The Flight of the Silvers (37 page)

He grinned at Zack’s furrowed perplexity. “Strains the brain, doesn’t it? Once upon a time warp, I was part of the gang. We started out as an eight-piece band. You guys, me, and Jury Curado.”

“You mean the guy on the driver’s license.”

Evan laughed. “You’re lucky that’s all you know him from. You should be thanking me. He was a real asshole. Always yelling. Always convinced he was right. He was decent enough to the womenfolk, especially Hannah. He wasn’t so nice to us beta males, especially me.”

“So why don’t I remember any of this?”

“Because the story changed. I changed it.”

“How?”

Evan waved a curt hand. “Ah, I’m sick of talking about it. Let’s talk about culture.”

“Why don’t you just get to the—”

“I know you weren’t crazy about your old life. I hated mine. But man, do I miss the culture. You must have noticed how bad it is here. The shit that passes for entertainment.”

Zack sighed with forced amenity. “The movies are pretty bad.”

“It’s all bad. You know why? No foreign geniuses to shake things up. No Charlie Chaplins or Alfred Hitchcocks or Sergio Leones. Foreign films are illegal here. You think George Lucas would have come up with
Star Wars
if he hadn’t been able to see
The Seven Samurai
? Of course not. But they sealed the doors and nailed the curtains shut. So now all we have are five hundred brands of American vanilla.”

“I do miss
Star Wars
,” Zack admitted.

“God, I’d kill to see the original trilogy again. I’d only maim for the prequels.”

Zack was amazed to find himself smiling. “If I had known what was coming, I would have packed a portable movie player and a suitcase full of discs.”

“You and me both, brother. It kills me that I only had a few minutes to prepare. I think about all the things I could have grabbed from my room. Even the cheapest piece of crap would have been a treasure to me now. But oh no. Azral, King of Time, was running late and had to rush me.”

Zack tapped the railing, debating whether or not to press Evan for intel. Could his information be trusted?

“I’m guessing you know a lot more about him than I do.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things I know, Zacky. I’ve seen this tale from start to finish. You really want to know about the Pelletiers?”

“Tell me.”

Evan took a deep breath. He knew he was sailing into dangerous waters now.

“They’re Gothams,” he explained. “But from way the hell in the future. Distant descendants of Peter Pendergen’s people. Fiftieth generation, hundredth—I have no idea. I just know they’re insanely powerful. They’re one family you don’t want to mess with. And yet you always do.”

“How many are there?”

“There are three. Papa Bear’s on special assignment. He’ll rear his ugly head next year. That won’t be a fun day for any of you.”

Zack thought back to the scary man in the tempic mask, the one who gave him his silver bracelet.

“What do they want with us?”

Evan cracked a dark laugh. “If I told you that, they’d come down on me like the Monty Python foot. They don’t want you knowing yet. All I can say is that we share a rare quirk in our DNA. Nothing that ever made us stand out from the crowd, though we do tend to fall on the brainy side. Even Hannah’s got some wattage in the noggin, though it sure did take a thumping, didn’t it?”

Zack slitted his eyes at Evan, swallowing his wrath. “How many of us did they bring over?”

“They gave out ninety-nine bracelets in ten different cities. Not sure how many of us are still breathing. Our group lost two. The Violets are down five.”

“The Violets?”

“Pelletier lingo. They like to call us by the color of our bracelets. Isn’t that cute? The Violets are the London folk. The ones in Osaka are the Rubies. The Pearls of Guadalajara are my favorites. All-girl group. Eight Mexicans and one hot Cuban.”

Zack remembered what the masked Pelletier had whispered, shortly after sealing the bracelet around his wrist.
Any other weekend, you’d be one of the G
olds.

His heart lurched. “There’s a New York group . . .”

“Yep. Motley bunch. Their Sterling Quint’s a Chinese woman. Some big-name biology professor. Easy on the eyes, but not the nicest gal. I know what you’re about to ask, by the way.”

“My brother’s from New York. If the Pelletiers are picking siblings—”

“Now, Zack—”

“Is my brother alive?!”

Evan scratched the skin beneath his mask. “We have reached the end of the ‘free information’ portion of our discussion—”

“Goddamn it! Just tell me!”

“—and have now commenced the part in which you need to be careful. There are things you want. You won’t be able to shout them out of me.”

As Zack struggled to compose himself, Evan grinned behind his mask. He knew this would be the final take of their discussion. Round 5 was a keeper.

“You realize you’re getting worked up over a guy you weren’t that close with. I mean when it comes to being different, the Trillingers make the Givens look like Siamese twins.”

“Who told you that?” Zack asked.

“You did. I’m stealing your own joke.”

“He’s still my brother.”

“Is it him you really need right now? Or are you just looking for a quest?”

The cartoonist turned away in clenched fury. Evan softened up.

“Listen, Zack, I know what you’re going through. You survived an apocalypse. You learned just how nasty the universe can be and now you’re scrambling to give your life meaning. And since you’re too smart to cram Jesus into the equation, you’ve fit everything into a neat Hollywood structure. In your mind, you’re on a hero’s journey, with allies and riddles and big epic quests. You even have a love interest, an uptight hottie who’s slowly warming up to your wisecracking ways. Better than being a speck of dust in a senseless world, am I right?”

Zack gritted his teeth. “You don’t know me at all.”

“Oh, I do. And please don’t think I’m judging you. I used to be the exact same way. I thought I had all the same things you did. I went to Brooklyn and listened to Peter Pendergen. That man . . . God, what a prick. He dominated our lives with big ideas and Holy Grail quests, and we ate it up with a spoon because we needed to believe it. You want to know how it all turned out?”

“No.”

“Good,” Evan said. “That’s why I called. I want to spare you from all that. There’s no need to throw your life away on a wild-goose chase. Screw it. Ditch the Silvers. Come join me.”

Zack looked up from the railing. “Are you kidding me?”

“Not at all. You and I, we’re nerds of a feather. I’m more of a brother than your brother ever was. We could have fun together. Reminisce about pop culture. Buy the attentions of hot and shallow women.”

“Buy them with what?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about money, Zacky. I’ve got bundles. While you were all futzing around in Terra Vista, I hit the casinos. With power like mine, you can’t even call it gambling. It’s more like synchronized winning.”

“What is your power, exactly?”

“Come with me and I’ll tell you. I’ll answer any question you have. You’ll get every spoiler about Rebel, Azral, Peter,
Amanda
. Trust me. It’ll be better to hear it all secondhand than to live it.”

“And you’ll leave the others alone?”

“Zack, if you come with me, none of them will ever hear from me again. I swear it.”

Evan was mostly sincere in his promise, though he knew there was an opportunity coming up soon, a rare and golden chance to shatter both sisters at once. If Zack joined him, Evan would have to sneak out for an evening.

“I need some time to think about this.”

“Okay,” Evan replied, with a cautious leer.

“But there are two things you could do to help convince me—”

Evan pounded his fist on the railing. “Oh, goddamn it!”

“What?”

“You keep forgetting that I know you, Zack! If you were really considering my offer, you would have drowned me in a dozen more questions. But no, you jump right to the demands.”

“That’s not necessarily—”

“Let me guess. You want me to promise to leave you guys alone for a week. Or two weeks. Or until you get to New York. Just as a good faith token. Am I right?”

Zack hissed an inner curse. That was exactly the angle he’d planned.

“And then you were going to press me about your brother again. So you could get something out of me before turning me down. Clever, Trillinger. Always the clever one.”

Zack hunched over his railing, his face an angry mask. “Did you really think I’d come with you? You’ve harassed us. You’ve
poisoned
us—”

“Oh, now you drop the ruse.”

“Hannah could still die because of you!”

“She won’t die. Azral won’t let her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No, no, no. You don’t get any more info. You blew it. I mean, shit, Zack. I really thought I could convince you this time.”

“Evan, listen to me—”

“Well, you’ll find out the hard way that the universe doesn’t care about your three-act structure. There’s no epic saga. No Holy Grail to find. You don’t even get your love interest. That’s another thing Peter takes from you. See, he’s a spiritual man, unlike you. With a better face and body. In a perfect world, the looks wouldn’t matter. But Amanda’s a woman. She’s a Given. It matters.”

Evan chuckled at Zack’s frozen expression, caught between despair and distrust.

“That’s okay. Don’t believe me. You’ll see for yourself soon enough. It’s just one of the many pains that await you, my friend. When you see tomorrow’s paper, you should clip that photo of you getting squeezed by the big tempic fist. Because that is you for the rest of your pathetic life.”

Evan leaned forward, hissing a whisper. “Oh, and by the way? Your brother’s dead. He was here. He was a Gold. But Rebel got him three days ago. Oops. So much for that quest.”

All the blood fled Zack’s face. The world outside faded away to a swirling haze. He dropped his phone over the railing, then returned inside without so much as a look at the goblin in the tower.

Screaming, Evan overturned the patio table. He raised a chair to throw through the glass, then froze at the sight of a tall couple in the bedroom. He had no trouble recognizing them.

“Shit . . .”

Azral curled a long white finger, sternly beckoning him. Esis stood at his side and shook her head in reproach. Evan knew there was nothing he could do to allay their displeasure. No matter where he rewound, the Pelletiers would be there, still aware of all events. Still angry.

He dropped his chair and removed the mask. There was no point in wearing it now. The Deps wouldn’t see a thing with their ghost drills.

His heart jackhammered as he joined the Pelletiers in the bedroom. When he’d first witnessed Azral’s wrath, centuries ago, he wet himself in terror. Never again. He’d never again show his fear to these people.

He plopped himself down in the overstuffed easy chair and forced a chirpy smirk.

“So. Is this a lecture or a spanking?”

—

Amanda stared at her tense reflection in the lumivision glass, pondering her next steps. Zack had traipsed back to his room with barely a word. She’d never seen him so distraught.

After five anxious minutes, she cautiously followed him into his room.

Zack leaned against a dresser, keeping a crossed-arm vigil at the window. She knew it was a painful position for a man with cracked ribs. He didn’t budge an inch at her approach.

“I asked you all to give me some space.”

“I know, Zack. I just—”

“Did you think you were an exception?”

“I was kind of hoping I was.”

Now he turned to face her. His eyes were gray and cold, the color of knives.

“You’re not.”

Amanda took a pained step back, then retreated from the room. The cartoonist resumed his window stance. He stood for two hours like a stone figurine, lost in the pain of his many new fractures.

TWENTY-FOUR

Hannah dreamed in high speed, a whirlwind barrage of fleeting scenes and images. She danced high in the sky on a floor of aeris, her long white gown twirling in the wind as Azral spun her under his finger. He dipped her halfway to the floor, ravishing her with a smile so flawless that she didn’t mind the freezing cold.

She ran crying through the streets of an old and foreign city on the brink of dawn, leaving footprints in the snow as she carried a bundled infant. She knew the Cataclysm was coming but she didn’t have time to warn anyone. She had to get her son to safety. He was all that mattered.

She stood onstage in a majestic old theater, a sprightly little child in a pretty white dress. As she sang her angelic rendition of “I’ll Fly Away,” her parents and sister smiled at her from the front row. Amanda’s hands were sleek and white, as if her skin wasn’t skin at all but—

No . . .

She lay in a void of pure whiteness. The air chilled her to the bone. A brown-haired woman eclipsed Hannah’s view. She was a fearsome beauty with coal-black eyes and a fiendishly crooked grin. The actress struggled to move but she was held in place by something cold. Not ice but—

“No. No tempis. Get it off me. Please!”

Esis raised an alabaster hand. “Hush, child. You’re mended now. Sleep.”

Her palm flashed white, and Hannah disappeared into a dreamless oblivion. Once her brain rebooted, she found herself awake in strange quarters. Someplace beige. Someplace warm.

—

Bleary thoughts floated through her head like dandelion puffs as she registered her new surroundings. The room smelled like paint and was devoid of all furniture except her bed. A familiar mop of shaggy blond hair poked out from the covers next to her.

Hannah traced a fumbling path through her memory. All she could see were the hazy images of a very bad brunch. Now she was in bed with a sixteen-year-old boy who—God help her—she wasn’t above seducing.

“David?”

He rolled onto his back and blinked in sleepy half awareness. His eyes popped open and he launched to a sitting position.

“Hannah! You’re awake! Wow, that’s . . . Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

She held the blanket in front of her chest as if she were topless. “Confused. What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain, but let me get Amanda first.”

“Wait!”

He paused at the edge of the bed. As she studied the wrinkles in his T-shirt, she waded through a tangled patch of queries and stopped at the thorniest one.

“How mad is she?”

“Who? Amanda?”

“Yeah. You were there this morning. You saw the way I acted.”

David eyed her in dim, blinking stupor. “Okay. Huh. Well, the good news is that she isn’t mad at all.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“Not bad news. Just . . .” He checked his wristwatch. “You’ve been unconscious for twenty-two and a half hours. That whole thing happened yesterday.”

“What?”

“Let me get Amanda.”

Baffled, she traced a finger along her forehead bandage and removed the blood-soaked hand towel that rested against the back of her skull. Despite all evidence of injury, she felt perfectly fine.

David soon returned with Mia and Amanda. Hannah was stunned by her sister’s dismal appearance. She looked like she’d gained ten years and lost two more husbands.

Amanda wrapped Hannah in a tight embrace. “Oh thank God. I was so worried.”

“I’m okay. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s not your fault. How are you feeling? Are you in pain?”

“Not even a little.” Hannah glanced at her bloody towel. “What happened to me? Did I fall?”

Amanda’s expression grew cloudy and dark. Hannah saw David and Mia trade an anxious glance.

“Okay, someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Amanda asked her.

“You sat on Zack’s lap. Then I got all bitchy at you. I said horrible things. I think I threw a glass at the floor.”

Hannah blanched at the sight of Amanda’s brow bandages. “Oh my God. Did I do that to you?”

“It’s not your fault. You were drugged.”

“Drugged? How?”

David filled her in on everything she missed—the spiked mimosas, the tempic hand, the rushed escape to Suite 1255.

Hannah listened quietly, staring down at the bedspread with increasing agitation. By the time he finished, her eyes were filled with wet, seething rage.

“He needs to die.”

“We’ll worry about Evan later,” Amanda insisted. She hugged Hannah again. “I’m just so glad you’re okay.”

She suddenly caught the scent of shampoo in Hannah’s hair, an odd smell for a woman who hadn’t showered since yesterday. She ran her fingers along the back of Hannah’s scalp.

“You checking my wound?”

“Yeah.”

“Must not be too bad if I can’t feel it.”

It bothered Amanda that she couldn’t feel it either. No broken skin. No scabs. Not even dried blood in her hair.

Hannah peeked into the empty living room. “Where’s Zack?”

“He’s in the other bedroom,” Mia replied. “He just had a long phone call with Evan.”

The news surprised David as much as Hannah. “He did? What did he say?”

“I don’t know. He just went straight to his room. I’m worried about him.”

“He’ll be all right,” Amanda said, unconvincingly. Still mystified by Hannah’s condition, she looked to David. “Did anything strange happen here last night?”

“Strange how?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

He shrugged in drowsy detachment. “I slept like a stone. If anything happened, I missed it. Why?”

Amanda shook her head, dismissing the issue. For all she knew, accelerated healing was a new aspect of her sister’s weirdness. There were certainly worse problems to have.

As the fog slowly cleared from Hannah’s thoughts, she suddenly remembered her other recent drama. She looked into the living room again.

“Where’s Theo?”

—

Twenty-four hours after Amanda flexed her great tempic arm, the incident continued to plague the Piranda Five Towers. The property bustled with law enforcers and news reporters, plus an ever-increasing influx of fanatical Gotham-seekers.

Theo felt like a rock star in disguise as he crossed the crowded lobby. He lowered his baseball cap, adjusted his sunglasses, and cast his eyes down at his shopping bag.

Sometime during his food run, management had called in the cavalry. Security guards blocked the path to all stairs and elevators now, refusing entry to civilian nonresidents.

Unfortunately, the only key Theo possessed belonged to the hotel’s most infamous suite. He counted the cash in his pocket. He had $653, enough to rent a basic room.

He approached the reception desk. The small blond clerk studied Theo skeptically.

“No luggage, sir?”

“It’s in the car.”

She slitted her eyes at him. “If you’re only here to investigate the disturbance—”

“I’m not,” Theo insisted. “I swear it.”

The glass doors swung open to heavy-footed bustle. Theo anxiously studied the large cadre of men who’d just arrived. They wore the same navy blue windbreaker with a golden eagle logo on the breast. Giant yellow letters were stitched on the back.

DP-9.

Theo froze in place as the Deps moved his way. Four of them lugged tall metal towers on dollies—ominous black obelisks that could have come straight from the Death Star.

Ghost drills,
Theo realized.
Shit.

He took his new room key and joined the line at the security checkpoint, lowering his gaze as the agents brushed past him. His heart jumped when he noticed the lone female in the group—dark skinned, with finger-thick dreadlocks that sprouted from her head like fireworks. Though Theo could only glimpse her from a rear angle, he knew she was the woman he’d seen on lumivision last night, the one who’d filled him with a prophetic sense of familiarity, a
préjà vu
.

Now she passed close enough for him to hear her strong voice and exotic accent. His recognition was so powerful that he could practically taste her name. It rolled around his thoughts like childspeak.
Missah Massah. Missah Ma
ssah.

Theo swallowed his panic as it became his turn to pass them. He pulled down the lip of his baseball cap and made a sharp left at the elevators, all the while battling his urge to peek at this woman, this
Missah Massah
. For all his strange new intimacy, he had yet to see her face.

It was extreme luck on Theo’s part that Melissa had yet to see his.

She sighed patiently into her handphone. “Sir, I understand your concerns, but if you limit our ghosting area, we’ll have a much more difficult . . . Yes, sir. I’ll hold.”

Howard Hairston watched her scowl. He was a young and freckly redhead, one of the few agents on the team who didn’t resent Melissa for her recently announced promotion. If anything, she’d make a better boss than Andy Cahill, who treated everyone under thirty like a high school intern.

“No luck with the judge?” he asked her.

She covered the phone. “No. He doesn’t want us scanning outside the crime scene.”

“Lovely. Why not make us wear blindfolds too?”

Melissa did a double take at the fast-moving Asian who slipped into the stairwell. She’d lived and breathed the fugitives for two weeks now, studying their ghosts from every angle. She knew their bodies, their postures, their gaits. That man moved a hell of a lot like Theo Maranan.

Can’t be,
she thought. The fugitives should have been three states away by now. They certainly weren’t crazy enough to linger here at the crime scene. Were they?

She shelved the debate when the judge returned to the line. While Melissa continued her plea for a more expansive ghost warrant, she bandied Theo’s name in her thoughts. She never guessed for a moment that he was doing the same with her.

—

David barely had time to answer the coded knock at the door before Theo swept past him in a flushed and winded huff.

“We have to go.”

“Why? What did you see?”

“Exactly what you were afraid of.”

David closed the door. “Ghost drills. Marvelous. I knew it wouldn’t take forty-eight hours.”

“We can’t wait for Hannah to wake up. We’ll have to move her somehow.”

“Move me where?”

Theo nearly dropped his bag at the unexpected sight of Hannah. She looked so spry and healthy that for a moment he thought he was hallucinating.

“Hannah. Wow. You’re up. When did . . . ?”

She eyed him through a cool squint. For all her miraculous recovery, Theo could see that she had yet to forgive him.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Why are you freaking out? What did you see?”

“The Deps. They’re going to start ghosting any minute now. We can’t—”

A bedroom door creaked open. Zack stepped outside. His skin was pallid. His face was racked with grief. Now Hannah knew exactly why Mia was worried about him.

He offered her a feeble hint of his old smirk. “Hey. Welcome back.”

Hannah rushed toward him in gushing empathy. Amanda raised a palm. “Don’t hug him. He has broken ribs.”

She took his hands instead. “Oh God, Zack . . .”

“I appreciate the pity, but I’m all right.”

“It’s not pity, you schmuck. I know what you did. I know you tried to reason with that psycho.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t work.”

“I didn’t think it would. But I love you for trying.”

Unnerved by Theo’s urgency, Mia looked to the door. “I really think we should go.”

They gathered their bags and masked themselves as best they could. While the men hid under hats and shades, the women fixed their hair in ways that were previously anathema to them. Hannah sported a ponytail for the first time since she played Sandy Olsson in a high school production of
Grease
.

The group split up into innocuous pairs and took three different routes to the parking structure. Hannah rode the service elevator with Zack. Even with painkillers, the cartoonist was in no condition to take the stairs.

He gazed at the doors through dark sunglasses, his face a dismal mask. Hannah caressed his wrist.

“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?”

Zack jerked a listless shrug. He wasn’t even remotely ready to talk about it.

Hannah rested her head on his shoulder. “We’re going to make it through this, Zack. All of them. The assholes in our lives will fall away one by one, and the six of us will find a nice quiet place to settle down.”

“You really believe that?”

Strangely enough, she did. Her new optimism surprised them both. Yesterday, she was a muddled wreck. Now her thoughts were clear and bright. If she’d known a concussion would do her so much good, she would have cracked her skull a long time ago.

Soon the Silvers reunited at the Royal Seeker. While Amanda drove a slow and careful path down the driveway, the others kept their wide eyes peeled for flashing lights. No one followed them.

The moment they crossed the front gate, they let out a collective exhale. Amanda peered back at the shrinking glass towers. This was the second time her tempis had brought the law down on them, the second time they’d been saved by luck and Theo Maranan. Though she wasn’t an augur like him, she couldn’t shake the inevitability of handcuffs in their future. Sooner or later, the Deps would find them. Their wrists seemed all but destined to carry the weight of silver bracelets.