He stood from his desk. “How?”
“Blood or darkness. Don’t know.”
Troublesome.
“The chance I die in the next thirty minutes?”
She thought, and felt the mosaic shift into a new configuration. Coil’s face predominated each tiny scene, active, speaking and alive in some, unmoving or dead in the others. “Forty two point seven zero nine percent for the worlds where I don’t die. Don’t know about the worlds where I’d die first.”
Hm, so whoever (probably today’s Slaughterhouse member) or whatever is the cause of this, they/it does not only target Dinah.
“And, say, Mr. Pitter? The chance he dies?”
“Forty point-” She stopped as Coil raised a hand.
Yeah, we don’t need all the decimals, we already got the point.
“So whatever it is, it happens here, and involves everyone here. Chance of survival if we leave?”
“Ten point six six four-”
Oh jeez, leaving is way worse than staying.
“No. Chance the average person in the city lives if we leave?”
That’s an odd question. Are you thinking Shatterbird or someone else with a large radius is the culprit?
“Ninety-nine point-”
“So we’re targets. It’s not an attack on the city. If we mobilize the squads? To one decimal place?”
Oh, okay, it does makes sense to ask about when you put it like that.
“Forty-eight point one percent chance I survive, forty-nine point nine percent chance you survive.”
So oddly enough, they seem to have the best survival chances if they stay put and don’t mobilize anyone to defend them. It’s like the threat in question would get pissed at them for trying to fight back, or something.
Also, I suppose the fact that it’s so unpredictable whether they’ll live or die points to Bonesaw.
Heh, if that’s the case, I love the irony of picking someone with the power of prediction as the POV character for a chapter about someone whose main characterization so far is “unpredictable”.
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