The Flight of the Silvers (31 page)

“Sit down. You’re making us nervous.”

He rejoined them at the tree, rapidly drumming his thighs as he scanned the grassy distance.

“You never mentioned a girlfriend before,” Mia said.

“She was an ex,” Zack clarified. “We broke up two years ago but we still lived together.”

“That’s a strange arrangement,” Amanda mused.

Zack rolled his shoulders in a sullen shrug. “It was a good apartment.”

Sensing the end of his effusiveness, Amanda dropped the topic and ate another peppermint. Zack had noticed her popping them like crazy over the past fifteen minutes, ever since Hannah and the others crossed into worrisome tardiness.

As she reached for the last candy, an odd new thought occurred to him.

“Wait. Don’t eat that.”

She paused. “Huh?”

“Hold that mint. And hand me the box, please.”

Confused, she passed him the little square tin of Breezers she’d purchased from the motel vending machine. Zack brandished the container like a stage magician.

“Now, what do you think would happen if I reversed this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think I could refill this box with mints of the past?”

Amanda stared at him blankly as she pondered his premise. “I don’t like the idea of half-digested candies suddenly disappearing from my insides.”

“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.”

Zack placed the tin on the ground and concentrated until it gleamed with light. He opened the lid to a fresh new heap of white candies.

Mia’s mouth went slack. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Amanda said.

“Wow indeed.” Zack looked to Amanda. “Do you feel any less minty?”

“No. I feel exactly the same. I can still taste the last one I ate.”

“Yeah. These are doubles. Holy crap. I made copies.” He laughed. “David’s going to blow a synapse.”

For all his awe, Zack suspected his feat was pitifully mundane to the civilized natives of Earth. He was right. The process of tooping had been a part of modern culture for decades. Using any rejuvenator, a container could be reversed to create temporal duplicates of its former contents, whether they were mints or apples or shiny gold nuggets.

Unfortunately for wealth seekers, tooping was an inherently flawed process, one that always resulted in inferior copies. Precious metals became rusted and worthless. Gems turned cloudy and cracked. Most tooped foods were inedible, though certain grains and vegetables were able to survive the process with a tolerable loss of quality. There were over a thousand toop-friendly recipes that had been discovered through years of experimentation—pastas, breads, and rice dishes that were easily saved by fresh seasonings.

Though tooping was prohibited by federal law, the authorities could only do so much to stop it in the kitchen. In the end, nobody craved shoddy cloned sustenance. It was just the fiscal reality. The middle class had leftovers. The lower class had do-overs.

In the grassy wilds, Zack received a quick education on the limits of tooping. The moment he sampled a re-created mint, his face contorted in comical disgust. Mia and Amanda covered their laughs.

“What’s wrong?”

He spat his candy into the dirt. “It’s awful. Like eating a dust bunny.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I’m serious. Try one.”

Amanda pushed his arm away. “I believe you!”

“God, that sucked. Let me have the original.” He took the mint from her hand, tested its structural integrity, and then ate it. “Yeah. Okay. I think Breezers were meant for one-time use.”

“Maybe they added a special chemical,” Mia said. “Like copy protection.”

Zack stared ahead in thought. “You know, I bet that’s one of the things that pawnbroker was testing for. To see if your wedding ring was a clone.”

“And I bet that’s why the cash here is all blue and glossy,” Amanda added. “It’s probably some fancy ink that can’t be duplicated.”

“Great,” Zack sighed. “Guess I can’t make a figurative mint either.”

Mia shook her head, frustrated. “We still have so much to learn about this place. I mean everything we figured out just now is stuff a third-grader already knows.”

“We’ll catch up,” Amanda assured her. “Someday.”

Once again, Zack looked out to the hills, rapidly drumming his thigh until Amanda pressed his hand still. As their fingers touched, he realized that she rarely mentioned her husband. He made a note to ask about him someday, carefully, when he had a few less items on his plate of worries.

“Where the hell are they?”

—

Hannah wasn’t sure which of her two friends would explain the Royal Seeker first. David and Theo circled the van at polar ends, one scanning the past, the other peering into the future.

After two revolutions, David seized the winning edge.

“Look, I adore Mia. I respect her rules for avoiding federal detection. But we’re well out of sight. It would be far easier to show you what I’ve learned than to tell you. May I?”

Before Theo or Hannah could answer, David closed his eyes in concentration. A ghostly copy of the Seeker appeared at the edge of the hill, rolling up the grass until it merged with its present counterpart. Soon a spectral door opened and a handsome young man in hiking clothes stepped into the sunlight. From his long blond ponytail and sideburns, Hannah figured he represented the haute couture of the Altamerican progressive.

The driver took a panoramic sweep of his surroundings, then shut his door. Hannah’s heart lurched as he moved to the edge of the fifty-foot drop.

“David, if he jumps, you tell me now. I don’t want to see that.”

“He doesn’t jump. Watch.”

For the next several seconds, he kept his expressionless gaze on the canopy of trees below him. Then, with triumphant fury, he threw the ignition key over the cliff.

“Oh no!”

“It’s all right,” David assured Hannah. “We’ll find it.”

The man procured a handphone from his pocket and pressed a single button. “Yeah, it’s me. It’s over. I’m out. Thanks for everything. Go fourp yourself.”

Satisfied, he chucked the phone into the trees, then turned around and left the way he came. The ghost disappeared in a ripple.

David beamed at his companions. “He walks back down the hill, still smiling. Whatever decision he made, it was a good one. For him and for us.”

“But who was he?” Hannah asked.

“Who cares? We have a vehicle now. An unstolen luxury van.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Theo said. “For all we know, this guy just quit his job as a car thief.”

David sighed impatiently. “It’s been sitting here for two days. If it was stolen, then it wasn’t reported. If it was reported, then it wasn’t tracked. This is our van now. We just need to find that key.”

They descended the hill and scoured the woods in a three-pronged sweep. The search felt like a needle-in-a-haystack conundrum to Hannah, but then she knew it was never wise to bet against David Dormer.

Theo took a break from his halfhearted hunt, wiping his brow with the lip of his T-shirt. Hannah was momentarily stunned by the sight of his finely muscled stomach, the hint of a scar on his left pectoral. She was wise enough not to ask about old wounds.

“You okay?”

“Headache,” he said. “Probably just lack of sleep. It’ll pass.”

“Did you see anything futurish when you looked at that van?”

“It’s hard to say. I got a bunch of vague flashes, but I can’t tell if they’re predictions or just my usual thoughts. Mia’s lucky. At least her future’s written out for her.”

“Well, were they good flashes or bad flashes?”

“Both,” he replied, with jittery uncertainty. “I feel like that van will take us all the way to New York, but that could just be wishful thinking. I also feel like that scene we witnessed up there wasn’t entirely genuine, but that might just be paranoia.”

Hannah grew tense all over again. There was something about the driver’s expression, right after he threw the phone, that slightly reeked of acting. She’d also filed the suspicion as paranoia. Certain parties had given her plenty of reason to be skittish.

“Found it!”

David bounded through the trees, grinning with triumph. He jingled a key chain in his hand.

“So who feels like driving?”

—

Hannah mentally cursed Theo and David as she climbed behind the wheel. She had two certified geniuses in her company and yet she was the one who had to pilot the crazy Royal Seeker. There were buttons and switches everywhere. This was no Salgado clunker. This was the goddamn
Enterprise
.

After ten minutes of wary experimentation, in which Hannah nearly sent the Seeker over the cliff, she finally got a handle on the controls. Soon the splinter group returned with their four-wheeled surprise. Zack’s fear turned to bafflement when he spotted Hannah behind the wheel.

He stood up and chucked his arms at full wingspan. “What . . . ? How?”

The passenger window opened to David’s chipper face. “Shall we discuss it inside?”

Soon the Silvers filled the six plush seats, basking in cool comforts. Between the air-conditioning, the fresh water, and her ridiculously cozy perch, Mia felt a full-body relief that was almost religious in intensity.

She glanced around in muddled awe. “I can’t believe you guys just found this lying around.”

David smiled at her. “After the last few days, I think we’re due for some random good fortune.”

“It just seems a little too random,” Zack fretted.

“And a little too good,” Amanda added.

Hannah narrowed her eyes. They weren’t even a couple yet and they were already making her ill with their cuteness.

David scowled at them. “This wasn’t delivered to our doorstep. It was abandoned in a distant patch of wilderness two days ago. Don’t you think that’s a little dodgy as far as traps go?”

“By the old rules, yes,” Zack replied.

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that in a world where time can go wibbly-wobbly and pretzel-bendy, it’s entirely possible that we were meant to find this Mystery Machine.”

“Meant by who?”

“Do you really have to ask, David? Do you think this is the first silver gift we’ve gotten?”

Amanda nodded darkly. “Exactly.”

Theo and Hannah remained outwardly neutral, though images of Azral had been circling their thoughts from the moment the van came to life. Theo fumbled with a thin metal attaché case he’d discovered under his seat. The lid was held shut by a convoluted system of clasps. He couldn’t tell if it was locked or just strange.

David flicked a curt hand. “I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to give yourself an ulcer over paranoid conspiracy theories, feel free. Just leave me out of it.”

“Hey come on, David . . .”

“Why are you getting so angry?” Amanda asked. “We’re just talking.”

“Except none of us have thanked him yet.”

The others looked to Mia as she straightened her seat back. Her expression was both remorseful and stern.

“Thanks to David, we don’t have to walk across the country now. We don’t have to worry about deserts or dehydration. We could be in Brooklyn in four or five days instead of two or three months, thanks to David. And he did it all without robbing or hurting anyone.”

She looked to him now. “Thank you, David. You probably saved my life again.”

The van fell quiet. Hannah scanned the bright new smile on David’s face, then confronted the disturbing new possibility that she’d be traveling with two couples soon.

Zack let out an attritional sigh. “Look—”

The attaché case loudly sprang open, startling everyone. Theo exhaled with relief. A few more minutes and he would have started smashing it.

The others stared at him, dumbfounded, as he procured a neatly wrapped stack of shiny blue cash. Hannah leaned forward and read the paper band.

“Holy shit. Five thousand dollars?”

Zack blinked in stupor. “Are you serious?”

“That’ll last us all the way to New York,” said Amanda. “Easily.”

“Guys, you’re not getting the full scope of this.”

Theo turned the case on his lap, revealing a tray of identical bricks. Lifting one revealed another, then another, then two others. Fifty stacks in total. A quarter of a million in cash.

The group fell into bewildered silence. Soon Zack found his way to the only sane response.

“Thank you, David.”

Nervous giggles spread through the van as the others followed Zack’s dizzy lead. The grin on David’s handsome young face slowly flatlined. He looked to Zack contritely.

“I’ll admit that your suspicion seems a little more plausible now.”

“Look, trust me, I’d rather be wrong. If Azral’s the one who gave us this stuff—”

“No,” said Hannah, frantically waving her palms. “I’m sorry. Between all the bad stuff of yesterday and the good stuff of today, I’m about to get the bends. Can we put away the big issues for a couple of hours? Can we just enjoy this? Please?”

No one had trouble agreeing to her request. After a cozy respite, Hannah oriented Zack on the van’s controls. David plotted a course on the computer navigation system. Soon the Silvers joined the speedy bustle on Highway X, snaking east through the South California grasslands and into the desert.

By the time the Seeker crossed into Arizona, the sun had set and David fell fast asleep in his seat. The five waking Silvers tumbled back into the larger issues. Some thought about Azral. Others thought about Peter. All of them wondered why one was so eager to help them get to the other.

TWENTY-ONE

The Power Boy chargery crackled with life, a pocket of activity in a bare patch of Kansas. Two hundred travelers ambled the station, stretching limbs and killing time while their vehicles drank from electric wells. The plaza offered two diners, four stores, an arcade, and a mini-theater. It also sported a tea lift, a diversion so unique that Zack nearly drove off the freeway gawking at it.

While the van replenished at a generator, the Silvers split up and wandered in pairs. Only Zack and Theo chose to brave the antigravity madness of the tea lift. They were loaded into a two-seat metal cup, which rose ten stories into the sky on a remote-controlled saucer of aeris. Despite the panorama of sun-drenched plains, Zack and Theo couldn’t take their eyes off the other riders—twenty cups of people, all floating through the air in a slow and synchronous halo.

Theo saw Zack’s stupefied expression and raised him a jagged chuckle. “This is some Willy Wonka shit right here.”

“I know. My inner physicist is sobbing right now. He demands we plummet.”

“Why did we do this again, Zack?”

“Oh, you know. When in Rome . . .”

“. . . fall as the Romans fell?”

The cartoonist shrugged. “We can’t be country rubes forever. If this is what they do at gas stations, just imagine their theme parks.”

An electronic chirping sound emanated from Zack’s pocket. He retrieved his handphone and checked the screen.
Amanda Calling.

He answered her with a grin. “Hey. You’ll never guess where we are.”

“I know where you are. I saw you in line. You’re both crazy.”

“You should try it. It’s amazing.”

“Yeah, no thanks. I’m just making sure you’re not holding each other and screaming.”

“Well, we’re not screaming.”

Amanda laughed. “Just try not to die, okay? I don’t like driving the van.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the base of the statue.”

He peered down at the thirty-foot sculpture of Power Boy—a chubby blond tyke with button eyes and an electric-blue superhero outfit. Two black-haired women stood at the feet of the eyesore. Even from a hundred feet up, Zack could see Hannah’s fidgety agitation. He was starting to share Amanda’s concerns about her.

“Yeah. I see you. Stay there. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Two days ago, Zack had purchased six handphones from an Arizona vendor, all bare-bones models that were prepaid for a generous amount of usage.

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after the van crossed into New Mexico, Hannah’s screen lit up with a chain of malevolent texts. The sender was only identified as
A. Sonnet
.

Hey Hannah Banana, Always-Needs-a-Man-a. I guess you found Jury in your pants.

He would have entered your knickers a hell of a lot quicker if I hadn’t messed with events.

In previous times, he was the pearl in your clam. You were the honey on his plantain.

Wherever we stayed, it was always the same. We’d all hear your screwings. Your melodious oohings.

It was not meant to be, unfortunately. He adored you, I assure you, but he always died before you. :(

You’d cry at the dirt in your little black skirt and you’d swear to us you loved him.

And yet within a week, we’d hear the mattress squeak.

The bump-bump-bump of a brand-new chump.

If only these men knew the real and awful you.

Rest assured I do, oh Hannah Banana.

:)

Now the actress paced the feet of the Power Boy, anxiously scanning every man in the crowd. She barely knew a thing about Evan Rander and already she hated him more than anyone she’d ever known. She hated him for singling her out, for chipping away at an already broken psyche.

While Amanda talked on the phone with Zack, laughing her radiant laugh, Hannah swallowed a high scream. As if her stalker problems weren’t bad enough, this voyage was quickly becoming a couples cruise, a romantic slow dance across the floor of the nation. The disparity of fortune killed her. It tortured her for reasons that were vain and petty enough to make her ashamed.

Soon Zack and Theo returned to the ground and rejoined the sisters. On the way back to the generator lot, Hannah clasped fingers with Theo. Despite her smile, her grip was tight and desperate. She hated herself for the plan she was hatching. She hated Evan for knowing her.

—

To Mia and David, the only thing better than having the Royal Seeker was having it to themselves. The moment they finished lunch, they dashed back to the van like secret lovers. Classical music played from the radio as they propped their legs on empty seats and buried themselves in nonfiction. David read
Temporis in a Nutshell
, an ironic title for an 594-page tome. Mia pored through
The Annotated History of America, Volume IX (1912–1940)
. The cover was graced with a haunting old photo of a broken doll in rubble, a shot of post-Cataclysm New York.

Mia sneaked a quick glance at David over the top of her book. She could only imagine that the teenagers of the world would roll their eyes at what these two did in the back of vans, and yet recent events had forced her to wonder. Ever since she spoke up for him on Tuesday, David’s smiles for her grew a few shades brighter and he touched her arm every time he brushed past her. She didn’t think it meant anything until Hannah slipped her a furtive whisper in the hotel garage.
You might have just started something.

Over the next three days, his affections simmered down to old levels, enough to stop her stomach pains. She had no idea what was going on behind that beautiful face of his. Maddeningly, Future Mia was no help at all on the matter. She could have ended the conundrum with a single spoiler, but chose to let her younger self twist in the wind. Mia had received time-traveling intel about Hannah and Amanda and Theo and Zack, but nothing about David. For baffling reasons, her future had yet to mention him once.

An advertisement on the outdoor movie screen suddenly caught her eye. She watched through the windshield as a trio of cartoon handphones danced atop a forty-foot tagline.
TRIPLE-8 IS ALL YOU NEED TO FIND ANYONE IN AMERICA, ANY TIME!

Mia’s mouth fell slack with revelation. It had been an irksome catch-22 that she didn’t know the phone number for Information. Now that she had it, she had a chance to shed some light on the other mystery man in her life.

David glanced up as she dialed her phone. “What are you doing?”

She shushed him with a finger. “Hi. Brooklyn, New York, please. Peter Pendergen.”

Mia spelled out his last name, then listened to the operator with faint surprise. “Oh. Okay. Is that near Brooklyn?”

David crinkled his brow at her. He didn’t know how any of these people could tolerate holding phones to their ears. The electronic squeals and crinkles were infuriating to him, like a whistling teakettle covered in firecrackers.

She scrawled a phone number into her journal. “Okay. I’ll try that. Thank you.”

“Success?” David asked.

“No listing in Brooklyn, but there’s a Peter Pendergen in Quarter Hill, just north of the city.”

“Could be an old number,” David speculated. “Or it could be where his handphone’s registered.”

Mia bit her thumb in dilemma. “Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t try calling?”

“I can think of several, but you have me all curious now. I say do it.”

She stepped outside, restlessly pacing beside the van as she dialed the number. Her heart skipped when someone answered on the fifth ring.

“Hello?”

Mia was surprised to hear a high young voice, a boy caught in the wavering chords of puberty. She wasn’t sure if she’d laugh or scream if she learned that Peter was her age.

“Hi. Is this . . . this isn’t Peter Pendergen, is it?”

The boy fell into a suspicious pause. “Who is this?”

“I’m a friend.”

Another pause. The boy took a bite of something crunchy, then spoke through chews. “My dad’s not known for his maturity, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any ten-year-old friends.”

Relieved, intrigued, and a little indignant, Mia stopped pacing. “I’m fourteen.”

“Okay. Fine. You’re fourteen. And you apparently have no idea what your friends sound like.”

“Well, I never actually talked to Peter. I’m sort of his pen pal.”

The boy choked on his snack. “Excuse me?”

“What?”

“If I heard you right, and if you’re not rubbing me, then I don’t think you meant to say ‘pen pal.’”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re implying you had homosexual relations with my father in prison. I don’t even know where to begin with that.”

Mia flushed hot red. “What? No! I didn’t . . . that’s not what it means where I come from!”

“Who
are
you?”

“I’m Mia Farisi, and I promise you that Peter really wants to talk to me! Is he there or not?”

The line fell silent again. Mia could almost feel the air in the boy’s hanging mouth.

“Holy Christ. You’re one of them. You’re a breacher.”

Mia scoffed. “I’m pretty sure I don’t like that term.”

“Are you insane calling here? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“Look—”

“If you value your life, hang up! Hang up right now and get rid of your phone!”

With a panicked yell, Mia hurled her phone. It sailed over a chain-link fence and disappeared into bramble.

Soon the other Silvers returned to find David and Mia embracing at the side of the van. Hannah was convinced the needle had finally swung all the way into romance until she saw the girl’s shattered expression. Mia fixed her frantic eyes on Zack.

“I think I told Rebel where we are.”

—

They fled the Power Boy with an 88 percent battery charge, and didn’t stop until they were halfway into Missouri. Mia was the last to unclench her fingers from the seat rests. The theoretical danger had theoretically passed. They were as safe from Rebel as they always weren’t.

The group ate dinner at a highway truck stop, their first experience in a bona fide speedery. Each booth and table was encased within a large glass cube. The place looked more like a human aquarium than a greasy spoon diner.

Theo was the first to spot the peculiar dial on the table, right above a sticker advising pregnant women and epileptics to avoid using it. After confirming that nobody in the booth suffered either condition, he turned the knob to 10. Suddenly the door to their enclosure locked, the glass lit up with a crosshatch of bright lines, and the outside world became ten times slower. Waitresses creaked their way between tables. Coffee poured like syrup from tilted pots.

As she casually perused her salad options, Hannah welcomed the others to her world.

Theo watched through the kitchen window in awe as a flipped burger rose and fell in slow motion.

“I just bent the fabric of time at a roadside grill. With a knob that sits next to the napkin holder.”

Amanda suffered a tense flashback to the fuel truck that dawdled over the Massachusetts Turnpike, seventeen years ago. She hid her bother behind a glib smirk.

“Great. A way to make the service even slower.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not meant to be used until after you get your food,” David said.

“Yes, thank you. I’d worked that out already.”

“So this is what you see every time you shift?” Mia asked Hannah. “It goes all blue like this?”

“Yeah. The faster I go, the bluer it gets. And colder. Sometimes I see my own breath.”

And sometimes she saw more. Hannah thought back to the hallucination she’d suffered on Monday—the handsome Jury Curado, embracing a second Hannah from behind.
He adored you, I assure you, but he always died before yo
u. :(

Mia pressed a finger to the glass. “You think this would work if the walls weren’t here?”

“The enclosure’s just for safety,” David explained. “If you put your hand beyond the field, it would exist at a different speed than the rest of your body. According to the book I’m reading, that’s called rifting, and it’s not a pleasant experience.”

Amanda checked Zack’s stony expression, still fixed on his menu. He’d been morbidly quiet since they’d fled the chargery. This wasn’t the best time to learn the term for what he did to Rebel.

Hannah looked to David with sudden concern. “Wait. I don’t have glass around me when I shift. I don’t have a suit. Am I in danger of rifting myself every time I speed up?”

“I imagine if you were, it would have happened already,” he mused. “I’d guess you’re more a danger to others. I certainly wouldn’t suggest touching anyone in your accelerated state.”

Czerny had told Hannah the exact same thing, some weeks ago. She’d assumed he was just worried about high-speed bruising and breakage. Apparently there were worse dangers.

David turned to Zack. “Come to think of it, you also create an open temporic field. I imagine you’d be just as much of a risk as—”

“I know.”

“He knows,” said Amanda, at the same time.

Zack closed his menu and twisted the knob back to 1. Life outside the glass returned to normal.

“Let’s just pick what we want and order.”

—

That night, they rented three rooms at a quaint little inn on the outskirts of Jefferson City. Though the Silvers had forsaken fleabag motels in the wake of their new riches, Zack urged sensible restraint. “This isn’t just travel money,” he’d told them. “It’s build-a-life-in-Brooklyn money.”

All the same, Zack readily caved when David asked for his own room. The boy made a prickly bedfellow, and became downright surly when he didn’t get his personal space.

Amanda stepped out of the shower at ten o’clock to find she had the women’s suite to herself. She saw Hannah outside the window, lounging poolside with Theo. She could only guess that Mia was reading in David’s room, her new evening ritual.

Edgy in solitude, she texted Zack on her phone.

he replied.

Two minutes later, he opened the door to Amanda. With her wet hair and white robe, her appearance was a throwback to his first recollection of her. She was a much more formidable presence than the high-strung redhead who’d slapped him seven weeks ago. Without a proper frame of reference, he couldn’t tell if she was changing into a whole new person or settling back into the person she was. Most of his thoughts were stuck on how good she looked with wet hair.