The Flight of the Silvers

by Daniel Price

  —

  Zack woke up at 6 A.M., stirred by the sound of gentle knocking. He rubbed his eyes and made a sleepy lurch to the door. Amanda and Mia greeted him from the hallway, both crisp and suspiciously sunny. Mia brandished a rolled-up note in her hand.

  “It’s for you.”

  “What?”

  “I got a note last night. It’s from me but addressed to you.”

  Zack wasn’t lucid enough to handle Mia’s temporal juju, or the furtive grins of both women. “What are you two up to?”

  “Just read it!”

  He blinked several times until his vision came into focus, then took the sheet from Mia.

  Dearest Zachary, brother of my heart,

  A clever man once told me that there’s no speed trophy waiting for us in Brooklyn. He was right. Now follow your own damn wisdom and slow down. This second Cataclysm isn’t happening for another four to five years. For your own sakes, it’s much more important to get here in a strong state of mind than it is to get here fast.

  My advice is to take Amanda’s advice, and then some. Find a ridiculously expensive hotel and hole up there for a week. Treat yourselves on comforts until you’re all ready to pop. Don’t worry about blowing the cash you have. Peter’s filthy rich, just like all his people. Money’s one of the few things you’ll never have to worry about again.

  Zack, if you trust me, then listen to me now. This is the note we wish we’d gotten. This is your chance to avoid one of our biggest regrets. Slow it down. Live it up. Heal your weary minds. Enjoy the simple pleasures of life, before life becomes less simple.

  With love, always,

  Mia

  A cynical voice in Zack’s head suggested that Mia was pulling a clever ruse, forging a note from her future self in order to keep him from souring Amanda’s plans. His theory dissolved when he saw his own handwriting at the bottom of the page.

  I’m Zack Trillinger and I approve this message.

  He couldn’t help but laugh in the wake of his self-correction. He could just picture the canny smirk on Future Zack’s face as he scribbled his authentication. He’ll need this. Trust me. I know the guy.

  Amanda leaned against the doorframe and sneered with vindication. “Get the message?”

  He reskimmed Mia’s words. Her last line struck an ominous chord, a dark complement to Theo’s grim portent. Fortunately for Amanda, the note instilled Zack with just the right amount of fear. The future could wait a little while longer.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Piranda Five Towers was a sparkling jewel of the Midwest, a gleam in the “I” of Indiana. Amanda found a brochure at a chargery kiosk and fell in love with the photos. A quintet of tall glass spires loomed like fingers around a great palm grotto. At night, each building glowed with heavenly lumis while a great floating ghostbox provided a kaleidoscopic light show for anyone willing to crane their neck. The rooms were gorgeous and the resort had enough amenities to keep guests busy around the clock.

  As the sun set on Saturday, the Silvers entered their new accommodations on the tenth floor of Tower Five. The Baronessa Suite was a 3,800-square-foot palace with two levels, three bathrooms, a full-size kitchen, and a hot tub veranda.

  Hannah dropped her knapsack and forged a gawking path into the living room. She was the only one who’d taken issue with Amanda’s choice of hotel, only because it was located in the ominously named city of Evansville. She was glad no one listened to her.

  “Oh my God. This is . . .”

  “Incredible,” Mia finished. “How much did this cost for the week?”

  “A fraction of what we have,” Zack told her. “No worries.”

  Giddy with pleasure, Amanda threw her arms around Zack’s neck. “Say it.”

  “Smugness doesn’t become you, Given.”

  “Say it!”

  “Fine. Yes. This was a brilliant idea. You’re the goddess of gratification. I bow to you.”

  David returned from his walk-around inspection. “There are six beds, but only three bedrooms. If no one has a problem with a coed arrangement—”

  “Theo and I can share,” said Hannah, with an arch grin. “Easy breezy. Problem solved.”

  Mia wasn’t sure whether to thank or slap Hannah for cutting off David’s thought. Theo nodded in shaky accord.

  “That’s fine. Whatever works.”

  Zack flipped through the elaborate room service menu and stopped at the page of lobster options.

  “Oh, this works. This really, really works.”

  —

  Their stay in the Baronessa Suite was one of the nicest weeks of their lives, with an asterisk. The events of checkout morning would forever mar their recollection, though the healing distance of time would eventually allow them to catalog the week as “mostly lovely,” or “perfect until. . . .”

  When stored in their own bottle, the first six and a half days shined from every angle. The Silvers enjoyed a level of carefree comfort that had eluded them on two worlds. They lived without worrying about finances or federal agents, sword-wielding killers or citywide Cataclysms. For 156 hours, they existed in the sweet haze of the moment. They coddled themselves in manners both shallow and deep, conventional and strange.

  It was on their first morning that Amanda Given, the goddess of gratification herself, stretched the definition of leisure to the snapping point.

  “I’m going to church,” she announced at breakfast. “Anyone care to join me?”

  She’d aimed the question at Zack in droll jest, and was stunned when David leapt at her offer. He’d always wanted to experience a Christian worship service, just to see how the pious majority lived.

  Following the directions of the concierge, they attended mass at a Roman Catholic church in downtown Evansville. Amanda dreaded all the daft adjustments to her old and familiar liturgy, but she was soon amazed by the wonderful sameness of it all. There were no tempic altars, no speed knobs on the pews, no peculiar rites or parallel-Earth prayers. For a brief time, two worlds converged and Amanda was back in the Chula Vista parish. She could almost feel Derek sitting next to her, a sensation bittersweet enough to draw quiet tears.

  David sat through the ceremony like an overcaffeinated tourist, launching his fascinated smile in all directions. It was only during the penitential rite that Amanda noticed him staring at the floor with a grim and heavy expression. Like her, he’d injured two policemen on Monday, when his ghosted truck sent their cruiser into a rough collision. By outward appearances, the boy had written off his actions as a necessary evil. Now Amanda wasn’t so sure.

  At noon, she parked the van in the hotel garage, then aimed a pensive stare at David.

  “I think I want to find the names of those cops we hurt and send them some of our money.”

  “That’s a horrible idea,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the Deps will know who sent the cash and why. They’ll determine our general location from postmarks. And they’ll seize your gift as evidence. Those policemen will likely never see a dime of it.”

  She stared ahead in busy contemplation. “Crap.”

  “If you’re looking for absolution, why didn’t you stay to make a confession?”

  Amanda debated it, but then realized that she’d either have to suppress the details of her tempic transgression or tell the priest the whole truth. She didn’t want to think how he’d react to her ungodly white monstrosity.

  “I just want to do it to feel good,” she said. “I mean, that’s what this week is for, right?”

  David bit his lip in churning thought. “I suppose we could give a portion of our money to local charities. People in need. I mean if we’re careful—”

  “We?”

  He gave her a shrug and a soft grin, then admitted he was never one for hot tubs.

  To the bewilderment of th
eir four companions, Amanda and David spent their week as wild roaming philanthropists, a bizarro Bonnie and Clyde. They rode the streets of Evansville with fifty thousand dollars of goodwill and a marked-up city map. They weren’t choosy in their targets—churches, temples, children’s centers, animal shelters. They even donated eight hundred dollas to the Natural Life Foundation, a group that was starkly opposed to all uses of temporis.

  For discretion’s sake, they never contributed more than a thousand dollars to a single charity, never gave their names, and never stayed too long to receive gratitude. David even swapped his native Australian accent for a flawless American dialect. “Your sister’s not the only actor in the group,” he told Amanda, with an impish grin.

  It wasn’t until their weeklong venture together that Amanda dropped her last thread of unease about David. Unlike Hannah and Mia, who’d both been smitten from the start, Amanda had always sensed something slightly off about the boy. She routinely detected a spark of effort behind his deep blue eyes, as if he were perpetually flexing a muscle or censoring a thought. By their second cozy lunch, she realized she’d been overjudging him, punishing him for the fleeting way he reminded her of Derek. When unfettered by those chains, David was a delight to be around. He dazzled her with knowledge on virtually every subject, amused her with anecdotes from his time among the Dutch and Japanese. He broke her heart with descriptions of his mother, a geneticist who fell to ovarian cancer when he was nine.

  “She’s the one who gave me this wristwatch,” he told her, brandishing his vintage silver timepiece. “Her dying wish was that every time I wind it, I find one reason to be thankful. I honor her request each time. Like clockwork, as they say.”

  On Friday afternoon, they donated the last of their cash to a fledgling theater company that was performing Titus Andronicus. Amanda was depressed to reach the end of her charity run. If she didn’t think Zack would blow a gasket, she’d ask for another week and fifty grand.

  As their elevator climbed the side of Tower Five, David clutched Amanda’s arm and shined a tender smile.

  “Thank you. This was a wonderful way to spend a week.”

  “Thank you. It was your idea.”

  “Yes, well, even I didn’t know how therapeutic it would be,” he admitted. “I come from a ‘big picture’ family. Big thinkers, with our heads always high in the clouds. Sometimes I forget the pleasures of small endeavors.”

  Amanda squeezed his hand. She couldn’t have loved him more.

  “So do you think you have it now?” David asked her.

  “Have what?”

  “Absolution.”

  The elevator opened. Amanda didn’t find her answer until they reached the door of their suite.

  “I can’t speak for God, but I think I can say I’ve forgiven myself.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “What about you?”

  David pulled back from the door, shooting her a look that was harsh enough to unnerve her.

  “I never said I was seeking forgiveness.”

  “I saw you at church, during the penitential rite. You looked upset. I assumed—”

  “Amanda, I would hurt a dozen more policemen to keep us from being incarcerated. I would kill a hundred to keep us alive. We can argue the ethics until we’re both old and gray. This is the new reality. I’m sleeping just fine.”

  As she cast her silent prayers that night, Amanda forced herself to stay positive. She thanked God for David Dormer—his strength, his insight, his kindness to his friends. All the same, she found herself grateful that he could only throw sound and light at his enemies. She shuddered to think what a boy like that could do with tempis.

  —

  Zack never thought he’d get tired of lounging in luxury. And yet by Monday morning his liquid daze congealed into a hard and restless boredom.

  While Hannah and Theo canoodled in their room and Amanda and David embarked on their mad giving spree, the cartoonist dropped his sketch pad and idly flipped through a dictionary of modern American slang. Ten minutes of baffling word study was all he could take before he jumped to his feet and plucked the history book from Mia’s hands.

  “Come on. We’re out of here.”

  They hailed a cab to Evansville and caught a big-budget suspense film, a tale of a killer shark that was uncreatively called The Killer Shark. The theater was shifted at 12×, allowing Zack and Mia to suffer two hours of atrocious cinema while ten minutes passed in the outside world. Sadly, there was no escaping once the movie began. The best they could do was dawdle at the concession stand until the building de-shifted and the front doors unlocked.

  They recuperated at a quiet seafood restaurant. Zack brought Mia to teary-eyed laughter with his tirade about the film, which he called a “cranial crucifixion” and a “developmentally disabled children’s production of Jaws.” She nearly choked on her soda when he went on to explain the new-world jargon he’d learned from Mia’s slang book.

  “Okay, so the act of cloning objects through temporis is called ‘tooping.’ We already knew that. But when you take tooped food and toop it again, it makes a noxious, smelly goo that people call ‘threep.’ You with me?”

  Mia bit her lip in quivering suppression and nodded.

  “Now, in addition to being a prime element of pranks and hazings, ‘threep’ is the all-purpose word for anything awful. It could be used as a noun, as in, ‘Hey, who cooked this threep?’ Or an adjective, such as, ‘Man, this job is truly threeped.’ If you’re looking for something stronger, ‘fourp’ is . . .”

  Mia burst into another fit of giggles. With a droll smirk, Zack proceeded.

  “‘Fourp’ is mostly used for emphasis, as in, ‘Wow, that movie was a fourping torture fest,’ or—”

  “There’s not a ‘fivep,’ is there?”

  “See, now you’re just being silly.”

  Mia realized now that Zack was the crucial ingredient in her feel-good week. On the cab ride home, she rested her head on his shoulder and told him that, like it or not, she’d be glued to his side for the next five days. He breathed a furtive whisper through her hair, a sneaky proposition that they break the leisure accord and research the fourp out of Peter.

  She squeezed his arm and told him she loved him.

  Their work began on Tuesday, in the hotel business center. Sitting side by side at a rented computer, they spent half the morning teaching themselves the gruesomely hostile operating system, which Zack likened to an eight-bit horror from Soviet Minsk. They tabbed their way through an endless maze of text menus until they found the door to Eaglenet, a web that was anything but worldwide. A digital wall had been erected around the borders of the nation, ensuring purely American data for purely American eyes. Despite its rigid structure, the network allowed free public access to fifty years of news archives.

  A keyword search for “Peter Pendergen” generated 1,206 articles. When he wasn’t a sound bite in someone else’s story, he was the author in the byline. Mia was surprised to learn that her pen pal (of sorts) was a freelance journalist who’d written for forty different publications. The subject of his stories was always the same: people who professed to have amazing temporal abilities. In some pieces, he called them “temporics.” In others, they were “chronokinetics.” Mostly he referred to them as Gothams, a term that deeply intrigued Zack and Mia.

  A keyword search for Gothams generated 1,014,353 articles.

  Zack tossed his partner a bleary stare. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  The topic consumed them for the rest of the week. For twelve hours a day, they sat at adjacent workstations, catching up on decades of Altamerican legend. In the 1950s, at the dawn of temporis, new rumors swirled of people who could innately bend time in one manner or another. The explanations ranged from the scientific to the mystical to the purely divine.

  Thirty-six years ago, a f
ormer Dep named Alexander Wingo breathed new life into the myth. He dubbed these people Gothams after the Halo of Gotham, the miraculous ring of land where more than sixty thousand souls survived the Cataclysm of 1912. Though they’d stood mere feet from the edge of the blast, the damage they suffered was purely emotional. The only exceptions were the pregnant women, many of whom birthed children with crippling defects. If Wingo was to be believed, a fraction of the infants had mutated in more interesting ways. Some developed strange talents. Some grew up to find one another and bear talented offspring of their own.

  In his book, Children of the Halo, Wingo claimed to have discovered a clandestine community of third- and fourth-generation Gothams. Though normal citizens in public, they secretly operated under their own arcane laws and rituals. Their strict mating customs made each generation stronger than the last. Wingo feared it was just a matter of time before they began birthing gods.

  The book created a huge stir among starry-eyed believers, spawning novels and movies and one long-running lumivision series. It also sparked an endless chain of incredible claims and sightings. At least once a month, some bold attention-seeker would come forward with nebulous proof of Gotham activity, only to get exposed as a fraud or dupe. Usually the one exposing them was Peter Pendergen. The man clearly had a taste for irony.

  On Friday evening, while the Silvers digested their dinner on the balcony, Zack and Mia shared the fruits of their labor.

  “He’s thirty-seven and widowed with one son,” Zack told them. “When he’s not out disproving the existence of his own people, he likes to write fiction. He has two published novels, both set in medieval Ireland. He claims he can trace his ancestry all the way back to King Arthur’s father.”

  “Yes, and I’m related to Beowulf,” David mocked.

  Zack laughed. “We didn’t buy it either. From his age, I assume he’s a fourth-generation Gotham, which is pretty mind-blowing when you think about it. I mean we’re nouveau weird. These people have been carrying it in their genes since 1912.”

  “They sound like interesting people,” Theo offered. “Shame they want us dead.”