by Daniel Price
“What are you saying?”
David studied his bandaged hand with dark and heavy eyes.
“I’m saying that for your sake and his, you might want to start thinking of him as a brother.”
—
At a quarter to three, David joined the others in the kitchen for breakfast. Mia was thrilled to see him swap warm apologies with Zack, and beamed with gushing relief when he squeezed her hand under the table. It scared her how easily David could move her to good and bad places. She wondered if that was a sign of being in love.
The bacon and waffles were nearly all gone by the time Amanda came downstairs. She met Zack’s bright cheer with a nervous half grin, then avoided his gaze for the rest of the meal.
Soon Theo sucked a sharp breath in pain, grinding all conversation to a halt. He glanced around at his worried friends, then sighed with futility.
“Yeah. I think it’s coming back.”
Zack tapped the table in tense resolve. “All right then. That settles that.”
“What settles what?”
“As soon as we’re ready, we’re saying good-bye to the cat and hello to Peter.”
He scanned the faces of the others, lingering an extra second on Amanda. “Anyone have a problem with that?”
Hannah, Theo, and Mia slowly shook their heads, censoring their many leery doubts about Peter. Amanda merely stared at her empty plate, deeply lost in other concerns.
David was the only one who smiled. No one needed to ask him how he felt on the matter.
—
The bathroom mirror was nothing more than a floating lumic projection. It was impervious to fogging, and could reflect at six different viewing angles.
As Mia finished drying herself, her elbow brushed a button on the wall. Suddenly the picture changed to a rear view. Unhappy to be mooning herself, she reverted to the traditional reflection, then squinted curiously at her body. There seemed less of her now than usual. She must have shed at least ten pounds since fleeing Terra Vista.
She slipped on her clothes and ran a drying wand over her hair, examining herself with sunny awe. Between the weight loss and David’s forgiveness, her mood was nearly healed from the battering it took earlier, when she received the cruelest message yet from future times.
I hate you. I despise you with every fiber of my being. You’re so hopeless, so clueless, so utterly blind to the things happening right under your nose. The Pelletiers are laughing at you, Mia. Semerjean is laughing.
I’d spoil the joke for you if I could, but it really doesn’t matter. Just take my advice and kill yourself. We should have never come to this world. We should have died in the basement with Nana.
Even now, hours later, Mia reeled from her own venom. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life as the whipping girl for every Future Mia in a black mood. If the girl with two watches was right, then the problem would only get worse.
Mia suddenly heard sharp, angry voices outside the door.
“Okay! All right! I was just asking, Hannah!”
“You’re not asking! You’re blaming!”
Mia put down the heat wand and groaned. God. Not this. Not now.
The sisters stomped through the bedroom, both half-dressed and flailing in jittery rage. While Hannah stuffed unfolded garments into duffel bags, Amanda rummaged through Xander’s closet.
“There’s a difference between being upset and being upset at you,” the widow snapped. “I’m upset because I only own one shoe now!”
“And you’re upset at me because I left your other pair at the lake house!”
“Did I say that? Did you actually hear me use those words?”
“You didn’t have to. It was all in your tone. Do you think we just met?”
Amanda shook her head in trembling pique, throwing shoe after shoe over her shoulder. Of course the old man had the narrow feet of a ballerina. She was destined to go barefoot to Brooklyn.
“You always do this, Hannah. Always.”
“Always do what?”
“Take your bad moods out on me. I know what you’re really upset about.”
“Oh do you now?”
“You hurt that agent. I get it. I hurt two cops so I know exactly what you’re going through. But do you come to me for help? Of course not. You decide to yell and scream at me, just like you always do!”
“Excuse me. Who’s screaming now?”
Amanda jumped up from the floor. “I am! I’m screaming at you now because I can’t take it anymore! You wear me out!”
Hannah clenched her jaw and looked away, her foot tapping maniacally.
“You think I’m weak. You think I’m so goddamn weak. Have you considered the fact that maybe I’m only weak around you? Maybe you’re the one who—”
The bathroom door flew open. Mia barged into the room, her wet hair throwing droplets in arcs. She snatched a pair of sandals from under the bed and chucked one at the feet of each sister. She waved a quivering finger back and forth between them.
“No more. I’m not sharing a room with either of you ever again. I don’t care if I have to sleep outside in a dumpster. I can’t do this anymore.”
Amanda and Hannah watched her in matching stupor as she stormed back to the bathroom. She spun around at the door, fighting tears.
“You think I wouldn’t kill to have my brothers here? You think Zack wouldn’t kill to have his brother here? You have no idea how lucky you are, and yet all you do is fight. There’s something seriously wrong with both of you.”
“Mia—”
She slammed the door behind her, jostling a picture from the wall.
Dead-faced, silent, Hannah made a slow trek out of the room. Amanda sat down on the bed and calmly gathered the sandals. As she slipped them over her feet, she thought once again about David’s theory and realized that the DNA didn’t matter. The six of them lived and screamed and hurt each other like family. They were all siblings down to the bone.
—
The Silvers rode the final leg of their journey in dismal silence. Xander’s red Cameron Arrow was a skinny little car with two platform rows that were better suited for couples. Zack’s arm brushed Mia every time he turned the steering wheel. She could feel Theo’s body tense up whenever he suffered a new flash of pain. She held his hand, caressing it with worry. Her future self once told her that it was more important to get to New York in a strong state of mind than it was to get there fast. She had no illusions about anyone’s current condition.
David slept soundly in the back, his head flopping in turns between each sister’s shoulder. As Hannah fixed her surly gaze out the window, her dark emotions flew back and forth across the car. She faulted Amanda, then faulted herself. She hated Amanda, then hated herself.
By the time she snapped out of her doleful trance, the Arrow had shot out of a tunnel and into a great urban thoroughfare.
Hannah blinked at the sight of yellow taxis and Jewish delis. “Wait. Are we . . . ? Is this . . . ?”
Zack shined his searchlight gaze around at all the lumic signs and tempic storefronts, these alien embellishments to the city he once knew. Though he was finally back in his native Manhattan, the cartoonist never felt farther from home.
“This is it,” he said, with a nervous exhale. “We’re here.”
THIRTY-ONE
The traffic light was nothing but a floating disc of lumis, two feet wide and red as a sunset. Fat gray pigeons fluttered through it while a hunched old woman crossed the street between tempic guardrails. A ghosted billboard stretched the length of the intersection, hawking heart-healthy breakfast cereal to idled drivers.
Zack leaned forward and craned his view at the near and distant streams of flying cars. He’d counted seven different levels of traffic when the light turned green, the billboard vanished, and the tempic rails gave way to open road.
Mia
tapped his wrist. “Zack.”
He snapped out of his trance and pressed the gas pedal, marveling at the taxi in the rearview mirror. A true New York cabbie would have honked him into oblivion for dawdling at a green light. This wasn’t Zack’s city on any level. Calling this place New York was like calling a dog a zebra, or swapping the concepts of blue and yellow.
“This should be Soho,” he uttered. “I mean we came out of the Holland Tunnel, so . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what they call it now.”
Mia stroked his wrist with sympathy. Though she’d never set foot in the old New York, a future self had sold this world’s version as a paradise beyond description, beautiful enough to evoke tears. Now she glanced through dry eyes at the windblown scraps of litter, the garish assault of animated ads. Wrong again, she seethed. You just keep giving me bad information.
Amanda writhed uncomfortably in the backseat. She could feel every tempic construct within a half-block radius, a hundred cold fingers pressing her thoughts. Barricaded storefronts stretched along both sides of the street, each one ready to ripple and dance for their visiting queen.
“What time is it?”
David checked his watch. “Half past ten.”
She eyed the stores suspiciously. “Middle of a Tuesday morning. Why is everything closed?”
Hannah stroked her lip in bother. The whole city seemed eerily quiet at the moment. There were only a handful of pedestrians on each block, most of them dressed from head to toe in lily-white garments. A husky street vendor sold a wide assortment of white Venetian masks.
“Something weird is going on here.”
“It’s not just here,” said Zack. “Everything was closed in Jersey too.”
Mia’s eyes bulged at a masked young couple in white bathrobes and sneakers. The man brandished a hand-painted placard that said New York Thrives on 10-5.
“Commemoration,” she said.
“What?”
“Ten-five. Today’s the anniversary of the Cataclysm.”
The Silvers glanced out their windows with fresh unease. They recalled Sterling Quint’s discussion of the great temporic blast that destroyed half of New York City on October 5, 1912. The day had become a major holiday in the United States and a near-religious event here in the rebuilt metropolis.
The Arrow turned north onto 6th Avenue. Mia read the scrolling lumic banner that stretched above all lanes. This is our day, New York. The whole world is watching. Show them why this is the greatest city on Earth, now and forever.
Zack shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know if our timing’s really good or really bad.”
Mia plucked Peter’s day-old message from her shoulder bag and reread it. “We need to find a pay phone.”
“I’m looking.”
“Maybe we should look on foot,” Amanda suggested. “Get out and stretch our legs. If we can.”
One by one, the others checked on Theo in the front passenger seat. He’d spent the whole ride with his head against the window, twitching in restless slumber. Now his eyes were wide open and marked with deep red veins. His headaches had once again become bundled with visions, prophetic flashes too quick and obscure to make any sense. The only clear image he saw was Azral Pelletier. His harsh and handsome face popped up over and over, enough to erase all doubt. The white-haired man was coming back as sure as the moon, and probably sooner.
Theo glanced out at a distant flurry to the east. “I think I see where everyone went.”
—
The Ghostwalk was a ritual that dated back to the first Commemoration in 1913. It began as a silent procession down 3rd Avenue—fifty thousand mourners in white robes and masks, all marching for the souls of the lost. As the years progressed and cracked hearts slowly healed, the Ghostwalk grew a fluffy tail of musicians, dancers, and other sunny revelers who sought to honor the dead by celebrating life. The cavalcade expanded each year until it became known as the March of the Spirits.
Today the twin parades were joined in bipolar harmony, the yin and the yang, the grief and the joy. The event moved to Broadway in 1942, starting at 96th Street and ending at City Hall Park.
The Silvers caught the tail end of the Ghostwalk at 14th Street, at the corner of New Union Square. They hovered at the edge of the crowd, watching the parade through their newly purchased masks. They indulged the vendor when they saw aerocycle cops scanning the crowd from twenty feet above.
Mia felt ridiculous in her butterfly eye-mask, even though half the locals around her wore sillier disguises. She stood on her tiptoes in a vain attempt to peer over the wall of spectators.
David offered her a smirk and a hand. He looked like a superhero in his white domino mask.
“Let me give you a lift.”
Mia’s brow curled in worry. “You’re hurt.”
“My spine’s just fine. Come on.”
She climbed onto his back with wincing dread. To her amazement, he didn’t even grunt. Maybe she’d lost more weight than she realized.
“You sure this isn’t hurting you?”
“You’d know,” David sighed. “As you saw yesterday, I don’t handle pain very well.”
The procession continued past them. The majority of ghostwalkers wore plain white bathrobes. Some women sported snowy gowns. A few men were decked out in formal ivory vestments that had been passed down for three generations. The one item that never varied was the mask, an expressionless white face with black fabric eyeholes. The uniformity created an eerily powerful effect. For a moment Mia imagined she was watching the departed souls of her world, all the teachers and classmates and neighbors and cousins who didn’t get silver bracelets. And to think she’d snapped at the sisters for not realizing how lucky they were. She was alive. She was alive on the back of a beautiful boy with the heart of a lion and an unflinchingly deep regard for her. Mia never stopped replaying the scene on the highway, when David threatened to kill two Deps if they harmed a hair on her head. She wasn’t just lucky, she was blessed.
Mia locked her arms around David and heaved a warm sigh over his shoulder. “Don’t feel bad.”
“About what?”
“The way you acted yesterday. We don’t care about that. You’ve been there for us since day one and we love you. We’ll love you no matter what you do.”
She breathed a soft whisper into his ear. “I’ll love you no matter who you kill.”
Though the mask lay still on his impassive face, David’s voice carried a thin new tremor.
“You’re a rare and precious jewel, Miafarisi. I dread the day our paths diverge.”
Everyone turned to look as booming cheers erupted to the north. Exuberant music blared up the street. The last of the Ghostwalk was exiting the square. Now came the March of the Spirits.
Amanda crunched her brow behind her white burglar mask as confetti guns popped and the locals turned jubilant. The crowd had gone from funeral to Mardi Gras at the turn of a dime.
She sneaked an anxious peek at Zack, a parallel study in conflicting extremes. His rabbit-eared mask radiated levity while the eyes behind it screamed with bewilderment. He stood right next to her, but he might as well have been a thousand miles away.
She took his dangling hand in hers. “It has to be hard for you. Coming back to your hometown and finding it so different.”
Zack threw an antsy glance at the drugstore behind him, where a public phone lay encased inside an opaque metal cylinder. A red light on the door indicated that the tube was currently occupied.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems like every big difference in this world can be traced back to the Cataclysm in one way or another. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised New York changed the most.”
The first of the parade platforms approached, ferrying a gorgeous young blonde in a star-spangled minidress. She crooned a bouncy tribute to New York into her microphone whil
e a thirty-foot ghostbox displayed a giant live projection of her buxom upper half. Zack noticed the empty space beneath the platform’s hanging drapes. It seemed aeris had turned all the floats literal.
Amanda stroked his hand with her thumb, then grimaced in affliction when he pulled it away.
“Zack . . .”
“It’s all right. I understand.”
“Understand what? We haven’t had a chance to talk.”
He pursed his lips in a crusty scowl. “If it’s a ‘let’s just be friends after all’ speech, I don’t need to hear it. You’ve been wearing it on your face for the last seven hours.”
Amanda threw a quick nervous glance at David, five feet away.
“It’s not what you think,” she said to Zack. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to explain it.”
“You don’t have to explain anything. It happens. It’s not like we signed a contract.”
Amanda clenched her jaw. She knew Zack well enough to see the mask behind the mask. He was determined to play the breezy teflon shrugger until one of them screamed.
“Would you listen to me? I’m not backing out. There’s just . . . a new complication.”
Exuberant children in brightly colored jumpsuits lined every edge of the second float. They reached into buckets and flung foil-wrapped candies at the crowd. Zack gave Amanda his full attention, even as a chocolate coin sailed between them.
“I’m all ears.”
She shook her head. “Not now. When we’re alone again, and when you’re less angry—”
“I’m not angry.”
“No. Of course not. You’re just convinced I dropped my feelings for you on a fickle whim. Why would that anger you?”
“Well, what did you expect me to think? Yesterday we had a nice plan worked out. Today you can barely look at me. I’ve had seven hours to scratch my head over it. All I have now are a bloody scalp and a few second thoughts of my own. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe it’ll be easier for everyone if we just forget it.”
Tiny spikes of stress tempis hatched from Amanda’s feet, piercing the straps of her borrowed sandals. She banished away the whiteness, then cast a thorny glower at the parade.