The Flight of the Silvers (16 page)

The next day, he indulged and insulted her with a ferociously girlish pocket diary—neon-pink, and covered in cartoon hearts. She tepidly thanked him, then transcribed every note she’d received. The original papers were flushed into the sea.

Soon it became routine for the others to find Mia scrutinizing her journal, tapping her pen in deep contemplation.

“What are you writing in there?” David asked her one night. He playfully peeked over her shoulder. “Anything about me?”

She slammed the book shut. “No. Go away.”

Despite his blistering intelligence, David often displayed the social tact of an eight-year-old. He openly guessed that the scar on Hannah’s wrist was self-inflicted. He idly observed that Amanda and Zack had nearly identical builds. He informed Mia that she would suffer fewer stomachaches if she ate more sensible portions. After each thoughtless gaffe, he turned sheepish in the heat of his victim’s stare.

“I was raised by a brilliant scientist with atrocious personal skills,” he explained to Mia. “From an early age, I was dragged through a gauntlet of foreign nations, each one with different rules of etiquette. Suffice it to say I’m a little bit strange. I might as well be from a third Earth entirely.”

Once Mia caught David canoodling with Hannah, walking arm in arm around the property like old Victorian lovers, she lost her fluttering crush on him. For all his alleged nonconformity, his fondness for large-breasted dingbats made him tragically typical. On the upside, Mia could finally relax around him. Her stomachaches gradually stopped.

On the second night of August, she received a tear-stained message on a scrap of motel stationery.

God, it makes me sick to look at you. The fat, clueless idiot I used to be. You think you’re adjusting? You think you’re getting a handle on your new life here? Trust me, hon. Your problems haven’t even started.

Beatrice Caudell watched on the monitor as Mia crumpled the note into an angry ball. An hour later, while the Silvers dined, Beatrice searched Mia’s room and found the paper under the bed. Soon it lay flat and wrinkled on the desk of Sterling Quint.

He suddenly became very interested in his youngest guest.

Brace yourself,
an older Mia warned her.
Things are about to get hairy.

On August 7, twelve hours after Amanda brought the ceiling down on her sister, Mia stood outside her door with Czerny, hoping to coax her out of exile. While the good doctor expounded with flowery optimism, Mia teetered miserably with flu. She would have killed for some of her grandmother’s minestrone, or at least a good long nap. But Amanda needed her support.

Don’t ever take her for granted,
her future self insisted.
She’s the best person you’ll ever know on this world.

Suddenly Mia noticed a shimmering disc of light in front of her. She assumed it was another spot in her vision until it spit out a roll of pink paper.

Czerny furrowed his brow at the tiny object. “What is that?”

She scrambled to pick it up. “Nothing. I dropped something.”

Unconvinced, the good doctor harangued her until she finally confessed her predicament. The news spread like current through the building. Quint was exuberant to the point of giddiness. The Holy Grail of temporal physics was now resting under his roof, nestled inside a meek little girl.

It wasn’t until the hullabaloo of the day finally ended that Mia remembered to read her latest message.

Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.

She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”

Two days later, Mia lunched in the bistro with Zack and David, chortling with laughter as they tried to one-up each other with tales of past social blunders. A small glow suddenly materialized above the table like a firefly. David and Zack jumped back in alarm.

“It’s okay,” Mia told them. “It’s mine. A note should come out any second.”

The men leaned closer to look, but nothing emerged. As she moved toward the portal, Mia was stunned to discover that, for the first time, she could glimpse through the keyhole. She saw her own face, red-nosed and puffy-eyed. Her future self was sick with flu.
Again?

No. The more she saw through the portal, the more she
felt
through it. She could feel herself standing outside Amanda’s door, nodding off to Czerny’s blather.

“Oh my God . . .”

“What?”

“I’m looking at the past. That’s me two days ago.”

David squinted at the portal. “I can’t see a thing. How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. I just can.”

“So what does this mean? That you’re the Future Mia this time?”

“I’m not sure. I think so. I mean I got a note. I told myself to feel better.”

Zack watched the shimmering breach with antsy trepidation. “I don’t want to panic you, but you might want to do exactly that.”

Panicked, Mia flipped through her diary, scanning her archives until she found the right message.
“Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.” [Pink paper, blue ballpoint.]

She’d been so ill and distracted that day, she never realized that the pink paper was from her diary itself. Mia ripped a half sheet from the back, then hurriedly scrawled the six-word message. She rolled it up and popped it through the hole. The portal disappeared in a blink.

The incident left her rattled for days. What if she’d sent different words on different paper? What would that do to her memories? What would that do to
time
?

“Paradox,” she uttered to David, as if the word was acid. “Maybe that’s what happened back home. Someone forgot to dot the ‘i’ on a time-traveling note and it ripped the whole world apart.”

The two young Silvers had embarked on a morning walk around the property, stopping at the thistle-covered tennis courts. As David jumped back and forth over the sagging net, Mia leaned against the fence, wrapping her fingers around the chain metal links.

“I don’t know,” David mused. “It seems like a paradox already. I mean you wrote ‘feel better’ because you thought you had to. And the Mia who sent your note presumably wrote the words because
she
felt she had to. So we have a chicken/egg conundrum. Who first chose the words? Who decided that ‘feel better’ was just the thing to say?”

Mia could feel her brain trying to jump out of her skull. Just three weeks ago, her biggest concerns were weight gain and the impending start of high school. Now she was trying to wrap her head around the mysteries of time, for health reasons.

Worse, Quint insisted that Mia spend four hours a day in a second-floor laboratory, twiddling her thumbs under a million dollars’ worth of monitoring equipment in the hope that a new portal would arrive. The sessions were excruciatingly awkward for Mia, especially with Beatrice on the other side of the table. The mousy young physicist was utterly humorless, and had a tendency to treat Mia like the Virgin Mary in her third trimester.

At the start of their sixth session, Beatrice surprised Mia with a large chocolate cupcake. A white-flamed lumicand protruded from the frosting.

“What is this?”

“A small thing,” Beatrice replied, in her nervous high voice. “I thought you might like some recognition.”

“For what?”

Beatrice cocked her head. “Isn’t this . . . ? I’m sorry. Our files say you were born on August 19.”

“I was.”

“Okay, well, that’s today. Today’s August 19. Happy birthday.”

As the calendar finally caught up with her, Mia covered her mouth and fled the lab. She spent the rest of the day sequestered in her room.

That night, David sauntered into her room without knocking and took a casual perch on her desk. He rolled a tennis ball over the back of his hands. Mia glowered at him.

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Never said you had to,” he replied. “However, if you’d like to see something interesting, put your socks on and come with me.”

She grudgingly followed him to the polished stone lobby. He stood at the reception desk and pressed his fingers to his temples.

“David, what are you—”

“Shhh. I need to concentrate for this.”

In a sudden instant, more than seventy people materialized across the vast marble floor—rich men in tuxedos, young women in cocktail dresses, bartenders, caterers, even a few photographers. A nine-piece orchestra played merry party music. Confetti and streamers flew everywhere.

Mia stared incredulously at the busy new scene. “What . . . what is this?”

“My issue,” David informed her, with a coy little grin. “My weirdness.”

For four weeks now, the boy had suffered a growing problem with ghosts. What started out as phantom sounds had evolved into strange visual anomalies that rattled everyone in the building. On August 10, the blurry upper half of a waitress interrupted the Silvers at dinner, passing through the bistro like a floating specter. Four days later, David’s evening stroll with Hannah was cut short by a week-old slice of sunshine that nearly blinded them both. And just last Thursday, David and Zack turned a hallway corner, only to pass through a day-old apparition of Zack himself.

David desperately worked with the physicists to understand the nature of his temporal manipulations, his ability to reproduce the past as sound and light. As far as his friends knew, he was still struggling to control it.

That situation had clearly changed.

Mia spun a sweeping glance around the lobby. The ghosts were jarringly crisp, nearly indistinguishable from the two living beings in the room. It was only when the partygoers passed through the furnishings of the present that they revealed their ethereal nature.

A young black caterer obliviously walked through Mia. She gasped and jumped out of his way.

“God. This is unreal. Who are these people?”

“This building was once a luxury hotel,” David explained. “What you’re seeing now is the opening night gala. This all happened about six years ago, give or take.”

“And you just plucked it right out of the past.”

David jerked a humble shrug. “It takes some effort. But it gets easier each time. Come on.”

He moved to the dance floor and held out his hand. Mia eyed him cynically.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Sure am.”

“You want us to dance with ghosts.”

His expression turned somber. “You’ve been dancing with ghosts all day, Mia. It’s been clear to everyone.”

She crossed her arms and looked down at her feet, speaking in a tiny, broken voice. “It’s my birthday.”

David nodded in grim understanding. “I’m sorry. I know that must hurt. If I had the power to bring your family back, even for one night, I would. You’ll just have to settle for me and these people.”

With a sly grin, he raised his beckoning hand. “Come on. If we’re going to dwell in the past, let’s do it in style.”

She slowly joined him on the dance floor, fighting a daft grin. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”

“These are strange times, Miafarisi. Might as well embrace it.”

He took her hands in his and together they danced—the boy with an eye in the past and the girl with a foot in the future. They twirled to the music in their sweatpants and socks, six years late to the party.

—

The next morning at breakfast, Hannah sniffed her slice of honeydew, then gave it to Zack to freshen up. Amanda dropped her fork and retrieved it with a long white protrusion that sprang from her palm like a frog’s tongue. Mia declared that she was tired of movies and wanted to see some live lumivision programs for a change. The others agreed. They’d demand that Quint unblock the channels sometime after the morning’s big presentation.

“What’s the official topic of this thing, anyway?” Amanda inquired.

David responded through a mouthful of apple. “I asked Quint that very question.”

“And?”

“He just said, ‘Temporis.’”

Hannah cast a befuddled look around the table. “Does anyone here know what that is?”

She received nothing but shrugs and head shakes in reply.

“Well, this should be interesting.”

At 9
A.M.
, Czerny popped his head into the bistro and asked his guests if they were ready. They were. In quiet harmony, the Silvers cleared their plates from the table, and then moved on.

ELEVEN

Sterling Quint came to work at 7
A.M.
, looking more dapper than ever in his double-breasted Benaduce suit, Vanya silk tie, and four-hundred-dollar pocket square. His wrists were garnished with eighteen-karat-gold cuff links that were molded in the elaborate pattern of watchworks, the closest thing he had to a lucky charm. He’d first worn them ten years ago at a grand convention hall in Havana, where he stood before two thousand of his fellow temporal physicists and assured them in his most regal baritone that Earth was not an only child.

“We are surrounded by infinite kin,” he’d declared. “Siblings and half siblings. Distant cousins. Even twins. These parallel realities share our physical space, lying just outside our perceptions. I believe that one day we’ll be able to access them, like so many frequencies on a radio.”

Quint was not the first scientist to present that notion, but he did offer a mathematical description of his multiverse in action, a theoretical equation that unified two competing ideas about the nature of time and purported to explain most if not all of the paradoxes involved with temporal manipulation.

Though his Radio Worlds Theory was untestable and could neither be proved nor disproved, it went on to dominate the university chalkboards and make him a global star of the physics field . . . for a time. Eventually his scientific peers, no better than teenage girls with their fickle tastes and fad worship, discarded his theory for a newer and shinier rival.

Now Quint could only grin at the thunderous uproar he’d create at the next temporal physicists’ conference. The looks on their pasty white faces when he unveiled the scientific find of the century.

The meeting room was large enough to seat a hundred, but only six folding chairs had been set in front of the dais. Most of Quint’s employees stood along the walls. Another few scurried onstage, rushing to prepare the mechanical devices that Quint would soon demonstrate for his guests.

Shortly after nine, Czerny arrived with five Silvers in tow. They approached their seats in a slow single file, their curious gazes fixed on the many strange contraptions up front. Hannah cast a baffled glance at a young and lanky post-grad who was dressed from head to foot in a blue rubber suit.

“What’s with the deep-sea diver?”

“It’s not a diving suit,” Quint told her. “You’ll see what it does.”

Zack sat down last. He dragged the sixth folding chair in front of him and used it as a footstool.

“Okay, Sterling. We’re here. Dazzle us.”

Quint glowered at him. “Put that back.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this for the prophet Elijah?”

“I think you already guessed who it’s for.”

“I have,” Zack admitted. “You could have just told us, you know.”

Amanda eyed him strangely. “What are you talking about?”

The double doors opened again. Now Beatrice escorted a young Asian man in a dark blue sweatsuit. He swept his nervous gaze through the crowd, recognizing only Quint and a handful of physicists. The five people in folding chairs triggered a cloudier air of familiarity, as if he’d seen them all in dreams.

One in particular stood out, just as she stood up.

“Oh my God . . .”

Hannah had only met him once, for a short but eventful eighteen minutes. Still, with nearly seven billion people gone, it was a drop of medicine to see him again. It was just so damn sweet to find another survivor from her world.

She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight.

“Hi, Theo.”

—

The last any Silver had seen of Theo Maranan, he lay unconscious on a stretcher, bleeding from his nose and mouth. The Salgados had given him a baby spot sedative, which reacted violently to the alcohol in his bloodstream, which threw him into a coma.

Though Azral had been surprisingly tepid to the loss of Natalie Tipton, Jury Curado, and the elusive Evan Rander, he was far less pleased about Theo’s plight. Four weeks ago, just moments after Theo’s bloody arrival in Terra Vista, Quint received an irate text message.

Quint blanched as he keyed his reply.

The news stunned Quint. For five long years, all of Azral’s instructions had come from prerecorded videos, all mysteriously delivered to some corner of Quint’s house and accompanied by staggering amounts of cash.
On the morning the nine Silvers became flesh in this world, Azral suddenly began communicating through mobile texts. Now suddenly he was coming in person.

At midnight, a round white portal bloomed on the wall of Quint’s office. An exquisitely tall couple stepped through the surface. Though Quint had no trouble recognizing Azral from the videos, the brown-haired woman was new to him. She wore a fluffy fur coat over a sheer cocktail dress. The shopping bag in her hand was adorned with Japanese text. Quint reeled to wonder if the pair had just stepped away from a sunny afternoon in Kyoto. (It was actually Osaka.)

Mercifully, Azral appeared to be in a genial mood now. With a soft grin, he introduced his companion as Esis Pelletier. Quint had no idea if she was his spouse, his sibling, or possibly both. (She was neither.) He had a hard time believing she was the medical specialist in question. The woman dressed like a European prostitute and grinned like she was high on four different opiates.

“Precious Sterling,” she cooed. “We gave them silver in honor of your name. We found it amusing. It still makes my heart laugh, when no one’s looking.”

Despite her questionable state of mind, Esis wasted no time getting to work. Quint watched with rapt fascination as she cut a bloodless path through Theo’s forehead, using tools and gels Quint had never seen anywhere. After seventeen minutes of tinkering, she closed Theo without a trace of incision. He looked exactly as he had before, except now his eyelids fluttered with restless life.

“He’ll awaken tomorrow,” Azral informed Quint. “It’s fortunate. That one’s of particular value to us. Had we lost him, I would have held you responsible.”

Quint felt a cold squeeze around his heart. “I apologize again. Are you . . . do you wish to see the others while you’re here?”

“Let them sleep,” said Azral. “They had a trying day. I would like to meet your staff, however. Please summon them.”

By 2
A.M.
, the physicists and Salgados had assembled in the lobby, sleepy and perplexed. To all subordinates, even Czerny, Azral Pelletier was merely an obscure Canadian philanthropist who’d given Quint carte blanche to run the operation. Azral did little to counter that notion. He shook everyone’s hands, congratulated them on their fine work, then wished them a merry evening.

Esis smirked at Quint’s befuddlement. “If you saw the strings like we do, you’d know the need for this charade. My wealth labors now to prevent future difficulties.”

Once the staff left to return to their homes and beds, Azral summoned a new portal in the wall. He turned around at the rippling surface and looked to Quint.

“Keep Maranan isolated. Until he recovers from his alcohol addiction, he’ll be a negative presence among the others.”

“And be extra nice to David,” Esis added, with a teasing smirk. “He’s my favorite.”

“I’ll do that. I promise. But . . .”

The pair eyed Quint quizzically, waiting for him to finish his thought.

“I’ve followed your instructions for five years now, Azral. I’ve done everything you asked. I’m just wondering when I finally get the chance to learn about you. I mean . . . where do you come from?
When
do you come from? What’s your ultimate purpose with these people?”

The Pelletiers smiled with enough wry amusement to make Quint regret his outburst.

“How soon you turn from seeking forgiveness to favor,” Azral mocked.

“I’m a scientist. Do you expect me to be incurious?”

“We expect you to be patient, Sterling. This is just the beginning of our relationship. For now, your focus should be on the Silvers. Keep them comfortable. Keep them content.”

“Our task will be simpler if they remain here willingly,” Esis added.

Quint’s thoughts turned to Zack, who’d been so stubborn and clever about securing an independent future. “And if they choose to leave?”

Azral’s deep blue gaze turned chillingly severe. “Then this won’t be the beginning at all.”

The couple disappeared into the shimmering circle. It shrank away to nothingness.

As he waited for his thumping heart to settle, Quint cursed himself for his whimpering subservience. For all he knew, Azral was a mediocrity in his native era—a fraud, a mental patient. And yet here was the great Sterling Quint, begging for knowledge like a dog begged for scraps.

Still, indignity was a small price to pay for this scientific windfall, a chance to forever rise above his simpering peers. For the greater prize, Quint resolved to do his job. Most important, he’d do it without any more mistakes. On the short list of things he didn’t want to learn from Azral was how he handled the people who disappointed him.

—

Hannah pulled away from Theo and studied him. When she first met him, he looked like a shipwreck victim. Now his face was clean-shaven and his hair was trimmed to a more civilized shag.

“I had no idea you were awake,” she said. “I must have asked about you a hundred times. All they told me was that you were hanging in there.”

Theo processed her with awkward, busy eyes. She recognized the look.

“You forgot my name, didn’t you? It’s all right. I’m Hannah.”

Czerny stepped in. “I’m afraid it’s worse than that. Due to his unfortunate mishap, he doesn’t remember his first day here.”

She looked to Theo again. “You don’t remember me at all? That talk we had in the van?”

As he raised his palms in shrugging remorse, his sleeves rolled back, revealing the Asian script tattoo on his left wrist and the shiny silver bracelet on his right. It had been nearly two weeks since Zack removed her own bangle. She never thought she’d have to look at one again.

“Okay, well, I can fill you in later. I’m just glad you’re all right.”

Theo thanked her, even though the state of all-rightness seemed about as distant as Alpha Centauri. He’d spent the last month tucked away in his one-man rehab unit on the second floor, with his own catered meals, his own lumivision, his own sweaty struggles. On the upside, he was truly sober for the first time in years. That made him only slightly prepared to be integrated with the other survivors. He was only slightly ready to hear what Quint had to say.

The esteemed physicist motioned Theo to the empty chair. “If you would.”

Theo sat down at the end of the row, drumming a nervous beat on his leg. The cartoonist offered him a smile and a handshake. “Zack Trillinger.”

“Theo Maranan. Hi. Did we, uh, also meet before?”

“Nope. This is our first time.”

“Okay,” he said, suppressing the hot urge to laugh. Zack already seemed as familiar as a best friend. He had no idea why.

Quint nodded to Czerny, who dimmed the lights and switched on the lumiplex. He cleared his throat, then the presentation began.

—

The first image to appear on the screen was a satellite photo of the world. Though Czerny ran the projector-like device from the other side of the room, Quint was able to move in front of it without casting a shadow or wearing the swirling colors of Earth on his skin.

“To start, I’d like to thank you all for your patience. You’ve gotten a lot of nonanswers to a lot of pressing questions. I know how frustrating that can be. Believe me, it was never our goal to keep you in the dark. We just want to portion out the information in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. Given all the strife with your physical anomalies, you can understand why we’d hold off on discussing the many quirks and differences of this new world.”

Theo scanned his fellow refugees, wondering if he’d failed to notice goat horns or cat eyes. When David caught his gaze, he turned his attention back to Quint.

“But now we feel enough progress has been made to attempt a basic orientation. This is only the first of what I hope to be many sessions. For today, we’ll start small. Constantin.”

Czerny pressed a button on the lumiplex. The wide shot of Earth changed to an illustration of an ancient Egyptian pyramid. As Quint spoke, familiar images advanced in quick order. The crucifixion of Christ. The
Mona Lisa
. The American Civil War. The montage ended with a grainy photo of a walrus-like man in a dark business suit.

“From our many interviews with you, we feel confident that the history of your world and ours are identical up to the early twentieth century. The man on-screen, William Howard Taft, is the last president our two Americas have in common.”

Mia and Zack scribbled into their respective books. Zack’s notation was a quick doodle of Taft, with “1912?” written underneath.

Quint continued. “So, what changed? What was the first thing to happen on one Earth but not the other? Under current limitations, it’d be impossible to pinpoint the exact moment in which our timelines diverged.”

The screen changed to a black slide with a single line of text.
October 5, 1912.

“However, we’ve identified the first
major
event to occur on just one Earth. That was simply a matter of asking. We learned that the date on-screen holds no significance to any of you. And yet it’s a day that everyone on this world knows by heart. It even has its own holiday.”

Now the screen gave way to a movie clip, a pulled-back view of a grand old city at the brink of dawn.

“This scene is from a 1978 historical drama called
The Halo of Gotham
. In addition to being one of the most acclaimed films of all time, it provides an extremely faithful reenactment of the event I’m about to discuss. There’s no footage of the actual—”

“What city is that?” Hannah interjected.