David stood at the window at the end of the hallway, his blond brow creased with confusion. The neighborhood was eerily quiet this morning. There were no children playing in their box yards, no sunbathers and their music spinners. Even the local street traffic, usually a nonstop rumble in the periphery of his hearing, had dried up. It suddenly occurred to David that today was the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The date had a religious significance on this world and the last. It even had a name.
“Easter.”
Hannah poked her head out of her bedroom. “Huh?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud.”
She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her, a breakfast plate in her hand. The food looked like it had barely been touched.
“Still not eating,” David noted.
“She’s eating a little.”
“It’s been three days. Maybe she should get up for a bit. Move around.”
Hannah looked at him tiredly. “I’ll handle Amanda. How’s Mia?”
“Sleeping.”
“You sure?”
“There are portal notes raining all over her bedroom,” David said. “That’s a pretty good indicator.”
He didn’t mean to sound snide about it. He considered apologizing to Hannah, or at least offering to help. Zack’s violent departure had shattered the orderly structure of the household, leaving most of the residents in a state of depression, dysfunction, or—in Peter’s case—absenteeism. Hannah took it upon herself to become all things to everyone: the cook, the maid, the nurse, the grief counselor. David had expected her own grief to catch up with her by now, but she kept finding new ways to outrun it.
“Look, Hannah—”
“What the shit?”
The cursing came from the first floor. David barely managed to turn his head before Hannah sped downstairs, returned the food plate to the kitchen, and joined Jonathan in the laundry closet. His T-shirt and jeans were splattered with soap suds. A tattered wet bra hung from his hand.
“What are you doing?” Hannah asked.
Jonathan jerked his head at the elaborate Vertech machine. “I’m trying to wash clothes, but this goddamn thing’s from Bizarro World. I mean look at these buttons. Agitate. Pendulate. Exsiccate?”
He examined the bra with a baffled expression. “Apparently that last one means ‘purée.’”
Hannah threw the garment in the washer, then set the timer for minus-six. “Forget the water features,” she told him. “That’s for new clothes. For everything else, you want the temporal settings.”
“Temporal.” Jonathan threw his hands up. “Everything in this house is a time machine.”
“You never used one of these?”
“I lived in a slum. We had a sink and a washboard.”
Hannah closed the lid and started the Vertech. She brushed some suds from Jonathan’s shirt. “You should have told me you were doing this. I would have helped.”
“I was doing it to help you.”
“You don’t have to. I’m all right.”
“You’re not all right. You’ve been running around since Friday. You haven’t slowed down. You haven’t even . . .” He dipped his head and sighed. “Heath’s cried more than you have, and he barely knew Zack.”
Hannah stepped away from him. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.”
Jonathan followed her into the kitchen and watched her scrape Amanda’s breakfast into juve tins. “Sorry,” he said. “After everything that’s happened, I guess I’ve learned to expect the worst.”
Hannah surprised him by chuckling. He tilted his head. “What?”
“When I first met Zack, he said something like that. He told me that after twenty-eight years of Jewish conditioning, he’d come to believe that, all things being equal, the darkest explanation is usually the right one.” She let out a broken laugh. “He called it Menachem’s Razor.”
Jonathan smiled until he saw Hannah’s lips quiver. She was fighting back tears. Losing.
“Our world had only been gone ten minutes,” she said. “And he was able to make jokes. I thought he was crazy but that’s just the way he is.”
“Hannah . . .”
“He never lets anything break him.”
David sat out of view on the stairwell, wincing in misery as he listened to Hannah’s cries. He didn’t need to look to know that Jonathan was holding her. That was just how it had started with Zack and Amanda.
But would these two learn from the tragic mistakes of others, or would they march blindly over the same cliff? David had no idea. Hindsight was his specialty, not foresight. All he knew was that he’d keep his mouth shut this time. There was nothing to be gained by nagging Jonathan and Hannah. It hadn’t done a damn thing to save Zack.
A large portal opened on the wall of the kitchen. Hannah broke away from Jonathan and grabbed a meat cleaver from the counter.
David ran into the kitchen. “Hannah, wait!”
Peter stepped through the surface and jumped at the sight of Hannah’s blade. His hands flew up in surrender. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! It’s just me! Just me!”
Hannah lowered the cleaver. “Goddamn it. Don’t do that.”
“Sorry.”
“Your portals look just like theirs!”
“I know.” Peter shrank the gateway out of existence. “I should have called first. I’m sorry.”
Everyone in the kitchen took a moment to collect themselves. David looked to Peter’s arms and counted twenty-two different bandages. Amanda had become so aggrieved in the wake of Zack’s abduction that her body erupted in tempic spikes. She might have brought the whole house down if Peter hadn’t subdued her in a chokehold. His quick thinking earned him dozens of puncture wounds.
His handphone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket and frowned at the screen. “The others still sleeping?”
David nodded his head. “Pretty much.”
“Well, wake them up,” said Peter. “I know where Zack is.”
—
No one knew what he’d been up to these past few days. He’d come in and out of the brownstone without a word of explanation, and rarely stayed home for more than an hour at a time. Now Mia, David, Hannah, and Theo watched Peter from the couches as he fiddled with his computer. He jiggled a small black device in the peripheral port, then looked over his shoulder at the lumivision’s screen. Whatever he was trying didn’t seem to be working.
Mia blinked at him in confusion, her eyes still bloodshot from the Pelletiers’ portal attack. “I don’t understand. How did he end up—”
“No idea,” said Peter. “I’ll explain what I know when everyone gets here.”
Theo rubbed his bandaged brow, testing his power for the hundredth time. He’d been totally blind to the future since Thursday, and it wasn’t because of his concussion. The Pelletiers were clouding his foresight. They were clearly intent on keeping Zack’s fate a mystery.
“How do you know that Rebel really has him?” he asked Peter.
“You’ll see in a moment.”
Jonathan and Heath came down the stairs, the former practically pushing the latter. Heath turned around every fourth step to register his shrill objection.
“You’re not listening to me!”
“I heard you, all right? It’ll be gone soon enough.”
Only Jonathan knew what the boy was upset about: a large yellow truck from the Transpac moving company, parked thirty yards down the street. Heath had been watching it all morning from the attic window, and had yet to see anyone come in or out of it.
“It shouldn’t be there,” he insisted to Jonathan. “It’s Easter. Nobody moves on Easter!”
“Buddy, listen to me. I know you hate yellow—”
“It’s not about the color.”
“—but we have bigger shit to deal with. Just dial it back, okay?”
Hannah held her hand out to him. “Sweetie, come sit with me.”
Heath hurried past her and monitored the truck through a slit in the window blinds.
Jonathan furrowed his brow at Peter. “You’re showing us a movie?”
“Not a movie,” said Peter. “As soon as—”
Everyone turned their heads toward the stairwell, where the final member of the group made a slow and clumsy descent.
None of the men had seen Amanda since Friday. She’d stayed tucked away in her bedroom, subsisting on liquids and a fistful of sedatives. Her skin was pallid. Her eyes were puffy. Her nightshirt hung off her like a shroud.
Amanda shambled into the living room and fixed her bleary eyes on Peter. “Just tell me he’s alive.”
“He was as of Friday.”
“You’ve known since Friday?”
“I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure they had him.” Peter smacked his computer. “Damn this thing. Why isn’t it working?”
David sprang up. “For God’s sake . . .”
“What, you fix image throwers now?”
“I am one.”
David touched the screen with two fingers, then raised his other hand. The room lit up with a giant projection: a still-frame of a tall and elegant Indian woman.
Peter nodded uncomfortably at David. “Thank you. Now—”
“Who’s the chick?” Hannah asked.
“Rebel’s wife,” David said. “I met her last year. She’s not pleasant.”
“Her name’s Ivy Sunder,” Peter explained. “She’s more than Rebel’s wife. She’s the other leader of the crusade. I’ve been bitmailing her these past few months, trying to arrange a parley. She didn’t respond until two days ago, when she sent me this spoolie.”
Theo crossed his arms indignantly. “Amanda’s right. You shouldn’t have kept this from us.”
“I had good cause. Now, I don’t have time to play the whole thing and I’m not going to stop for questions. Just watch and listen.”
He tapped his keyboard, unfreezing the playback. The camera followed Ivy as she walked backward down a lavish hallway. Its marble walls were lined with decorations: paintings and sconces, murals and mirrors. From the length of the corridor alone, it seemed the place was a mansion.
“It breaks my heart that it’s come to this, Peter. When I think about you, all I see is that sweet and skinny kid who used to chase me through the warrens. You were the only one who could ever go portal-for-portal with me. I miss those days.”
Mia hated herself for finding Ivy attractive. She looked beautiful in her chiffon summer dress, and she spoke with a strong, crisp diction that radiated intelligence. How the hell was she married to a thug like Rebel?
Ivy stared at her audience with soulful brown eyes. “I hate what you’re doing now. I hate what I’m doing. I think about all the friends I’ve lost, those six poor strangers who died in White Plains. It kills me what we had to do to those breachers. Their faces still haunt me at night.”
Hannah peeked over her shoulder at the two surviving Golds. While Jonathan glowered at Ivy’s image, Heath dipped his head with shuddering grief.
“We still don’t believe in your plan to save the world,” Ivy told Peter. “But now we’re starting to wonder if maybe we’ve been wrong ourselves. God knows these breachers keep surprising us. We thought they were all in league with the Pelletiers.”
She gripped the knob of a mahogany door. “But they’re clearly no friend of Zack Trillinger. And he’s obviously not a fan of them.”
Hannah sucked a loud gasp as the door opened to reveal Zack. He sat in an office study, his hands cuffed to the arms of a wooden chair. Tall, humming generators flanked him on all sides, suppressing his power with a solic field.
Zack took a brief, miserable look at the camera before lowering his head. Ivy moved behind him and gripped his shoulders. “He was beaten and half-starved when he found him,” she said to the camera. “He told us who tortured him but he won’t tell us why.”
Amanda leaned forward, her eyes drenched in tears. Though Zack was dressed in clean clothes and showed no visible signs of abuse, she could clearly see the trauma in his eyes. He was barely holding on to his sanity.
“The restraints are just a precaution,” Ivy insisted. “As you know, there’s bad blood between him and my husband. But the two of them had a good conversation this morning. They hate the Pelletiers more than they hate each other. And they both have a vested interest in seeing the Earth survive.”
Ivy crouched down to Zack’s level and addressed him in a soft, earnest voice. “If it turns out we were wrong, would you forgive us for our mistakes?”
Zack closed his eyes and nodded. David could feel every ounce of his humiliation. This was pure theater and Zack knew it. But his life depended on playing along.
“And if we’re right?” Ivy asked him. “If we offered solid proof that you breachers have to die in order to save this world?”
Zack raised his head with forced dignity, his hooded eyes fixed on the camera. “Well, then I would, in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, greet the reaper with a smile.”
Theo’s and Heath’s eyes bulged in synch. “Shit . . .”
Hannah looked at Theo. “What?”
Peter shushed them. “Wait.”
Ivy led the cameraman back into the hallway. “He’s an interesting one, that Trillinger. I don’t believe everything he says, especially about his Earth being egg-shaped, but he has made us question everything we know about the breachers. If it’s true that we have a common enemy, and if it’s true we have a similar goal, then we might be able to work together after all.”
Peter narrowed his eyes at her. “Here it comes.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen now, Peter. On Sunday, I’ll text you the address of a meeting location. You’ll have two hours to get there. The elders have already sworn us to an oath of armistice. As long as none of you attack us, we can’t attack you. We’ll return your friend, alive and well, and then we’ll see if we can work out a truce. If not, we’ll part ways peacefully and save our fight for another day.”
Her expression turned severe. “You can understand why, after all your betrayals, we need to be firm with you, Peter. If you’re late, or if you leave any of the breachers behind, we’ll take that as an act of bad faith. And then we’ll have no choice but to respond. I don’t have to tell you what that means for Zack.”
Mia covered her mouth. Amanda’s hands crusted over with tempis. “No . . .”
“I hope you make the right choice,” Ivy said to Peter. “For once.”
The screen went black. David cleared the lumic projection. Everyone in the room turned their nervous eyes to Peter.
“Before you get your hopes up,” he began, “you should know that—”
“It’s a trap,” Heath blurted.
Theo nodded his head in tense agreement. “He’s right. Zack was trying to warn us.”
“How?” Amanda asked.
“Admiral Ackbar’s a character from Return of the Jedi. He barely has any lines but one of them’s a classic. It was a running joke on the Internet.”
“What’s the line?”
“‘It’s a trap,’” Heath said.
“‘It’s a trap,’” Theo echoed.
Peter blew a hot breath at the floor. “It’s most definitely a trap.”
The room went silent. Hannah cocked her head at Peter. “So all that stuff about the truce . . .”
“Malarkey,” he said. “I see right through her. She hasn’t changed her mind. She wants you all dead. Even if it doesn’t save the world, it’s a blow to the Pelletiers. That’s good enough for her and Rebel.”
“So what happens now?” Mia asked. “What do we do when she sends the address?”
“She already sent it,” Peter admitted. “I got it ten minutes ago.”
Amanda shot to her feet. “What?”
“Listen to me—”
“We have to get Zack!”
“Amanda—”
“If we don’t go, they’ll kill him!”
“Amanda, he might already be dead.”
The others paused, horrified. Peter sat down on the sofa, then clutched Amanda’s arm. “The trap’s been baited. They don’t need Zack anymore. Then again, they might keep him alive just to give our augur something to look at. I don’t know.”
“I don’t care,” Amanda snapped. “If you’re wrong—”
“Just listen to me, okay? There’s a better way—”
“No.” The objection came from David this time. Peter looked to him, exasperated. “You won’t even hear me out?”
“I don’t need to. You’re about to propose some unilateral rescue effort that risks nobody’s life but yours. Ordinarily I’d be fine with that, except I was there the last time you tried to save Zack from Rebel. It didn’t go well.”
Peter gritted his teeth. “Boy, you don’t know half as much as you think you do.”
“He knows plenty,” Amanda said. “If Zack and I had listened to him, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I’m not making that mistake again. And I won’t let you throw your life away on some stupid act of chivalry.”
“It’s not chivalry, it’s—”
“Dumb,” Hannah said. “You need us, Peter. Everyone sees it but you.”
He shot to his feet. “Goddamn it! You’re playing right into Ivy’s hands! This is exactly what she wants.”
“What do you expect us to do?” Theo asked. “Let Zack die?”
“You’re not doing anything,” Peter said. “I’ll bring the others before I bring you.”
“He’s my friend!”
“I don’t care. Your only job is to stay alive and find that string.”
Theo opened his mouth to object, but he could see from the looks on his friends’ faces that they were with Peter on this one.
Hannah clasped his hand. “He’s right. You’re too important.”
“And you’re all fogged up anyway,” Amanda added. “You won’t be able to help us.”
“I can still help.”
Mia shook her head. “If Zack were here, you know what he’d say.”
Peter snorted. “Glad you feel that way, darling, because you’re not going either.”
“What?”
“The others at least have a chance to protect themselves. You can’t even make a working portal.”
“Then give me a gun!”
David looked at her despondently. “The last time you faced Rebel, he nearly killed you.”
“But he didn’t,” Mia said. “Zack saved me. Now you’re telling me I can’t save him back?”
The heavy faces of her companions told her everything she needed to know. “That’s all I am to you. Just dead weight.”
“Of course not,” said Amanda. “We love you.”
“But you don’t believe in me.”
“Mia . . .”
“Fine. Go.” She wiped her eyes, then fled into the foyer. “But you better goddamn save him.”
The others stayed silent as she disappeared up the stairwell. Her slammed door echoed through the house.
Peter’s gaze shifted gravely between Hannah and David. “I suppose I can’t talk either of you out of going.”
“No,” said David.
“Hell no,” said Hannah.
Jonathan fidgeted with his T-shirt, still damp with soapy water. “I’ll go.”
Heath stared at him in horror. “What? No!”
“You don’t have to do this,” Hannah said.
“Heath and I would be dead if it wasn’t for Josh Trillinger. The least I can do is help save his brother. And as it stands, I like Zack.”
Heath tugged his arm. “Don’t go! Please.”
“You stay here with Theo and Mia. You’ll be all right.”
“No we won’t!”
Amanda looked at the wall clock. “We’re wasting time.”
Peter nodded. “We leave in ten minutes. Do whatever you need to get ready.”
While the others filed out of the living room, Peter asked Amanda to stay behind. She studied the many bandages on his arms, her face racked with guilt.
“I’m sorry about that, Peter. I . . . lost my head.”
“I know. That’s what worries me. I can’t stop you from coming, but you have to pull yourself together. If Zack’s dead, or if they kill him in front of us—”
“Don’t say that.”
“—we can’t have any more friendly fire.”
Amanda looked down at her fumbling hands. When her emotions ran wild, she was a danger to everyone around her. Even now in the haze of her sedatives, she could feel the tempis waking up. Soon it would be pounding against the bars of its cage, screaming to be released.
“I won’t hurt you again,” she promised Peter. “Any of you.”
“Good to hear.” He grabbed a dangling lock of Amanda’s hair and tucked it behind her ear. “You realize this is all but a suicide mission. They know our tricks. They’re ready for us.”
“What choice do we have?”
“You could still let me handle it on my own. Quietly. Diplomatically.”
“There’s nothing quiet or diplomatic about your people.”
“Look—”
“No. Those bastards have hurt us time and time again. It ends today. And I’ll tell you something else. If we get there and Zack’s dead, or if they kill him in front of us, it won’t be my people who need to worry about me.”
Amanda brushed past him, then made a hard line up the stairs.
“I’ll kill every last Gotham I see.”
—
At eleven o’clock, the rescuers assembled. They looked deceptively normal in their blue jeans and sneakers, their faded gray sweatshirts and bargain-bin windbreakers. They might have passed for Sunday strollers if it wasn’t for their more conspicuous adornments. Peter and David each carried a .38 pistol in a belt holster. Hannah had strapped two billy clubs to her legs. Amanda wore a paramedic bag over her shoulder. Jonathan only had himself to bring.
Theo watched from the far side of the garage, his foot tapping a restless beat. Though his foresight remained lost in an impenetrable fog, he couldn’t shake his ominous feeling, as if everyone’s fate had already been decided. Surely the Pelletiers knew what would happen when they brought to Zack to Rebel. But what did they have to gain by war?
As the sky door opened on rumbling metal wheels, Peter pushed a manila envelope into Theo’s hands. “There’s thirty thousand dollars in there, plus directions to an apartment in Jersey. If we’re not back by sunset, take Heath and Mia and stay there. You remember where the spare van’s parked?”
Theo nodded tensely. “I do, but—”
Peter tapped the envelope. “There’s something in there for Mia. A note. Don’t let her read it till you know I’m dead.”
“Jesus. Peter . . .”
“Whatever happens, you keep safe. If you die, we all do. You understand me?”
“I get it. Just be careful.”
Jonathan peeked into his bedroom and saw Heath perched on a pair of wooden boxes, his nervous gaze fixed out the window. He turned to Theo.
“He’ll be a handful. Just be patient, all right? He’s a good kid at heart.”
“We’ll be okay,” Theo assured him.
Amanda checked David’s watch. “Fifty minutes.”
“Let’s go,” Peter said.
As her sister and the others climbed into the Peregrine, Hannah hurried over to Theo and gave him a hug. “We’ll be back,” she promised him. “All of us. Even the funny one.”
Theo smiled weakly. “I’m counting on it.”
The van doors closed. Peter started the engine. The Peregrine had barely risen a foot off the ground before Mia rushed up the stair ladder and ran to the driver’s door. She’d changed into a track top and jogging pants, a knit cap and sneakers. A bookbag dangled in her grip.
Peter rolled down the window, scowling. “Sweetheart, I told you—”
“Bug!”
“What?”
“There’ll be a swifter named Bug, a lumic named Mink, a tempic named Jinn, and a solic named Mercy. There’ll also be an air brake you have to pull. I’m not sure what that means but I got two different warnings about it. It must be important.”
The sisters and Jonathan traded uneasy looks. Mia kept her hard eyes on Peter. “You said I couldn’t make a working portal. I just made two hundred of them.”
She’d spent the last ten minutes opening the floodgates of her mind, filling her bedroom with the portals of Future Mias. She’d only had time to read a fraction of their notes.
Mia opened her bookbag and showed Peter her messy collection of paper scraps. “There’s a lot more in here. You can take them all with you, but I’m your best chance at interpreting them.”
Peter eyed her skeptically. “Those other Mias hate you. How can you trust them?”
“Because they love Zack. They won’t do anything to hurt him.”
“Darling . . .”
“You’re walking into a trap and you don’t even have an augur! You need me.”
Peter tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, thinking.
“An air brake,” he said.
“An air brake,” Mia echoed.
Peter muttered a curse, then lowered the Peregrine back to the ground. Mia closed up her bag and ran around to the side door.
“I’ll watch over her,” David assured Peter. “I won’t let anyone hurt her.”
Peter didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A sixteen-year-old pledging the safety of a fourteen-year-old. Lambs to the slaughter, he thought.
As the Peregrine ascended through the roof of the brownstone, Jonathan peeked down at the street. Heath’s dreaded yellow moving truck remained double-parked down the road, its rear gate closed and not a soul in the vicinity. The whole damn street seemed eerily devoid of people.
Hannah caught his troubled expression. “What’s the matter?”
Jonathan thought about it a moment, then anxiously shook his head. “Nothing. It’s all right.”
A hundred feet below them, at the far end of the Transpac trailer, Gingold watched the Peregrine through a surveillance camera. He scowled into his headset.
“I want a shadow on that junker. Don’t let it see you and don’t let it out of your sight.”
He’d been six minutes away from staging a full-blown takedown—twenty-four operatives hiding all around the residence, each one armed with four different kinds of weapons. If that wasn’t enough to tip the scales, a solic wasp was coming that would all but guarantee a bloodless victory. These freaks were nothing without their temporis.
But the wasp had yet to arrive, and now the fugitives were leaving. Gingold didn’t think for a moment that the timing was coincidence. Someone must have tipped them off. The augur or—
“Sir?”
He turned to look at his imaging analyst. She directed his attention to her thermal scan monitor, at the humanoid orange shapes on the top floor. “They left two behind.”
“What?”
Gingold leaned in closer and studied the silhouettes. The boyish figure was unfamiliar to him but he easily recognized the other one. Only one man in the group stood shorter than six feet.
“Maranan.”
This was a baffling development. The fugitives were deadly but they weren’t callous. They’d never abandon two of their own unless—
—they don’t know, said a blithe little voice in Gingold’s head. Even Maranan doesn’t know you’re here.
“Sir, how do you want to proceed?” asked Tomlinson, his second-in-command. “Should we—”
“Shut up. Let me think.”
Gingold tapped the cleft of his chin, his camera eyes locked on Theo. He didn’t like improvising, but a golden opportunity had just presented itself. He figured if Sun Tzu had known about augurs, the old general might have added a tenet to his Art of War: “Never pass up the chance to take one by surprise.”
He hailed the agents on his network. “All right, folks. We had nine targets. Now we have two. Don’t get cocky. Stick to the plan and be ready for anything.”
Gingold signaled to Tomlinson. The truck’s rear gate opened. Gingold prepped his automatic rifle and took a long, hard look at the brownstone.
“Move in.”