penelope said, and for the first time in her life, she said it without apology. "My gift has always been sequential. I just didn't—" She ducked as a vision of a low-hanging light fixture sent her bobbing sideways. "—I didn't know what the sequence was for."

She moved through the chaos like a dancer following choreography only she could hear. A vision of a jammed door handle—she tried the right-hand door, found it locked, pivoted to the service corridor without breaking stride. A vision of a dropped pen—she bent, retrieved a fountain pen from the carpet, and the motion brought her under a collapsing ice sculpture that shattered where she'd been standing. A vision of a misdialed number—she pressed three buttons on a service phone as she passed, and somewhere in the building, a fire door clicked open.

Each trivial misfortune was a waypoint. Each petty inconvenience was a step. The universe of small disasters she'd spent her whole life mourning—the stubbed toes and paper cuts and jammed locks and lost umbrellas—they'd been a language all along. And she was finally, finally fluent.

"Penelope," Sebastian said, and his voice held something she'd never heard in it before. Wonder. "You're incredible."

"I'm a disaster," she corrected, vaulting a collapsed table with a grace that surprised them both. "I'm just a useful disaster."

The champagne tower loomed ahead, trembling, its glass flutes singing a high, desperate note. The disc beneath it pulsed faster now, and the air around it warped and bent. Penelope could see the control panel—a small, rectangular housing mounted at the base of the platform, with a single toggle switch glowing amber.

One more vision hit her: a scalded hand, reaching for something hot. She adjusted her grip, used her cardigan sleeve to shield her fingers, and grabbed the edge of the platform. The metal seared through the wool—she felt the heat kiss her palm—but she held on.

She pulled herself to the control panel. The toggle switch waited, patient and amber. Behind her, the Atrium echoed with the sounds of Hexenburg's psychic elite in full, undignified collapse.

Penelope reached for the switch.

And the final vision came.

It didn't hit like the others—no impact, no disorientation. It arrived softly, clearly, with the terrible gentleness of a hand closing around a throat. She saw the backseat of a black car. Leather seats. Tinted windows. The streetlamps of Hexenburg sliding past outside, gold and ghostly.

And sitting in that backseat, composed as marble, silver hair in its severe chignon, dressed in white—was Grandmother Orlena Vale.

Her milky, cataract-clouded eyes looked directly into Penelope's. She smiled—the cold, precise smile of a woman who had never once in her life been surprised by anything.

"Phase two begins when the disc goes offline," Grandmother Orlena said, her voice measured and absolute, each word a stone dropped into still water. "Thank you for turning it off for me, Penelope. I couldn't do it remotely."

The vision dissolved.

Penelope's hand hovered over the switch, trembling. The amber glow painted her ink-stained fingers gold. Behind her, Sebastian was shouting something—her name, maybe, or a warning. The disc pulsed beneath her palm, and somewhere in the building, a psychic was screaming about a blue wallet on Thursday.

Her grandmother's voice echoed in her skull, patient and terrifying: I couldn't do it remotely.

Penelope's hand hovered. The switch waited. And the ceiling of the Celestial Atrium—its constellations frozen mid-collapse, its painted stars scattered like broken glass—seemed to hold its breath.