FIFTEEN

Quint didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. At every stop on his morning commute, he examined the dark new bags under his eyes, the jaundiced hue of his skin. He’d spent a long and sleepless weekend devising a scheme to kill Zack Trillinger, for reasons he convinced himself were absolutely vital to science.

By the time he reached the garage, at 7:25, he’d smothered the last of his doubts. This could work. This would work. The plan would go off without a hitch and everything would be okay again.

At 7:26, the universe sharply corrected him.

Quint’s knees buckled with strain as he eyed the bloodbath in the lobby—four dead strangers in multiple pieces, plus a frozen body that Quint could only guess was once a Salgado. He sidestepped the blood on the landing, only to find another spatter on the wall of the second floor hallway.

Having spotted Czerny’s car in the garage, Quint unlocked the door to his office and found Beatrice Caudell splayed dead on the rug. Her small blue eyes were bloodshot and frozen open in shock.

Quint held the wall for support and staggered down the hall. His office was the last room in the building to contain life—ninety-eight rodents, plus two surprise visitors he only loosely deemed to be human.

“Hello, Sterling.”

Azral sat on the edge of Quint’s desk, his face a calm and genial mask. Esis stood among the mouse cages, petting the fur of a small white youngling. Quint noticed that all the other rodents were engaged in rampant copulation. The madwoman had redistributed his creatures, mixing browns with whites, males with females. Five years of meticulous breeding, ruined.

“What in God’s name happened here?”

“The facility was attacked,” Azral informed him.

“Attacked? By who? Who are those people downstairs?”

“Brown mice,” said Esis, with a look of wry mischief.

Though Azral smirked with humor, the joke flew several feet over Quint’s head. He wanted to wring both their necks.

“They’re natives like yourself,” Azral told him. “Though a more unique strain.”

“I don’t understand. How could this have happened?”

“How indeed?” Esis asked, with a pointed glare at Azral. He sighed with soft contrition.

“The error is mine. I underestimated these people, despite the warnings of my ever-wise mother.”

Esis crossed her arms in a showy pout. Quint studied her in daft surprise. The woman looked ten years younger than the man who called her Mother.

“Where’s everyone else? What happened to the subjects?”

“The Silvers are alive,” said Azral. “But they won’t be returning. The plan has changed.”

“Changed how?”

“That’s no longer your concern. Though I hold you blameless in this latest trouble, I’m afraid this is the end of your involvement in our project.”

Dumbfounded, Quint studied Azral in the vain hope that this was just another peculiar gag.

“No. You can’t cut me loose after all this time, without any explanation.”

“You’ll find I can indeed do such a thing.”

“You owe me answers, goddamn it! One of my employees is dead!”

“All of your employees are dead,” Esis casually informed him.

The nausea came back full force. Quint leaned against a bookshelf. “What? Why?”

“A necessary evil,” Azral sighed. “I seek to prevent future complications. If it’s any comfort, none of your people suffered much. Most of them died in their sleep.”

Quint took no comfort in that at all. “Then why . . . why am I . . . ?”

“I wanted to thank you for all your hard work, Sterling. You did everything I asked of you. And aside from that early issue with Maranan, you handled your tasks superbly. Know that we’ll always value your contribution.”

Quint’s eyes darted back and forth in busy thought. “Look . . . look, why don’t we compromise, okay? Just give me the girl. Give me Farisi and we’ll go our separate ways.”

“Sterling . . .”

“You said she was expendable!”

“To us,” Azral said. “Not to them. The Silvers will be traveling now. They’ll need her unique insight.”

“But—”

“Furthermore, you misunderstand your situation. I said I wanted to thank you. I never said you were spared.”

The walls of Quint’s mind suddenly constricted into a narrow tunnel, as a million floating concerns melted away to just one. White-faced, he fumbled the knot of his tie until it came loose. He knew that pleading for his life would be futile, like begging the mercy of a great white shark or a snowy avalanche.

Suddenly the esteemed physicist erupted in a low and untimely chuckle. The Pelletiers watched him with furrowed bother.

“Did you not understand what—”

“Oh, I got it,” Quint said, still chortling. “I may be many things, Azral, but I’m not stupid.”

Esis eyed him warily. “And yet you laugh in the face of your own demise.”

No one was more surprised than Quint, a man whose whole life had been an upward climb, filled with endless battle. Now after fifty-five years, there was nothing left to do. No one left to fight. The revelation was . . . liberating.

“I’d explain it,” he said, through dwindling snickers. “But I doubt you’d understand. If the two of you represent the future of mankind, then this is an excellent time to stop progressing.”

Azral and Esis exchanged a stony glance, then bloomed a matching set of grins.

“Oh, the pride of the ancients,” said the son.

“Truly a sight to behold,” said the mother.

Their condescension cracked the walls of Quint’s serenity. He shot a wrathful glare at Azral.

“Just get it over with already, you stretched stain. You chalk-faced bowel. If I have one regret, it’s that I won’t get to see all your plans crumble right on top of you. Don’t think it won’t happen. You’re clearly not as smart as you think you are.”

Expressionless, Azral rose from the desk and approached Quint. The physicist smiled.

“It’ll be even more amusing if your grand design gets foiled by the very people you brought here. The great Azral Pelletier, brought low by an actress, a cartoonist, and all their little friends. It’s a shame I’ll miss that. Talk about a sight to behold.”

With a soft and solemn expression, Azral rested a gentle hand on Quint’s scalp.

“I thank you again for your help, Sterling. Your work here is done.”

Quint closed his eyes in anticipation of pain, but he felt nothing more than a faint and bubbly tickle under his skin. He peeked an eye open.

“What—”

He dropped through the rug as if it were nothing more than mist. Down he fell, through the floorboards and wires, the lobby chandelier. He passed through all objects like an apparition but he plummeted like a stone.

When he reached the underground parking lot, Quint finally screamed. He disappeared through the concrete and then continued in darkness. By the time he succumbed to suffocation, he’d already descended an eighth of the way into the Earth’s crust. His body kept on falling, all the way to magma.

Grim-faced and silent, the Pelletiers exited the complex. The moment they reached the front yard, Azral turned around and closed his eyes in concentration.

A dome of piercing white light suddenly enveloped the building—a bubble of backward time moving at accelerated speed. Inside the field, corpses vanished, plants shrank, mice perished as zygotes. The hint of past life appeared in split-second intervals, like aberrations in a flip-book.

By the time the dome disappeared, the entire structure had been reversed fifty-two months, reverted to the failed hotel that Quint had yet to purchase. Every file, every photo, every mention of the Silvers was now erased from existence.

Esis peevishly crossed her arms and addressed Azral in a foreign tongue, a byzantine blend of European and Asian languages that was still over two millennia away from being invented.

“I warned you not to overlook our ancestors, sehgee. You should have listened to me.”

“I know.”

“You and your father both.”

Azral held her hands, his sharp eyes tender with affection. “Just forgive us, sehmeer, and embrace the new course.”

Esis heaved a wistful breath and fixed her dark stare at the blooming sun.

“I can’t help but worry for those children. There are so many futures open to them now. So many strings.”

“There’s only one outcome that matters,” Azral insisted. “They go east. To Pendergen.”

“Assuming they don’t fall on the way.”

Azral wrapped his arms around Esis and cast a soulful gaze down the driveway.

“They will not fall,” he assured her. “Not the important ones, at least.”

—

Nobody knew where they were going, least of all Zack. His only goal now was to avoid looping back into police search paths. Every chance he got, he drove east into the rising sun.

Twelve miles from the site of their standoff, the engine fell to sickly whirrs. Zack veered onto a narrow forest road and pulled over to the dirt. He felt relatively good about ditching the van here in a desolate area, under the thick canopy of trees. He could only assume that the police hunt had extended to helicopters or whatever they used here to make pigs fly.

He gave everyone five minutes to gather their wits and scant belongings, but Amanda insisted on ten. She’d discovered a sterilized pack of sutures at the bottom of Czerny’s med kit and was determined to close Theo’s wound before they all proceeded on foot.

While the others exited, she remained with Theo in the back of the van. She saw him wincing with every stroke of the needle.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m an oncology nurse. I don’t do this very often.”

“You’re doing fine.”

Theo studied her as she made her final stitches. Her expression was tight and unsettled, like crumbling stone.

“They have those healing machines,” he reminded her. “Anything you did to those cops will be undone.”

“Not if I killed them.”

“I don’t think you did.”

Amanda didn’t think so either, but she couldn’t escape the grim possibilities. She’d pinned those men down with the hands of a giant. Another ounce of thought and she could have crushed them like eggs. It had taken her years to accept cancer as part of God’s great plan. She didn’t even know where to start with tempis.

Twenty feet away, Mia paced the side of the road, kicking tiny stones with vacant bother. She couldn’t shake the tickle from her cheek, the strip of skin that the policeman’s bullet had kissed with hot air. Someone just fired a gun at her face. And yet somehow she was still standing.

David chucked acorns at the treetops, startling numerous birds.

“What’s going on in that head of yours, Miafarisi?”

“I was just thinking how you saved my life back in that building. I never even thanked you.”

David shrugged as if he’d merely lent her a nickel. “No worries. Just glad we’re all still breathing.”

He caught his oversight and turned to Mia in hot remorse. She threw her dismal gaze inside the van, at the blanket-draped corpse of Constantin Czerny.

“Shoot. Mia, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she told him. “I just feel bad leaving him like this.”

“We can’t bury him,” David said. “There’s no time. No reason. The police will only dig him up.”

Mia didn’t think she had any tears left in her, and yet her eyes welled up again.

“He was nice.”

David pulled her into a soft embrace, resting his chin on her scalp. Such a sweet thing, this Miafarisi. Such a sweet child.

Zack leaned against the driver’s door, nervously tapping his foot. Between all the traumas of the recent past and all his worries about the near future, he found the energy to mourn the sketchbook he’d left behind in Terra Vista. It was the last surviving relic of his old life. Now he had nothing left but memories.

Hannah emerged from the woods, red-faced and puffy-eyed. She’d gone into the trees to vomit, but it turned out all she needed was a few good minutes of unabashed weeping. She wiped her eyes and rested against the van.

“You okay?” Zack asked.

“Yes. Thank you. You’re still an asshole.”

He’d already apologized twice for making her run after the van. She didn’t care. She was suffering the second-worst morning of her life and she needed to be irrational about something.

He took her hand and pushed a small silver disc into her palm. “There.”

“What’s this?”

“Restitution. I found it in the cup holder.”

Hannah studied the coin. It was twice the size and value of a standard quarter, and bore the side-profile portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. She found the inscription under his head—We Persevere—to be ominously cryptic. She could only guess it had something to do with the Cataclysm.

“That’s all the money you found?” she asked.

“That’s all the money we own.”

She pocketed the coin. “Fifty cents. Lovely.”

A red sedan turned a sharp corner onto their road. Hannah tensed up and squeezed Zack’s arm. He squinted at the approaching vehicle.

“It’s okay. It’s not a cop car.”

Loud country-rock music blared from within as the vehicle rolled to a slow stop beside Zack and Hannah. The young driver turned off his radio and leaned over to the passenger side, whistling in wonder at the dilapidated van.

“Hoo-EE! I’ve seen some threeped-up rides in my time, amigos, but that is one unhappy son-of-a! You folks doing all right here?”

The man was slight in stature, but he dressed and acted to compensate. Beneath his wide gray cowboy hat were a pair of sunglasses large enough to qualify as novelty shades. His red denim shirt was garnished with rhine-stones. The man practically drowned his new acquaintances in his proud Southern drawl.

“We’re fine,” Zack assured him. “Bought a clunker. Clipped a deer. You know how it goes.”

“I hear that. Sure as hell do. Sometimes life just grabs you by the jangles and gives it a good ol’ squeeze!” He tipped his hat at Hannah. “If you’ll pardon the expression, ma’am.”

Even with his absurd shades, Hannah could tell he was aggressively unconcerned about her delicate ears and quite interested in the goods beneath her tank top. She crossed her arms uncomfortably.

“Sure I can’t help?” asked the cowboy. “I’m mighty handy with a wrench.”

Zack shook his head. “No thanks. We’re fine. We appreciate it though.”

The man kept smiling, his high cheer peppered with a hint of wry amusement.

“All righty. I’ll just mosey on along then. But if you’re ever feeling blue, just remember: it’s a brand-new day and the sun is shining bright. Yes, sir!”

He lowered his shades and offered Hannah a quick wink that was creepy enough to distract her from all her recent woes. Zack was intrigued by the “55” tattoo on the back of his right hand. He wondered if the significance of the number was cultural or personal.

For Evan Rander, it was very personal.

He revved his engine, then offered his two fellow Silvers a final preening smile.

“Y’all take care now. Keep walking.”

“Keep walking,” Zack repeated.

He and Hannah continued to watch the car as it disappeared to the east. Zack could have sworn he heard laughter over the loud, noxious music.

Hannah kept her gaze on the car’s dust trail. “Why’d you say ‘Keep walking’?”

“American expression. Means ‘Be well.’ ‘Stay strong.’ That sort of thing.”

“Oh.” She vaguely recalled the pony-haired girl at the supermarket saying the same thing. At the time, Hannah had taken it as a rude brush-off. Guess the kid was being nice.

Once Amanda finished Theo’s bandage and the last of the van’s useful items were collected into bags, there was little else to do but move on. The Silvers gathered at the side of the road.

Amanda watched Hannah caress her aching hand, then grabbed it for inspection.

“What are you doing, Amanda? I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You keep rubbing it and wincing.”

“Well, you’re not making it better by squeezing it.”

“Just let me check, okay?”

“Ow! Goddamn it!”

Amanda dropped Hannah’s arm. “We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think it’s fractured.”

“It is now!”

“Yes, thank you for yelling at me. That’s just what I need right now.”

Mia watched their exchange with dark fascination, then looked away when Amanda noticed her.

Zack pointed to the elevated highway in the distance, stretching deep into the sunrise. “I don’t know the name of that road, but it runs east. I say we travel underneath it until we hit the next town. Along the way, we can figure out what to do about money and food and all that. Is everyone okay with that idea?”

In slow succession, they all nodded. Zack studied their grim and weary faces.

“All right then.”

The group took a final mournful look at Czerny, then slowly proceeded down the road. Two by two, they traveled east—rarely talking, frequently yawning.

Soon a commuter aerotrain crossed high above them on invisible tracks. The bottom of each car sported glowing white struts that varied in formation from trailer to trailer. From below, the whole thing looked like a giant string of dominoes.

The group stopped in place, craning their necks until the final car passed from view.

“They have flying trains,” Hannah uttered. “Did anyone else know they had flying trains?”

From the blank expressions of the others, it was clear that they didn’t.

“Jesus.”

Amanda rubbed her back. “Come on.”

With a deep breath, the actress picked a pebble from her sneaker and then joined the others. The Silvers followed the road to the elevated highway, and then kept walking.