by Daniel Price
“I was raised by a brilliant scientist with atrocious personal skills,” he explained to Mia. “From an early age, I was dragged through a gauntlet of foreign nations, each one with different rules of etiquette. Suffice it to say I’m a little bit strange. I might as well be from a third Earth entirely.”
Once Mia caught David canoodling with Hannah, walking arm in arm around the property like old Victorian lovers, she lost her fluttering crush on him. For all his alleged nonconformity, his fondness for large-breasted dingbats made him tragically typical. On the upside, Mia could finally relax around him. Her stomachaches gradually stopped.
On the second night of August, she received a tear-stained message on a scrap of motel stationery.
God, it makes me sick to look at you. The fat, clueless idiot I used to be. You think you’re adjusting? You think you’re getting a handle on your new life here? Trust me, hon. Your problems haven’t even started.
Beatrice Caudell watched on the monitor as Mia crumpled the note into an angry ball. An hour later, while the Silvers dined, Beatrice searched Mia’s room and found the paper under the bed. Soon it lay flat and wrinkled on the desk of Sterling Quint.
He suddenly became very interested in his youngest guest.
Brace yourself, an older Mia warned her. Things are about to get hairy.
On August 7, twelve hours after Amanda brought the ceiling down on her sister, Mia stood outside her door with Czerny, hoping to coax her out of exile. While the good doctor expounded with flowery optimism, Mia teetered miserably with flu. She would have killed for some of her grandmother’s minestrone, or at least a good long nap. But Amanda needed her support.
Don’t ever take her for granted, her future self insisted. She’s the best person you’ll ever know on this world.
Suddenly Mia noticed a shimmering disc of light in front of her. She assumed it was another spot in her vision until it spit out a roll of pink paper.
Czerny furrowed his brow at the tiny object. “What is that?”
She scrambled to pick it up. “Nothing. I dropped something.”
Unconvinced, the good doctor harangued her until she finally confessed her predicament. The news spread like current through the building. Quint was exuberant to the point of giddiness. The Holy Grail of temporal physics was now resting under his roof, nestled inside a meek little girl.
It wasn’t until the hullabaloo of the day finally ended that Mia remembered to read her latest message.
Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.
She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
Two days later, Mia lunched in the bistro with Zack and David, chortling with laughter as they tried to one-up each other with tales of past social blunders. A small glow suddenly materialized above the table like a firefly. David and Zack jumped back in alarm.
“It’s okay,” Mia told them. “It’s mine. A note should come out any second.”
The men leaned closer to look, but nothing emerged. As she moved toward the portal, Mia was stunned to discover that, for the first time, she could glimpse through the keyhole. She saw her own face, red-nosed and puffy-eyed. Her future self was sick with flu. Again?
No. The more she saw through the portal, the more she felt through it. She could feel herself standing outside Amanda’s door, nodding off to Czerny’s blather.
“Oh my God . . .”
“What?”
“I’m looking at the past. That’s me two days ago.”
David squinted at the portal. “I can’t see a thing. How can you tell?”
“I don’t know. I just can.”
“So what does this mean? That you’re the Future Mia this time?”
“I’m not sure. I think so. I mean I got a note. I told myself to feel better.”
Zack watched the shimmering breach with antsy trepidation. “I don’t want to panic you, but you might want to do exactly that.”
Panicked, Mia flipped through her diary, scanning her archives until she found the right message. “Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.” [Pink paper, blue ballpoint.]
She’d been so ill and distracted that day, she never realized that the pink paper was from her diary itself. Mia ripped a half sheet from the back, then hurriedly scrawled the six-word message. She rolled it up and popped it through the hole. The portal disappeared in a blink.
The incident left her rattled for days. What if she’d sent different words on different paper? What would that do to her memories? What would that do to time?
“Paradox,” she uttered to David, as if the word was acid. “Maybe that’s what happened back home. Someone forgot to dot the ‘i’ on a time-traveling note and it ripped the whole world apart.”
The two young Silvers had embarked on a morning walk around the property, stopping at the thistle-covered tennis courts. As David jumped back and forth over the sagging net, Mia leaned against the fence, wrapping her fingers around the chain metal links.
“I don’t know,” David mused. “It seems like a paradox already. I mean you wrote ‘feel better’ because you thought you had to. And the Mia who sent your note presumably wrote the words because she felt she had to. So we have a chicken/egg conundrum. Who first chose the words? Who decided that ‘feel better’ was just the thing to say?”
Mia could feel her brain trying to jump out of her skull. Just three weeks ago, her biggest concerns were weight gain and the impending start of high school. Now she was trying to wrap her head around the mysteries of time, for health reasons.
Worse, Quint insisted that Mia spend four hours a day in a second-floor laboratory, twiddling her thumbs under a million dollars’ worth of monitoring equipment in the hope that a new portal would arrive. The sessions were excruciatingly awkward for Mia, especially with Beatrice on the other side of the table. The mousy young physicist was utterly humorless, and had a tendency to treat Mia like the Virgin Mary in her third trimester.
At the start of their sixth session, Beatrice surprised Mia with a large chocolate cupcake. A white-flamed lumicand protruded from the frosting.
“What is this?”
“A small thing,” Beatrice replied, in her nervous high voice. “I thought you might like some recognition.”
“For what?”
Beatrice cocked her head. “Isn’t this . . . ? I’m sorry. Our files say you were born on August 19.”
“I was.”
“Okay, well, that’s today. Today’s August 19. Happy birthday.”
As the calendar finally caught up with her, Mia covered her mouth and fled the lab. She spent the rest of the day sequestered in her room.
That night, David sauntered into her room without knocking and took a casual perch on her desk. He rolled a tennis ball over the back of his hands. Mia glowered at him.
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Never said you had to,” he replied. “However, if you’d like to see something interesting, put your socks on and come with me.”
She grudgingly followed him to the polished stone lobby. He stood at the reception desk and pressed his fingers to his temples.
“David, what are you—”
“Shhh. I need to concentrate for this.”
In a sudden instant, more than seventy people materialized across the vast marble floor—rich men in tuxedos, young women in cocktail dresses, bartenders, caterers, even a few photographers. A nine-piece orchestra played merry party music. Confetti and streamers flew everywhere.
Mia stared incredulously at the busy new scene. “What . . . what is this?”
“My issue,” David informed her, with a coy little grin. “My weirdness.”
For four weeks now, the boy had suffered a growing problem with ghosts. What started out as phantom sounds had evolved into strange visual anomalies that rattled everyone in the building. On August 10, the blurry upper hal
f of a waitress interrupted the Silvers at dinner, passing through the bistro like a floating specter. Four days later, David’s evening stroll with Hannah was cut short by a week-old slice of sunshine that nearly blinded them both. And just last Thursday, David and Zack turned a hallway corner, only to pass through a day-old apparition of Zack himself.
David desperately worked with the physicists to understand the nature of his temporal manipulations, his ability to reproduce the past as sound and light. As far as his friends knew, he was still struggling to control it.
That situation had clearly changed.
Mia spun a sweeping glance around the lobby. The ghosts were jarringly crisp, nearly indistinguishable from the two living beings in the room. It was only when the partygoers passed through the furnishings of the present that they revealed their ethereal nature.
A young black caterer obliviously walked through Mia. She gasped and jumped out of his way.
“God. This is unreal. Who are these people?”
“This building was once a luxury hotel,” David explained. “What you’re seeing now is the opening night gala. This all happened about six years ago, give or take.”
“And you just plucked it right out of the past.”
David jerked a humble shrug. “It takes some effort. But it gets easier each time. Come on.”
He moved to the dance floor and held out his hand. Mia eyed him cynically.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Sure am.”
“You want us to dance with ghosts.”
His expression turned somber. “You’ve been dancing with ghosts all day, Mia. It’s been clear to everyone.”
She crossed her arms and looked down at her feet, speaking in a tiny, broken voice. “It’s my birthday.”
David nodded in grim understanding. “I’m sorry. I know that must hurt. If I had the power to bring your family back, even for one night, I would. You’ll just have to settle for me and these people.”
With a sly grin, he raised his beckoning hand. “Come on. If we’re going to dwell in the past, let’s do it in style.”
She slowly joined him on the dance floor, fighting a daft grin. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”
“These are strange times, Miafarisi. Might as well embrace it.”
He took her hands in his and together they danced—the boy with an eye in the past and the girl with a foot in the future. They twirled to the music in their sweatpants and socks, six years late to the party.
—
The next morning at breakfast, Hannah sniffed her slice of honeydew, then gave it to Zack to freshen up. Amanda dropped her fork and retrieved it with a long white protrusion that sprang from her palm like a frog’s tongue. Mia declared that she was tired of movies and wanted to see some live lumivision programs for a change. The others agreed. They’d demand that Quint unblock the channels sometime after the morning’s big presentation.
“What’s the official topic of this thing, anyway?” Amanda inquired.
David responded through a mouthful of apple. “I asked Quint that very question.”
“And?”
“He just said, ‘Temporis.’”
Hannah cast a befuddled look around the table. “Does anyone here know what that is?”
She received nothing but shrugs and head shakes in reply.
“Well, this should be interesting.”
At 9 A.M., Czerny popped his head into the bistro and asked his guests if they were ready. They were. In quiet harmony, the Silvers cleared their plates from the table, and then moved on.
ELEVEN
Sterling Quint came to work at 7 A.M., looking more dapper than ever in his double-breasted Benaduce suit, Vanya silk tie, and four-hundred-dollar pocket square. His wrists were garnished with eighteen-karat-gold cuff links that were molded in the elaborate pattern of watchworks, the closest thing he had to a lucky charm. He’d first worn them ten years ago at a grand convention hall in Havana, where he stood before two thousand of his fellow temporal physicists and assured them in his most regal baritone that Earth was not an only child.
“We are surrounded by infinite kin,” he’d declared. “Siblings and half siblings. Distant cousins. Even twins. These parallel realities share our physical space, lying just outside our perceptions. I believe that one day we’ll be able to access them, like so many frequencies on a radio.”
Quint was not the first scientist to present that notion, but he did offer a mathematical description of his multiverse in action, a theoretical equation that unified two competing ideas about the nature of time and purported to explain most if not all of the paradoxes involved with temporal manipulation.
Though his Radio Worlds Theory was untestable and could neither be proved nor disproved, it went on to dominate the university chalkboards and make him a global star of the physics field . . . for a time. Eventually his scientific peers, no better than teenage girls with their fickle tastes and fad worship, discarded his theory for a newer and shinier rival.
Now Quint could only grin at the thunderous uproar he’d create at the next temporal physicists’ conference. The looks on their pasty white faces when he unveiled the scientific find of the century.
The meeting room was large enough to seat a hundred, but only six folding chairs had been set in front of the dais. Most of Quint’s employees stood along the walls. Another few scurried onstage, rushing to prepare the mechanical devices that Quint would soon demonstrate for his guests.
Shortly after nine, Czerny arrived with five Silvers in tow. They approached their seats in a slow single file, their curious gazes fixed on the many strange contraptions up front. Hannah cast a baffled glance at a young and lanky post-grad who was dressed from head to foot in a blue rubber suit.
“What’s with the deep-sea diver?”
“It’s not a diving suit,” Quint told her. “You’ll see what it does.”
Zack sat down last. He dragged the sixth folding chair in front of him and used it as a footstool.
“Okay, Sterling. We’re here. Dazzle us.”
Quint glowered at him. “Put that back.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this for the prophet Elijah?”
“I think you already guessed who it’s for.”
“I have,” Zack admitted. “You could have just told us, you know.”
Amanda eyed him strangely. “What are you talking about?”
The double doors opened again. Now Beatrice escorted a young Asian man in a dark blue sweatsuit. He swept his nervous gaze through the crowd, recognizing only Quint and a handful of physicists. The five people in folding chairs triggered a cloudier air of familiarity, as if he’d seen them all in dreams.
One in particular stood out, just as she stood up.
“Oh my God . . .”
Hannah had only met him once, for a short but eventful eighteen minutes. Still, with nearly seven billion people gone, it was a drop of medicine to see him again. It was just so damn sweet to find another survivor from her world.
She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight.
“Hi, Theo.”
—
The last any Silver had seen of Theo Maranan, he lay unconscious on a stretcher, bleeding from his nose and mouth. The Salgados had given him a baby spot sedative, which reacted violently to the alcohol in his bloodstream, which threw him into a coma.
Though Azral had been surprisingly tepid to the loss of Natalie Tipton, Jury Curado, and the elusive Evan Rander, he was far less pleased about Theo’s plight. Four weeks ago, just moments after Theo’s bloody arrival in Terra Vista, Quint received an irate text message.
Quint blanched as he keyed his reply. ss to one of the nation’s best neurologists. I can have him here by sundown.>
The news stunned Quint. For five long years, all of Azral’s instructions had come from prerecorded videos, all mysteriously delivered to some corner of Quint’s house and accompanied by staggering amounts of cash. On the morning the nine Silvers became flesh in this world, Azral suddenly began communicating through mobile texts. Now suddenly he was coming in person.
At midnight, a round white portal bloomed on the wall of Quint’s office. An exquisitely tall couple stepped through the surface. Though Quint had no trouble recognizing Azral from the videos, the brown-haired woman was new to him. She wore a fluffy fur coat over a sheer cocktail dress. The shopping bag in her hand was adorned with Japanese text. Quint reeled to wonder if the pair had just stepped away from a sunny afternoon in Kyoto. (It was actually Osaka.)
Mercifully, Azral appeared to be in a genial mood now. With a soft grin, he introduced his companion as Esis Pelletier. Quint had no idea if she was his spouse, his sibling, or possibly both. (She was neither.) He had a hard time believing she was the medical specialist in question. The woman dressed like a European prostitute and grinned like she was high on four different opiates.
“Precious Sterling,” she cooed. “We gave them silver in honor of your name. We found it amusing. It still makes my heart laugh, when no one’s looking.”
Despite her questionable state of mind, Esis wasted no time getting to work. Quint watched with rapt fascination as she cut a bloodless path through Theo’s forehead, using tools and gels Quint had never seen anywhere. After seventeen minutes of tinkering, she closed Theo without a trace of incision. He looked exactly as he had before, except now his eyelids fluttered with restless life.
“He’ll awaken tomorrow,” Azral informed Quint. “It’s fortunate. That one’s of particular value to us. Had we lost him, I would have held you responsible.”
Quint felt a cold squeeze around his heart. “I apologize again. Are you . . . do you wish to see the others while you’re here?”