When he was ten he learned to count in other people's losses.
The lesson was not a mathematic, not an arithmetic of coins or days, but an accretion: some mornings he would wake with the tiredness of a man who had loved and been left, and he would take it onto himself like an heirloom, page by page. At fifteen, the lives began to stack with attention: he could not walk past a bakery without tasting the hands that had kneaded dough three different centuries and in three different climates, his own fingers would suddenly remember the exact way a thumb should press into the loaf to coax air into grain. He called it "retrem" at first, private vocabulary for the way a previous life clung to his throat after sleep. Later, doctors would give it names like "hyper-episodic transference"; artists would call it tragic; his neighbors dismissed it as the melodrama of a quiet boy. He called it the thing that had turned his nights into libraries.
The first life to truly break him was not superior by magnitude or terror; it was ordinary, and ordinary things are the most precise weights.
He dreamed as a woman named Marta for seventy-seven years. In the dream she rose with a body of bone that had learned to accept weather as a calendar. She married a man whose hands smelled of tar and regret, delivered two children in a clay house that cradled the sea's slow, infertile breath. She was a midwife in a stretch of coast that had been softened by salt and engineering; her hands moved in repetition to coax forth lungs. She buried a son in a storm and learned how a grief can be saved in the mouth and worn like a brooch so it does not infect the living. She taught a child to read from the margins of a ruined ledger and, near the end, she placed a small, folded scrap under her pillow and called it "for the next hell." The dream ended with Marta stitching letters into the hem of a child's shirt. the letters were names and the shirt was handed to a child, who left with the world on her shoulders.
When Ivo woke he carried the smell of salt for days. He kept seeing the small folded scrap in the hem of whatever he happened to be holding: the strap of his schoolbag, the rim of an enamel cup, the edge of his pillow. He could mimic Marta's knot with his thumb without thinking. He sat in the kitchen and held the cup until his fingers ached, tasting a memory he had not earned. The ache was not nostalgia; it was more like a moral debt, an account whose interest compounded while he slept.
"No way," his sister said, once. Rhi was fifteen and solid, the kind of person who lived in immediate movements and practical business: eat, study, prank, sleep, repeat. She had the clean indignance of someone who had not yet learned the corrosions of interiority.
"You remember a whole life?" she asked, frosting a pastry with a motion that had nothing in common with the midwife's hands.
"Not mine," he said, because the truth was buckshot and he did not know how to shape it. "Not that one."
"Then why do you act like it is?" she asked, and he could not tell whether there was cruelty in her words or the bluntness of someone who thought his behavior theatrical.
Because if the thing you feel in your bones after a dream is real enough to make you flinch, you must behave as if the flinch has meaning. Because the dead want a guarantor, and he had become good at taking responsibility for things he had not done.
Sleep was a dangerous refuge. When he tried to stop sleeping, the dreams with their fleshy decades became phantom pains: he would wake with the shape of two decades of the same man's marriage, and the grief would bend his spine in the afternoon. So he learned to schedule them. He learned to carve his days into angles that made the nights more tolerable. He started keeping a ledger, not the Memory Ledger that the Institute would later invent, but a cheap notebook with a cracked spine and the word "retrem" scrawled on the cover. In it he worked like a clerk of experience: dates, impressions, what the dream taught him about a hand or a language or the cadence of a region's prayers. Writing made the dreams manageable, an office file for other people's lives. He wrote because notation was a kind of shelter.
He told his teacher once, halfway through a mathematics exercise. The teacher laughed not unkindly, but with the relief of someone who had the institutional gravity of disbelief on his side.
"Young men can be dramatic," the teacher said. "Write poetry. Stop sleeping."
So he wrote poetry and did not stop sleeping.
Marta came back more than once over the years, like a recurring footnote: an image of fingers in wet earth, a phrase about how to fold a child's kerchief, a weathered face turned aside at the sound of a bell. And then their came the dream that was not an echo but a fissure.
He found out about the tyrant in the language of intimacy.
The dream did not begin with an apocalypse; it began with a child's breath. He felt himself born into poverty and cleverness, the particular consciousness of a boy who is given more love in the form of ideas than in touch. He grew with the clarity of a man who is excellent at systems: a brilliant young engineer, a man taught to believe that if you can model people well enough you can correct them. The life had a steady rationality that made atrocities possible because they were planned with a mind that thought in spreadsheets. He watched the man, Kael fall in love not with cruelty but with the purity of efficiency. He watched Kael decide that the suffering of the many could be ended by the nonexistence of the many. He watched policies authored like poems, cascade into programs, and then he watched the programs do what programs do: converge on outcomes without malice, with the coldness of operators.
When Ivo woke he had the entire seventy-one years in his mouth. He tasted the antiseptic of committee rooms and a child's cough and a lover's silence. He recognized the arithmetic of casualty in the man's syllables. He opened his notebook and wrote, on the margin, a single word: Kael. That was the name the dream retained into waking, the only anchor in a sea of centuries. The word looked absurd on his handwriting: small, tidy, somehow real.
He thought then and this is the only honest part of that moment that the dream was a story he could file away, another unwanted narrative. He thought it would pass like Marta had passed, a dark echo that would teach him compassion and then fade. He did not know it was a prophecy because he did not yet understand what it meant to dream forward instead of backward.
When he told Nora he was shaking. Nora laughed and then, when she saw how white he was, stopped and put a hand on his shoulder. Her touch had the pragmatic warmth of a person who knows where to put support.
"You saw a life," she said. "So?"
"I think I saw the end," he said. His voice was ridiculous in its ordinary register, like a child trying to ring a bell far too large for his strength.
Nora's eyes narrowed. She was used to anomalous things being metaphors for social issues. She had made an essay once about colonial memory and the artist's duty to not sentimentalize. "What end?"
"The end of..." he stopped, searching for words that would not make him sound like a superstition merchant. "Of people. Of a lot of people. I don't know how. He, the man in the dream, he had plans."
Nora sat down hard on the table bench and took in the rest of the room like someone cataloguing the minimal elements needed for an experiment. Her first impulse was to render the dream into a hypothesis, to ask about replicability and bias. Her second was the thin mouth of fear that appears in any human when they face a kind of knowledge that demands action.
"So you think knowing his name matters?" she asked, because Nora was that kind of bluntness. "You think his name on a paper changes what happens three centuries from now?"
"It's the only thing I have," he said.
It was a meager weapon: a name. But names are not nothing. He had learned that from Marta's hem, letters stitched like anchors. Names make genealogies legible. Names make people searchable in ledgers and, later, in the Bureau's databases. He could try to find Kael's ancestors, he thought, but his attempt at planning unraveled within the yawning problem: the tyrant's birth was three centuries away. The genealogical tree between the present and Kael would be a forest of unknown faces. It was like trying to stop a shadow by catching a mote of dust.
The moral arithmetic of the problem was simple and vicious. To prevent Kael, he would have to change people who had not yet been shaped by history. He would have to do the impossible: influence prospective lines so they would not birth the mind that became what he saw in the dream. He could try to convince themselves and their neighbors in the present to act differently. He could try to manipulate marriages in the Basin, buy grain in the right season, pick which classroom a child should sit in. He could become a petty god, fiddling with the gears of private lives hoping the machine's output would differ. He could, by any of those nudges, create a different future and he could, in trying, cause harm that was just as bad. A shove intended to save a thousand lives might extinguish one that would have saved ten thousand by some unforeseen relation. The asymmetry appalled him.
"You see why this is a problem," he said to Nora. He put his hand on his notebook. The page, with Kael's name, was an altar.
Nora did not argue about the metaphysics of prophecy. She argued about pragmatics.
"Then do the thing you always do," she said. "Catalog. Translate. Make it falsifiable."
"It is not falsifiable," he said. He could not bring himself to say that had he been reading his own ledger he would have concluded that the dream was a cruel joke. Because the dream did not tell him how; it only unfurled reasons and sensibilities. It offered him a future as if it were a moral portrait and then left him to pick up the brush.
"Start with the obvious," Nora said. "Find the immediate chain. See who in existing lineages could conceivably trace into that name."
He wanted to tell her he had no idea which chain; genealogies were riddled with adoptions, migrations, tiny decisions. But he said, instead, "I don't know where to search."
Nora's look was not cruel. It was the look of someone who understood that human beings often get the world right only by getting a thousand things wrong along the way. "Then we'll build a model," she said, like a bricklaying instruction. "We start with the statistical"
"Statistical?" he repeated. He was not a fan of statistics; they dissolved the particular into neat probabilities.
"Yes," she said. "Because what else? Hope? Prayer? Or you keep sitting on your hands until the future is no surprise. If it is a tyrant you saw, then something in the social structures encourages tyrannical minds. Find those structures in the present and start small."
He thought of structures as a patient would think of levers on his body. Which levers to touch? He had dreamed someone else pressing them cleanly, with bureaucratic precision. The dream's man Kael had a mouth that made policy into liturgy. He had watched the man engineer consent.
"I don't know if I'm allowed to change things," Ivo said finally. The sentence was a small confession of cowardice. When you carry other people's lives, interference tastes like hubris.
Nora's hand tightened on his shoulder. "Who will stop you?" she asked. "What authority trumps a man who has the years of a stranger on his skin? If this isn't a delusion, the moral choice is not whether to act but how to act responsibly."
Responsibility, in his head, grew into a paradox: the more he tried to be responsible, the more he relied on institutions and institutions corrupt intentions. He saw, in a flicker, what would happen when an Institute found a boy with the name of a tyrant on his margin. He saw committees forming around him, the sterile problematizing of his gift, the translation of human memory into instruments of prediction. He imagined being offered a choice: trade the liberty of his body for the leverage of a machine that could remote-control probabilities. He felt the vertigo of becoming useful to people whose moral scale he could not trust.
"Then we remain amateurs," Nora said. "We gather what we can. For now, we practice not to change the world wholesale but to avoid obvious atrocities."
He wanted to believe it. The idea of smallness comforted him: that architecture could be altered not by grand architectures but by a thousand tiny acts. He had proof in the minutiae: prevent a petty insult, and the insult's recipient moves to a different city and never teaches a child the syllable that will become a curse in a later life. The butterfly theory was less mystical when you saw how social lives were woven from small threads; it was concrete, infernal, and exact.
So he began.
He began with Marta's hem. He tracked marginal names in the Basin, wrote down birthdays and trades, and watched the small mercies ripple. He visited the baker's stall and learned which housewives preferred rye. He paid for a child's education. He corrected a clerk's arithmetic. He thought he was testing a hypothesis; in truth he was trying to make amends for a man he had never met and a crime he had not yet determined.
The first time he nudged something and watched a consequence widen into a wrong he had not intended, his hands shook. A man who had been cheerful and alive a week earlier lost the job he'd loved because of a rumor Ivo had helped spread to break a petty alliance. The man later died in a small hospital with an undiagnosed infection. Ivo's ledger did not know what to do with that death. He had wanted to prevent an abstraction; instead he had harmed a living body. The knowledge tasted like metal.
After that he kept a list not only of what he did to the world, but of what the world did to people because of his doing. It was a ledger with two columns: intent and effect. The second column always wrote larger.
That night he slept.
He did not know that dreaming forward was a disease that would require him to become a moral criminal to test his ethics. He did not know that the name Kael would be the hinge on which entire moral theaters swung. He did not know that the first validness of a prophecy was its name that to know the sound of a man three centuries from now is to become a threat and a promise in the same breath.
He only knew, with the naked and useless certitude of a young man feeling a new burden, that the world had just become a map he could not read and that somewhere on it a life waited patient, inevitable, listening.
He turned his light out and let the hours come, because if grief is the only thing one can multiply at will, then sleep seemed the only honest business left.
Retrem. The word sat in his mouth like a coin: heavy, minted, precise.
He dreamed.