SEVEN

No one ever guessed that the two women were siblings. One was a tall and skinny redhead with piercing green eyes. The other was a short and curvy brunette with the wide brown stare of a deer. They had different noses, different jaws, different voices, different walks. The only visible trait they shared was an unwavering intensity. No one ever accused the daughters of Robert and Melanie Given of being too relaxed, though Hannah came close to earning that distinction now. While Amanda froze in white-faced shock, the actress exhaled with breezy relief, as if the sisters had lost and found each other at the mall.

“Oh, hey. There you are.”

Amanda made a slow trek toward Hannah, her lips tangled on a hundred burning questions. All she could manage were a few stammering wuhs.

“Martin left me in the van,” said Hannah. “I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to stay there or . . .” She threw her dizzy gaze around the lobby. “What is this place? It looks like a Hilton.”

Hannah suddenly noticed David and Mia watching her with puzzled interest. “Kids in robes. Weird. I hope this isn’t a cult. Hey, has Zack arrived yet? Skinny guy? Carries a sketchbook? I left him back at the marina. He has my stuff.”

Amanda gripped Hannah’s chin and turned her face left and right. She thought about the otherwordly penny in her pocket and wondered now if this woman was a similar entity, an ersatz version of the old familiar thing.

Hannah crunched her brow. “Okay, Amanda, you’re freaking me out. Can you please say something?”

“I-I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t believe I’m looking at you. I mean I can’t believe it’s you.”

“It’s me.”

“Do you remember seeing me last night?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Do you remember where we were? What we talked about?”

Hannah slit her eyes in suspicion. “What exactly are you testing me for?”

“Your pupils are dilated and you’re unfocused. You’re talking about people named Martin and Zack. I just need to see you’re in there. I need to know you’re the Hannah I know.”

The actress sighed with exasperation. If there was ever any doubt that this was her very own Amanda, she’d just erased it with her singular brand of well-meaning condescension.

“I saw you at the theater,” she replied. “At my premiere of Damn Yankees. You made it perfectly clear that you weren’t a fan of the Hindu version.”

Amanda let out a brusque cry and wrapped her in a sobbing embrace. Hannah rubbed her back.

“It’s okay. It’s really me. And it’s really you. And I’m really, really glad I found you.”

Amanda wiped her eyes, then shined a trembling grin at the orphans.

“Mia, David, this is Hannah. She’s my sister.”

David blinked in amazement. “Sister? Wow. That’s . . . I mean it was obvious you knew each other but . . . wow. That can’t be coincidence.”

“That we’re sisters?”

He stared at Hannah blankly. “That you both got bracelets.”

“Oh. Right. I wonder how many other people got these.” She studied Amanda’s broken wrist. “Hey, what happened to you?”

Amanda was distracted by Mia’s dark and cloudy expression. God only knew how many loved ones the poor girl lost today.

She turned back to Hannah. “I fell. What happened to your arm?”

“I hit a bus.”

“What?”

Hannah stopped to read the brass sign on the wall. “Pelleh-teer.”

“Pell-tee-ay,” David corrected. “It’s French-Canadian. I asked.”

Now Hannah zeroed in on David as if he just turned visible. “Holy shit. You’re gorgeous.”

“He’s sixteen,” said Amanda.

Hannah glared at her. “I was remarking. I was not angling.”

Amanda noticed a little black sticker at the base of Hannah’s neck. She peeled it off.

“What is this?” She sniffed the sticky side. It had a faint medicinal scent. “It’s a drug. They drugged you. No wonder you’re acting so . . . Let me look at your pupils.”

“I’m fine! It’s just a baby spot. A mood-lifter. It works great. It did wonders for me and Theo.”

“Who’s Theo?”

Hannah stared with fresh discomfort at the scruffy green baseball cap in her hand. Amanda quickly connected the dots.

“Wait, is he the guy they carried in here? The one who was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice? Are you kidding me, Hannah? Are those the wonders you’re talking about?”

“You don’t know it was the drug that did that.”

“Then what happened to him?”

Sighing, Hannah crunched the cap in her grip. In truth, she had no idea what happened. Even in a lucid state, she’d have a hell of a time explaining the curious case of Theo Maranan.

—

Thirty-two minutes ago, she’d discovered the ultimate recipe for joy: a baby spot and a comfortable seat in a fast-moving vehicle. The view outside the window was poetry in motion, an ever-changing canvas of color and light. Every time the van stopped at a traffic signal, she’d snap out of her euphoric daze and launch chirpy, childlike questions at her two Salgado escorts. What makes ambulances fly? Are we getting Zack next? Do you know the white-haired man? Why isn’t everyone in the world addicted to baby spots?

With dwindling patience, Martin fielded her queries (“Aeris,” “Maybe,” “Who?” “Because the more you use them, the less they work”). His son raced through yellow lights just to keep her quiet.

Soon the van pulled into an alley behind a supermarket. Hannah peered through the front grate and studied Martin’s handheld computer. The screen contained a grayscale city map, peppered with four blinking red dots.

“What are the dots? Are those the people you’re looking for? And how are you finding us anyway? Our bracelets?”

The Salgados opened their doors and hurried outside.

“We’ll be back in a couple,” said Martin. “Just sit back and stay easy, okay?”

Hannah let out a cynical snort. “You sound like my last date.”

She spent the next few minutes in cushy silence, pinching her lip with growing fluster as the awful sounds of apocalypse came trickling back into memory. The booming crackle of the hardening sky. The horrible crunching noise of the frozen corpses . . .

The back doors of the van suddenly sprung open. Hannah saw Gerry Salgado struggling with a thrashing young Asian. He wore a dirty gray hoodie over khaki shorts and sandals. Sun-bleached letters on his chest advertised Stanford University. An Oakland A’s baseball cap lay askew on his head.

Martin affixed a small black sticker to the stranger’s neck, then joined his son in the tussle. The captive helplessly writhed in their grip.

“Let me go! Please! I’m not ready for this!”

The Salgados forced him into the seat opposite Hannah, then held him in place until he sat still. Hannah noticed a pair of foreign script symbols tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. The silver bracelet on his other arm was all too familiar.

“There we go,” said Martin. “You feeling better now?”

The man nodded at Martin. Hannah could see he was in dire need of a shave and a haircut. He couldn’t have become this disheveled just from one morning.

“I’m not ready,” he repeated.

“Not ready for what?” Hannah asked him, eliciting glares from both Salgados.

The stranger finally noticed her. His twitchy gaze stopped at her bracelet.

“You’re kidding, right?” He glanced at the Salgados. “Is she kidding me?”

Martin rubbed his arm impatiently. “Okay, listen, we need to get moving again. I’ll trust you two to get along back here. You’re both in the same fix and you’re both gonna be okay.”

Soon they were traveling again. Hannah wasn’t pleased that her window view was now obscured by 160 pounds of discombobulated Asian, but she didn’t want to offend him by moving away.

Screw it, she thought. Might as well mingle.

“Hi. I’m Hannah. What’s your name?”

He took off his cap and fluffed his messy hair.

“Theo,” he replied hoarsely. “Theo Maranan.”

“Hi, Theo. How you feeling now?”

He smeared his bleary eyes. “Fluffy and awkward. Like rabbits are screwing in my head.”

Hannah grinned. “Yeah. That’s the baby spot. It gets better.”

“What’s a baby spot?”

“The little patch on your neck. It’s a drug. A mood-lifter.”

His face crunched with confusion. “They have drugs here?”

“Yeah. Sure. Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed.”

For all his wear and tear, Hannah found Theo to be somewhat easy on the eyes. He wasn’t especially burly but he had broad shoulders and finely chiseled features. On a better day, in a better state, she might have even flirted with him.

He raised a loose finger at her arm sling. “You mind if I ask how, uh . . . ?”

“Oh, this? I had some kind of weird mental seizure. Then I hit a bus.”

“Wow. Damn. That would do it.”

She looked again at the script symbols on his arm. “Maranan. That’s Filipino, right?”

He nodded, impressed. “Yeah. Very good. Most folks guess wrong.”

“Well, I dated one of your people.”

“Fair enough. I dated one of yours.”

The two of them plunged into giddy chuckles, prompting Martin to turn around and check on them.

“Okay, I see what you mean about the baby spot,” Theo said. “I shouldn’t be laughing at all, given what’s coming.”

Hannah’s smile died away. “What’s coming?”

“Are you kidding?”

“That’s the second time you . . . No, I’m not kidding. I have no idea what’s going on.”

“You’re better off. Trust me.”

They both fell quiet for a few blocks. Theo studied her cautiously.

“Can I ask you something personal, Hannah? You don’t have to answer.”

She shrugged. “Try me.”

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

The question didn’t bother her as much as she expected. She chewed her lip in contemplation.

“I had a big emotional breakdown when I was thirteen. I cut myself pretty badly.”

“Your wrists, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Across the vein or up and down?”

She eyed him strangely. “What does that matter?”

“Well, to me it’s the difference between a cry for help and a serious attempt at suicide.”

Her pleasant buzz began to falter. “I guess it was a cry for help then. Still a horrible thing to put my mother and sister through.”

“What about your dad?”

She looked away. “He died the year before.”

Theo nodded with clinical intrigue. “I see. Suicide?”

“Cancer. Can we please change the subject?”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you.”

The van sailed through three green lights before Theo spoke again. “I hope you don’t think I was judging you. Believe me, I’m in no position to wag the finger at anyone. I’m a law school dropout, a rehab washout, and an all-around blight on the family tree. If I told you the worst thing I ever did, you’d get the strong and rightful urge to push me out of this van.”

Hannah pulled her gaze from the moving scenery and back onto him.

“I also tried suicide,” Theo added. “Five years ago. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was a full-fledged attempt to end it. The only reason it didn’t work is because apparently, among my many faults, I’m also bad with knots.”

Hannah let out a churlish giggle. She covered her mouth, mortified.

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.”

Theo smirked with good humor. “It’s okay. You’re picturing me falling through a half-ass noose, right onto my full ass. That’s pretty much what happened.”

They both fell into dizzy laughter again. Theo moaned and wiped his eyes. “You know what’s even crazier? For all my attempts to kill myself, both quickly and slowly, I don’t even know what did it in the end. I have no idea how I died.”

Hannah’s humor vanished in an instant. She stared at her new companion in deep bother.

“Theo, do you . . . Jesus, I don’t even know how to approach this.”

“Just ask.”

“Do you really think you’re dead right now?”

He stared at her, expressionless, for a full city block. “Okay. This is tricky. I don’t want to upset you again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s take this step by step. You told me you got hit by a bus . . .”

“No, I said I hit a bus. It was parked. I only dislocated my shoulder.”

Theo sat forward now, his eyes darting back and forth in busy thought. Hannah blinked at him in fresh bewilderment.

“Oh my God. You think this is the afterlife for both of us.”

He held up a hand. “Okay, wait now. Before you mock me—”

“I’m not mocking you, Theo. I just—”

“I was enveloped in a ball of hard, glowing . . . something. And then everything went white. When it stopped, I found myself in this place with glimmering walls and flying trucks. I mean, what am I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah confessed. “I still don’t know.”

“Then how do you know I’m not right?”

In a more sober state, it might have occurred to Hannah to ask the Salgados to settle the matter. Instead she found herself considering the notion that she was in fact riding the jitney to her own eternal judgment. She imagined the panel would deliberate for ten seconds before sending her to the hazy gray place where mediocre people went.

“I’m sorry, Theo. I don’t think you’re right. I’m alive. I’m screwed up right now, but I’m alive. It’s the only thing I know for sure.”

To Hannah’s surprise, the idea only seemed to unnerve him more. He furiously tapped his bracelet.

“I talked to someone,” he said. “I’m not religious at all, so please don’t mistake me for the kind of person who sees angels everywhere.”

“Go on.”

“He found me at the bus station this morning. He was fierce-looking and—I say this heterosexually—very pretty. He said his name was Azral and that he’d never seen so much wasted potential in a person. He wasn’t the first to tell me that, by the way, and he certainly wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. But then he said I was moving on to a new world. That I’d finally make myself useful there. Then he gave me this bracelet . . .”

Hannah listened and nodded. She already had her next question lined up.

Theo shook his head at himself. “God. You must think I’m an idiot.”

“I don’t. Really. When I first got here, I thought this was Canada.”

After scanning her for ridicule and finding none, Theo leaned his head back and laughed. His face twitched briefly, like he was shaking off a fly.

“I’d been riding all night from San Francisco,” he told her. “So I was already at diminished capacity when I met the guy. I’ll also admit that I wasn’t entirely sober.”

“Theo . . .”

“My point is that I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Theo, did this guy have white hair?”

He stared ahead serenely. At this point, he’d lost all capacity for surprise.

“Yeah. I guess you met him too.”

The van pulled to a stop along the curb. Hannah looked out the window. They were still downtown, in a decidedly less ritzy area than the one she’d arrived in.

“We’ll be back,” said Martin. “We got two signals, so you’ll be in good company soon.”

The Salgados disappeared down an alley, between a dilapidated post office and a grungy diner. Hannah and Theo fell into an awkward silence. Suddenly the actress felt an eerie chill on the back of her neck, as if someone was watching her. She turned around and scanned the street. No one.

Soon Theo’s head dipped and his eyelids fluttered erratically. Hannah left him to his twitchy nap.

“Azral,” she muttered, in a vacant daze. It was strange to learn the name of the white-haired man after all this time. He was no angel. As sure as Hannah knew she was alive, she knew he was no force of goodness.

Four minutes after leaving, the Salgados returned without company.

“What happened?” Hannah asked. “I thought we were getting more people.”

Martin hurriedly texted his daughter. “False alarm.”

Hannah could practically feel his tension. His son looked downright disturbed. She opted not to inquire further. She’d had enough agitation for one ride.

The vehicle started up again. Soon Hannah drifted off into uneasy thoughts. A floundering actress, a droll cartoonist, and a law school dropout who got plastered at bus stops. Why us, Azral? What could you possibly want from—

“He’s right,” Theo murmured.

Hannah looked at him again. His eyes were still closed. She couldn’t tell if he was addressing her or merely talking in his sleep.

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“Zack. He’s right. It’s not enough money to get to Brooklyn.”

She sat forward. “Wait, what?”

A few drops of blood trickled onto his sweatshirt. Then a few more. Then his nose became a faucet. It didn’t take a nurse to see that something very wrong was happening inside Theo Maranan.

—

While the first two floors of the Pelletier building had been converted to office space, the top flight stayed true to its hotel origins. Thirty suites remained fully furnished with beds, chairs, and dressers. Only the locks and lumivisions had been removed, by order of the new owner, Dr. Sterling Quint.

Amanda emerged from her shower to discover that one of the physicists had taken her clothes for study. All she owned now were her gold cross necklace and diamond wedding ring. She was willing to let science have the ring, if science asked.

She fastened her robe and crossed the hall into Hannah’s suite, listening to the running shower through the bathroom door. She pushed it open a crack.

“Hannah? You okay?”

Amanda could see her silhouette through the gauzy white curtain, the buxom shape that Derek had ogled fourteen hours ago. Hannah leaned against the tile in somber repose. The mood-lifters were wearing off, turning her thoughts to stucco.

“I’ll be out soon,” she said in a dismal voice.

“There’s no hurry, Hannah. I just wanted to check on you.”

“What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The quiet girl in the lobby.”

“Mia.”

“Yeah. Mia. She didn’t look very happy.”

“She just lost her whole family.”

“That’s what I figured,” Hannah said. “It’s got to hurt a little. I mean to see that we didn’t.”

Amanda sat on the edge of the sink and closed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“You know Mom’s dead, right?”

The spider-leg tingles came back to Amanda’s right arm. Her fingers twitched uncontrollably. “Hannah . . .”

“This wasn’t just San Diego. It was everywhere. A kid with a radio said so. The whole goddamn world.”

Amanda could hear her sister’s choking sobs over the water. “Hannah, you’re coming down off a very strong drug . . .”

“No, I’m coming down off everything! I’m crying about our mother! How come you’re not?”

A powerful chill seized Amanda’s hand. She pulled back her sleeve and gasped at the mad new blight on her arm. Her skin was covered in tiny white dots from her fingertips to her bracelet. The beads looked as hard and shiny as plastic, but they moved with a life all their own. Amanda watched with frozen horror as three flea-size spots shimmied up her thumb.

Oblivious to the crisis, Hannah rested her head against the wall. “I didn’t . . . Look, I don’t know what I’m saying right now, okay? Don’t listen to me.”

Amanda shook her hand with hummingbird zeal until the dots disappeared. She searched every inch of her skin for remnants.

“Amanda?”

She threw her saucer gaze at the shower curtain. “W-what?”

“I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’m not . . .” She flashed back to her alley encounter with Esis, the strange white tendril that had burst from her hand. What did she do? What did she do to me?

Amanda jumped to her feet. “I should . . . I should check on the kids.”

“Let me know if you find out anything about Theo.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask.”

“He said he was a blight.”

Amanda stopped at the door. “What?”

“Theo. He made himself out to be some god-awful person, but he didn’t seem so bad.”

Hannah smeared hot water against her eyes. “I don’t want him to die.”

Amanda kept staring at her flushed pink arm, lost in dark imaginings. God only knew what the scientists would do if they found out about her white affliction. They’d probably have her vivisected by sundown.

“He’ll be okay,” the widow said, without remotely meaning it. “We’re all going to be okay.”

—

Amanda returned to the game parlor, her arm still tingling from her outbreak. She noticed David and Mia keeping a curious vigil at the window.

“What’s going on?”

Mia turned to her. “Erin’s back. She found another one of us.”

“Looks healthier than the last guy,” David added. “Though he doesn’t seem pleased.”

Before Amanda could peek for herself, the procession moved inside. Loud voices echoed from the lobby.

“—not until you tell me what the hell’s going on! I mean, why so cryptic? Are they paying you to generate suspense? Because trust me, I’m all stocked up.”

David smirked at his companions. “He’s certainly spirited.”

Mia noticed Amanda’s tense expression. “Are you okay?”

She forced a thin and shaky smile, even as her thoughts churned with hot new worries. She’d held Mia’s hand earlier. What if she infected her? What if they both had the alien blight now?

Amanda studied Mia’s fingers as casually as she could. “I’m okay. How . . . how are you feeling?”

“Numb,” the girl replied. “Tired. I’m happy for you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your sister.”

“Oh.” Amanda blinked in confusion, then reeled with guilt. “Yeah. I still can’t believe she’s alive.”

“Are you two close?”

“Uh, well—”

The argument in the lobby got louder, closer. Now they could hear Beatrice’s chipmunk voice.

“Sir, if you would just give me your name . . .”

“My name is Up Yours until I get some answers. What is this place? Who are you working for? What the hell do you want with me?”

“Sterling Quint will answer everything—”

“Sterling Quint? Sounds like a Bond villain. I’m not appeased. But if you can get him here and talking in five minutes, I’ll become a lot nicer.”

The group appeared in the doorway. Between Beatrice and Erin stood a lanky young man with wavy brown hair. His rumpled black oxford was torn at the left shoulder. He clutched a spiral-bound pad against his chest. A sketchbook.

Zack examined the three refugees in bathrobes, then chucked a hand in hopeless dither.

“Okay. Now I’m at a spa.”

—

Czerny stopped at the end of the second-floor hallway. He squeezed a drop of clear liquid into each eye and shot a blast of eucalyptus spray up his nostrils. After several blinks and sniffs, he was finally ready. He knocked on the door to the Primary Executive’s office, and then once again stepped into Rat Heaven.

Scattered among the Persian rugs and sculptures stood ten huge glass aquariums, each filled with scampering mice of the brown and white varieties. Despite the apartheid arrangement, both breeds enjoyed a life of murine opulence, filled with fresh mulch and lettuce, frequent mating opportunities, and the greatest luxury of all: time. As physicists, the Pelletier Group experimented with math, not mammals. None of these creatures would see the business end of a scalpel. Not for a few generations, anyway. Their caretaker was breeding a special strain for his wife, a university neurobiologist. Czerny could tell from the devoted pampering that these creatures were more than a pet project to Sterling Quint. They were pets.

A fat white mouse roamed free on his great mahogany desk. Quint stroked her back as she chomped a piece of radicchio.

“I’m not encouraged by the blood on your shirt.”

Czerny breathed through a scented tissue. “I’m afraid the Oriental has fallen into coma, sir.”

Quint scowled in pique. “Idiots.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Salgados. They should have smelled the alcohol on him. They had no business drugging him in the first place.”

“As it stands, I agree. Shall I dismiss them?”

Quint pondered the matter a moment, then slowly shook his head. “No. The last thing we need are disgruntled ex-contractors spilling our secrets. Raise their wages, but give them less responsibility. Have them guard the property or something.”

“Of course, sir. Clever thinking.”

It had been remarked by people crueler than Czerny that Sterling Quint kept mice to make himself feel larger. A quirk from his father’s genes had left him with achondroplasia, which stopped his growth at four-foot-five. While he struggled with his stature as a child, he’d made peace with it in his adult years. Now, at the distinguished age of fifty-five, he took comfort in the fact that “little” languished at the bottom of his list of pertinent adjectives.

“That doesn’t solve the problem of our unfortunate guest,” said Czerny. “I fear his condition exceeds my expertise.”

“Maranan won’t die,” Quint assured him. “I have a specialist coming tonight.”

Czerny knew better than to press his boss for details, or to inquire how he knew the Filipino’s name. He glanced at the three-by-three bank of monitors on the wall. Seven of the screens showed empty rooms. He saw Amanda, Zack, and the teenagers on one. On another, he caught Hannah running a towel over her wet, naked skin.

Blushing, he forced his gaze back onto Quint. “Uh, I suppose you already know that our sixth guest has arrived.”

“Sixth and last,” Quint responded. “That’s all of them.”

This was news to Czerny, especially since there had been nine signals from the start. One led to a corpse. He was eager to learn what Quint knew about the other two.

“Okay. I’ll inform the team. I take it you’ll be introducing yourself soon?”

“Yes. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Czerny sniffed his tissue again. “Excellent. I’ll let you prepare.”

“Constantin . . .”

He turned around at the door. Quint leaned back in his leather chair, shining flawless white teeth.

“It’s okay to smile. This is exciting stuff.”

Czerny laughed. “You have a gift for understatement, sir.”

Alone again, Quint held the free-roaming mouse and petted her with euphoria. There were six new people in his building today, six people who didn’t exist on this world yesterday. As far as science was concerned, this was a game changer. A game winner. Now all he had to do was follow the wisdom that Azral had texted him twenty minutes ago.

Keep them safe. Keep them content.

Quint wasn’t worried. It was easy to keep them safe when no one else knew they existed. Keeping them content was harder, given their state of mind. It was also less important. When these six people lost their world, they lost their options. In the end, they had nowhere else to go.