The Flight of the Silvers (12 page)

In the resulting silence, David surveyed his stunned audience. He raised a cautious brow at Zack. “Was that, uh . . . was my answer somewhat in line with yours?”

The cartoonist chuckled grimly. “I was just going to say it’s cliché. Jesus. I’m glad you went first.”

“How the hell did you put that all together?” Hannah asked David.

“The only thing my dad loved as much as science was science fiction. We read a lot of books together. Guess I picked up a thing or two.”

Amanda bit her lip as she thought back to her own reading nights with her father. “I bet he was so proud of you.”

David rolled his shoulders in a dismal shrug. “I guess so. He wasn’t the type to say.”

As Mia sat down, Zack shined a contemplative gaze at Amanda and Hannah. “David has a point. You two don’t look a thing alike. You’re not half sisters or adopted, right?”

“Full sisters,” Hannah replied. “It’s a little more obvious without our dye jobs.”

“And you both got bracelets,” Zack pondered. “That can’t be coincidence.”

David nodded. “That’s what I said.”

Amanda kept silent as she sliced into her chicken. Zack could see she was agitated by the subject. He didn’t care. He was just a stiff breeze away from a fierce and unseemly breakdown. He needed this distraction.

“Yeah, that’s a hint right there. The question is why would, uh . . .”

His attention was seized by David, who sat down at the table with a teeming plate of green peas. The boy sprinkled heaping dashes of salt onto his pile, then looked up at his four confounded friends.

“Quite an interesting diet there,” Zack said.

“Just fussy,” David replied. “She did mention something about our potential.”

“Who?”

“The woman who gave me my bracelet. Esis.”

“
Ee
-sis?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah. Tall and lovely woman. She told us—me and my dad—that I was very important. She said that I was part of something larger now, and that I had the potential to help bring about a great and wonderful change to all humanity. That’s not verbatim, of course, but—”

“She’s insane.”

The others looked to Amanda. She aimed her dark gaze down at her plate.

“I’m sorry, David. If we’re talking about the same person, then I wouldn’t trust a single thing she said. She was completely out of her mind.”

From his frigid expression, David clearly didn’t enjoy her analysis. “I had a hunch you met her too. What did she say to you?”

“I don’t remember the specifics. I just know her behavior was completely erratic. One second she was complimenting me, the next she was grabbing my hair. She . . .”

Thinking about her sister, Amanda decided to censor the part where Esis launched across the alley with blurring speed. That part struck a little too close to home now.

“She was just crazy.”

David shrugged. “Well, the Esis I met seemed intelligent and kind. Not even remotely crazy. In either case, you and I would be dead without her intervention.”

“Am I supposed to be grateful? For all we know, they’re the ones behind all this.”

“Oh, come on. You have no evidence to support that.”

Zack raised his palms. “Okay, hold it. Wait. David, I agree we’re getting ahead of ourselves—”

“I don’t even know why we’re talking about this at all,” Amanda snapped. “Can’t we have
one
night to recover?”

“Hey, I was about to throw you a bone. As it stands, I’m deep on your side of the crazy issue. I didn’t meet this Esis, but I have nothing nice to say about the guy who gave me my bracelet.”

David raised an eyebrow at Zack. “Do tell.”

“There’s not much to tell. He wore a mask. All I could see were his eyes. But he looked like he was having the time of his life while people were burning to death all around us. That alone makes him someone I’d very much like to unmeet and hopefully never come across again.”

“That’s how I feel about Azral,” Hannah added. “The white-haired man. I mean I know he saved my life twice, but he still scares the living—”

“What do you mean twice?” Zack asked.

Hannah could see her sister tense up across the table. She figured any mention of their childhood incident would send Amanda to tears.

She lowered her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Frustrated, Zack glanced over to Mia, the lone holdout in the conversation. She stabbed at her food with a dismal expression.

“She didn’t see anyone,” David replied on her behalf. “She was asleep when she got her bracelet.”

Zack scratched his neck in edgy thought. “So from the looks of it, we’re dealing with two, possibly three different people.”

Three,
the sisters thought in synch.

David scooped another forkful of peas. “We don’t have enough information about them to form any theories.”

“I think we do,” Zack replied. “The fact that Amanda and Hannah are here right now is a big fat clue that these people chose us for genetic reasons. Why else would they give bracelets to two biological—”

With a choked sob, Mia pushed her chair back from the table and fled the room. Amanda rose from her seat, shooting a harsh green glare at Zack before trailing out the door.

The cartoonist sighed at Hannah. “Your sister’s not the most relaxed of women.”

“She just lost her husband.”

“I know. I just . . .” Zack frowned with self-rebuke, then flicked a somber hand. David listlessly poked a fork at his peas.

“We lost people too,” he told Hannah. “We’re just trying to figure out why they died. And why we didn’t.”

Hannah could finally see a hint of strain behind the boy’s handsome face. She figured she could live to be a hundred and still not understand the way men handled their emotions.

Amanda and Mia returned eight minutes later, their faces raw from crying. Mia brushed her bangs over her puffy eyes and stared down at her half-eaten dinner.

“I have four brothers,” she announced, with matter-of-fact aloofness. “I know for a fact that they’re my biological siblings and I’m all but sure they didn’t get bracelets.”

The room fell into bleak silence. Zack placed a hand on Mia’s wrist.

“I have an older brother back in New York. Josh. We’re about as different as two siblings can be, but we get along.” He gestured at Amanda and Hannah. “When I found out these two were sisters, my heart nearly jumped out of my chest because it made me think that maybe he got a bracelet too. Who knows? With all the crazy things that happened today, maybe we both have a brother out there.”

Mia raised her head to look at him. “I don’t know. I hope you’re right.”

By the time Czerny came back to check on them, the clock on the wall had reached 8
P.M
. The food had grown cold and the conversation had settled back to mundane mutterings, increasingly hindered by gaping yawns.

Czerny suggested, with droll understatement, that perhaps it was time to call it a day.

—

In a sleepy drove, the group—which Zack took great pleasure in calling the Sterling Quintet—climbed the stairs to the third floor. Zack and David disappeared into their chosen suites without so much as a good-night. Never had a sentiment seemed so pointless.

Amanda urged Mia to share a room with her and Hannah, just for warmth and company. Though tempted, Mia politely declined. She expected to do a lot more crying between now and dawn. She didn’t want to muffle herself out of some misguided sense of courtesy.

After three restless hours, she regretted her decision. No matter what she did, she couldn’t get comfortable in her room. When the lights were off, the darkness pulled her straight back to her morning grave. She could feel the dirt in her hair again, the creepy-crawly bugs on her skin. When the lamp was on, she couldn’t stop thinking about the scientists who watched her every move.

Just as her eyelids finally fluttered on the cusp of sleep, a soft and tiny glow seized her attention. It hovered directly above her, like a distant moon or a penlight. The radiant circle spit a small object onto her nose, then disappeared in a blink.

Baffled, Mia sat up in bed and retrieved the item from her pillow. It was a small scrap of paper, tightly rolled into a stick. She turned on the lamp and unfurled the note.

You just survived the worst day of your life. I won’t say it’s all candy and roses from here, but it does get better. Hang in there. Put your faith in Amanda, Zack, and the others. They’re your family now.

The note was punctuated with a U-shaped arrow, a symbol Mia herself often used to indicate more content. She flipped the note over.

Yeah, that includes Hannah. Cut her some slack. She’s a really good person. She even saves your life.

Mia read the words over and over, her heart thumping with agitation. She remembered the curvy feminine letters of her first note, the one that had encouraged her to keep digging for air. Not only did the penmanship on this message match her memory of the original, it triggered a new and disturbing sense of familiarity.

She climbed out of bed and flipped on the desk lamp, transcribing a snippet of her note onto a blank sheet of stationery.

After comparing the two handwriting samples side by side, Mia choked back a gasp. She wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry at the true scope of her weirdness. She wasn’t speeding or blanching. She wasn’t hearing voices or losing artwork. She was simply getting notes. Notes of prescient knowledge. Notes in her very own pen.

Mia lay awake for hours in furious bother. By the time her eyes finally closed, the darkness had given way to pink morning light. Her second day on Earth had already begun.

NINE

There were nine Silvers at the start.

Though Sterling Quint’s physicists had monitored all nine arrivals in progress, only six of the refugees made it to the Pelletier compound in Terra Vista. The remaining three signals led the Salgados to a dead woman, a dead man, and a cracked and empty bracelet.

Quint was upset to learn that he’d lost a third of his future case studies, but his benefactor strangely didn’t seem to mind. Azral assured Quint that the three fallen subjects were expendable in the grand scheme.

But what of the missing one?
Quint had texted.
I assume the owner of the empty bracelet is still at large.

An hour later, while Quint sat in the conference room with his new guests, the handphone on his desk lit up with a curt new message.

You’re better without him.

—

Before his cosmic migration and universal upgrade, Evan Rander wasn’t a fan of his native Earth. His favorite things in the world, in fact, were the ones that helped him escape it. Sci-fi movies. Video games. Internet smut. He was—by sight, sound, and self-acknowledgment—a geek. Even in his rare bouts of style and swagger, he resembled a meerkat with his narrow frame, sloping shoulders, and hopelessly juvenile features. At twenty-eight, he was continually mistaken for a ginger-haired boy of seventeen. He’d given up correcting people.

With each lonely year, Evan became increasingly convinced that Earth wasn’t a fan of him either. Most of his frustrations came from the pretty young women of his world, who continually rejected his awkward attempts to engage them, his creepy leers. It had been theorized in more than one ladies’ room that Evan Rander had a stack of restraining orders at home. Or worse, a stack of bodies.

If his lovely detractors could have seen inside his mind, they would have learned that his fantasies, while hardly chaste, were actually quite romantic. But after a lifetime of cold shoulders, Evan feared he didn’t have the looks to attract a suitable girlfriend. He certainly didn’t have the money. His lean existence as a part-time computer specialist had left him in a sinkhole of debt, enough to force him out of his apartment and into his father’s house in City Heights West.

No baron himself, Luke Rander was far from happy to share his meager abode. For years, his best hope for Evan was that the boy’s baffling nerd proclivities would one day lead to some profitable nerd venture. Soon his furtive disappointment began leaking out of him like sweat.
No work again today, huh? You should be pounding the pavement instead of playing computer games. At least get some exercise. How do you expect to find a woman if you’re all pasty and scrawny? Guess the family name’s dying with you. No work again today, huh?

Round and round the record spun, until the stress caused Evan to wake up with ginger hairs on his pillow. The only ray of sunshine in his dismal life was Shannon Baer, a young account executive at his main worksite. Though she’d failed to make his A-squad of office lusts, she was an indisputable cutie, and she bucked the trend of her peers by treating Evan with smiles and banter. He even detected flirting when she teased him about his LEGO coffee mug.

Eager to learn her feelings without the risk of asking, Evan used his administrative access to log into her e-mail archives. She’d only invoked his name three times. The first two mentions were work related. The last one, in response to her teasing boss, was a knife in the eye.

Oh shut up. It’s not like that at all. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, Evan’s not as creepy as everyone thinks. Of course if I ever go missing, be sure to check his basement first. :)

The next day, he returned to the office in his nicest clothes and warmest grin. After engaging Shannon in friendly chitchat, he told her he needed to install a new antivirus program on her PC. He joked that she was getting the special package, despite her misguided hatred for LEGOs. She laughed and let him do his thing.

Unfortunately for Shannon, his “thing” was a custom malware script that, at the stroke of midnight, erased her project files from her computer and every backup server. Thirteen months of work, irrevocably destroyed. For Evan Rander 1.0, it was the cruelest punishment he was capable of inflicting, though he’d spent the night imagining far worse.

His vengeance quickly backfired on him. Once his handiwork was discovered, the president of Shannon’s company had him blackballed from all his freelance agencies. With a simple series of phone calls, Evan had become a toxic commodity, unemployable.

Luke Rander gritted his lantern jaw when he learned of his son’s comeuppance. “You know, for all your flaws, I never thought you were stupid until now. But you did it. You screwed up your life, all because you couldn’t handle a little rejection.”

For the last three weeks of his endemic existence, Evan moved through the house in a grim and listless state, his thoughts frequently dancing around the handgun under his father’s bed. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was high past time to put the world out of his misery.

On the third Saturday of July, he woke up in freezing cold, his gadgets blinking in confusion. He barely had a chance to process the new peculiarities before a large, round pool of radiant white liquid bloomed on his wall like an oil slick.

Evan watched in bug-eyed wonder as a towering stranger stepped through the surface, a white-haired being of crystalline perfection. Despite his splashing entrance, there wasn’t a hint of wetness on his skin, his hair, his tieless gray business suit.

Expressionless, the man approached the bed and addressed Evan. His voice was honey smooth, peppered with an anomalous accent.

“Listen up, boy. Time is short and I have much to do. In five minutes, everything around you will cease to be. If you wish to continue living, extend your wrist quickly.”

Evan raised his arm with meek and dreamy deference. Azral’s thin lips curled in a smirk.

“Your cooperation is a welcome change. I won’t forget that.”

He procured a featureless silver bracelet from his pocket. Evan’s thoughts screamed as he watched it break into four floating elbows. They glided over Evan’s fingers, reconnecting at the thinnest part of his wrist with a
clack
.

“What is this?” Evan asked in a tiny voice. “Am I dreaming?”

“I don’t have the time or mind to explain your situation, child. Just keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come for you shortly.”

Azral squinted with revulsion at the unwashed garments on Evan’s floor. “You’ll wish to find proper clothes, if you have them. Then say good-bye to your father. You won’t be seeing him again.”

Amidst all the daft and scattered notions in Evan’s head, it occurred to him that he’d rather eat his own arm than suffer one more look of disapproval from the bearish old man.

Suddenly Azral’s white brow crunched in wrathful scorn. He lurched forward and grabbed Evan by the collar.

“Only a weak man fails to honor his parents. You should be grateful. It was your father’s unique genes that saved your life today. Clearly I didn’t choose you for strength of character.”

As the fearsome stranger walked back to his white liquid portal, Evan suddenly found himself in a small pool of yellow.

“Pathetic,” said Azral, before disappearing into the breach.

Over the course of his long and lawless existence on Earth’s wild sibling, Evan would find many reasons to hate Azral Pelletier. Near the top of the list was the ridiculously short amount of time he’d given Evan to prepare for his great upheaval. He’d only just zipped his jeans over fresh boxers when the silver bracelet buzzed with life. Shirtless and barefoot in his father’s moldy bathroom, he was sealed in light, safely preserved as the house and sky collapsed around him.

It was in that final moment that he forgot his fear. In the space between worlds, the space between lives, he was briefly at peace with himself. The old Earth faded away to an empty white void, and Evan Rander felt nothing at all but gratitude.

—

As the proprietor of a dreary midtown mini-market, Nico Mundis was used to seeing odd behavior in his store. Aside from the typical assortment of ne’er-do-wells who would rob him at gunpoint or speedlift his wares, he’d suffered his fair share of rants, raves, threats, and propositions. The sexual come-ons always baffled Nico the most, as he was sixty-eight and quite obese.

His favorite strange incident occurred three years ago, when a group of egghead scientists traced an invisible signal to his canned goods aisle. The group leader, a spiky-haired Poler named Constantin Czerny, offered Nico three thousand dollars to let them affix a small device to his wall. Some kind of particle scanner enhancer thingy. Sure, why not? Money was money. At the end of the transaction, Czerny gave Nico his phone number and advised him to call should anything unique happen. Nico had no idea what Czerny meant by that and wasn’t sure if Czerny knew either.

Now, just minutes before opening for Saturday business, something unique happened.

As Nico filled the register, the overhead lights died. The table fan came to a stop. Even his electronic watch went blank. Only the white tempic barrier continued to function. It coated the windows from the outside, giving the shop a hazy, snowed-in look.

A flash of light filled the back of his store. Nico grabbed his shotgun and aimed it at the disturbance. He blinked through the dancing brown spots in his eyes and reeled to see a shirtless young man where previously there’d been no one.

Evan blinked twice at the gun, then raised his scrawny arms in terror. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Nico moved closer to survey the damage. The blast had taken a curved bite out of his store, leaving a concave groove in the wall and slicing half the cans and shelves around the intruder. Tiny wet vegetable morsels dripped onto the floor, covering broken pieces of bathroom tile that had come from God knows where.

“Who are you?” Nico shouted. “What are you doing here?”

“Look, just don’t shoot, okay? I have no idea! The last thing I—”

His eyes rolled back into his head and he launched into violent convulsions. Nico took an anxious step back. He couldn’t tell if the boy was suffering an epileptic seizure or an otherworldly possession. He wasn’t entirely wrong on either count, but what he was truly witnessing at the moment was nothing less than the death of the original Evan Rander.

As Evan stood and stirred, a tidal wave of cerebral data flooded into him. Millions of vivid new facts and memories. They filled his brain node by node, reshaping his psyche. On the outside, he was still a twenty-eight-year-old man with a seventeen-year-old face. In his altered consciousness, he was older now. Many years older and exponentially sharper.

His upgrade had arrived.

Evan breathed a weary moan, as if he’d just given birth. For a moment Nico feared the intruder would fall into tears, but Evan soon let out a delirious laugh.

“Oh man. Man oh man oh man.”

He swept his blinking gaze around the store. Nico was amazed at how differently the stranger carried himself. He looked fiercely confident now. Not even a tad confused.

With a hammy grin, Evan spread his arms out wide. “Nico! Nico-Nico Mundis!
Ti kanis?
”

The shopkeeper took another step back. “How do you know my name?”

“Ah, Nico-Nico. You and I go way back. You’re my Square One Buddy, buddy. Always here at the beginning to greet me with a friendly smile. And since we’re such good buddies, hey, why don’t you put down the boomstick?”

Evan was unsurprised to see the gun remain fixed on him. As he sighed and stretched, his hidden hand seized a can of string beans.

“Well, I figured it was a shot in the dark, no pun intended. Guess I can’t blame you for being sore. For years you’ve been praying for some young and topless beauty to pop into your
Efta-Edeka
, and here I am. You should’ve been more specific.”

He swung his gaze to the cloudy white doorway. “Oh, hello, bishop.”

As Nico reflexively turned his head, Evan hurled the can—a perfect throw that connected squarely with the shopkeeper’s temple, driving him down. Evan rushed around the counter and grabbed the shotgun off the floor. He jammed the barrel into Nico’s stomach, then his nose.

“Why must we do this dance every time, Nico? You know I don’t like hurting you.”

Evan launched a swift kick into his ribs.

“Well, I like it a little. So do us both a favor. Waddle your ass over to that wall and stay there. I’ll be gone soon enough. I just need to do a little convenience shopping.”

Snorting through bloody nostrils, Nico crawled to his checkout stand and sat up as best he could.

Evan unwrapped an epallay and stuck it to his chest. “Oof. Mama. These reboots never tickle. My head’s all fourped. But who am I to complain? I’m alive, right?”

Nico eyed the silent alarm button at the floor of his station. It was so easy when he could just step on it. Now it was five feet away—a mile in his condition.

Evan sauntered over to Nico’s sparse selection of clothing. He threw on a black
Viva San Diego
T-shirt and cheap bresin sandals.

“Since I last saw you, Nico-Nico . . . well, I’ll be honest. This last round sucked. Everyone was extra annoying. The Pelletiers. The Gothams. The Deps. And don’t even get me started on You-Know-Who. Hannah had her tits in such a wringer, I had to kill her to keep her from killing me. And then her sister came looking for blood. Nearly killed me with her goddamn tempis.”

Evan grabbed a handbasket and filled it with items: a quart of rubbing alcohol, a pint of orange juice, a hammer, a hunting knife. He stopped at the soda/vim dispenser and grabbed a large drinking cup.

“Between you, me, and the green beans, Nico, I’m still kinda pissed about it. So now I have two Givens at the top of my shit list.”

Evan retrieved a near-empty tube of Crest from the floor. It had traveled with him from his father’s bathroom and was now a one-of-a-kind relic. He stashed it in his basket.

“I don’t know, Nico. Part of me’s tempted to sit this one out. Maybe find an island somewhere and sip margaritas while the idiots do their idiot dance. I haven’t written myself out of the story since . . . God, what round was it? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Oh, hey. That reminds me.”