He and Levi were bare-chested and wearing patterned swim trunks. Booth, our overseer for the day, had similar bottoms but wore a blue T-shirt with the phrase “Surf’s Up” scrolled across the front. Analeigh and I both had pretty skimpy bikinis on underneath short dresses that served as cover-ups, and all five of us wore cheap plastic flip-flops.

We were all basically naked, a feeling that left my skin crawling with unease. The wardrobe complemented our destination, though—a beach in the Maldives, off the coast of Sri Lanka, 2001. The boys had chosen this particular observation—Analeigh and I had voted to observe the fate of Anastasia, lost daughter of the last Russian tsar, but we’d been overruled.

Instead we got to watch some famous Californian extreme athlete drown. Lovely.

Extreme sports fascinated Levi in particular, and he planned to work on isolating a common strand of human evolution that had sparked a desire to call dancing with death an entertaining pastime. Jay Moriarty had died one day shy of his twenty-third birthday while free diving—diving deep under water without oxygen tanks, a hobby that did not seem advisable. He had been happily married, according to history and our previous observations, and was described as a gregarious guy who loved life. But apparently not enough to want to continue living it. In truth, I wasn’t sure what there was to learn from him or why this even made the list of options for today’s trip.

I found the story depressing, but the worst part was how avoidable his untimely death had been.

If these past seven years had taught me one universal truth, it was that the humans who died the youngest, who had been gifted with the least amount of time, managed to do the most with it. They were often remembered, these tragic children, and their legacies lived on in ways that people who had been given entire lifetimes couldn’t seem to achieve. The reasons behind that observation would make an amazing reflection topic. Maybe I would explore it one day.

Analeigh and I tossed our Historian uniforms into the drawer next to the boys’ and Booth’s. Gooseflesh popped out on my arms and I shivered in the freezing cold air lock, crossing my arms over my chest to avoid giving the boys a show.

Booth checked to make sure we were all ready, then set his cuff and gave it an exact location that would be deserted at the time of day we were arriving, which was just after breakfast, when Jay left his friends to go snorkeling.

The lights on the cuff turned to green, and the five of us shimmered inside a blue bubble for a moment until the decontamination chamber disappeared and we stood several yards away from a deserted beach, under the cover of a grove of coconut trees.

*

Maldives , Indian Ocean , Earth Before–June 15, 2001 CE (Common Era)

My skin immediately warmed in the sticky, tropical air. The view from where we stood stunned me: the beaches were pristine and white, the ocean unbelievable cascading shades of blue. It was almost clear, a crystal aquamarine as it washed onto the shore and deepening to turquoise, then cobalt as it spread farther from the shore.

“Whoa.” Analeigh breathed the word next to me, her eyes round as they took in the perfect paradise.

“It looks a lot like Petra, but the water there isn’t blue like this. More of a greenish brown. This is better,” Levi observed.

If Petra resembled the Maldives even a little bit, I could see why the property there had to be drawn in a lottery.

Over the next hour, the beach filled with sunbathers and surfers, snorkelers and divers, and Analeigh and I stripped off our cover-ups. We all slathered on sunscreen, an unnecessary little product in our System missing natural sunlight. It smelled wonderful. The sand burned the soles of my bare feet, and the sun baked the skin on my shoulders. Waves washed over my toes as I wiggled them, displacing tiny sand crabs that scurried to find new places to hide.

Booth led us to a more secluded section of shoreline, where boats floated just offshore, their red and white diving flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. The lenses on my glasses indentified Jay Moriarty, a rather handsome guy about the same age as Jonah, with a smile that hit me like a punch in the gut from sixty or seventy yards away.

He faced the water alone, his tanned, toned body obeying his commands to stretch and go through some complicated breathing exercises. A blue mask and snorkel sat on his forehead and he fixed it in place, jumping in the water and kicking lazily back and forth for a while. The expression of contentment on his handsome face felt incongruous, but only because I knew what was about to happen. Still, if I had to die, it would be good to know it would be doing something I loved half as much as this boy loved diving in the ocean.

That was this recording’s hidden moment of beauty. Jay’s passion.

When Oz’s lips brushed my ear, it startled me. I jerked away and shot him a glare, but he moved in closer, using a hand to hold me in place. “Do you know what would have happened had he not died today?”

I kept my eyes, my glasses, trained on Jay. I didn’t need any more trouble.

Oz switched to silent speech, apparently realizing an outward conversation would be recorded along with our observations. “He would have died tomorrow in a boating accident with his wife.”

The whispered words, facts that could only be glimpsed with the help of the strange Projector, sent shivers down my spine. My mind lost complete track of what I was supposed to be recording as Jay grabbed hold of a rope anchored to the sea floor and kicked below the surface for the last time.

“His is the only trajectory I’ve ever seen that keeps stopping no matter what. If we saved him, it would buy him another twenty-four hours. If we saved him tomorrow, he’d get another week.” Oz leaned in even closer. “It almost makes one believe in fate.”

I gave a small shake of my head and elbowed him away from me. I didn’t believe in fate. None of us did. The concept was nothing more than the result of choices made by men—by us and the people around us—and, despite the anomaly Jay Moriarty apparently presented, could always be altered.

Still, Oz’s little Projector lesson turned over and over in my mind, like a pancake flipped and flipped until both sides were burned black. I used the brain stem tattoo to search information on Jay Moriarty, a task that should have been completed before we’d left had I been paying proper attention to my studies the past couple of days. I found more than one reference to the fact that Jay, even as a boy, had felt a strange certainty that he would not live a long life.

Then again, one could argue that if he hadn’t been attracted to dangerous sports, this day might have been avoided.

Except according to Oz, Jay’s early death was predestined. It made me think of Caesarion and his belief in beings who watched our lives play out, planned from beginning to untimely end. As much as I wanted to believe, as hard as I tried and wished there was a grand design that would bring us together again in another realm, I didn’t. Couldn’t.

We stood still on the beach, moving every once in a while to shift position or wander toward the water so that no one would take note of the group of five people seemingly riveted to smooth, clear water when Jay’s body was later discovered.

A while after he’d kicked to the bottom, two other divers roamed the area. The eyeglasses shared the strangers’ eventual eyewitness accounts with me, including the fact that they’d seen Jay on the bottom but had left him there, assuming he was training.

It was sad, and interesting, but I didn’t understand why we were here. Aside from Oz’s strange and cryptic statement about fate and Levi’s obsession with the psychology behind extreme sporting, if Jay Moriarty had never been meant to live, then his death couldn’t have any lasting positive or negative impression on humanity.