The Flight of the Silvers (38 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

On a wet Thursday morning in a tiny lakeside village, Mia Farisi’s weirdness got a little bit weirder.

The sisters had gone to Main Street on a grocery errand, with the two youngest Silvers in tow. Once Hannah and Amanda disappeared inside a barn-size market, David and Mia explored the quaint surroundings. Nemeth was a rustic hamlet in the southeast corner of Ohio, home to 188 people. It graced the lip of a thousand-acre lake that teemed with striped bass and walleyes. Half the wooden shop-signs included some reference to bait or tackle.

Mia loved everything about Nemeth. In saner times, she’d dreamed of becoming a big-name author who retreated to the quiet country whenever she needed to finish her latest magnum opus. The fantasy included a posh lake cabin, two dogs, and a miraculously compliant husband who only appeared when she needed him.

She felt the edge of a high girlish cackle when David put his arm around her, even though she knew it was merely a gesture of purpose. Holding her under their shared umbrella, he led her to a two-story building that served as both post office and town hall. A sprawling twelve-month calendar graced the front window.

David counted the squares from Armageddon to now. “Wow. It’s been sixty-one days.”

“Which way are you surprised?”

“Feels like longer. Hell, it feels like a month since we came to Nemeth.”

Mia cringed at the scorn in his voice. The lake-house layover had been her idea. David wasn’t shy in voicing his opposition. In the four days since settling into their secluded retreat, he took numerous opportunities to remind everyone that Brooklyn was just 488 miles away. A one-day drive. A single battery charge.

“Look, when Zack gets better—”

“I know,” he replied. “I’m not angry.”

“You’re impatient.”

“I’m concerned. Let’s just leave it at that.”

He leaned in to study the dozens of handwritten notations on the calendar. “Huh. Look at all those birthdays. I bet this thing lists the birthday of every person in town.”

“That’s so sweet. See, this is why I love the country.”

“Yes, it’s all sweetness and light until they spot a minority in their midst.”

Mia batted his hand. “That’s not always true.”

“It is. I’ve seen it all over. Small towns create small mind-sets.”

“Yeah, isn’t it terrible the way they generalize?”

Her jibe evoked a laugh and an affectionate squeeze from David. Amidst the flurry in her thoughts, she felt a twinge of an impending portal.

She nervously glanced around. “Crap. Here we go again.”

A bright white bead materialized in front of her chest like a penlight. Fortunately, the rain obscured the floating breach from the few townsfolk straggling about.

David hunched forward and leered at the anomaly. “Wow. My father would have given an arm to study one of these.”

“I’d give an arm to stop getting them in public.”

“Are you receiving or sending?”

“It’s a delivery.”

After the incident in Ramona, in which she was caught off guard by a past portal, Mia kept a shoulder bag with her at all times. It contained her journal and an assortment of colored pads and pens. Hannah called it the Emergency Paradox Prevention Kit.

A rolled-up note slowly emerged from the breach. Mia cupped her hands to catch it, then experienced an unpleasant new twitch, as if a shady stranger had violated her personal space. Suddenly the note combusted in angry flames.

Mia blinked in bewilderment as smoldering black flakes snowed down on her palms.

“What . . . ? David, what just happened?”

“Not a clue. You ever see that before?”

“No.”

She wiped the ash from her hands, trying hard to shake the feeling of sabotage. “God. I hope the message wasn’t important.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was just a warning about me and my sweeping generalizations.”

Mia fought a grin. “I already knew about that.”

“Right. No big loss then.”

Amanda and Hannah emerged from the grocery store. They made a clumsy dash through the rain and loaded their shopping bags into the Seeker. David lost his humor and sighed with resignation.

“Guess we’re going home.”

—

Mia had found the lake house in a booklet of vacation rentals. The photos could have been ripped straight from her fantasies, from the cedar walls to the stone hearth fireplace to the windows and skylights and patios galore. Better yet, it was buffered by nature in every direction. The nearest human neighbor was half a mile away.

With uncharacteristic fervor, she convinced the others that it was a perfect place to hide and heal, a welcome change from their usual digs. She was right. From the moment the landlord left the Silvers to themselves, the ones who weren’t David felt a gushing love for the place. They’d spent the last two months in a state of flux—as guests of the world, guests of the physicists, guests of the hotels and motels of Altamerica. Now they had a house all their own. Those who craved a slice of domestic tranquility suddenly found one on a platter.

For the Great Sisters Given, serenity lay at the bottom of a cooking pot. Though neither one considered herself a culinary goddess, Amanda and Hannah took fervent glee in playing house chef. They spent hours each day twirling around the kitchen, passing spoons and spices between each other as multiple mixtures bubbled on burners.

While they worked, they smiled and giggled. When they disagreed, they disagreed kindly. Their knockdown brawl on the hotel balcony filled them with a desperate need to be perfect to each other. Soon their forced rapport snapped into place and they found themselves speaking intimately for the first time in years. Amanda finally shared the details of her broken marriage with Derek, his vicious last words. Hannah revealed the mystery of Jury Curado, from her strange ghostly vision to Evan’s cruel hints of love undone.

The only topics they dodged were their current thorny entanglements. Hannah swore that everything was fine with Theo, though the tension between the ex-lovers was clear for everyone to see. Amanda claimed she wasn’t worried by Zack’s grim new state of being, a ceaseless black mood that filled the house like smog and only intensified in her presence.

“It’s just pain,” she insisted. “Once his ribs heal, he’ll become his old self again.”

Hannah wasn’t so sure. For the first four days in Nemeth, Zack carried all the textbook signs of depression. He stopped shaving. He rarely spoke. He spent most of his time alone, either sketching in his tiny bedroom or staring out at the lake from a patio lounger.

On their third night in Nemeth, Zack finally opened up about his fateful phone call. He shared everything he learned about Evan’s alternate history with the Silvers, plus the stunning but questionable revelations about the Pelletiers.

Though everyone sensed Zack was withholding something, only David succeeded in drawing it out of him. Late Wednesday night, the boy invaded Zack’s room and pestered him until he divulged the fate of his brother. Zack relayed the news with matter-of-fact aloofness, never once looking up from his sketchbook.

David leaned against the dresser and gazed out at the rain. “As with all of Evan’s information—”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying you should take it with a grain of salt.”

“You’re the one who told me I shouldn’t get my hopes up about Josh.”

“I did. I still believe you shouldn’t. The odds suggest he died on our world like everyone else.”

Zack took dark pleasure in David’s tactless candor. It made a nice contrast to the delicate tiptoe everyone else walked around him.

“I don’t know how you always manage to stay so rational. Doesn’t this stuff ever get to you?”

“Of course it does,” David attested. “Why do you think I’m so eager to get to New York? I’m convinced that Peter Pendergen can provide us with all the shelter, safety, and crucial information he promised us. You used to feel the same way.”

Zack put down his pencil and looked at him. Evan’s harsh words about Peter were never far from his thoughts.

“Well then maybe it’s my turn to tell you not to get your hopes up.”

“Zack . . .”

“Think about it. If Peter’s information’s so crucial, why didn’t he include it in his letter? If getting to him is so important, why didn’t he offer to meet us somewhere halfway? And then there’s the big question. Why do the Pelletiers want us to go to Peter? Why did they give us the van?”

David chucked a loose hand. “I can’t answer any of that. I just know in my heart that he’s our only hope. Unfortunately, I see the way the others react whenever I mention Brooklyn. Now I’m scared that we’re about to add Peter to the list of people we’re avoiding.”

“They just need time,” Zack said. “
I
need time.”

David opened the door and turned around, his face a somber veil.

“Sooner or later, Zack, our problems will come find us again. It’d be nice for once if we met them on our terms.”

The next day, while the group ate lunch in the dining room, David told the others about Mia’s strange incident in town, the self-combusting note from the future. No one seemed willing to explore the issue with him.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he assured Mia. “For all you know, your future self used a new type of paper, one that doesn’t handle time travel very well.”

She rolled her shoulders in a feeble shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Zack watched from the end of the table as the others stared down at their food. That seemed to be the default reaction now whenever David soiled their haven with real-world matters.

The cartoonist dropped his napkin over his plate and vented a loud, wistful sigh.

“We need to get better.”

Everyone turned to look at him. It had become a rare occurrence for Zack to join a discussion, much less start one. He tapped the table pensively.

“The way I see it, we have four different threats out there and Evan’s the least of them. And yet he kicked our asses worse than the Gothams, the Deps, and the Pelletiers ever did. Hell, we kicked our own asses for him, all because some of us still can’t control their weirdness.”

Hannah took umbrage at his stern implication. “It’s not Amanda’s fault. She was drugged.”

“So were you. So was I. And yet we didn’t go crazy with the shifting and juving.”

Flushed with guilt, Amanda looked down at her fingers. “He’s right.”

“No, he’s not,” said Hannah. “This was nobody’s fault but Evan’s. And by getting pissy at you, Zack’s playing right into his hands.”

“I’m not saying this to be pissy.”

“Bullshit. You’ve been cold to my sister for days. Everyone sees it. And I don’t think it’s fair.”

Now it was Zack’s turn to blush. He couldn’t look at Amanda now without recalling Evan’s teasing hint of the future, her predestined romance with Peter Pendergen. He was ashamed to let it bother him so much, and doubly ashamed that it was noticeable.

“Look, all I’m saying is that we need to get a better handle on these things we do. They’re our biggest advantage when they work right and our biggest liability when they don’t.”

David nodded his head. “I agree. I mean if we’re staying here awhile, we might as well put the time to good use. We’re hidden away now. No one will see us if we practice.”

“You sure about that?” Mia asked. “If you’re wrong, the Deps will be all over us again.”

“Maybe. And maybe someday soon you’ll get a portal in public that can’t be concealed. Wouldn’t you like to learn how to avoid that?”

She narrowed her eyes at David. “That’s not up to me.”

“You sure about that?”

Zack gestured to Theo and Mia. “To be brutally honest, I think you two need the most work. You’re our early warning system. If you were both a little more attuned to the future, maybe we could have avoided Evan’s prank before it blew up in our faces.”

The two resident oracles stared at Zack with pained astonishment.

“Now you’re really being unfair,” Theo griped.

“Now Zack’s right,” Hannah shot back. “Did you get a flash of warning at all when we were drinking our spiked mimosas?”

Theo glared at her. “I would have told you if I did.”

“Well then you just proved Zack’s point, didn’t you?”

“Hey, you know what else I can’t foresee? An end to your grudge against me.”

“This isn’t about that. Get over yourself.”

“It is about that, so why don’t we both get over me?”

Amanda raised her hands. “Okay, stop. This isn’t helping. Now Zack needs at least two more weeks to properly heal. If some of you want to spend that time practicing, then do it. If not, then don’t. But we can’t fight each other like this. We have enough problems.”

In the cool silence, Zack uncovered his plate and stared at it until it glowed. The others watched now as his razed corn cob repeatedly vanished and reappeared, each time with more kernels. The ash-gray clone of a chicken breast re-formed itself piece by piece.

Soon the dish regressed to an empty state. Zack squeaked a finger across the pristine surface.

“Mia, what’s the term for the thing I just did?”

“I think that’s called zilching.”

The others studied Zack in wonder. More surprising than his table trick was the bright look on his face, his first smile in days.

“Zilching,” he said. “I like that.”

—

The rain went away that night and didn’t come back until the first of October. In the nine-day space between storms, the Silvers spent a lot of time thinking about temporis. They endeavored in their own unique ways to become better acquainted with their peculiar talents. Their results, like the weather, were a mix of scattered clouds and sunshine.

No one was surprised to see David blaze his way to the head of the class. Rarely a day went by without him demonstrating a mind-blowing new aspect of his weirdness. On Thursday, he created miniaturized ghosts of the group at dinner, displaying them on the table like a shoe-box diorama. On Sunday, he filled the backyard with constructs made of last night’s darkness. On Tuesday, he summoned five real-time projections of himself. They surrounded him like bodyguards, matching his every move and sound.

The next night, he premiered his greatest special effect yet.