A cold rain came to Brooklyn on Wednesday, the first of April’s showers. The updraft winds and low air temperature prompted the New York Weather Bureau to issue a Level 1 hailstorm alert. All over the city, people doubled back home for their tempic umbrellas. Aeromobile drivers rushed to get to their destinations before flight traffic was grounded.
Jonathan watched the rain from the backyard patio, a red umbrella in his grip. Under normal circumstances, he’d be standing beneath the overhang of the Union Square Skybus Station, playing rock songs for pocket change. Today would have been a real slog. Weather like this made everyone grumpy, stingy. Jonathan would have been lucky to get anything more than nickels in his guitar case.
Thankfully, his scrounging days seemed to be over. Some remarkable strangers had rolled out the red carpet for him on Monday and offered him a better way to live. Now he had all the food, clothing, and shelter he could have ever possibly hoped for, with no strings attached.
Actually, no. There was one string.
Hannah, Amanda, and Peter watched him anxiously from patio chairs, an ominous-looking trio in their hooded black rain slickers. They’d spoken in turns for fifteen minutes, filling him in on the Earth’s secret illness. Now, at last, came the Q&A part of the discussion.
Jonathan gazed at the clouds with tense, busy eyes. “Four years,” he said. “Shit, that’s . . .”
He switched his umbrella to his other hand, then slowly shook his head. “I mean I never expected to grow old on this world. But four years . . .”
“Jonathan—”
“Why does this keep happening?”
Hannah rose from her chair and crouched at his side. “Look, we told you it’s not set in stone. We have a chance of stopping it.”
“Right. The one string to rule them all.”
“It exists,” Peter insisted. “I’ve seen it.”
“Even though you’re not an augur.”
Peter rose from his chair and moved behind Amanda. “I had a bit of a stroke last year. Put me in a coma and sent me to the God’s Eye. You don’t have to be an augur to go there. You just need the right wires to touch in your brain.”
Jonathan took a moment to study Peter and Amanda. He’d thought they were married when he first met them, but apparently they were just friends. They sure did have a vibe to them, though. He wondered what kept them from boffing each other, especially in light of the world’s ticking deadline.
“How do you know it wasn’t just a dream?” he asked.
Amanda wriggled uncomfortably in her chair. “Because Rebel’s seen it too.”
Jonathan peeked over his shoulder at the patio door, increasingly nervous that Heath would come looking for him. This wasn’t a conversation for his ears. Not yet, anyway.
He turned back to Amanda, skeptical. “So Theo’s gonna go to the God’s Eye, find the string, prove Rebel to be the asshole that he is, and then save the whole planet.”
She shook her head. “He’ll tell us what needs to be done.”
“It’ll be up to all of us to make it happen,” Peter said.
A brief white flash filled the eastern half of the sky. Jonathan counted six Mississippis before the thunder came.
“I wasn’t exactly a mover and shaker on the old world,” he admitted. “This is way beyond my pay grade.”
“I was an actress,” Hannah said. “Zack was a cartoonist. Theo was a law school dropout. None of us are trained for this.”
“We’re handling it day by day,” Amanda said. “And so will you. Just give it time.”
“Time.” Jonathan scoffed. “What if Rebel’s right? What if killing us ‘breachers’ is the only way to save everyone?”
The sisters traded a heavy look. Peter cut a slow path toward the brownstone. “I don’t believe that’s the case.”
“And if Theo finds out that it is?”
Peter opened the back door and turned around in the light of the kitchen. Jonathan didn’t like the expression on his face. Not one bit.
“Then I guess we’re in for another discussion.”
—
Despite all warnings, the hailstorm never came. The rain continued in dribs and drabs throughout the day. By nightfall, the clouds gave way to a bright crescent moon.
At ten o’clock, just minutes after Jonathan and Heath retired to the attic, Peter summoned the Silvers to the basement den. They sat among the beds and chairs, their eyes following Peter as he paced the beaded carpet.
“I’m afraid we have a problem,” he began. “A dilemma, actually. Can you stop that?”
Two Davids sat at the foot of Theo’s bed: one real, one made entirely out of last night’s darkness. He unsummoned his shadow self, then gave Peter his full attention. “Is this about the wolves?”
“It’s not Heath’s power that worries me. It’s Jonathan’s.” Peter snatched a pencil from Zack’s drawing table. “There have been forty-four droppers in the history of my clan, and they’ve all had the same unfortunate tendency.”
“To do what?” asked Amanda.
“To die.”
The others paused, blank-faced, while Peter resumed pacing. “When it comes to temporal abilities, my people bloom early and fast. Most of us manifest around the age of two. My son . . .”
He deliberated his words before continuing. “It was God’s folly to put such big power in little hands. We’ve had our share of accidents.”
Peter raised Zack’s pencil to eye level and dangled it between his fingers.
“The problem with droppers is that their first mistake is always their last. A sudden shock, a bad dream, even an ill-timed thought could trigger their power on themselves. Before anyone can do anything . . .”
He let go of the pencil. It dropped through the air, then disappeared into a twelve-inch portal on the floor.
Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”
“I saw it happen once,” Peter said. “Poor girl was playing in the village square. She skinned her knee and next thing we knew, she fell through the grass like a phantom. Didn’t even have time to scream.”
Theo sat forward, gape-mouthed. “That’s horrible.”
“Yes. It’s the one power we don’t consider to be a blessing. It’s more like a death sentence.”
“How old was the girl when she, uh . . . ?”
“Four,” Peter said. “Droppers don’t usually live past six.”
“But Jonathan’s an adult,” Mia said. “He has more control than a kid.”
“It’s not about age, darling. It’s experience. And Jonathan’s still new to his talent. All things considered, it’s a miracle he’s still alive.”
Amanda flashed back to her early tempic mishaps. If she’d been cursed with Jonathan’s power, she would have dropped herself on her very first day.
“There has to be something we can do.”
“Maybe,” Peter said. “We discovered a while back that tempis is the only thing an intangible object can’t fall through. Now our one living dropper spends all his time on it. He has a tempic catcher under his bed, a tempic sheath on his chairs, even tempis on the soles of his shoes. It’s not an easy life he lives, but he’s twelve years old and still with us.”
Zack creased his brow at Peter. “Okay. So we buy a bunch of barriers and line the floors with them. What’s the dilemma?”
“It might not be the best choice. There’s a force out there even stronger than tempis. It may have been saving Jonathan all along.”
Only Amanda caught his gist. “Ignorance.”
“Exactly. He doesn’t know the danger he’s in. We put the fear in his head and it could be self-defeating, like telling a man on a tightrope not to look down. The minute he steps off the tempis, and it’s bound to happen sooner or later, his mind could get the better of him. All it takes is a thought.”
Theo’s heart sank with dread. He’d learned from his many trips through the God’s Eye just how cruel the human subconscious could be.
“I have my preference on how to proceed,” Peter said. “But we’re a group. This should be a group decision.”
“It should be his decision,” Zack countered.
“If we take away his ignorance, the choice is already made.”
Mia scratched her neck, agitated. “I don’t like this. We shouldn’t keep secrets from each other.”
“Even if that secret saves his life?” David asked her.
“Ignorance didn’t stop me from getting portals in my sleep. It didn’t stop you from blinding yourself.”
Zack nodded in agreement. “If Jonathan drops in the middle of the night, we’ll never forgive ourselves. We’ll always know we could have saved him.”
“That goes both ways,” Amanda said. “If he dies from our meddling—”
“Wouldn’t you want us to tell you?”
“I’d want you to do whatever it takes to keep me alive, even if that means lying to me.”
Peter puffed a loud breath. “As it stands, I agree with Amanda and David. But if the augur among us has any insight, now’s the time to share it.”
Theo tapped his leg distractedly. Once again, he caught a prescient glimpse of Amanda screaming with grief, her body erupting in hard spikes of tempis. He didn’t think she’d get that hysterical over a man she’d just met. She had to be mourning someone closer to her. Someone in this room.
“I haven’t seen a single future where Jonathan drops himself,” Theo attested. “That’s not to say it can’t happen. I just know from experience that some prophecies are self-fulfilling. Some warnings . . .” He took a nervous look at Amanda. “I think telling him will do more harm than good. It won’t be great for Heath’s state of mind either.”
David shook a finger at him. “That’s a good point.”
“Very good point,” Peter said. “We seem to be approaching a quorum.”
Mia rose up from her chair. “You can’t do this. It’s not right!”
“Jonathan put his trust in us,” Zack said. “If we keep this from him, we won’t deserve it.”
Amanda looked to her sister, the lone holdout in the conversation. “Hannah?”
She sat to the side on an inflatable lounger, her finger tracing a slow path across the vinyl. After a moment of thought, she jumped to her feet and fixed her stern brown eyes on Peter.
“There’s no dilemma. No debate. First thing tomorrow, I’m telling him.”
“Hannah—”
“You don’t know him like I do, okay? He’s a strong man. A survivor. If anyone deserves our respect, it’s him.”
She gave David a hard look. “And Zack’s right. If we start lying to each other, where does it stop?”
—
The next morning, as a flat gray sky brought another drizzle to Brooklyn, Hannah remembered why she’d spent most of her life avoiding bold decisions.
“Shit.”
Jonathan leaned against the rail of her balcony. He rapped the metal with his knuckles, then spun around to face her. “Shit! Hannah, why would you tell me that?”
“I don’t know! I thought it was something you needed to hear.”
“Yeah, well, you thought wrong. This is even worse than your other news.”
“How is it worse?”
“Because it is, all right? I just . . .” He rubbed his face with both hands. “You didn’t know me on the old world, Hannah. I was a screwup. Anyone who knew me learned real fast not to count on me. Then Heath came along and . . . goddamn it, I promised him I’d never leave him. I gave him my word and I meant it.”
Hannah shook her head. “It doesn’t have to be like that. The tempis—”
“Oh, fuck the tempis. I’m not spending the rest of my life as an invalid. What good does that do anyone?”
“Jonathan . . .”
“Look, I appreciate your concern. I do. But you have to let me handle this my way, okay? Just . . .”
He closed his eyes and let out a pitch-black chuckle. “Just drop it.”
Hannah reached out to touch him, then pulled her hand back. She could already feel old patterns reemerging, an insatiable craving for physical distraction. It would be so damn easy for them to screw away the pain, but the relief never lasted. After the intimacy came her fear of intimacy, then the distance, then the fighting. And by this time next week, Hannah Banana (always needs a man-a) would have another ex-lover in the house.
No. Not this time. She’d spent the last six months in a state of self-reliance and she had very much come to like it. She would just have to comfort Jonathan as a friend.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Your life was so much simpler before you met us.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He looked down at his calloused fingers. “It wasn’t exactly a picnic.”
Once again, Hannah pondered Ioni’s motive for bringing her and Jonathan together. Maybe it was never about sex or romance. Maybe it wasn’t about Jonathan at all.
“Heath won’t be alone,” Hannah told him. “If anything happens to you, and I hope to God it doesn’t, we’ll take good care of him. I promise.”
Jonathan looked at her with a complicated expression, an evincible mixture of fondness and doubt.
“You don’t seem convinced,” Hannah noted.
“I’m convinced you’ll try,” he said. “I’m not so sure you’ll succeed.”
He gripped the railing and blew a hot breath through his nose. “He really doesn’t like you people.”
—
The next twelve days passed with slow unease, like sandaled feet on broken glass. Though the Silvers and Peter formed an instant rapport with Jonathan, they had a more difficult time with their other new housemate: a hundred-pound boy of singular name who seemed all but determined not to fit in.
Heath didn’t need his tempis to keep the others on edge. He wandered into bedrooms without any sense of propriety, shook dandruff from his hair at the dinner table. He griped to Jonathan about the Silvers while they were in full view and earshot. “His shirt’s torn.” “I don’t like what she cooked.” “Why does he make that sound when he eats?”
Even worse were his daily outbursts, where he’d flap his arms in shrieking tantrum and run barreling back to his bedroom. No provocation was seemingly too small for him—the wrong word, the wrong sound, the wrong color entrée. The others grew accustomed to hearing his cries from the attic, interrupted by the sound of Jonathan’s soft appeasements: [mumble mumble] “No!” [mumble mumble] “No! I want to leave!”
By the fifth day, Heath cautiously began to mingle, though the conversations were limited to topics of his choosing. With Zack, the subject was always Josh Trillinger, a pinch of salt in a suppurating wound. With David, it was his wristwatch. Heath had become fascinated with the antique silver timepiece, the last surviving remnant of David’s old life. “Where did you buy it?” “How often do you wind it?” “Has it ever stopped working?” “Can I have it when you die?”
With Amanda, Heath only wanted to talk about the power they shared. He was curious to know if she ever killed anyone with her tempis (“No.”), or hurt someone accidentally (“Well . . .”).
“I’ve never hurt anyone,” Heath boasted. He’d found Amanda in the kitchen and watched her closely as she cut up an onion with a self-made knife. “My wolves do what I say, except for Rose.”
Amanda looked at him strangely. “Rose?”
“Rose Tyler,” he said. “She’s the meanest one in the pack and she doesn’t always listen to me. She’s mad because she wants to kill people and I don’t let her.”
Amanda’s tempic blade rippled with distress. “You have to watch her, Heath.”
“I try. But she has her own mind. There’s only so much I can do.”
He peeked into the pot and scowled at the bubbling sauce. “That smells like puke.”
Heath continued to keep his distance from the rest of the group, despite their numerous attempts to be friendly. Whenever Theo and Mia tried to engage him, he simply glanced at them with a skittish side-eye, as if they were ghosts or figments of his imagination.
“Don’t take it personally,” Jonathan told Mia. “Heath has a weird mental filing system. He’s just figuring out where to put you.”
It was no mystery how Heath had filed Peter. The man was a Gotham, a rather loud one at that. Amanda could feel Heath’s tempic energies spike whenever Peter barged into a room, bellowed with laughter, or invaded Heath’s personal space. She feared the day would come when Peter pinched the boy’s last nerve and got a formal introduction to Rose Tyler.
As for Hannah, everyone could see that Heath didn’t like her, and her servile attempts to please him only made it worse. She followed him around like an anxious new stepmother, offering him every amenity under the sun. She prepared meals to his exact specifications, only to have them pushed away over a smell or color issue. She sewed him a beautiful replica of his football jersey, only to have it languish at the bottom of his dresser. He shrank from her touch. He scowled at her questions. He bristled at the cloying voice she used around him, as if she’d just brought him home from a puppy farm.
On Heath’s seventh night with the Silvers, he finally exploded. He threw his dinner plate at the wall, kicked over his chair, and then made a screaming dash for the front door.
Jonathan stumbled after him, but the kid was too damn quick. “Heath, no!”
Hannah jumped into blueshift and passed Heath in the foyer. By the time he registered the hot breeze at his side, she was blocking the door with her body.
“What’s your problem with me?” she asked him.
Heath doubled back to the kitchen door, only to find Hannah blocking that too.
“I’ve been nothing but nice to you.”
Howling, Heath ran upstairs to his attic refuge, and barricaded the door with a dresser.
Hannah watched him from the edge of Jonathan’s mattress, her legs crossed, her lips curled in a frown.
“I can do this all night.”
Heath spun around, bug-eyed. “Leave me alone!”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need you doing that!”
“Doing what? The cooking? The sewing?”
“Pretending to like me!”
Hannah blinked at him, mystified. She’d lived with David so long, she forgot how insecure some teenage boys could be.
“Heath, why would I pretend to like you? What reason could I possibly have?”
Flustered, he began tidying up the bedroom. He hung Jonathan’s guitar on a wall hook, then gathered the handwritten song sheets he’d been working on, night and day, for the last eight months. With Jonathan’s help, he’d restored sixty-five classic rock songs from memory, and he was just getting started. Heath refused to let the best parts of his world die in some freak cosmic accident. Note by note, lyric by lyric, he would bring them all back.
Hannah’s face softened as she watched him scurry around. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been trying too hard. I go a little crazy sometimes when I like someone and they don’t like me back.”
“Why?”
“Because it hurts.”
“No. I mean, why do you like me?”
“Oh.” She needed a good ten seconds before she could formulate an answer. “Because you remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Heath turned around and eyed her skeptically.
“What?” Hannah asked. “You think we don’t have anything in common? Music’s everything to us. And we didn’t just stumble onto it like Jonathan did. There was someone in our lives who passed that love onto us. For me, it was my mother. Who was it for you?”
Her stomach did a cartwheel as she saw Heath’s dismay. The last thing she needed was a faceful of wolves.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “But I see it in you. I recognize it and it makes me . . . I don’t know. Ever since I met you, I’ve had this overwhelming urge to take care of you.”
Heath frowned at the floor. “You want to mother me.”
“I want to sister you,” she corrected. “And if you knew me, you’d know how rare that is.”
Hannah looked down at her hands and let out a bleak laugh. “I’ve never been a big sister to anyone.”
Over the next few days, she noticed a marked change in Heath’s behavior. He didn’t grit his teeth when she talked to him. He didn’t complain about the meals she cooked. He even managed to find his way into the football jersey she’d made for him. The royal blue fabric practically glistened against his skin.
On the nineteenth of April, a full two weeks after Heath’s arrival, Hannah stepped out of her bathroom to find him sitting on her bed. She tightened her towel.
“Uh, sweetie, you should probably knock before you . . .”
She stopped when she noticed the scissors in his hand. They hung loosely between his fingers, the loops pointed awkwardly at Hannah.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s with the, uh . . .”
Now she could see the pleading look in his eyes, the frustrated way he tugged at his curls.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened in revelation. “Oh!”
An hour later, Hannah escorted Heath to the edge of the living room, where five of their housemates had gathered to watch a movie. One by one, they turned away from the lumivision and marveled at Heath’s transformation. His unruly afro had been trimmed into a short and tidy wave cut. The style made him look five years older, and stunningly handsome.
Jonathan’s mouth fell open. “Holy crap. Who is that?”
“You look good,” Mia said.
Heath acknowledged her with a twitchy half grin before losing himself in the movie. He sat on the carpet and watched with rapt attention.
Jonathan made room for Hannah on the sofa. He leaned in close for a whisper. “What did you do, drug him?”
“He came to me,” she whispered back.
“Well, you’ve done it this time, sister. He’s both of ours now.”
Soon Peter and Amanda joined the others in the living room. As the movie progressed to the second act, Theo looked around in the light of the lumivision and studied the faces around him—everyone on this world he cared about. Thankfully, the two new members of the group had a clean and stable future here, at least as far as he could see. Jonathan wasn’t dropping out of their lives anytime soon, and Heath had become an all-but-permanent fixture in Theo’s visions.
But there was discord in the Silvers’ strings, a creeping fog around the future of Theo’s closest friends. He’d never seen anything like it before, and nothing he did could penetrate the mist. All he could feel was an impending sense of loss and bereavement. All he could hear was the sound of Amanda’s screams.