TWENTY

They marched north, through a seemingly endless terrain of dirt roads and grassy hills. Yesterday’s clouds had all but vanished. Now the late-summer sun raged away at their skin, repeatedly forcing them to take shade under sprawling oaks.

When they traveled, they plodded forth in a drowsy trance. It was only while resting that thin reeds of chatter sprang up between them. Virtually all the conversation came from Amanda and the men. Mia had fallen into a bleak silence. Amanda didn’t like her flushed color or the way she occasionally staggered on the grass. Mia had to assure her twice that she was fine. Just quiet.

Everyone knew why Hannah wasn’t talking.

It was at their first oak tree respite, four hours ago, that Theo relayed a message from Evan Rander.

“He said check your pockets. I have no idea why. Just . . . be careful.”

At first Hannah couldn’t find anything in her shorts but the silver half-dollar Zack had given her. She opened her knapsack and fished through the jeans she’d purchased yesterday. Tucked away in the back pocket was the driver’s license of a handsome thirty-year-old man. After a few seconds of tense perusal, she passed it to the others. Zack was the first to speak his name.

“Ernesto Curado. Huh.”

“You don’t know the guy?” David asked Hannah.

She didn’t, but she was sure she recognized Ernesto from her hallucinatory vision yesterday, the muscular man who’d held another Hannah so closely from behind. Her ghostly double had called him Jury.

Amanda studied the license with fidgety unease. “It doesn’t make sense. How did Evan get this in your pocket?”

“He did it yesterday when I bumped into him at the department store. He put all my stuff back in the handcart. Guess this was why.”

“But what was he hoping to accomplish? I mean if he was trying to upset you, why use the driver’s license of a man you never met?”

“I don’t know,” said Hannah, with distant bother.

Zack returned the license to her. “Well, whoever he is, he’s from the unified state of California. He’s one of us.”

“Was one of us,” David corrected, with enough detachment to make Hannah want to scream.

Theo frowned at him. “You don’t know he’s dead.”

“I think the message is a pretty clear indicator.”

Evan had placed a small and ominous sticky note on the back of the card. You would have liked him.

Hannah obsessively studied the license for the next two miles, until all his information was chisel-etched into memory—his height (six-foot-two), his weight (205 pounds), his hair (black), his eyes (brown). She knew his address on 13th Street, not far from where the 747 had crashed. She knew he was an organ donor and that he shared a birthday with her mother.

She also knew that Jury Curado was dead. There was no maybe about it. He survived the end of the world, but he didn’t survive Evan Rander.

At noon, the Silvers rose from their fifth shady rest stop. Hannah watched jadedly as Amanda once again enlisted Zack to help her to her feet, a surprisingly dainty move for a woman who was normally self-reliant to a fault. The actress had caught enough lingering stares from Zack to know, even if he didn’t, that he harbored some attraction for Amanda. It wasn’t until her sister’s second outreached hand that Hannah realized the door swung both ways.

Great, the actress seethed. She gets a funny love interest. I get a deranged stalker.

Theo walked alongside her on the unpaved road. She glowered at his tender concern. “My sister send you to check on me?”

“I’m checking on my own,” he insisted. “I feel bad. I should have waited until we were settled before—”

“Settled? When are we ever getting settled? We can’t go a day without someone jumping us.”

“Things will get better.”

“Is that a premonition or just a platitude?”

Theo wasn’t sure. Ever since he stepped out of the woods, he’d carried an odd surplus of optimism, more than he knew how to handle. His body beamed with giddy anticipation, as if there was a recliner and an ice-cold lemonade waiting for him on the other side of the plains.

“Hannah, I’m really sorry I threw that Evan stuff on you. I should have waited.”

“I’m mad at you for the opposite reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re holding out on me. I know he talked about me, but you’re not telling me what he said.”

In relaying his tale of last night’s discussion, Theo had censored Evan’s uncharitable mentions of Hannah. He was stunned she’d sensed the omissions. The woman could be jarringly perceptive.

“I didn’t think it was worth sharing,” he said.

“Well, it’s about me, so why don’t you let me decide?”

“It’s about both of us, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

As Theo formulated his reply, Amanda and David both shouted in alarm. Now the others followed their gaze to the middle of the road, at the still and crumpled form of Mia Farisi.

—

She’d blacked out once before. Last year, at the end of a school assembly, Mia felt the auditorium spin into a vortex of bright lights. Before she knew what was happening, her eyelids fluttered and she toppled back into her classmates.

It was her own damn fault. Her latest weight tantrum had thrown her into a six-day regimen of cabbage soup and rice cakes. She never expected her crash diet to become literal.

Her oldest brother picked her up from school. Though Bobby Farisi was six-foot-four and built like a fortress, his baby sister had a way of turning him to porcelain. After a half mile of stony silence, he fell into blubbering tears.

“You pull any stupid shit like that again, I swear to God I’ll kill you. Don’t ever scare me like that!”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“Don’t apologize,” said Amanda. “Just drink.”

She woke up in the shade, with her head in Amanda’s lap and a bottle pressed against her lips. Her head pounded. Her skin throbbed as if she were one continuous bruise. Mia took a sip of warm water and then scanned her surroundings. She could only see Amanda and Zack.

“What happened?”

“You fainted,” said Amanda. “You’re overheated. A body can only take so much.”

“Where are the others?”

“They went to get water. They’ll be back soon.”

“Water from where?”

David had spotted the green bolt logo of a vehicle charging station behind a line of distant trees. None of the others could see it, even after following his pointed finger. The boy had thrown Zack a lordly grin. “And you mock my love for carrots.”

Zack wasn’t feeling very humorous at the moment. He paced the grass with furious distraction.

“You should have told us you weren’t feeling well. We would have rested more.”

“I didn’t want to slow us down,” Mia said.

“You think there’s a speed trophy waiting for us in Brooklyn? Our only reward is getting there alive. So you tell us next time. You pull this martyr crap again, I’ll tape you in a box and mail you to Peter.”

Amanda squinted at him. “Ease up. She doesn’t need a lecture now.”

On the contrary, Zack’s wrath was like water for Mia’s soul. Though the cartoonist could probably fit inside one of her brother’s arms, he carried the same masculine vulnerability, the same caring passion. It was scary how much she loved him right now.

Zack let out a self-defusing sigh, then sat down with the others. “I don’t like splitting up like this. Not without cell phones.”

“They’ll be fine,” Amanda assured him. “They know the way back.”

At least the men do, she thought. Her sister had the directional skills of a leaking balloon.

Once Amanda caught Zack’s gaze, she motioned to Mia’s free hand. He took it in his grip. Though he offered her a weak smile, he had to suppress his other new concern. If things were this tough in the grasslands, they didn’t have a prayer of making it through the desert.

—

Hannah’s calves burned with fury as she climbed the steep ridge. Her only comfort was the malevolent twinge of glee she drew from Theo’s matching strain. She’d forcibly volunteered him for the water-gathering mission, the Jack to her Jill. Though the task hardly required three people, David insisted on coming along. The boy barely broke a sweat.

“You could have left your backpack with the others,” he told Hannah.

“It’s okay. It balances the weight up front. Not that you ever noticed these.”

David eyed her with perplexed indignity. “I noticed. I just never said anything. Was I supposed to?”

“No, but you’re a teenage boy. I should have caught you looking by now.”

He jerked a tired shrug. “I don’t get the fascination with large breasts. I won’t say it’s a purely American fetish, but it does seem to be rampant in this culture and era. I admit I’m intrigued by the unique disparity between you and your sister. From what I can see, she barely has a chest at all.”

Hannah slapped Theo’s shoulder. “See? David knows how to get on my good side.”

“If I acknowledge your superior endowments, will you stop being mad at me?”

“Just tell me what Evan said!”

“He said you’d flirt with me soon!”

Hannah stopped at the top of the hill and stared at Theo in puzzlement. “That’s it?”

“That’s the bulk of it. Yes.”

“Jesus, that’s nothing. I flirt with people all the time. I flirt with David.”

The boy nodded. “It’s true. She does.”

“Theo, why did you think that would bother me?”

He flicked a tense hand. “I don’t know. He said you’d flirt with me by default, that you can’t exist without a man to wrap around your finger, which I thought was pretty unkind.”

“It’s also kind of true,” Hannah admitted. Throughout her adult life, the actress had rarely gone a week without some fling, tryst, or other quasi-romantic dalliance. She gravitated toward partners who were meek enough to put her on a pedestal, a handy way to control the terms of the relationship. She wasn’t proud of it, but she was aware enough to recognize the pattern. The real mystery was how Evan knew it.

“There was one other thing,” Theo cautioned. “He told me you used to have a fourth option, but he removed it.”

Now Hannah was bothered. For the twentieth time, she procured Jury’s license from her pocket. Evan’s teasing note still burned fresh in her mind. You would have liked him.

“I don’t understand. How could he say I had the option if I never got a chance to meet him?”

“He must have his own temporal talents,” David mused, as if merely discussing the weather. “We know from Mia that it’s perfectly possible to tamper with the past. Maybe Evan can do the same. Maybe we exist in a branching chronology that he created, an alternate-alternate timeline where Ernesto Curado never became part of the group.”

Hannah trembled as she tried to wrap her mind around the implications—a human being removed not just from life but from the memories of everyone who knew him. She couldn’t think of a crueler thing to do to a person, and yet Evan clearly took joy in his feat. Worse, he was determined to fill in the blanks for Hannah, to make sure she knew exactly what she lost.

David continued to ponder the idea. “Actually, given how much Evan knows about us, I’m starting to think he used to be part of our group as well. Maybe he’d been with us from the beginning, until he decided to change that. What I can’t figure out though—”

“David . . .”

“—is how his own memories would be preserved.”

“David, stop.”

At Theo’s words, the boy glanced up at Hannah’s pained face. He flinched with remorse. “Sorry. I was channeling my father again. I could be wrong about all of this. I probably am.”

She rubbed her eyes. “It’s all right. Let’s just keep going.”

Eight minutes later, they reached the MerryBolt chargery, a facility that looked less like a gas station and more like a drive-in theater. The lot contained over two dozen generator spaces for cars. A large screen kept motorists distracted with commercials and cartoons.

Thankfully, the place included a mini-market that was stocked to the roof in ice-cold refreshments. After downing a full cherry vim, Hannah felt her inner gauges swing back into the green. She blithely locked arms with her companions, like Dorothy in Oz, as they proceeded down the road with their new bags of bounty. She considered talking about her breasts again, just for positive attention, then cursed herself for being so damn insecure.

A hundred yards from the chargery, David came to a sudden halt. He aimed a curious gaze up a long dirt hill.

“Huh.”

“What’s the matter?”

He broke from Hannah’s grasp. “Wait here. I want to check something.”

Theo shook his head. “Uh-uh. We’ve split up enough already.”

“Fine. Then come with me.”

“David, are you sure this is a good idea?” Hannah asked. “Mia really needs water.”

“I know what Mia needs. If this is what I think it is, she’ll benefit most of all.”

Hannah and Theo traded a dim expression as they followed David up the slope. Whatever the boy was looking at was invisible to them. All he would tell them, as he led the charge, was that something interesting came up this hill two days ago and never came down.

By the time they joined David at the crest, they could see exactly what he was talking about. The recent past had met up with the present. And quite a present it was.

The luxury van glistened in the sunlight, resting serenely near the edge of a cliff. Aside from the dirt and grass on the tires, the vehicle looked as pristine as a showroom special. Through the tinted windows lay six plush bucket seats. A metal emblem on the rear door heralded the van as a Royal Seeker. It was painted in shiny silver.

Hannah held her mystified gaze on the abandoned vehicle.

“Huh.”

—

Zack ambled back and forth in the leafy shade, clucking his tongue to a forcibly cheery tune. If pressed to name the song in his head, he could only peg it as a number from The Little Mermaid. The one the crab sings.

Soon he spotted the dry chagrin of Amanda and Mia and became smirkingly contrite.

“Sorry. That used to drive my girlfriend nuts too.”

“Sit down. You’re making us nervous.”

He rejoined them at the tree, rapidly drumming his thighs as he scanned the grassy distance.

“You never mentioned a girlfriend before,” Mia said.

“She was an ex,” Zack clarified. “We broke up two years ago but we still lived together.”

“That’s a strange arrangement,” Amanda mused.

Zack rolled his shoulders in a sullen shrug. “It was a good apartment.”

Sensing the end of his effusiveness, Amanda dropped the topic and ate another peppermint. Zack had noticed her popping them like crazy over the past fifteen minutes, ever since Hannah and the others crossed into worrisome tardiness.

As she reached for the last candy, an odd new thought occurred to him.

“Wait. Don’t eat that.”

She paused. “Huh?”

“Hold that mint. And hand me the box, please.”

Confused, she passed him the little square tin of Breezers she’d purchased from the motel vending machine. Zack brandished the container like a stage magician.

“Now, what do you think would happen if I reversed this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think I could refill this box with mints of the past?”

Amanda stared at him blankly as she pondered his premise. “I don’t like the idea of half-digested candies suddenly disappearing from my insides.”

“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.”

Zack placed the tin on the ground and concentrated until it gleamed with light. He opened the lid to a fresh new heap of white candies.

Mia’s mouth went slack. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Amanda said.

“Wow indeed.” Zack looked to Amanda. “Do you feel any less minty?”

“No. I feel exactly the same. I can still taste the last one I ate.”

“Yeah. These are doubles. Holy crap. I made copies.” He laughed. “David’s going to blow a synapse.”

For all his awe, Zack suspected his feat was pitifully mundane to the civilized natives of Earth. He was right. The process of tooping had been a part of modern culture for decades. Using any rejuvenator, a container could be reversed to create temporal duplicates of its former contents, whether they were mints or apples or shiny gold nuggets.

Unfortunately for wealth seekers, tooping was an inherently flawed process, one that always resulted in inferior copies. Precious metals became rusted and worthless. Gems turned cloudy and cracked. Most tooped foods were inedible, though certain grains and vegetables were able to survive the process with a tolerable loss of quality. There were over a thousand toop-friendly recipes that had been discovered through years of experimentation—pastas, breads, and rice dishes that were easily saved by fresh seasonings.

Though tooping was prohibited by federal law, the authorities could only do so much to stop it in the kitchen. In the end, nobody craved shoddy cloned sustenance. It was just the fiscal reality. The middle class had leftovers. The lower class had do-overs.

In the grassy wilds, Zack received a quick education on the limits of tooping. The moment he sampled a re-created mint, his face contorted in comical disgust. Mia and Amanda covered their laughs.

“What’s wrong?”

He spat his candy into the dirt. “It’s awful. Like eating a dust bunny.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I’m serious. Try one.”

Amanda pushed his arm away. “I believe you!”

“God, that sucked. Let me have the original.” He took the mint from her hand, tested its structural integrity, and then ate it. “Yeah. Okay. I think Breezers were meant for one-time use.”

“Maybe they added a special chemical,” Mia said. “Like copy protection.”

Zack stared ahead in thought. “You know, I bet that’s one of the things that pawnbroker was testing for. To see if your wedding ring was a clone.”

“And I bet that’s why the cash here is all blue and glossy,” Amanda added. “It’s probably some fancy ink that can’t be duplicated.”

“Great,” Zack sighed. “Guess I can’t make a figurative mint either.”

Mia shook her head, frustrated. “We still have so much to learn about this place. I mean everything we figured out just now is stuff a third-grader already knows.”

“We’ll catch up,” Amanda assured her. “Someday.”

Once again, Zack looked out to the hills, rapidly drumming his thigh until Amanda pressed his hand still. As their fingers touched, he realized that she rarely mentioned her husband. He made a note to ask about him someday, carefully, when he had a few less items on his plate of worries.

“Where the hell are they?”

—

Hannah wasn’t sure which of her two friends would explain the Royal Seeker first. David and Theo circled the van at polar ends, one scanning the past, the other peering into the future.

After two revolutions, David seized the winning edge.

“Look, I adore Mia. I respect her rules for avoiding federal detection. But we’re well out of sight. It would be far easier to show you what I’ve learned than to tell you. May I?”

Before Theo or Hannah could answer, David closed his eyes in concentration. A ghostly copy of the Seeker appeared at the edge of the hill, rolling up the grass until it merged with its present counterpart. Soon a spectral door opened and a handsome young man in hiking clothes stepped into the sunlight. From his long blond ponytail and sideburns, Hannah figured he represented the haute couture of the Altamerican progressive.

The driver took a panoramic sweep of his surroundings, then shut his door. Hannah’s heart lurched as he moved to the edge of the fifty-foot drop.

“David, if he jumps, you tell me now. I don’t want to see that.”

“He doesn’t jump. Watch.”

For the next several seconds, he kept his expressionless gaze on the canopy of trees below him. Then, with triumphant fury, he threw the ignition key over the cliff.

“Oh no!”

“It’s all right,” David assured Hannah. “We’ll find it.”

The man procured a handphone from his pocket and pressed a single button. “Yeah, it’s me. It’s over. I’m out. Thanks for everything. Go fourp yourself.”

Satisfied, he chucked the phone into the trees, then turned around and left the way he came. The ghost disappeared in a ripple.

David beamed at his companions. “He walks back down the hill, still smiling. Whatever decision he made, it was a good one. For him and for us.”

“But who was he?” Hannah asked.

“Who cares? We have a vehicle now. An unstolen luxury van.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Theo said. “For all we know, this guy just quit his job as a car thief.”

David sighed impatiently. “It’s been sitting here for two days. If it was stolen, then it wasn’t reported. If it was reported, then it wasn’t tracked. This is our van now. We just need to find that key.”

They descended the hill and scoured the woods in a three-pronged sweep. The search felt like a needle-in-a-haystack conundrum to Hannah, but then she knew it was never wise to bet against David Dormer.

Theo took a break from his halfhearted hunt, wiping his brow with the lip of his T-shirt. Hannah was momentarily stunned by the sight of his finely muscled stomach, the hint of a scar on his left pectoral. She was wise enough not to ask about old wounds.

“You okay?”

“Headache,” he said. “Probably just lack of sleep. It’ll pass.”

“Did you see anything futurish when you looked at that van?”

“It’s hard to say. I got a bunch of vague flashes, but I can’t tell if they’re predictions or just my usual thoughts. Mia’s lucky. At least her future’s written out for her.”

“Well, were they good flashes or bad flashes?”

“Both,” he replied, with jittery uncertainty. “I feel like that van will take us all the way to New York, but that could just be wishful thinking. I also feel like that scene we witnessed up there wasn’t entirely genuine, but that might just be paranoia.”

Hannah grew tense all over again. There was something about the driver’s expression, right after he threw the phone, that slightly reeked of acting. She’d also filed the suspicion as paranoia. Certain parties had given her plenty of reason to be skittish.

“Found it!”

David bounded through the trees, grinning with triumph. He jingled a key chain in his hand.

“So who feels like driving?”

—

Hannah mentally cursed Theo and David as she climbed behind the wheel. She had two certified geniuses in her company and yet she was the one who had to pilot the crazy Royal Seeker. There were buttons and switches everywhere. This was no Salgado clunker. This was the goddamn Enterprise.

After ten minutes of wary experimentation, in which Hannah nearly sent the Seeker over the cliff, she finally got a handle on the controls. Soon the splinter group returned with their four-wheeled surprise. Zack’s fear turned to bafflement when he spotted Hannah behind the wheel.

He stood up and chucked his arms at full wingspan. “What . . . ? How?”

The passenger window opened to David’s chipper face. “Shall we discuss it inside?”

Soon the Silvers filled the six plush seats, basking in cool comforts. Between the air-conditioning, the fresh water, and her ridiculously cozy perch, Mia felt a full-body relief that was almost religious in intensity.

She glanced around in muddled awe. “I can’t believe you guys just found this lying around.”

David smiled at her. “After the last few days, I think we’re due for some random good fortune.”

“It just seems a little too random,” Zack fretted.

“And a little too good,” Amanda added.

Hannah narrowed her eyes. They weren’t even a couple yet and they were already making her ill with their cuteness.

David scowled at them. “This wasn’t delivered to our doorstep. It was abandoned in a distant patch of wilderness two days ago. Don’t you think that’s a little dodgy as far as traps go?”

“By the old rules, yes,” Zack replied.

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that in a world where time can go wibbly-wobbly and pretzel-bendy, it’s entirely possible that we were meant to find this Mystery Machine.”

“Meant by who?”

“Do you really have to ask, David? Do you think this is the first silver gift we’ve gotten?”

Amanda nodded darkly. “Exactly.”

Theo and Hannah remained outwardly neutral, though images of Azral had been circling their thoughts from the moment the van came to life. Theo fumbled with a thin metal attaché case he’d discovered under his seat. The lid was held shut by a convoluted system of clasps. He couldn’t tell if it was locked or just strange.

David flicked a curt hand. “I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to give yourself an ulcer over paranoid conspiracy theories, feel free. Just leave me out of it.”

“Hey come on, David . . .”

“Why are you getting so angry?” Amanda asked. “We’re just talking.”

“Except none of us have thanked him yet.”

The others looked to Mia as she straightened her seat back. Her expression was both remorseful and stern.

“Thanks to David, we don’t have to walk across the country now. We don’t have to worry about deserts or dehydration. We could be in Brooklyn in four or five days instead of two or three months, thanks to David. And he did it all without robbing or hurting anyone.”

She looked to him now. “Thank you, David. You probably saved my life again.”

The van fell quiet. Hannah scanned the bright new smile on David’s face, then confronted the disturbing new possibility that she’d be traveling with two couples soon.

Zack let out an attritional sigh. “Look—”

The attaché case loudly sprang open, startling everyone. Theo exhaled with relief. A few more minutes and he would have started smashing it.

The others stared at him, dumbfounded, as he procured a neatly wrapped stack of shiny blue cash. Hannah leaned forward and read the paper band.

“Holy shit. Five thousand dollars?”

Zack blinked in stupor. “Are you serious?”

“That’ll last us all the way to New York,” said Amanda. “Easily.”

“Guys, you’re not getting the full scope of this.”

Theo turned the case on his lap, revealing a tray of identical bricks. Lifting one revealed another, then another, then two others. Fifty stacks in total. A quarter of a million in cash.

The group fell into bewildered silence. Soon Zack found his way to the only sane response.

“Thank you, David.”

Nervous giggles spread through the van as the others followed Zack’s dizzy lead. The grin on David’s handsome young face slowly flatlined. He looked to Zack contritely.

“I’ll admit that your suspicion seems a little more plausible now.”

“Look, trust me, I’d rather be wrong. If Azral’s the one who gave us this stuff—”

“No,” said Hannah, frantically waving her palms. “I’m sorry. Between all the bad stuff of yesterday and the good stuff of today, I’m about to get the bends. Can we put away the big issues for a couple of hours? Can we just enjoy this? Please?”

No one had trouble agreeing to her request. After a cozy respite, Hannah oriented Zack on the van’s controls. David plotted a course on the computer navigation system. Soon the Silvers joined the speedy bustle on Highway X, snaking east through the South California grasslands and into the desert.

By the time the Seeker crossed into Arizona, the sun had set and David fell fast asleep in his seat. The five waking Silvers tumbled back into the larger issues. Some thought about Azral. Others thought about Peter. All of them wondered why one was so eager to help them get to the other.