It wasn’t the sort of thing that won awards. In fact it wasn’t something she could even prove was happening. But when she was faced with a choice, any choice, one of them always had more mice.

Of course it wasn’t actual mice, that would have been stranger somehow. No, these were mice-like somethings, shadows that skittered and squeaked and hopped from choice to choice in a maddening swarms. Shadows that no one else could see.

She’d learned, through trial and error, that the choice she wanted was almost always the one more mice clustered around. Only ‘almost’, because after all they were just mice, and they couldn’t be right all the time. Plus half the time the choices were to close to call and she had to guess.

There was one almost-mouse that she always watched for. It was aged-newspaper brown with dainty white paws (although whether it had four or eight she could never quite tell) and a small white star between its eyes. She followed that mouse, if she saw it, no matter what the others suggested.

Because that mouse, that wasn’t a mouse, seemed to know something the other mice didn’t…