The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “How’d you do that, anyway?” Peter asked him. “You didn’t sound a thing Australian.”

  David shrugged. “Did some acting in prep school. It’s not hard. I can teach you to hide your brogue, if you’re interested.”

  “No thanks. Just warn me before you try something like that again.”

  “Sure thing, Dad.”

  The joke didn’t sit well with either of them. David knew that Peter missed his real son, just as Peter had heard an earful about David’s late father. Neither one of them was in the market for a proxy. Sometimes Mia, who’d grown to adore both men, wondered if they even liked each other.

  They stepped into the screening room, which had been thoroughly modernized in recent weeks. A black glass lumiscreen stood in place of the old canvas, while the velvet seats had been swapped for flytex recliners. The upholstery was so new, it still smelled of factory chemicals, a rubbery stench that made Peter wince.

  “Oof. Lordy. Let’s just get this over with.”

  David squinted in concentration, his mind traveling back through the room’s recent history. He stopped at December thirty-first, then creased his brow at the strange new sights in his head.

  “Huh.”

  “What?” Peter asked. “What do you see?”

  “My own corpse.”

  Peter checked to make sure Cassandra wasn’t snooping before turning back to David. “Show me.”

  With a wave of his hand, David brought the past to life as phantoms. Old wooden armrests poked out from the recliners. A long-dead projector beam lit up the screen. Four government agents in tempic armor moved up and down the aisles—intangible, oblivious to David and Peter.

  Peter’s eyes shifted gravely around the bodies in the room, the six dead Silvers who lay crumpled in five places. “Well, ain’t that a thing.”

  “Looks disturbingly real,” David said. “I’ll give them credit for that.”

  “Give who credit?”

  “The Pelletiers.”

  “What makes you think they did it?”

  “Who else could have faked our deaths so convincingly? Who else has motive to throw the Deps off our trail?”

  Peter took a nervous look at Oren Gingold. “Those aren’t Deps.”

  “What do you mean? I see Melissa right there.”

  “Those aren’t fake bodies either,” Peter said. “I’m afraid that’s really you.”

  The images rippled as David processed the news. His eyes bulged at the spectral screen of old, the large brown ring that had been seared into the fabric.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “A time portal?”

  “The only kind that leaves a scorch.”

  “You said time travel was impossible.”

  “Impossible to survive,” Peter said. “Easy to do if you don’t mind dying.”

  David blinked at him, flummoxed. “That’s insane. You’re saying that sometime in the future, my friends and I step into a time portal, knowing full well it’ll kill us.”

  “I doubt it was by choice.”

  David waved his hand again. The agents and corpses vanished. Now Cassandra Dewalt and four elderly friends sat together in the center seats, sipping wine and chuckling as a black-and-white French comedy played on-screen.

  “What are you doing?” Peter asked.

  “Jumping back an hour.”

  “If you’re hoping to see the portal, you won’t. Those things can’t be—”

  Before Peter could say “ghosted,” a flickering glow appeared in the middle of the movie screen. The tiny bead expanded across the canvas, growing and growing until it became a twenty-foot disc. David had seen Peter and Mia make dozens of portals, but they were never this bright, never this turbulent. The surface churned with stormy waves. The edges danced like a ring of white fire.

  Cassandra and her friends shielded their faces, screaming as the light of the portal burned them. A fierce gust of wind pushed the two frailest women over the backs of their chairs.

  Peter checked the door for the present-day Cassandra. “For God’s sake, boy! Shut it down!”

  David muted the noise with a gesture. His eyes remained fixed on the portal.

  “I mean stop the whole thing!”

  “Not yet,” David said. “I want to see.”

  Peter peeked at the glow through a watery squint. “This is crazy.”

  “What’s crazy?”

  “In five generations, none of my people have ever been able to ghost a portal.”

  “I’m not one of your people.”

  That was true. Peter was one of the few who knew that David Dormer wasn’t born on this world. He was a transplant, a breacher, the orphaned child of a dead sister Earth. Like the rest of the Silvers, he came from a place where time only moved in one speed and direction. Neither man nor machine had the power to bend it.

  Now that he had temporis, David wielded it with extraordinary prowess. He wasn’t the first of his group to blaze past the limits of Peter’s clan. Lord only knew what mighty feats these transdimensional cousins would be pulling a year from now.

  If they lived that long.

  Suddenly, the Silvers flew through the portal as if a vacuum had pulled them. David froze their ghosts in mid-trajectory and then studied their expressions. Matching looks of pain and surprise had been chiseled onto all their faces, even his own.

  “You’re right,” he said to Peter. “This wasn’t voluntary. Someone killed us.”

  “Well, let’s not—”

  “I can’t get over this. I’m looking at the past and seeing the future.”

  “One future,” Peter stressed. “One possible outcome out of trillions.”

  “It’s still the death of everyone I care about.”

  Peter scoffed. “Thanks.”

  “I’d mourn you too if you were with us. Why aren’t you?”

  “How should I know?”

  “What if this was your portal?”

  Peter’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Boy, if you don’t trust me by now—”

  “I’m not saying it was intentional. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you were coerced.”

  “You’re getting way ahead of yourself.”

  “I just witnessed my own murder,” David said. “It’s made me somewhat speculative.”

  “Come on. We got what we came for.”

  Peter moved for the exit, then noticed David wasn’t following. His wide blue eyes remained glued on his friends.

  “David . . .”

  “We’re all dressed up, like we’re going to a formal event. Any idea what it could be?”

  Peter had a guess. “Not a clue. Look, don’t try to make sense of it. And don’t let it shake you. I’ll tell you as many times as you need to hear it: it’s just one future out of many.”

  David vanquished the ghosts and followed Peter up the aisle. He turned around at the exit and took a last lingering look at the screen.

  “One more future to avoid.”

  —

  It happened the same way every time.

  By his 115th trip through the God’s Eye, Theo had seen the apocalypse from every angle. It clung to its script like a meticulous actor: never improvising, never changing a beat. If any of his friends had asked him (and none of them ever did), he could describe each moment with journalistic detail: a five-stage demise stretched out over three hours.

  It begins with the clouds all evaporating at once. In the span of a breath, the sky all over the world gives way to a clear and sickly whiteness, more like an absence than the presence of something new. The air carries a metallic scent and there isn’t a hint of wind to be felt anywhere. Living creatures, great and small, become restless. Wary.

  With two hours left, the electricity falters. Radios go silent. Fan blad
es roll to a stop. Every handphone and computer screen on the planet goes dark. The temporic devices, meanwhile, shift into simultaneous overdrive. Tempic walls erupt in spikes. Aeromobiles drift into the sky like lost balloons. Millions of people die in the surge, and the trouble is just beginning.

  At the start of the final hour, the temperature drops below freezing. From the sands of the Sahara to the tropics of Oceania, humans huddle together and cry puffs of steam.

  Then, with four minutes left, the sky makes a horrific sound—a booming crackle, like a thousand splintering glaciers. The aeric vehicles plummet back to Earth in a hail of flaming wreckage. Those who remain outside, those who still have the strength to crane their necks, see glistening crags far above them, as if the entire upper atmosphere had frosted over with ice.

  No, not ice. Something harder. Something worse.

  Forty seconds left. The crackling sheet of tempis descends loudly from the heavens, crushing all the tallest mountains, all the highest cities. As the buildings at sea level quickly start to topple, there’s not a shred of doubt left in anyone’s mind. The sky has fallen.

  The end has come for everyone.

  For Theo, who’d already survived the death of one Earth, this vision was more than just a prophecy. It was a memory. And now it was his view on the way to work.

  He flew through the future as both specter and spectator, a formless observer on a fast-forward dash through time. Here in the God’s Eye, in the cold gray space between moments, he had near-total control of his foresight. He could speed up the playback, slow it down, rewind and study a branching string. Not that it ever helped. Every future ended with that same three-hour death rattle. The shrieks. The cries. The god-awful crackling sound.

  Furiously, Theo thrust himself forward, through the end of the world and into the hazy void that lay just beyond. At long last, the clamor stopped. His gruesome commute was over.

  He took a moment to gather himself, then conjured a floating simulacrum of his body. As always, he dressed himself in his most comforting ensemble: his gray Stanford hoodie with the sun-bleached letters, his loose beige cargo shorts, and ratty old sandals. The clothes reminded him of a simpler time, when he was just a drunken ex-prodigy on the streets of California. When nobody on Earth had expected a damn thing from him.

  He turned around and winced at the eyesore in the mist, the great white wall that had become his chore and burden. It stretched endlessly in four directions: a quadrillion points of light, a quadrillion variations of this world’s future . . . or lack thereof. Peter believed that somewhere in this sea of severed timelines, a single string extended onward—a blessed chain of events in which humanity somehow dodged its death sentence. The solution was nestled inside that strand, and Theo was the only one who could find it.

  He wasn’t optimistic.

  A tiny gleam suddenly caught his eye, a threadlike protrusion on a distant part of the wall. He swooped toward it like a sparrow, then cursed when he realized his senses had tricked him. It wasn’t a full string, just a lone stubborn Earth that managed to live a few weeks longer than the others. The apocalypse refused to commit to a single date on the calendar. It varied from timeline to timeline, bouncing around within a three-month window. The discrepancies littered the wall with an endless array of nooks and nubs.

  When Peter had first heard about the variance, four months ago, he became positively giddy.

  “You see, Theo? I told you. It wouldn’t jump around like that if there wasn’t a human factor at work. We have influence over this thing. If it can be moved, it can be stopped.”

  That was easy for Peter to say. He wasn’t the one who had to look for a needle in Nebraska. He didn’t have to fly through Armageddon each and every day to see the consequences of his—

  “Stop.”

  —failure.

  “Stop it,” Theo hissed. “Just shut up and focus.”

  He continued his search. After a few minutes of dull, fruitless scanning, he heard a familiar crackling noise in the distance. The sound of apocalypse was back in his ears and Theo knew exactly why. His subconscious was torturing him again, wrapping him up in his own insecurities like a straitjacket.

  “Stop it.”

  Despite all his efforts, the crackling got louder, more intense, as if every dying Earth had joined in on the chorus. Theo clenched his teeth, his eyes squinted shut as trillions of skies crystallized into tempis. Billions of screams on each world.

  “Stop it!”

  It happened the same way every time.

  “Stop!”

  —

  Amanda sat up in her chair with a start.

  Until just now, Theo had been sitting quietly on his bed, eyes closed, legs folded neatly beneath him. He’d looked so serene in his meditative state that he might as well have been levitating.

  But then his head snapped back, his eyes popped open, and he yelled like a man who’d been thrown from an airplane. Amanda had no idea what was happening. It was usually Hannah or Zack who watched him while he was in the God’s Eye. She had no experience augur-sitting.

  She dropped her magazine and rushed to his side. “Are you okay?”

  Theo rubbed his face with trembling hands. “What . . . what time is it?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “Day or night?”

  Amanda eyed him worriedly. “Night.”

  The basement was a windowless den of tumbled stone and cedar, a rather grim place under normal circumstances. Through bright decorations and well-chosen amenities, Zack and Theo managed to turn their room into the brownstone’s number one social destination. Rarely an evening passed without the two of them hosting a card game, a movie screening, or a just a breezy late-night gab session. Of course Amanda hadn’t been down here much these past few weeks, for reasons that still depressed her.

  She kneeled behind Theo and gently rubbed his shoulders, soothing him in accordance with her sister’s strict instructions.

  “You have to be careful with him,” Hannah had told her, ninety minutes before. “Give him warmth, but not too much sympathy. He doesn’t like pity.”

  “I was a cancer nurse,” Amanda dryly reminded her. “I know how to comfort people.”

  Hannah slung her purse over her shoulder, her eyes dark and doleful. “This isn’t a patient you’re dealing with. This is the whole world’s doctor.”

  Try as she might, Amanda couldn’t fault the metaphor. As she kneaded the knobs in Theo’s back, she tried for the thousandth time to wrap her mind around the insane scope of his mission. It was a terrible responsibility to drop on anyone, much less a recovering alcoholic. Yet despite all her empathy, a part of her wanted to push him harder. Just find it, Theo. Find the damn string so we can stop having nightmares.

  Theo looked to his roommate’s empty bed. “Where’s, uh . . . ?”

  “He went to that club with Hannah. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah. That was tonight.” He chuckled cynically. “After all this time, she’s finally meeting her mystery date.”

  “It’s not a date.”

  “It was implied.”

  “Well, she doesn’t see it that way,” Amanda told him. “If she did, she wouldn’t have brought Zack.”

  Theo winced at her painful attempt at massage. The woman had all the finesse of a drunk and angry lobster. It didn’t help his mood to think of the power inside Amanda’s hands, the same crackling white tempis that was four years away from killing everyone.

  “You really don’t have to do this,” he said.

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

  Theo sighed in surrender, then studied himself in his hand mirror. He was only twenty-four and already he had flecks of gray in his hair. His bronze skin, a perk of his Filipino heritage, had become hopelessly pallid. He needed sunlight. He needed sleep. He needed to think about something other than the world
’s goddamn ticking . . .

  He adjusted the mirror and did a double-take at Amanda. She caught his stare in the glass.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I . . .” Theo censored himself with a headshake. Amanda’s reflection had triggered a sudden premonition, a split-second image of her screaming with grief. There was no point warning her about it. Without concrete details, he was just as likely to steer her into the prophecy as out of it.

  Amanda clucked her tongue at the tension in his back. “I hate what this is doing to you. I wish there was some way we could help.”

  He snapped out of his daze. “Sorry. What?”

  “I said I wish there was—”

  “Hold it.” He raised his head toward the ceiling beams.

  Amanda followed his gaze. “What?”

  “She’s waking up.”

  “Oh.”

  Amanda climbed off the bed with a loud and weary breath, then scooped up Theo’s wastebasket. “I got it.”

  —

  In a ruddy little bedroom on the second floor, between the generator closet and the hot water shifter, the youngest of the Silvers sat up with a yawn. Sleep had become a fickle commodity in Mia Farisi’s life, leaving her pacing around at night and catnapping during the day. She assumed her insomnia was stress related, as she had several good reasons to fret. She was an alien, a fugitive, a chronokinetic freak, a target of Gothams, a girl in love, and the two-time denizen of a dying Earth. On the upside, she’d lost fourteen pounds since coming to Brooklyn, so at least she had that.

  Groggy, sightless, Mia reached to remove her blindfold and stubbed her fingers on her hard metal fencing mask. It was a new addition to her sleepwear, one Peter had insisted on after a note from the future dropped into her mouth and nearly choked her to death. The blindfold was an older accessory, the only way to shut out the near-constant glow of tiny portals.

  Mia took a cursory look around the room. Rolled-up sticks of paper lay scattered everywhere, from the mattress to the carpet to the folds of her T-shirt—a hundred and sixty-eight notes in total, all delivered over the course of an eighty-minute nap.