The Flight of the Silvers (50 page)

THIRTY-ONE

The traffic light was nothing but a floating disc of lumis, two feet wide and red as a sunset. Fat gray pigeons fluttered through it while a hunched old woman crossed the street between tempic guardrails. A ghosted billboard stretched the length of the intersection, hawking heart-healthy breakfast cereal to idled drivers.

Zack leaned forward and craned his view at the near and distant streams of flying cars. He’d counted seven different levels of traffic when the light turned green, the billboard vanished, and the tempic rails gave way to open road.

Mia tapped his wrist. “Zack.”

He snapped out of his trance and pressed the gas pedal, marveling at the taxi in the rearview mirror. A true New York cabbie would have honked him into oblivion for dawdling at a green light. This wasn’t Zack’s city on any level. Calling this place New York was like calling a dog a zebra, or swapping the concepts of blue and yellow.

“This should be Soho,” he uttered. “I mean we came out of the Holland Tunnel, so . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what they call it now.”

Mia stroked his wrist with sympathy. Though she’d never set foot in the old New York, a future self had sold this world’s version as a paradise beyond description, beautiful enough to evoke tears. Now she glanced through dry eyes at the windblown scraps of litter, the garish assault of animated ads.
Wrong again,
she seethed.
You just keep giving me bad information.

Amanda writhed uncomfortably in the backseat. She could feel every tempic construct within a half-block radius, a hundred cold fingers pressing her thoughts. Barricaded storefronts stretched along both sides of the street, each one ready to ripple and dance for their visiting queen.

“What time is it?”

David checked his watch. “Half past ten.”

She eyed the stores suspiciously. “Middle of a Tuesday morning. Why is everything closed?”

Hannah stroked her lip in bother. The whole city seemed eerily quiet at the moment. There were only a handful of pedestrians on each block, most of them dressed from head to toe in lily-white garments. A husky street vendor sold a wide assortment of white Venetian masks.

“Something weird is going on here.”

“It’s not just here,” said Zack. “Everything was closed in Jersey too.”

Mia’s eyes bulged at a masked young couple in white bathrobes and sneakers. The man brandished a hand-painted placard that said
New York Thrives on 10-5
.

“Commemoration,” she said.

“What?”

“Ten-five. Today’s the anniversary of the Cataclysm.”

The Silvers glanced out their windows with fresh unease. They recalled Sterling Quint’s discussion of the great temporic blast that destroyed half of New York City on October 5, 1912. The day had become a major holiday in the United States and a near-religious event here in the rebuilt metropolis.

The Arrow turned north onto 6th Avenue. Mia read the scrolling lumic banner that stretched above all lanes.
This is our day, New York. The whole world is watching. Show them why this is the greatest city on Earth, now and forever.

Zack shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know if our timing’s really good or really bad.”

Mia plucked Peter’s day-old message from her shoulder bag and reread it. “We need to find a pay phone.”

“I’m looking.”

“Maybe we should look on foot,” Amanda suggested. “Get out and stretch our legs. If we can.”

One by one, the others checked on Theo in the front passenger seat. He’d spent the whole ride with his head against the window, twitching in restless slumber. Now his eyes were wide open and marked with deep red veins. His headaches had once again become bundled with visions, prophetic flashes too quick and obscure to make any sense. The only clear image he saw was Azral Pelletier. His harsh and handsome face popped up over and over, enough to erase all doubt. The white-haired man was coming back as sure as the moon, and probably sooner.

Theo glanced out at a distant flurry to the east. “I think I see where everyone went.”

—

The Ghostwalk was a ritual that dated back to the first Commemoration in 1913. It began as a silent procession down 3rd Avenue—fifty thousand mourners in white robes and masks, all marching for the souls of the lost. As the years progressed and cracked hearts slowly healed, the Ghostwalk grew a fluffy tail of musicians, dancers, and other sunny revelers who sought to honor the dead by celebrating life. The cavalcade expanded each year until it became known as the March of the Spirits.

Today the twin parades were joined in bipolar harmony, the yin and the yang, the grief and the joy. The event moved to Broadway in 1942, starting at 96th Street and ending at City Hall Park.

The Silvers caught the tail end of the Ghostwalk at 14th Street, at the corner of New Union Square. They hovered at the edge of the crowd, watching the parade through their newly purchased masks. They indulged the vendor when they saw aerocycle cops scanning the crowd from twenty feet above.

Mia felt ridiculous in her butterfly eye-mask, even though half the locals around her wore sillier disguises. She stood on her tiptoes in a vain attempt to peer over the wall of spectators.

David offered her a smirk and a hand. He looked like a superhero in his white domino mask.

“Let me give you a lift.”

Mia’s brow curled in worry. “You’re hurt.”

“My spine’s just fine. Come on.”

She climbed onto his back with wincing dread. To her amazement, he didn’t even grunt. Maybe she’d lost more weight than she realized.

“You sure this isn’t hurting you?”

“You’d know,” David sighed. “As you saw yesterday, I don’t handle pain very well.”

The procession continued past them. The majority of ghostwalkers wore plain white bathrobes. Some women sported snowy gowns. A few men were decked out in formal ivory vestments that had been passed down for three generations. The one item that never varied was the mask, an expressionless white face with black fabric eyeholes. The uniformity created an eerily powerful effect. For a moment Mia imagined she was watching the departed souls of her world, all the teachers and classmates and neighbors and cousins who didn’t get silver bracelets. And to think she’d snapped at the sisters for not realizing how lucky they were. She was alive. She was alive on the back of a beautiful boy with the heart of a lion and an unflinchingly deep regard for her. Mia never stopped replaying the scene on the highway, when David threatened to kill two Deps if they harmed a hair on her head. She wasn’t just lucky, she was blessed.

Mia locked her arms around David and heaved a warm sigh over his shoulder. “Don’t feel bad.”

“About what?”

“The way you acted yesterday. We don’t care about that. You’ve been there for us since day one and we love you. We’ll love you no matter what you do.”

She breathed a soft whisper into his ear. “I’ll love you no matter who you kill.”

Though the mask lay still on his impassive face, David’s voice carried a thin new tremor.

“You’re a rare and precious jewel, Miafarisi. I dread the day our paths diverge.”

Everyone turned to look as booming cheers erupted to the north. Exuberant music blared up the street. The last of the Ghostwalk was exiting the square. Now came the March of the Spirits.

Amanda crunched her brow behind her white burglar mask as confetti guns popped and the locals turned jubilant. The crowd had gone from funeral to Mardi Gras at the turn of a dime.

She sneaked an anxious peek at Zack, a parallel study in conflicting extremes. His rabbit-eared mask radiated levity while the eyes behind it screamed with bewilderment. He stood right next to her, but he might as well have been a thousand miles away.

She took his dangling hand in hers. “It has to be hard for you. Coming back to your hometown and finding it so different.”

Zack threw an antsy glance at the drugstore behind him, where a public phone lay encased inside an opaque metal cylinder. A red light on the door indicated that the tube was currently occupied.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems like every big difference in this world can be traced back to the Cataclysm in one way or another. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised New York changed the most.”

The first of the parade platforms approached, ferrying a gorgeous young blonde in a star-spangled minidress. She crooned a bouncy tribute to New York into her microphone while a thirty-foot ghostbox displayed a giant live projection of her buxom upper half. Zack noticed the empty space beneath the platform’s hanging drapes. It seemed aeris had turned all the floats literal.

Amanda stroked his hand with her thumb, then grimaced in affliction when he pulled it away.

“Zack . . .”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

“Understand what? We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

He pursed his lips in a crusty scowl. “If it’s a ‘let’s just be friends after all’ speech, I don’t need to hear it. You’ve been wearing it on your face for the last seven hours.”

Amanda threw a quick nervous glance at David, five feet away.

“It’s not what you think,” she said to Zack. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to explain it.”

“You don’t have to explain anything. It happens. It’s not like we signed a contract.”

Amanda clenched her jaw. She knew Zack well enough to see the mask behind the mask. He was determined to play the breezy teflon shrugger until one of them screamed.

“Would you listen to me? I’m not backing out. There’s just . . . a new complication.”

Exuberant children in brightly colored jumpsuits lined every edge of the second float. They reached into buckets and flung foil-wrapped candies at the crowd. Zack gave Amanda his full attention, even as a chocolate coin sailed between them.

“I’m all ears.”

She shook her head. “Not now. When we’re alone again, and when you’re less angry—”

“I’m not angry.”

“No. Of course not. You’re just convinced I dropped my feelings for you on a fickle whim. Why would that anger you?”

“Well, what did you expect me to think? Yesterday we had a nice plan worked out. Today you can barely look at me. I’ve had seven hours to scratch my head over it. All I have now are a bloody scalp and a few second thoughts of my own. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe it’ll be easier for everyone if we just forget it.”

Tiny spikes of stress tempis hatched from Amanda’s feet, piercing the straps of her borrowed sandals. She banished away the whiteness, then cast a thorny glower at the parade.

“I swear to God, Zack, sometimes I think you’re played by twins. I never know which one of you I’m going to get.”

“Great. Maybe the four of us can go out for burgers sometime.”

“Go to hell.”

Amanda cut through the crowd, her jaw held rigid with forced composure. Zack tossed another glance at the pay phone before trading a desolate look with Hannah. She wished the two of them would get over their issues, whatever they were, and just screw already. She feared she and Theo were partly to blame for their hesitation. They didn’t provide the best sales brochure for the carpe diem hookup.

They sat side by side on an unattended shoeshine stand, their faces both covered in weeping theater masks. Theo’s head dipped and jerked erratically. Hannah couldn’t tell if he was asleep or lost in premonitions. She ran gentle fingertips up and down his forearm. The caress always seemed to soothe him, no matter how far gone he was.

“Where’s the happy face?”

Hannah jumped at the high voice next to her. A cute young brunette leaned against the wall. She wore a sleeveless white gown that hugged every contour of her elfin body. Her long brown tresses matched Mia’s hairstyle to the strand. If it wasn’t for the girl’s honey skin and vaguely Eurasian features, Hannah might have wondered if a Future Mia had sent herself back in time.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“You and your fella are wearing the same theater mask,” the stranger noted. “It’s supposed to be one happy face and one sad face. You know, Thalia and Melpomene. The Muses of comedy and tragedy.”

Hannah felt silly to be conversing through a disguise. She pulled it away. The girl studied her.

“Nope. Still sad, but prettier now. Damn, hon, you’re a scorcher. I bet you drive all the boys wild.”

The actress bloomed a bleak little grin. “Not enough to keep them.”

“You seem to be doing all right with that one.”

Hannah peered at Theo, oblivious in his torpor. “It’s not like that.”

“I wasn’t slapping a label on it. I just see the way you’re comforting him without a second thought or a ‘what’s in it for me?’ Whatever you are to him, he’s lucky to have you.”

It was the sweetest notion Hannah heard in days. But for all the girl’s rosiness, she wielded a sad face herself. She held a glossy mask in her hand, the plain white façade that Hannah had spotted ad nauseam five minutes ago.

“You were in that first parade.”

“The Ghostwalk. Yeah. I do it every year, though I never make it the whole way without losing it. I’m probably the only one who still cries about the Cataclysm. Everyone else is thinking about their aunt Jody or that dog who ran out in the road.”

“Well, you can hardly blame them. It happened a century ago.”

The girl shrugged tensely. “What can I say? I’m a slow griever.”

The next float ferried four lithe young women in black rubber speedsuits, prancing around the platform in slow ballet motions. Suddenly their gear glowed with patchwork strips of color and they swayed around each other in a hazy blur. Hannah watched in gaping astonishment as their streaking hues combined to form ethereal images—an ocean sunset, a city skyline, a crude American flag. The crowd cheered wildly with each new tableau.

Soon the quartet de-shifted and resumed their gentle mincing. The girl smiled at Hannah’s slack-faced awe.

“Guess you’ve never seen lumis dancers before.”

“No. That was incredible. Jesus. I don’t know how they do that without breaking a bone.”

“Years of practice,” said the girl. “Takes months to rehearse one routine. You should see what the Chinese do with it. Their stage shows are mind-blowing.”