The Flight of the Silvers (6 page)

It’s you,
her higher functions insisted.
You’re the one doing this.

“No . . .”

The last working piston in her mind told her to run, and so she ran. She ran over the grass and out of the marina, through the alley and all the way back to the business district. Wherever she went, she couldn’t escape the smoky blue haze. Everywhere she looked, cars moved like pedestrians and pedestrians moved like turtles. Litter scraps fluttered in the wind like lazy bumblebees.

Suddenly a large shadow enveloped her. She turned around and looked up.

A massive metal saucer, the size of a Little League field, emerged over the building tops. It floated hundreds of feet above the asphalt, slowly spinning on its own axis.

Unlike everything else in Hannah’s trudging blue world, the ship moved at a decent pace, at least twenty miles an hour. From below, it looked like a giant metal wagon wheel. Each wedge was filled with a fluorescent white light.

Once the silver hub came into view, Hannah saw a tableau of man-size letters.

ALBEE’S AERSTRAUNT

ALL-AMERICAN CUISINE

2-HOUR BRUNCH ROUNDS @ 8X

FOR RESERVATIONS CALL #49-95-ALBEE

Her last thread of perseverance snapped. A shriek rose up from the core of her being. She ran again, her frantic gaze fixed on the high-flying bistro. Her wind sprint lasted fifteen feet, ending smack at the side of a parked Metro bus. A crunch. A crack. A wall of pain. And then Hannah’s whole crazy world, her
terra insana
, went from blue to black.

—

She opened her eyes to white clouds. The heads of a dozen bystanders formed a popcorn string around the edge of her vision. She could feel the cold, hard sidewalk beneath her aching body. The deep blue madness had ended, thank God. Her onlookers moved and talked at normal speed.

As soon as Hannah tried to get up, a sharp agony seized her left shoulder. She cried out.

A new head eclipsed her view—a stout, middle-aged man with beady brown eyes and a thick walrus mustache. He wore an authoritative green uniform that Hannah didn’t recognize. A cop? A guard? A forest ranger?

“Try not to move,” he told her. “You wrenched yourself pretty good.”

“It hurts . . .”

“Yeah. I fig you dislocated your shoulder. I can pop it back in but we have to get you better situated. Just try to stay still, okay? What’s your name?”

“I can’t do this . . .”

“Yes you can. You’ll be okay. Listen, I couldn’t find cards on you. What’s your name?”

“H-Hannah.”

“Hi, Hannah. I’m Martin Salgado. I want you to relax now, all right? I’m here to help.”

The man directed his voice at someone she couldn’t see. “Turn her on three. Ready? One . . . two . . . three.”

Hannah sensed three different hands on her body. They tilted her two inches to the right, triggering another sharp jolt in her shoulder. She squealed in agony.

“Sorry,” said Martin. “No avoiding that. But the good news is that I got an epallay right here with your name on it. Just stay easy.”

He slid a smooth board beneath her before rolling her flat again. With a soft electric whirr, Hannah rose three feet off the sidewalk.

Martin stood at her side with an adhesive bandage in his grip—fire-red, with a white “E” in the middle. He peeled it off and pressed it against Hannah’s injured shoulder.

“What is that? What did you put on me?”

“That’s the epallay,” he told her. “In a few minutes, you won’t feel the pain.”

Just outside her view, Martin’s partner gently pushed Hannah forward. She rode with eerie steadiness, like she was riding an oiled track. She thought about the baby stroller and wondered if she now had to add herself to the ever-growing list of things that shouldn’t be floating.

The wall of bystanders opened up. A middle-aged woman crunched her brow at Hannah’s two handlers.

“Hey, shouldn’t you fellas wait for the police?”

“Mind your own,” said Martin.

Hannah grabbed his wrist. “Wait, you guys aren’t cops?”

Martin laughed amicably. He hadn’t heard that word in decades. “No, we’re Salgado Security, a private contract firm. I’m the proprietor. The one pushing you is my son Gerry. We’re gonna take good care of you.”

“No, no. Wait. Stop. Stop. I don’t want this.”

“Listen, Hannah, I don’t mean to be quick with you, but we’re on a bite here—”

“No, you don’t understand. I need to wake up. None of this is happening. I need to wake up.”

Martin raised his palm. The floating stretcher stopped. While he rummaged through his shoulder bag, Hannah craned her head at Martin’s young and burly son. Tears flowed up her temples.

“I can’t take it anymore. Help me. Please.”

“Dad . . .”

“I got it,” said Martin, while unwrapping another adhesive. This one was black and square, the size of a fingernail. He peeled it from the paper and then affixed it to Hannah’s neck.

“What was that? What—”

“Baby spot. It’s a mood-lifter. In two minutes, you’ll feel a whole lot better.”

The stretcher moved again. She floated thirty feet to the edge of a parked green van.

“Wait. Wait. Where are you taking me?”

“It’s all right. I’m bringing you to folks who’ll be able to help you.”

“Who?”

“Nice people,” said Martin. “Smart people. They hired us to find you all and bring you back to safety. You’ll be okay. Trust me.”

The Salgados loaded her into the van. Once inside, Martin sat Hannah up in her stretcher and popped her arm back into its socket. All the pain fled her body in a quick and glorious instant.

“Wow. That’s . . .”

Martin smiled. “Told you.”

By the time he finished wrapping her arm in a cozy black sling, the baby spot on her neck had opened every dark curtain in her head, flooding her with sunshine. Suddenly she could see the overwhelming positives of her situation. Maybe these clients of Martin’s were as smart and nice as he said they were. Maybe they’d make perfect sense of everything. And if they could find Hannah, maybe they could also find Amanda and Mom and everyone else she knew and cared about. All the good people of Earth, gathered up like pilgrims to start a happy new society. It had the potential to be wonderful. Hannah could run the theater.

As the engine started, the actress found herself smiling for the first time today. She smiled at the people on the street. She smiled at the floating cars she couldn’t see. She smiled at the flying saucer that served brunch on weekends. She smiled at the thought of mimosas over San Diego.

Soon the van pulled a U-turn. Hannah turned her head and smiled at the bus she’d collided with. She could see through the window, to the sprawling web of cracks on the opposite glass. She was pretty sure she caused that damage, but she wasn’t remotely bothered. It was a brave new world with strange new rules, and Hannah smiled at the possibilities.

FOUR

Twelve miles east of the San Diego Harbor, and seven feet down, a writhing young figure came awake in darkness. For the first few breaths of her new existence, the girl in the bracelet lived in a near-perfect state of incomprehension, the kind she hadn’t experienced since her own messy birth, nearly fourteen years ago. She didn’t know who she was or what she was, if she was alive or dead. She didn’t even know if she had a body.

But then she smelled her own sweat, felt the cotton folds of her pajamas. Now the salient details of her life came trickling back in bullet points. She was Mia Farisi, fresh out of middle school with a 4.0 GPA and a weight of 150. She was born and raised in La Presa, where she lived in a two-story house with her father, her grandmother, and three burly brothers. A fourth one served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. Mia made him e-mail her every day, just to let her know he was okay.

Except . . . Things were not okay. Something bad had happened right here in La Presa. Something that sounded a lot like war.

Her mind flashed back to the thunderous booms that shook the house at 4:42 this morning, when all the clocks stopped and all the planes fell to earth. Within moments, Peter Farisi burst into his daughter’s room, shirtless and panicked.

“Take Nana to the basement! Don’t come out till I tell you it’s safe!”

“Dad, what—”

“Just go!”

It was in the basement that something terrible had happened. A strange vibration on her wrist. An unexpected light. A rumble from above. And then . . .

“Nana?”

The word rolled up Mia’s throat like sandpaper. She’d screamed herself raw before fainting, but she didn’t know why. The last few moments of her memory were still a muddled blur.

She scrambled to her knees and fumbled through the darkness. The floor around her was concave and covered in dirt. No, it
was
dirt. She stood up and felt the wall. Also dirt, also curved. As Mia crossed to the other side, her bare foot slipped on a pair of smooth wooden planks. Her honor student brain—now working at two bars of power—processed the data and came back with a flustered guess.
Loose steps from the basement. You were standing right on
them.

She continued to feel the walls—perfectly curved all around, like someone had taken an eight-foot ice cream scoop to the earth and carved out a perfect sphere.

Or an egg.

Mia gasped. She remembered the egg of light now. It had encased her on the basement steps. Her grandmother had clawed at its ethereal shell, feebly trying to extricate her. Mia remembered seeing white steam in Nana’s cries. Winter breath in the third week of July, in a town ten miles north of the Mexican border.

“Nana?”

At three bars of power, Mia’s brain finally introduced her to the problem at hand.

“Oh no. No . . .”

She reached up as far as her five-foot frame would let her, feeling nothing but air. She seized a stair plank and jabbed it at the ceiling. Crumbs of dirt drizzled down on her.

“Oh no. No, no, no, no . . .”

While she continued her frantic stabs at the earth above, words of alarm scrolled along her inner news ticker.
You’re buried. You’re buried. You’re buried alive. You’re buried alive and you’re gonna die.

—

“It’s nothing to get upset about,” Nana had insisted. “These things happen.”

At ten o’clock last night, Vera Farisi entered the dimly lit kitchen and found Mia rummaging through the cabinets in busy fluster. She bounced from shelf to shelf, scanning the calorie counts of every food item and marking them in her notebook. An unfortunate encounter at the mall had left her tense and despondent.

Vera flipped on the light switch. “Sweetheart—”

“Leave it off. I can see.”

“Those girls were only teasing you because they’re insecure.”

“No, Nana, that’s . . . You just don’t understand.”

Vera flicked a spotty hand in exasperation. In her eyes, Mia was a beautiful girl with sharp hazel eyes, flawless olive skin, and a lush brown mane that any woman would kill for. Yes, the child was a little chubby, and had an unfortunate penchant for dark and frumpy clothes, but she was nothing close to the six-chinned horror she saw in the mirror.

Mia read the nutrition label on her favorite dessert snack, then croaked a surly groan. There was nothing even remotely dietetic in the house. The men in her family were all built like tanks. They could eat a plate of lard and burn it off by suppertime.

“That was just a sneak peek of what I’ll get in high school,” she insisted. “I’ll be a walking target every day.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do. And I deserve it for letting myself get this fat.”

For the thousandth time, Vera cursed the girl’s mother, a vain and selfish
stronza
who’d abandoned the family years ago. Mia needed female guidance. All she had was this wrinkled old crone who hadn’t been a teenager since World War II.

“Tell me what I can do for you, peanut. Can I make you something?”

“No! Are you even listening to me?”

Mia lowered her head and winced at herself.

“I’m sorry, Nana. I’m just . . .”

Her grandmother smiled softly. For all the girl’s neurotic self-loathing, she was still the darling treasure of the family, the one who stayed sweet and sensible while her brothers swung through the house like wrecking balls. The Farisi men loved her with such fervent devotion that Vera pitied the first boy who was foolish enough to give her grief.

“Come here, angel.”

Mia crossed the kitchen and embraced her, sighing with self-rebuke. It was hard to forget how Vera had grown up in fascist Italy, a barefoot orphan who’d lived from crumb to crumb. And now here was her granddaughter, wailing over a weight gain like it was the end of the world.

God help me,
Mia thought, as the kitchen lights flickered.
God help me the day I have real problems.

—

Mia blindly thrust the plank at the ceiling, her breath spilling out in high wheezes. Dirt rained down in clumps—falling into her hair, onto her face, down her pajama top. She felt an unpleasant tickle as something crawled across her cheek on tiny legs. Screaming, she dropped the board and furiously slapped her skin until the wriggling stopped.

She fell to her knees and wept. For all she knew, she was miles underground. Even if she stood just three feet under grass, she’d never make it out. She was too short. And digging would only bring the world down on her anyway. All things considered, she’d rather die with stale air in her mouth than fresh dirt. If she was lucky, she’d die sleeping.

A faint light suddenly pierced the blackness of the grave. Mia looked up to see a luminous white disc hanging in the air, two feet in front of her. It started out the size of a coin but then expanded vertically. Two quarters tall. Five quarters. Twenty.

At forty quarters of height, the strange object dropped into the soil.

Dumbfounded, Mia picked it up. It was a cigar tube made of some glow-in-the-dark metal. Unscrewing the lid revealed ten smooth plastic sticks, all wrapped in a long strip of paper with handwriting on the outside. She unfurled it, squinting at the words in the dull radiance of the tube.

PS—Shake the lumicands to light them up.

She shook one of the sticks, then squawked in surprise as a small flame ignited at the end. The fire was fluorescent white and gave off no heat whatsoever. Mia put her free hand above it and then in it. The flame licked her palm harmlessly.

In the new light, she caught more handwriting on the other side of the note.

Mia, there are only 16 inches of dirt between you and sunlight. Use the lumicands. Use the boards. Keep digging. Trust me.

She had to be imagining all this. Maybe she was hallucinating from oxygen deprivation. She noticed her breaths were sharper now. The air felt thicker.

Crazy or sane, she was running out of time.

Mia shook each of the candles and then stuck them into the walls, as if decorating a cake from the inside. By the tenth and final flame, her grave was as well lit as an office cube.

She took a moment to notice her silver bracelet, a strange new adornment that had mysteriously appeared overnight. It terrified her to think that someone had crept into her room and slipped it on her while she slept. She didn’t even know how that was possible. The band had no seam and was too tight to slide over her hand. Her mysterious gifter would have had to break her thumb.

She shelved the puzzle and resumed her frantic digging. After two minutes, she managed to carve a small hat of air at the top of the egg, but she had yet to pierce daylight. Her shoulder muscles screamed with strain. She couldn’t take a breath without coughing. She couldn’t stop crying as dark memories came trickling back.

“Nana . . .”

—

“I’m sorry,” Mia said, as she shivered beneath a blanket.

She huddled with her grandmother in the basement, stashed against the wall between old moving boxes. A dusty kerosene lamp burned at their feet, casting jittery shadows on the stone. The electricity had been out for five hours now. The Farisi men went out to investigate the clamor four hours ago. They had yet to come back.

Mia’s eyes glistened in the flame light. “I should have never gotten so worked up about those stupid girls at the mall.”

Vera squeezed her arm. Though the woman put on a brave face, Mia could hear the strain in her voice. Every instinct she had was screaming that her son and grandsons were dead.

She stroked Mia’s arm. “I know, peanut. I’m just sorry you never had proper advice on these matters. You could have used a mother in your life. Or a sister.”

Mia rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder. “You’re all the mother and sister I need.”

Vera bit her lip and looked away. She hadn’t prayed since September of 1943, when Allied tanks rolled into Salerno. Lord only knew what was happening out there now. She held Mia tight and sent her broken thoughts upward.
Please, God. Don’t let her die. If I should fall, please bring her to someone who’ll care for her.

A loud creak from upstairs turned Mia’s gaze. “Dad?”

She jumped to her feet. Vera clambered after her. “Mia, wait . . .”

“Dad, is that you?”

Halfway up the steps, she felt a strong vibration on her wrist. Mia barely had a chance to notice the glimmering bracelet before a bright yellow haze enveloped her, surrounding her in a near-perfect sphere.

Vera threw off her blanket. “Mia!”

“Nana, what’s happening?”

The walls trembled with violent force. The piercing creaks of metal and wood filtered down through the ceiling. The entire house above them seemed to be screaming. The whole world was coming apart.

—

The candles in the grave began to sputter. Mia clenched her jaw and kept digging, her throat whistling with each desperate gulp of air. She couldn’t shut out the image of her grandmother, helplessly clawing at Mia’s egg of light as she cried puffs of steam. Winter breath in the third week of July . . .

“No . . .”

. . . in a town ten miles north of the Mexican border.

“No!”

And then something terrible happened. The house, the roof, the heavens themselves, came down on top of them. In a span of a scream, everything Mia knew disappeared in a sea of white. Gone.

“NANA!”

With a final shove, Mia fell back against the earth. The plank pierced the ground and toppled over. Mia caught a soft new glow across the ground. She looked up.

Sunlight glimmered down through a thin slit in the ceiling. Little blades of grass flapped around the edges. Beyond that, a hint of blue sky and clouds.

As she breathed in the air of a whole new world, Mia Farisi curled into a ball and cried.

—

She had no idea how long she stayed there in the dirt. Minutes. Hours. A lifetime. At some point in her stupor, she caught a quick shadow above her. A fat black nose traveled up and down the slit, sniffing excitedly. Yellow paws tore at the hole. Soon the retriever was yanked away. Now Mia looked up into the wide blue eyes of its owner.

“Sweet Jesus . . .”

After twelve minutes of digging, the hole was wide enough to lower a stepladder. Mia emerged into the side yard of a two-story home in some posh but foreign suburb. She’d been buried so close to the house that a few lateral scrapes would have revealed the foundation.

Her rescuer, a thin and elderly man in a faded maroon sweat suit, stared at Mia like she’d fallen from space. He scratched his cheek in bewilderment.

“This is crazy. I’m thinking I should call someone but . . . Christ, it’s my yard. What will they think?”

Mia didn’t reply. Her tears had made streaks of clean on an otherwise dirt-caked face, but now her gaze was dry and distant.

“I can’t even fathom what you’ve been through, girl. And I want to help you. But before I call the police, I need to know that you can talk. You have to tell them I didn’t do this to you.”

The retriever ran barking to the front lawn and returned moments later with a stout young woman in a pea-green uniform. She consulted a small device in her hand, then looked to Mia.

The old man waved his palms. “I found her like this! I didn’t do this!”

“Ease it, gramper. You’re not in any trouble.”

The woman kneeled down by Mia, brushing the dirty brown hair from her face. She studied the bracelet on Mia’s wrist.

“You poor thing. You must’ve been through hell and back. What’s your name, kitten?”

She continued to stare ahead, speaking in a tiny doll’s voice. “Mia.”

“Mia, my name’s Erin Salgado. I work for Salgado Security. We’ve been hired to find you and bring you to safety. You’re going to be okay.”

The old man furrowed his brow. “You were hired to find her but you didn’t know her name?”

Erin shot him a frosty glare. “If you’re doubting, call the poes. I fig they’ll have more questions for you than for me.”

“Look, hey, I was just asking.”

Erin squeezed Mia’s hand. “Listen, sweetie, I need you to trust me. My clients—”

“Bobby.”

“What?”

Mia finally looked at Erin, her lush lips trembling with anguish.