The Flight of the Silvers (57 page)

Mia lay cradled in Zack’s arms, her eyes wide with vacant horror as he pressed a bloody T-shirt to her chest wound. The cartoonist served a silent contrast to Theo’s raging sorrow, a snapshot image of a man in blanket shock. His tears had paused in mid-journey, lining his cheeks like scars.

Azral stood expressionless among the broken glass, calmly waiting for his protégé to collect himself.

“Theo . . .”

One by one, the doppelgängers vanished. A lone Theo crouched by Mia’s side. “How long does she have?”

“Moments,” Azral informed him. “She dies before the agents breach the barrier.”

“Oh God. There has to be something we can do.”

“I don’t know, Theo. Is there?”

“Don’t play games with me! I’m not in the mood!”

“It’s your mood that clouds you. Your emotions prevent you from seeing.”

“Seeing what?”

“The futures,” Azral said, with a sweeping hand gesture. “They reveal themselves in this place. They sing to us from every corner. Have you not wondered about the lights in the mist?”

Theo looked to the northern wall, at the tiny beads that twinkled within the fog. He’d glimpsed them everywhere he turned in this dreary gray world. He didn’t know why they scared him.

“What are they?”

“I said your talent was a violin, Theo. These . . .”

Azral moved behind him, plunging his fingers deep into the augur’s skull.

“These are the strings.”

Hot white strands of light converged on Theo from every direction. His consciousness erupted in a screaming torrent of images—a million parallel futures, all as different as siblings but knotted at the ends with the same painful traumas. Every string ended with his own cold death. Every string started with Mia’s.

“NO!”

Azral leaned in close, his imperious voice cutting through the chaos. “You see them now. All the branching possibilities. All the endless permutations and patterns. We’ve been so blind, Theo. Our species has lived for so long like moles in a tunnel. You’re among the first to step into the light and see time as it was meant to be seen. This is humanity’s greatest evolution. A whole new dimension of perception. It’s beautiful, is it not?”

“It hurts!”

“You hinder yourself.”

“She keeps dying!”

“You adopt the grief of your elder incarnations. For them, it’s too late to save her. Not for you. Detach yourself and perhaps you’ll find a brighter outcome hidden among the multitudes.”

With a raspy shout, Theo thrust his palms and cleared a six-foot ball of space around him. The strings now ended in a curved wall of pinlights. The bedlam in his thoughts dissipated.

Azral retracted his hands. “Good. Very good.”

The augur dropped to his ethereal knees, panting through imaginary lungs. “Go to hell . . .”

“I only seek to aid you. The girl can be saved.”

“You’re lying!”

“Look again. Search the strings more carefully. You’ve no reason to hurry. We don’t age here. Our bodies don’t clamor for food or sleep. In this realm, time is our servant. Use it.”

Theo raised his head and squinted at the array of tiny lights. Glancing at it was like staring into an endless crowd of suffering children, searching for the one who smiled. And Azral expected him to do this for days, weeks, years on end.
Is this how you learned the strings, you murderous shit?
Is this what turned you cold and white?

He squinted his eyes shut. “I can’t do this! I can’t keep watching her die!”

“Then she is indeed lost.”

“You know how to save her. Just tell me!”

“Am I indebted to you, boy? Are you the one who rescued me from a dying world, or was it perhaps the other way around?”

“I never asked you to give me a goddamn bracelet! And you wouldn’t have saved us if you didn’t need us for something. So just tell me! Tell me how to keep her alive!”

Azral sighed defeatedly, a reaction that nearly made Theo burst with jaded laughter. Though he was new to the Gray or the God’s Eye or whatever this place was called, he was a decorated veteran in disappointing people. The familiarity soothed him like a warm shot of whiskey.

“It seems I overestimated you, Theo.”

“You found me drunk at a bus stop. What did you expect?”

“I found you long before that, but no matter.” Azral touched Theo’s back. “Come.”

Their final journey was different from the others. Instead of twirling around like a leaf, Theo shot forward at blurring speed, his vision a tableau of bright, streaking colors. Occasionally he felt a shift in direction, as if Azral steered them down a branching path.
Forks in the road,
Theo mused, though he imagined it was hardly so binary. There were likely millions of options at every juncture, millions of variations and subvariations, even a few minor miracles.

After an indeterminate period—nestled somewhere in the space between “soon” and “soon enough”—the pair emerged into a sparse but cozy living room. Venetian blinds filtered afternoon sunlight. Taped moving boxes lined the bare walls. A group of mismatched chairs and couches stood in sloppy formation around a circular glass coffee table. The cushions were occupied by five people Theo readily recognized, including himself.

His twin stretched out on a plush recliner, locking his arms around Hannah’s waist as she wearily leaned against him. Zack, David, and Amanda all slouched alone in their sofas. Amanda wore a makeshift splint of broken broomsticks and duct tape. The others sported numerous bandages.

The spectral Theo peeked over David’s shoulder and examined his wristwatch.

“It’s a quarter after one. A little over an hour from now.”

Azral cracked a patronizing grin at Theo’s muddled notion of “now.”

“Where is this?” Theo asked.

“Approximately five miles east of the office tower.”

Theo peeked out the window at a red-leafed sycamore tree. “Brooklyn. Jesus, we really did get out.”

“In this string, yes.”

“But what about—”

Hannah cut him off with a melodious yawn, startling him. He thought the scene was a still frame like all the others. His friends were merely languishing in dull stupor.

Now he heard the clinking of ceramics through the kitchen door. His eyes bulged when Mia entered with a tray of steaming mugs. Though her face drooped with fatigue like all the others’, she looked healthy enough to live for decades.

She placed a cup on the end table next to Amanda. “He doesn’t have milk. Sorry.”

The widow stared ahead in dead torpor, her voice a flimsy wisp. “Okay.”

The spectral Theo continued to study Mia in slack awe. “God. It’s like she was never shot. How did that happen? Was there a reviver in the building?”

“There was a reviver in that very room,” Azral replied. “You simply failed to see it.”

“Well, how do I find it then?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I go back. How do I make this the future that happens?”

Azral eyed him with dark disbelief, as if Theo were lost in a broom closet.

“This
is
happening, child. Every path of time exists on the landscape, one as real as the next. Did you think I merely brought you here for instruction?”

Now Theo was truly lost. “What are you telling me?”

“I said you could resume your journey at any time. You have only to concentrate to take your place in that chair. Your life will continue seamlessly from this moment. Is that not preferable?”

Theo blinked distractedly, his mind twisting in furious dilemma. As tempting as it was to be done with all the day’s traumas, he couldn’t shake the subtle air of incongruity that kept him detached from this scene. These friends didn’t feel exactly like the people he knew. This was Zack with an asterisk, Hannah with a caveat.

Azral studied him warily. “What troubles you now?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. I mean if I do this, what happens to the other timeline?”

“It continues.”

“Without me?”

“Very much with you.”

“How does that work?”

“Far beyond your understanding,” Azral replied, with crusty impatience. “To explain it now would be like explaining a sphere to a circle. You’re not ready. Perhaps you never will be. You’re more like Rander than I feared.”

Theo crossed his arms and stared at his other self sandwiched comfortably between a soft chair and a warm actress. There had to be a catch to this bow-wrapped present. This string had to have its own strings attached.

“Is this what you do, Azral? You pick and choose the futures you want?”

“As I said—”

“Right. It’s beyond me. There’s no denying that. But I’m not like Evan. The thought of jumping trains right now makes me queasy. It feels like I’m leaving my friends behind.”

Azral shook his head in brusque bemusement. “You beg me for hints and now reject the full answer. You’re a fool.”

“I am a fool,” Theo admitted. “I’ve been one as long as I can remember. But you know what? You came at me on the second-worst day of my life. You showed me everyone I care about in horrible danger and then somehow expected me to grasp the intricacies of the universe. For a master of time, you have shitty timing. You also killed Bill Pollock. So no, I don’t trust this answer of yours. And I don’t believe for one second that you just happened to save us from a dying Earth. I’m pretty sure it was healthy until you came along.”

In the sharp and frosty silence, Theo grew convinced that Azral’s next move would be lethal. Instead the white-haired man merely summoned a single strand of light from the wall. The moment it hit Theo, he felt a vague sense of familiarity, like a numb hand on his arm.

“What . . . what is this?”

“The path of return,” said Azral. “This string will lead you back seventy-six minutes to the place you and your companions still suffer. If you proceed slowly enough, you’ll witness events in reverse and note all the timely decisions that enabled your escape. Perhaps you’ll succeed in duplicating this outcome. Perhaps you’ll fail and lose more than one friend in the process. It seems a needless risk to take when you’re already here, but I suppose fools will do as they do.”

Long seconds passed as Theo pondered the heavy new task ahead. Azral shined his cool blue eyes on Hannah.

“Seh tu’a mortia rehu eira kahne’e nada ehru heira.”

Theo eyed him strangely. “What was that?”

“An old expression of my people, a rallying mantra for the soldiers and scientists who kill for the greater good. ‘I shall feed Death before I starve her.’”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You think me a monster when I’m merely a crusader. My parents and I fight for the greatest purpose of all. If we succeed in our endeavor here, we’ll save countless trillions of lives. We will starve Death like none other before us.”

Theo narrowed his eyes. For a cynical moment, Azral looked as silly as a biologist explaining the benefits of cancer research to his lab mice.

“Small comfort to the ones you serve to her,” Theo groused. “When’s it our turn?”

“We didn’t bring you here to kill you. On the contrary, we’ve labored to keep you all alive. Do you think it was fate that rescued you from your coma? Was it the hand of God that pulled Hannah from the brink of a fatal concussion? We’ve provided you with comfort and aid at every turn, Theo. And yet even now as I offer a means to save the child Farisi, you see me as an enemy.”

“How am I supposed to know what you are to us when you won’t tell us what we are to you?”

“Crucial,” said Azral. “There are those among you who are crucial to our plans. I would think that’d be obvious by now.”

“But what do you
want
with us?”

Azral regarded him with a jaded leer. “I see the futures better than you, child. Telling you now serves no benefit. You’ll know when it suits us.”

Theo chucked his ethereal hands. “So we just go about our lives in the meantime, hoping we don’t do anything to piss you off.”

“If you hinder us by accident, you’ll be duly warned as the elder Given was.”

And if we hinder you on purpose?
Theo wondered, before he could stop the thought.

The mist on the wall grew dark and stormy. Azral floated toward the swirling exit, then turned around to bathe Theo in an icy stare.

“Look to the strings, boy. See what becomes of our enemies.”

He disappeared into the fog, leaving Theo alone in this quiet scene, this teasing preenactment of better times. It seemed utterly daft to throw himself back into the fray and risk Mia’s life in retrospect. And yet the more he thought of Azral, the more he feared the numbing effects of this talent. If he had access to a billion Mias, how long before he stopped mourning the loss of one or two of them? How long before he shrugged off the death of one measly Earth?

He worked his hands around the lone strand of light and found it as solid as a rope. With a hearty tug, he pulled himself toward the past, determined to reverse engineer their escape from the office building. Theo didn’t care how long it took him. He had all the time in the world to get it right.

THIRTY-FOUR

The seconds moved with slow-ticking fury as David watched the last two Gothams stagger toward the exit. While his maimed right hand felt light enough to float away, his other wrist was burdened with a .40 caliber pistol and a vintage silver watch. It had been forty-four ticks since Rebel’s last gunshot echoed through the eastern arch, ample time for David to envision all the worst scenarios. The thought of Mia with a bullet in her eye—just one shade darker than the current reality—made his gun arm twitch with a vicious life of its own.
Tick, tick, tick.

The hands on his watch hit 11:57 when he leapt out from behind his pillar and summoned a line of ghostly duplicates. Eight Davids aimed their pistols in synch, speaking with one firm voice.

“Stop.”

Rebel and Ivy turned around at the portal, freezing at the sight of the one-man posse just forty feet away. Ivy jumped in front of her husband.

“Don’t shoot us! We’re leaving! We’re going!”

“Try it,” David hissed. “See how well that works for you.”

Sixty feet above, Amanda wrung her fingers in screaming tension.
Just let them go, David. You’ll get yourself killed!

Rebel dropped his empty gun and heel-kicked it through the portal. He tried to speak but could only groan a pained garble.

The eight Davids cocked their heads. “I’m sorry. Was that English?”

“He can’t talk,” Ivy explained. “Look at him.”

“Yes. I can see someone already had their fun with him. What’s he trying to say?”

“He’s asking you to let me go.”

“Does he expect me to believe you’re innocent in all this?”

“No. But our child is. Look at me.”

David narrowed his cool blue eyes at her bulging stomach. “What’s your name?”

“Krista.”

He raised his gun. “Try again.”

“Ivy! My name’s Ivy!”

“Well, Ivy, tell me something. Why should I care about the innocent lives in your family when you clearly don’t care about the innocent lives in mine?”

Rebel leaned forward in growling defense. Ivy held him back.

“You think we like doing this? We’re not assassins. I’m a network engineer. My husband’s a security consultant. Freddy was a college student.”

“Who’s Freddy?”

“The boy you shot in the face.”

David balked at her knowledge before hardening again. “You sent him to kill us. I was only defending myself.”

“That’s just what
we’re doing! We’re defending ourselves and everyone we know! You have no idea what’s at stake here!”

“Nor do you,” he said, as he peered through the arch. “See, your man just fired seven gunshots and I’m anxious to know where they went. So we’re going to walk in that direction and find out together. I swear to you, if any of my people—”

A distant shriek echoed through the chamber, filtering down from the fifth floor. While the trio in the lobby looked up, Amanda turned her white gaze down the hall.

“Hannah?”

Seeing his chance, Rebel wrapped his arms around Ivy and threw them back through the portal. David aimed his pistol at the white liquid pool as it shrank closed. He muttered a curse, then waved away his mirror selves.

The door to the maintenance hall flew open with a kick. David watched Theo with blank-faced puzzlement as the augur bolted through the lobby like a champion sprinter. His urgent expression filled David with dread.

“Theo, what happened? What did you see?”

A second scream rang out from the fifth floor. David launched his troubled gaze back and forth, up and east, before forcing a hot decision.

“Goddamn it.”

He ran after Theo. His wristwatch ticked to 11:58.

—

Theo had no idea how long he’d been in the God’s Eye. For all he knew, he spent days on his backtracking path through time, analyzing every twist and turn of their impending escape. He knew how precarious these next few minutes would be. He didn’t have an inch of room for error.

He rushed past the reception desk of Nicomedia Magazines, over the broken glass, and into the cubicle where Zack cradled Mia in his arms. The two of them breathed the same shallow breaths in synch, wore the same bombshelled expression. Only Zack looked up and noticed Theo.

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Zack . . .”

“Where’s Amanda?!”

“She’s all right. Listen—”

Zack shook his head, venting all the notions that had stacked up in his mind like greasy dishes.

“I think the bullet missed her heart. If we can keep her from slipping into shock, she’ll have a chance. Amanda will know what to do.”

“I know what to do, Zack. You have to listen to me . . .”

They both turned at the sound of hurried footsteps. The moment David reached the cubicle, his jaw went slack and his gun fell from his hand.

“Mia . . .” He dropped to his knees and clutched her arm, his bloody face twisting with grief. “No.
No!
”

Mia kept her glazed stare on the ceiling, her consciousness swirling at the bottom of a deep, dark well. She could hear David’s voice far above her. She could feel Zack holding her dying body in his arms. Strange how she came into this world buried six feet underground and was now fixing to leave it like a nestled newborn.

From grave to cradle,
she thought.
I did it all backwards.

David brushed the bangs from her forehead. “You stay with me, Mia. You hear me?” He turned to Theo. “You said the Deps were coming.”

“They’re already here.” He glanced at the wall clock. “They’ll hit the lobby in eighty-two seconds.”

“If they’re storming the building, they’ll have revivers outside.”

“No, David—”

“I’ll bring her to them! They’ll fix her!”

“And then take you both,” Zack said.

“You’ll get us back, just like we got Amanda and Theo back.”

“You think Melissa won’t expect that next time? You think she’ll make it easy?”

“Zack, you have to trust me—”

Theo kicked a file cabinet. “NO! She’s going to die in
seconds
! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! You’re the only hope she has, Zack!
You’re
the reviver!”

The cartoonist drank him in through saucer eyes. It had been five days since his last healing attempt, one that had gruesome consequences for a poor young fawn. The thought of trying again on Mia, a much larger creature, seemed as safe as closing her wound with dynamite.

“It won’t work,” he insisted. “It’ll just kill her quicker.”

David nodded darkly at Theo. “He’s right. You didn’t see what happened last time.”

Theo was all too familiar with the risks. He’d stopped at this very place in the God’s Eye to view the alternate outcomes. Zack only managed to save Mia ten percent of the time at best. In nearly all other instances, she ended up a pristine corpse or a desiccated husk. Most horrific of all were the riftings, the times Mia woke up screaming in agony as her distended stomach exploded in a torrent of blood and gases.

Theo had spent long, painful hours analyzing the details, looking for some identifiable factor that separated the wins from the losses. In the end, it all came down to timing. There was a three-second window where Zack succeeded more often than not. It was almost here.

“Zack, I’ve seen it. I’ve watched you bring her back to life. But you got to get ready. You have to do it exactly when I tell you. Please.”

David gripped Zack’s arm. “Let me take her to the agents. It’s her only chance.”

“David, shut up! You’re killing her!”

“
You’re
killing her! You have no idea what you’re doing!”

Zack tuned out his friends, his addled gaze drifting around the cubicle. He was stunned to find a recent issue of
Wonders
with his own image on the cover, the famous photo of his plummet from a hotel balcony. Once again he saw his face contorted in purple agony as Amanda’s great tempic hand squeezed him from above. In cropped context, it looked like God Himself had reached down to smite him. Now the bastard’s cruel hand was coming for Mia.

No,
thought the cartoonist.
You will not.

“David, get back.”

“Wait. Listen to me—”

“Get back!”

Theo pulled David to his feet. Zack lay Mia flat on the carpet, then joined the others at the cubicle entry. The augur fixed his stare on the wall clock, his finger raised tensely.

“Wait.”

Suddenly Mia wheezed a loud and broken gasp. Her eyes fluttered to a close.

“What was that?” Zack asked.

“Her last breath,” Theo replied. “Go.”

Zack clenched his fists and squinted in nervous concentration. Mia’s limp body shuddered. Her skin lit up with a gauzy incandescence. Zack gritted his teeth, struggling to hold the temporis that bucked and swerved like a rickety spotlight. He knew that if any part of Mia fell outside the glow, even for a moment, she’d be lost forever.

Four seconds into his battle, the magazine cover penetrated his thoughts, shaking his focus and plaguing him with an overwhelming sense of futility. He shot his rage upward at the malignant forces of the universe—the ones who took his world, then yanked his brother away on a short rubber string. Now they teased him with a flicker of hope for Mia. He could already see the punch line coming.

Suddenly, Amanda’s lovely face bloomed in his thoughts like a sunrise. Her lips curled in a wry and canny smirk.

Oh Zachary, you schmuck. You cynic. You think I wasted time cursing the heavens when you fell from that balcony? Uh-uh. I ran right to the edge and caught you. That’s not God’s hand smiting you in that photo. That’s Him and me saving you.

Warm tears spilled down Zack’s cheeks as his inner Amanda stroked his face.

It’s so easy to believe, after everything we’ve seen, that we live in a cold and senseless universe. But as long as we have a world to live in, as long as we have people to love, we are the lucky ones, Zack. We are the blessed.

Now go catch our little sister. Bring her back to us.

With a last cry of strain, Zack engulfed Mia in a cool blinding flash. David and Theo unshielded their eyes to find Mia motionless on the floor. Her feet were bare and her hair was damp from the shower. Her clean silk blouse was unbuttoned all the way to her navel, revealing a perfectly unblemished sternum.

The men stood as frozen as statues while they waited for her body’s response. They knew this was the crucial moment, the point where Mia would scream or explode or merely die quietly. Or . . .

She sat up with a lurch, gasping with urgent breath. David and Theo flanked her sides.

“Mia!”

She looked around the cubicle with frantic eyes, and then screamed in bewilderment. This Mia was nine hours younger than the one Rebel shot. She’d only just slammed the bathroom door on the sisters in Quinwood. Then suddenly her whole existence screeched like a yanked vinyl record and she felt the vague sense of drowning. Now here she was in some strange corporate office that looked like it had been through World War II. Zack and David were both marred with bloody gashes. Theo never looked healthier.

Mia glanced down at her open shirt, then anxiously covered herself. “What’s happening? Where are we?”

David wrapped his arms around her, hugging her with a gushing relief that scared her as much as it thrilled her. She feebly returned the embrace. “You’re bleeding.”

He croaked a soft chuckle. “I’m all right. I’ll be fine.”

“David, what’s going on?”

“We’ll explain it,” Theo promised. “But right now we have to go. David, can you carry her?”

He nodded at Theo, his young brow curled in gentle contrition. “What’s the plan?”

“There’s a hatch in the generator room. It’ll take us underground. We have to move fast.”

“I heard someone screaming upstairs. I think it was—”

“We’ll deal with that.” Theo looked to Zack. The reversal had left him even more shell-shocked than Mia.

“Zack . . .” Theo shook his shoulder. “Zack!”

“Huh?”

“I know that took a lot out of you, but we’re not done yet. This is the hard part.”

Zack’s absent stare turned sharp with worry. “Amanda. Hannah . . .”

“I know.”

“We have to get them.”

“We will. I promise. Come on.”

While Zack regained his footing, Theo avoided David’s suspicious leer. It seemed like weeks ago that Azral warned the augur about the burden of foresight.
Our choices often seem questionable to those around us, even cruel. You’ll know this soon enough.

“Soon enough” had come far too soon for Theo. There was no way to prepare his friends, no time to explain why they had to leave Hannah and Amanda behind. Even the best strings turned in bad directions. The sisters had to suffer just a little bit more.

—

The law office shook with loud orchestral drama. Evan had cued Hannah’s iPod to the original Broadway cast recording of
Les Misérables
, thirty-ninth track. Now he danced around the reception area in his security guard uniform, a puckish smile on his face and a cone-shaped gun in his swinging hand.

He minced his way to the dismal corner where Hannah wept, strutting with operatic pomp as he marched to the final battle song.

“Ohh, would you listen to that drama? I’m all tingly. Aren’t you tingly?”

The actress lay fetal on the floor of her cage, her hands pressed over her eyes. Evan had drawn three screams from her with his handheld jolter, a weapon legally restricted to riot police. Though its static electric charge could clear a small crowd without causing injury, the blast was far less gentle to those who couldn’t flee. Every inch of Hannah’s skin throbbed with hot needle stings.

Evan paused the iPod, then heaved a bleak sigh.

“Tragic. The only surviving music from our world and it’s all showtunes and crap pop. Typical Hannah. Bouncy, flouncy, mispronouncy. It kills me to think of all the great minds who died while you just keep on jiggling.”

She pulled her hands away, only to flinch at his sickening leer. It bore through her clothes and skin, making her feel worse than naked, worse than the dumb animal he’d trapped so easily.

“Bet you’re itching to know how I got my hands on your little pink jukebox.”