NINE

There were nine Silvers at the start.

Though Sterling Quint’s physicists had monitored all nine arrivals in progress, only six of the refugees made it to the Pelletier compound in Terra Vista. The remaining three signals led the Salgados to a dead woman, a dead man, and a cracked and empty bracelet.

Quint was upset to learn that he’d lost a third of his future case studies, but his benefactor strangely didn’t seem to mind. Azral assured Quint that the three fallen subjects were expendable in the grand scheme.

But what of the missing one? Quint had texted. I assume the owner of the empty bracelet is still at large.

An hour later, while Quint sat in the conference room with his new guests, the handphone on his desk lit up with a curt new message.

You’re better without him.

—

Before his cosmic migration and universal upgrade, Evan Rander wasn’t a fan of his native Earth. His favorite things in the world, in fact, were the ones that helped him escape it. Sci-fi movies. Video games. Internet smut. He was—by sight, sound, and self-acknowledgment—a geek. Even in his rare bouts of style and swagger, he resembled a meerkat with his narrow frame, sloping shoulders, and hopelessly juvenile features. At twenty-eight, he was continually mistaken for a ginger-haired boy of seventeen. He’d given up correcting people.

With each lonely year, Evan became increasingly convinced that Earth wasn’t a fan of him either. Most of his frustrations came from the pretty young women of his world, who continually rejected his awkward attempts to engage them, his creepy leers. It had been theorized in more than one ladies’ room that Evan Rander had a stack of restraining orders at home. Or worse, a stack of bodies.

If his lovely detractors could have seen inside his mind, they would have learned that his fantasies, while hardly chaste, were actually quite romantic. But after a lifetime of cold shoulders, Evan feared he didn’t have the looks to attract a suitable girlfriend. He certainly didn’t have the money. His lean existence as a part-time computer specialist had left him in a sinkhole of debt, enough to force him out of his apartment and into his father’s house in City Heights West.

No baron himself, Luke Rander was far from happy to share his meager abode. For years, his best hope for Evan was that the boy’s baffling nerd proclivities would one day lead to some profitable nerd venture. Soon his furtive disappointment began leaking out of him like sweat. No work again today, huh? You should be pounding the pavement instead of playing computer games. At least get some exercise. How do you expect to find a woman if you’re all pasty and scrawny? Guess the family name’s dying with you. No work again today, huh?

Round and round the record spun, until the stress caused Evan to wake up with ginger hairs on his pillow. The only ray of sunshine in his dismal life was Shannon Baer, a young account executive at his main worksite. Though she’d failed to make his A-squad of office lusts, she was an indisputable cutie, and she bucked the trend of her peers by treating Evan with smiles and banter. He even detected flirting when she teased him about his LEGO coffee mug.

Eager to learn her feelings without the risk of asking, Evan used his administrative access to log into her e-mail archives. She’d only invoked his name three times. The first two mentions were work related. The last one, in response to her teasing boss, was a knife in the eye.

Oh shut up. It’s not like that at all. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, Evan’s not as creepy as everyone thinks. Of course if I ever go missing, be sure to check his basement first. :)

The next day, he returned to the office in his nicest clothes and warmest grin. After engaging Shannon in friendly chitchat, he told her he needed to install a new antivirus program on her PC. He joked that she was getting the special package, despite her misguided hatred for LEGOs. She laughed and let him do his thing.

Unfortunately for Shannon, his “thing” was a custom malware script that, at the stroke of midnight, erased her project files from her computer and every backup server. Thirteen months of work, irrevocably destroyed. For Evan Rander 1.0, it was the cruelest punishment he was capable of inflicting, though he’d spent the night imagining far worse.

His vengeance quickly backfired on him. Once his handiwork was discovered, the president of Shannon’s company had him blackballed from all his freelance agencies. With a simple series of phone calls, Evan had become a toxic commodity, unemployable.

Luke Rander gritted his lantern jaw when he learned of his son’s comeuppance. “You know, for all your flaws, I never thought you were stupid until now. But you did it. You screwed up your life, all because you couldn’t handle a little rejection.”

For the last three weeks of his endemic existence, Evan moved through the house in a grim and listless state, his thoughts frequently dancing around the handgun under his father’s bed. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was high past time to put the world out of his misery.

On the third Saturday of July, he woke up in freezing cold, his gadgets blinking in confusion. He barely had a chance to process the new peculiarities before a large, round pool of radiant white liquid bloomed on his wall like an oil slick.

Evan watched in bug-eyed wonder as a towering stranger stepped through the surface, a white-haired being of crystalline perfection. Despite his splashing entrance, there wasn’t a hint of wetness on his skin, his hair, his tieless gray business suit.

Expressionless, the man approached the bed and addressed Evan. His voice was honey smooth, peppered with an anomalous accent.

“Listen up, boy. Time is short and I have much to do. In five minutes, everything around you will cease to be. If you wish to continue living, extend your wrist quickly.”

Evan raised his arm with meek and dreamy deference. Azral’s thin lips curled in a smirk.

“Your cooperation is a welcome change. I won’t forget that.”

He procured a featureless silver bracelet from his pocket. Evan’s thoughts screamed as he watched it break into four floating elbows. They glided over Evan’s fingers, reconnecting at the thinnest part of his wrist with a clack.

“What is this?” Evan asked in a tiny voice. “Am I dreaming?”

“I don’t have the time or mind to explain your situation, child. Just keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come for you shortly.”

Azral squinted with revulsion at the unwashed garments on Evan’s floor. “You’ll wish to find proper clothes, if you have them. Then say good-bye to your father. You won’t be seeing him again.”

Amidst all the daft and scattered notions in Evan’s head, it occurred to him that he’d rather eat his own arm than suffer one more look of disapproval from the bearish old man.

Suddenly Azral’s white brow crunched in wrathful scorn. He lurched forward and grabbed Evan by the collar.

“Only a weak man fails to honor his parents. You should be grateful. It was your father’s unique genes that saved your life today. Clearly I didn’t choose you for strength of character.”

As the fearsome stranger walked back to his white liquid portal, Evan suddenly found himself in a small pool of yellow.

“Pathetic,” said Azral, before disappearing into the breach.

Over the course of his long and lawless existence on Earth’s wild sibling, Evan would find many reasons to hate Azral Pelletier. Near the top of the list was the ridiculously short amount of time he’d given Evan to prepare for his great upheaval. He’d only just zipped his jeans over fresh boxers when the silver bracelet buzzed with life. Shirtless and barefoot in his father’s moldy bathroom, he was sealed in light, safely preserved as the house and sky collapsed around him.

It was in that final moment that he forgot his fear. In the space between worlds, the space between lives, he was briefly at peace with himself. The old Earth faded away to an empty white void, and Evan Rander felt nothing at all but gratitude.

—

As the proprietor of a dreary midtown mini-market, Nico Mundis was used to seeing odd behavior in his store. Aside from the typical assortment of ne’er-do-wells who would rob him at gunpoint or speedlift his wares, he’d suffered his fair share of rants, raves, threats, and propositions. The sexual come-ons always baffled Nico the most, as he was sixty-eight and quite obese.

His favorite strange incident occurred three years ago, when a group of egghead scientists traced an invisible signal to his canned goods aisle. The group leader, a spiky-haired Poler named Constantin Czerny, offered Nico three thousand dollars to let them affix a small device to his wall. Some kind of particle scanner enhancer thingy. Sure, why not? Money was money. At the end of the transaction, Czerny gave Nico his phone number and advised him to call should anything unique happen. Nico had no idea what Czerny meant by that and wasn’t sure if Czerny knew either.

Now, just minutes before opening for Saturday business, something unique happened.

As Nico filled the register, the overhead lights died. The table fan came to a stop. Even his electronic watch went blank. Only the white tempic barrier continued to function. It coated the windows from the outside, giving the shop a hazy, snowed-in look.

A flash of light filled the back of his store. Nico grabbed his shotgun and aimed it at the disturbance. He blinked through the dancing brown spots in his eyes and reeled to see a shirtless young man where previously there’d been no one.

Evan blinked twice at the gun, then raised his scrawny arms in terror. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Nico moved closer to survey the damage. The blast had taken a curved bite out of his store, leaving a concave groove in the wall and slicing half the cans and shelves around the intruder. Tiny wet vegetable morsels dripped onto the floor, covering broken pieces of bathroom tile that had come from God knows where.

“Who are you?” Nico shouted. “What are you doing here?”

“Look, just don’t shoot, okay? I have no idea! The last thing I—”

His eyes rolled back into his head and he launched into violent convulsions. Nico took an anxious step back. He couldn’t tell if the boy was suffering an epileptic seizure or an otherworldly possession. He wasn’t entirely wrong on either count, but what he was truly witnessing at the moment was nothing less than the death of the original Evan Rander.

As Evan stood and stirred, a tidal wave of cerebral data flooded into him. Millions of vivid new facts and memories. They filled his brain node by node, reshaping his psyche. On the outside, he was still a twenty-eight-year-old man with a seventeen-year-old face. In his altered consciousness, he was older now. Many years older and exponentially sharper.

His upgrade had arrived.

Evan breathed a weary moan, as if he’d just given birth. For a moment Nico feared the intruder would fall into tears, but Evan soon let out a delirious laugh.

“Oh man. Man oh man oh man.”

He swept his blinking gaze around the store. Nico was amazed at how differently the stranger carried himself. He looked fiercely confident now. Not even a tad confused.

With a hammy grin, Evan spread his arms out wide. “Nico! Nico-Nico Mundis! Ti kanis?”

The shopkeeper took another step back. “How do you know my name?”

“Ah, Nico-Nico. You and I go way back. You’re my Square One Buddy, buddy. Always here at the beginning to greet me with a friendly smile. And since we’re such good buddies, hey, why don’t you put down the boomstick?”

Evan was unsurprised to see the gun remain fixed on him. As he sighed and stretched, his hidden hand seized a can of string beans.

“Well, I figured it was a shot in the dark, no pun intended. Guess I can’t blame you for being sore. For years you’ve been praying for some young and topless beauty to pop into your Efta-Edeka, and here I am. You should’ve been more specific.”

He swung his gaze to the cloudy white doorway. “Oh, hello, bishop.”

As Nico reflexively turned his head, Evan hurled the can—a perfect throw that connected squarely with the shopkeeper’s temple, driving him down. Evan rushed around the counter and grabbed the shotgun off the floor. He jammed the barrel into Nico’s stomach, then his nose.

“Why must we do this dance every time, Nico? You know I don’t like hurting you.”

Evan launched a swift kick into his ribs.

“Well, I like it a little. So do us both a favor. Waddle your ass over to that wall and stay there. I’ll be gone soon enough. I just need to do a little convenience shopping.”

Snorting through bloody nostrils, Nico crawled to his checkout stand and sat up as best he could.

Evan unwrapped an epallay and stuck it to his chest. “Oof. Mama. These reboots never tickle. My head’s all fourped. But who am I to complain? I’m alive, right?”

Nico eyed the silent alarm button at the floor of his station. It was so easy when he could just step on it. Now it was five feet away—a mile in his condition.

Evan sauntered over to Nico’s sparse selection of clothing. He threw on a black Viva San Diego T-shirt and cheap bresin sandals.

“Since I last saw you, Nico-Nico . . . well, I’ll be honest. This last round sucked. Everyone was extra annoying. The Pelletiers. The Gothams. The Deps. And don’t even get me started on You-Know-Who. Hannah had her tits in such a wringer, I had to kill her to keep her from killing me. And then her sister came looking for blood. Nearly killed me with her goddamn tempis.”

Evan grabbed a handbasket and filled it with items: a quart of rubbing alcohol, a pint of orange juice, a hammer, a hunting knife. He stopped at the soda/vim dispenser and grabbed a large drinking cup.

“Between you, me, and the green beans, Nico, I’m still kinda pissed about it. So now I have two Givens at the top of my shit list.”

Evan retrieved a near-empty tube of Crest from the floor. It had traveled with him from his father’s bathroom and was now a one-of-a-kind relic. He stashed it in his basket.

“I don’t know, Nico. Part of me’s tempted to sit this one out. Maybe find an island somewhere and sip margaritas while the idiots do their idiot dance. I haven’t written myself out of the story since . . . God, what round was it? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Oh, hey. That reminds me.”

Evan unwrapped a magic marker and drew a large “55” on the back of his right hand. It was a mnemonic device, a way to help organize his multiple sets of memories. He’d eventually hit the laser-brand parlor and get a more lasting reminder. For now, this would do.

“Aw, who am I kidding? I can’t stay away from the fun and games. You didn’t believe it for a second. You know me too well.”

Nico had managed to halve the distance between himself and the alarm trigger. He shuffled another inch to the right, then froze when he spotted Evan’s smirking face above the dog food bags.

“Pathetic, man. You’re usually within slapping distance of the button by now. Are you even trying?”

“Please. I have children . . .”

“No you don’t. Stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Evan doubled back to the checkout stand and emptied his goods into a knapsack. He popped open the cash register, then arranged the crisp blue bills into a folded pile. There was no need to count it. It was $212, just like always.

“All righty. The power’s coming back and I have a date with a sweet Georgia peach. So this is where we . . . wait! The synchron! May I have your watch, parakalo? I need it more than you do.”

Nico hurriedly removed his timepiece and held it out to Evan. He snatched it away and wrapped it around his wrist.

“Thanks. Now we’re ready.”

He checked the ammo in the shotgun, then blew dust off the barrel. Nico crawled backward.

“No! Please!”

Evan aimed the gun at his face. “You know, I remember a time, long ago, when I was the one crying and begging for my life. You didn’t kill me but you still weren’t nice. I’m just saying.”

“Please, sir! Please!”

Evan lowered the weapon. “‘Sir’? Did you just call me sir?” He laughed in amazement. “Wow. Fifty-four times and you never called me sir. I’m not sure how to feel. I mean I like it, obviously. I love it. But how much?”

Staring ahead in whimsical thought, he opened the shotgun. Two fat shells dropped to the floor.

“That much, it seems. Good job, Nico, you silver-tongued devil. You just charmed your way to a minor life extension.”

Just as he tossed the gun over his shoulder, the overhead lights flickered back to life.

“Hey, look at that. Right on cue.”

Evan turned the keylock next to the register, causing the tempic barrier to vanish. Cars and pedestrians became visible on the other side of the glass.

He grabbed his bag and patted Nico’s cheek. “Always a pleasure, my friend. Until next time.”

Evan ventured outside to a City Heights West that—unlike its shabby, old-world counterpart—actually resembled a city. Split-level houses had become replaced with sprawling office complexes. Trees had given way to animated lumic billboards. He chuckled at how he noted the difference every single time.

Soon his smile disappeared and he stopped cold. Evan didn’t let Nico Mundis live very often, and he just remembered why. The fat man’s testimony to the local police would enter the national law enforcement database, where certain key phrases would ring bells among the eagle-eyed federales in DP-9. Most of the Deps were easy enough to evade, but some, like the exotic Melissa Masaad, were annoyingly sharp. She could make Evan’s life that much harder.

He closed his eyes in concentration until his head went light and he felt a full-body tingle, as if swimming in seltzer. Wild colors streaked all around him as the clock of his life reversed ninety-two seconds. Soon Evan found himself back inside the store, back behind the barrier, back with a loaded shotgun aimed at Nico Mundis.

With no memory at all of Evan’s prior clemency, the shopkeeper raised a thick hand, crying. “No! Please!”

“Sorry, buddy. I forgot I had my reasons for doing this.”

“Please, sir! Please!”

Unfortunately for Nico, Evan was no longer surprised or charmed by the honorific. He fired the shotgun. A cracking boom. A spray of blood. A good portion of Nico spattered onto Evan.

“Oh great. Lovely.”

Evan rewound ten seconds, this time killing Nico from a slightly safer distance. He left the store clean.

As a hopeless perfectionist with a very unique talent, Evan Rander was no stranger to repetition. The act of undoing and redoing had become as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes the tedium was enough to drive him crazy. But it sure as hell beat living the one-take life, with all its indelible gaffes and consequences. Regret was something Evan had abandoned a long time ago. It died on his native Earth, with his father, his debt, and his crippling insecurities.

He returned to the street and hailed the first cab he saw. Evan knew the driver’s name before the car even stopped, but chose to play dumb.

“Take me downtown, my good man. Childress Park. I’m on a squeeze, so 10× and aer it.”

Before the driver could question him, Evan pressed two blue twenties against the glass. Proof that he could afford the speed and flight surcharges.

With a steamy hiss, the vehicle ascended forty feet to the taxi level, then folded its tires inward. The doors and windows locked shut, the classic winged-foot icon lit up on the fare meter, and the cab shot off like a bullet.

It took sixty-three seconds to cross five miles of urban scenery. Inside the taxi, eleven minutes passed. Evan stared out the window at his slowed surroundings. He spotted a puffy plume of chimney smoke that, in the sluggish blue tint of the world, reminded him of Marge Simpson’s hair. He sighed with lament. They had nothing like The Simpsons here in Altamerica. Satire escaped these fools.

—

The taxi landed at the edge of an enormous green park, a lush oasis in a field of modern glass office towers. Like the rest of the business district, the place was sparse of life on Saturday.

Evan tossed sixty dollars at the driver. “Don’t go away. I’ll be back in five.”

As he exited the cab, the synchron on his wrist beeped, informing him that it had readjusted to local time. By external clocks, it had only been seven minutes since he and his fellow Silvers crash-landed into this part of existence.

Some crashed harder than others.

In the middle of the park, on a flat patch of grass between picnic tables, a fetching young blonde lay sprawled on her back. Unlike the scattered homeless dozers who malingered here on weekends, the woman was barefoot in a lacy pink nightgown. The silk was marred with dirt and gashes. Only her silver bracelet remained spotless.

She fixed her cracked red eyes on Evan, speaking through wheezes and bloody gurgles.

“I can’t move. I can’t feel anything. I don’t know what’s happening. Please help me.”

Evan kneeled by her side, clucking his tongue with sarcastic pity. She must have been ten stories up when the whole world changed on her.

“Oh, Peaches,” he said, in a mock Savannah drawl. “I do declare this is not your day.”

Evan made a habit of visiting Natalie Tipton in her dying moments. By his twentieth encounter, he’d pieced together her life in fragments. She was born Natalie Elder in Buford, Georgia, the only child of a waitress and a rail worker. She’d overcome dyslexia to earn a full scholarship to Emory University, where she studied to become a veterinarian until a well-placed kick from an ailing mare shattered her knee and ambitions.

But life had a way of working out for the terminally pretty. She soon met Donald Tipton, a campus football legend. They fell in love, got married, then moved out west when Donald scored a place with the San Diego Chargers.

If there was any drama during her time as a footballer’s wife, Natalie didn’t say. In the face of her demise, her only regret was not finishing college and becoming a veterinarian. She’d confessed this to Evan, back when he bothered to feign sympathy.

Having no recollection of their previous encounters, Natalie stared in terror at this creepy, grinning stranger.

“W-what happened to me?”

“You’ve taken a dreadful fall, sugah. And now you’re bone soup, ah say, bone soup from the neck down.”

“Please. Call an ambulance. I’m begging you.”

“Oh, I’ve tried that, darling. But it’s a big park. The paramedics never find you in time. Shame too, because they have a machine that could fix you right up. Reverse those injuries like they never happened.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not the pilot of this plane wreck, sweetie. Just a passenger with a better seat. If you’re looking to file a grievance, the people you want are the Pelletiers. Though in their defense, I’m pretty sure they warned you to stay on the ground floor.”

He was right. Natalie had woken up in the utility room of her building, twenty floors down from her penthouse suite. A hand-scrawled note on the floor strongly advised her to stay where she was. She didn’t listen. When the power died, she was stuck in the elevator between the eighth and ninth floors. Then her bracelet shook, the scenery changed, and Natalie Tipton had nowhere to go but down.

“I don’t understand why this happened,” she cried.

“Oh, honey bear. You don’t even have time for the short answer. Trust me. You’re not long for this world either.”

Natalie closed her eyes and wept. “Why are you so cruel? What did I ever do to you?”

For once, her dialogue crossed into new territory. Evan’s smile dissolved.

“Huh. Weird. I usually get that question from Hannah, not you. For her, I have a long list of grievances. For you?” He gave it some thought. “I don’t know. Maybe you remind me of her. You both go wet for dumb muscle. You both seem to confuse lust with love. Now, granted, I never met your husband. But somehow I doubt you would have fallen for him if he was a professional chess player.”

Natalie turned her head, wincing. “Oh God. I just want this to stop.”

“Well, you’re about to get your wish.” Evan checked his watch. “It’s curtain time.”

While her shallow breaths settled and her consciousness slipped away, Evan stroked her arm and stared pensively at the trees.

“You know, I chat with the Pelletiers on occasion. I once asked them why they didn’t stop you from falling. I mean they can see the futures better than anyone. They could have tied you down, broken your foot, done a hundred other things to keep you on the ground floor. Hell, they could still go back and save you. I’m not the only one with a rewind button.

“So when I asked, that crazy bitch Esis just gave me a shrug and said, ‘Natalie’s but one of many.’ Can you believe that? They destroy a whole damn world to bring us here and we’re still nothing to them. Just rats in their maze.”

He checked her pulse, then breathed a wistful sigh. Natalie Tipton was gone.

“Ah, Peaches. You’re better off. I’ve seen the way this story ends, again and again. It never changes.”

Evan reached behind her and unhooked her necklace. The chain ended at a dime-size silver disc, engraved with the electric bolt logo of the San Diego Chargers. Despite his utter disdain for football and the people who watched it, the trinket had become a cherished piece of old-Earth memorabilia. Worth the trip every time.

With a creaky groan, Evan clambered to his feet and clasped the charm around his neck.

“I’d stick around for the wake, darlin’, but I’ve got a meeting with my old platoon commander and he’s a real bear about punctuality. Sorry to say your whole life was pointless, and your death even more so. But what can you do? That’s just the way the peach crumbles.”

He walked away whistling, quietly resolving to be nicer to Natalie next time. In the grand scheme, she never did him wrong. She was the only Silver he could say that about.

—

While the cab soared to its next destination, Evan dumped the contents of his knapsack onto the seat. He stashed the drinking cup between his thighs, then poured himself a cocktail of rubbing alcohol and orange juice.

The noise of glooping liquids caused the cabbie to peer through the mirror. Evan smirked at him.

“Ease it, flyman. I won’t spill a drop.”

He stirred the concoction with his new hunting knife, then plunged his fist into the cup. The moment his silver bracelet became submerged, the liquid churned with hissing bubbles.

Soon the taxi landed in a run-down patch of the Gaslamp Quarter. Evan tossed another pair of twenties to the driver, then made his way down a dingy alley. As he crossed into the dark shadow of an elevated highway, he could hear a man’s heavy breaths.

Evan bloomed a devilish grin. “Hello, hello, hello? Is there anybody in there?”

He stepped on a circle of concrete that was darker than the rest—a patch of the old San Diego, fused into the new. The upper half of a guitar case, complete with upper half of guitar, lay nearby. It had been sliced in a smooth curve. As always, the Great Cuban Leader hadn’t ventured far from his landing spot.

“Just nod if you can hear me,” Evan teased. “Is there anyone home?”

In the darkest corner of the alley, between two metal trash cans, a thirty-year-old man huddled against the wall. Black-haired, olive-skinned, and powerfully built, he wore a silk blue button-down over jeans. Even in his rattled state, the man was disgustingly handsome. Evan had lost count of the number of women who’d made complete fools of themselves to get his attention. Unlike Nico and Natalie, people he’d only encountered a few minutes at a time, Evan had years of experience with Ernesto “Jury” Curado. There were few folks on Earth he knew better, and few he hated more.

Evan watched with great amusement as Jury pressed his fingers against his temples, trying to will the universe back into order.

“¿Qué bola, asere? Welcome to beautiful downtown Other San Diego. Don’t forget to try our Other Krullers. They’re out of this world.”

“Shut up,” Jury said.

“Hey. Ouch. Hostility. What seems to be the problem, officer? Are we having a bad trip?”

Jury rose to his full six-foot-two height, grumbling at Evan through a sleek Cuban accent.

“Look, I don’t know if you’re a hallucination or a street nut. All I know is that someone drugged me and I’m freaking out. So go away.”

Two years ago, upon receiving a Certificate of Commendation for exceptional performance, Officer Jury Curado had been called a “man of absolute conviction” by the Deputy Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol.

Yesterday morning, his twin sister had a different way of phrasing it.

“You’re a stubborn ass!” she screamed, from behind her locked bedroom door.

Ofelia Curado knew better than anyone that when Jury got an idea in his head, there was no force in the heavens that could get it out. When they were fourteen, he was convinced that leaving Cuba was the only way to save Ofelia from their monstrous father. He was right. In Miami, he was convinced it would be better to fight for citizenship than to buy fake papers. He was right. He was right about better opportunities in California. He was right about his sister’s hideous boyfriends. He was right about her drug problems and her eating disorder. He was right. He was right. He was right.

“I can’t take it anymore!” she yelled. “You make my life a living hell! Just leave me alone!”

Like Jury, his sister was a raven-haired stunner, even on bad days. Sadly, the lingering traumas of childhood had made every day a bad one for Ofelia. She was, as Jury sang, a beautiful mess, and he had frequent cause to rescue her from some not-so-beautiful men. Whether they were lowlifes who exploited her for fun and profit or Lawrence Nightingales who sought to become her savior-with-benefits, they’d all left Ofelia worse for the wear. Some of them had nearly killed her. At Jury’s hands, some of them were nearly killed.

Six months ago, his sister had found solace in the arms of a good woman. Martina Amador was a social worker, a squat and ugly matron who was a full twenty years older than Ofelia. Jury could only imagine their coupling was just another form of self-punishment for his sister, another way to lash out at the universe. And yet under Martina’s care, she actually improved. First she got clean. Then she got hungry. And finally she found employment as a receptionist. She worked now.

Despite all improvements, Jury remained wary of his sister’s lover. When Ofelia declared her intention to move out and live with Martina, the twins fell into strife. They screamed Spanish at each other through her bedroom door twenty-six hours ago.

“How long before she moves on to another fixer-upper?” Jury asked. “How long before she leaves you for a woman even younger, prettier, and more screwed up than you?”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to fall back into my old ways so you can be my protector again!”

“You’re wrong!”

“No, you’re the one who’s wrong this time! You’re the one who needs a screwed-up woman to take care of. So just go out and find one already. I can’t be that person anymore!”

Friday was a bad day for Jury Curado, which made it an awful day for the moving violators of Interstate 5. Over the course of his final workday, he reduced three different speeders to sobs and nearly broke the arm of a belligerent drunk driver.

Every Friday night, he played guitar at a tiny downtown coffeehouse. Most of his songs were mellow instrumental numbers, though he’d occasionally sing in Spanish when there was a fetching young woman in the audience. On the eve of his final performance, melancholy and desperation pushed him to snare his chords around a middle-aged bottle-blonde with a screeching, high laugh. He followed her home for drinks and debauchery, then woke up in her bed at 7 A.M. with the scent of bad sex in his nostrils and a thundering drum in his skull.

On the long walk back to his apartment, the oddities of the world began to stack up and unnerve him—the white sky, the chilled air, the blinking traffic lights. He turned a blind corner and was shoved against a building by an unseen aggressor. The guitar case fell to the ground.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?”

With cold hands and shocking strength, the attacker bent Jury’s arm behind his back.

“You don’t want to do this,” Jury said. “I’m a cop.”

“Shhhh,” a silky smooth voice whispered in his ear. “You hush now, hermano.”

Jury could feel something cool and metallic clasp around his right wrist. He was sure he was being handcuffed, but the second loop never clicked.

“What are you—”

With a warm blast of air, he was suddenly freed from his armlock. He launched from the wall and scanned the area. The only other soul within eyeshot was a tall man in a black T-shirt and slacks, watching him from two blocks away. He tipped his baseball cap at Jury in mock courtesy, then dashed away at a speed normally reserved for cheetahs.

His thoughts in free fall, Jury grabbed on to the nearest logical explanation. That batty woman he slept with must have laced his drinks with something. PCP. Mescaline. There was no other explanation.

Soon he reached his neighborhood, and the end of all doubt.

The debris of a crashed commercial airliner had turned 13th Street into a hellish horror. A battered nose cone lay in front of his local bodega. A smoldering pile of wreckage stood where his apartment building used to be. Jury covered his gaping mouth, stifling a delirious cackle. No. This was just a psychedelic nightmare. A jet plane never crashed into his home, his sister.

Thus Jury Curado, the man of absolute conviction, rode his fervent denial through the end of the world and into the next one. He kept crouched and still in a quiet corner, waiting for the hallucinations to go away.

Unfortunately, the new stranger—this smirking little imp—made the situation more difficult.

“Who the hell are you?” Jury asked.

Evan stood upright and rigid, his lip curled in sharp ridicule. “Sir! Evan Rander reporting for duty, sir!”

“Why is your hand in that cup?”

“Sir! I’m trying to start a trend, sir!”

“Why are you talking like that?”

Evan relaxed his stance. “Can’t help myself. You’re our great leader. Our stalwart commander. You whipped our sorry maggot asses into shape and turned us into a crack fighting unit. Well, except for Mia. Poor little thing.”

Jury clenched his fists, trembling with frustration. Evan exhaled in sympathy. “I know. It’s all very confusing. You want to know why my hand’s in a cup? The answer’s right there on your wrist.”

Now Jury examined his new silver bracelet, the most innocuous of all the recent anomalies. “What is this?”

“You know, I asked Azral once. I mean I know what the bracelet does, but I wanted to know how it does it. He gave me a haughty little grin and told me that any answer would be futile, like explaining a handphone to an ancient Egyptian.” Evan laughed. “Asshole, right? Well, what Mr. Snooty McFuture doesn’t realize is that even an ancient Egyptian can figure out how to break a handphone. Look.”

Evan removed his hand from the liquid. The band on his wrist was now cracked and white, as if frozen solid. He pulled the hammer from his knapsack and tapped the surface until a small section shattered. The remainder slid easily over his hand.

“Ta-da! See? If you want to ditch your own, feel free to use my mixture. It’s a special cocktail I invented. I call it the Unscrewdriver.”

Jury resumed his huddle. Evan shrugged nonchalantly.

“Suit yourself, Sarge. But you should know that there are people tracking us through these things. The Salgados will be here in two minutes to take you to their fancy building in Terra Vista. You don’t want to go there. Trust me. In six weeks, that place will be a bloodbath.”

Jury sprang to his feet, red-faced. “Shut up! For God’s sake, just shut up. I’m freaking out right now and the last thing I need is some creepy little geek who makes no sense!”

Evan’s glib smile vanished. Now Jury could see the hatred on his face. Though the policeman had fifty pounds of muscle on his new acquaintance, he raised his palms in contrition.

“Look, I’m not myself this morning. I took a drugged drink and . . . God, you wouldn’t believe the stuff I’m seeing.”

Evan fished through his knapsack with fresh cheer. “Well, why the hell didn’t you say so? Just so happens I have something that can help you.”

He carefully approached Jury, his hand still buried in the bag.

“Now, I want you to keep an open mind, okay? The thing about this—”

He plunged the hunting knife deep into Jury’s chest.

“—is that it really hurts.”

Gasping, Jury fell back against the wall, feebly clutching the hilt of the knife as he sank back to the ground.

Evan furiously stood over him, pinching a thumb and finger. “You know, I came this close, this close, to letting you live this time. I was ready to find a whole new way to screw with you, just for variety. If you were living the same five years over and over again, you’d know how crucial it is to mix things up.”

In Jury’s final moments, Evan no longer existed. The whole world bled away. All he had left were thoughts of Ofelia. He realized she may have been right after all.

“But no,” Evan continued, “you had to remind me why the world’s a better place without you. So now once again, you’ve reduced yourself to a bit role. You don’t get to play the hero. You don’t get to lead the Silvers. You certainly don’t get the big-titted love interest. Nope. So sorry. No Hannah for you.”

By the time Evan finished ranting, the last spark of life had left Jury Curado. His eyes fell shut and his head dropped back against the brick.

Evan crouched down and hissed a gritty whisper in his ear. “Rot in hell, pendejo.”

A long green van rolled to a stop at the mouth of the alley. Evan plucked the wallet from Jury’s pocket, then climbed the fire escape ladder. He smiled down from the roof as Martin Salgado and his square-headed son traced their wave signal down the alley. They squawked in fluster at the sight of Jury’s corpse.

“A little too late there, fellas,” Evan murmured.

He scurried to the front of the roof and looked down at the van. From his high angle, he couldn’t get a glimpse of Theo Maranan, the great Asian prophet. But Evan had a perfect view of Hannah.

“Come on, baby. Turn around and show me those big browns.”

Hannah twisted in the cushions and aimed a nervous glance out the window. Evan chuckled. For all her twitchy instincts, the actress had no idea what she just lost in that alley, the great and awful edit that Evan just made to her story. When left to their untampered fates, Hannah Given and Jury Curado would meet in Terra Vista and smack together like magnets—the man of absolute conviction and the woman of no conviction at all, locked in a vapid dance of physical worship and wall-piercing orgasms. It was an excruciatingly painful spectacle that Evan had suffered a long time ago, back in the days when he tried to be a good little Silver.

Fighting bitter memories, he plucked the twenty-dollar bill from Jury’s wallet and sniffed it deeply. Ah, the green, green cash of home. Funny how he’d hated his Earth so much when he lived there and now he missed it terribly. Sadly, his rewind talent stopped at the canned goods section of Nico’s store. He couldn’t jump back any further. Home was forever just a few seconds out of reach.

Now here at the start of his fifty-fifth play-through, his fifty-fifth trip through the same half decade, Evan Rander was not a fan of his adopted Earth. He knew there was only one escape from his carousel hell, and yet he couldn’t find the nerve to end himself. What else could he do then but keep on spinning? What better way to fill his endless days than by punishing the sisters and Silvers who’d wronged him?

As the Salgado van pulled away from the curb, Evan stood up and straightened his shirt. He whistled a happy tune on the way back to the fire ladder. He didn’t know where he’d heard the song before. He wasn’t even sure which Earth it came from.