THIRTY-THREE

Everything stopped.

The ambient hum of the building generators fell silent. The light on the desk phone froze in mid-blink. A fat bead of water halted its drop from a sweaty ceiling pipe. It hung in the air like a miniature planet.

All over the office, all across creation, time held its breath and waited for Theo.

The bewildered augur kept as still as his surroundings as he fought to absorb this latest insanity. What little color the room had was gone. A thin gray mist blanketed the floor and walls. He saw twinkling specks of light through the fog, like distant cities.

Vague time passed—a second, a minute, an hour—before he dared to move. He writhed in his thoughts and suddenly found himself sling-shot to the other side of the office. Dumbstruck, he turned around and reeled at the haggard young Asian in his former place. The man sat huddled behind the desk in a frozen cry of grief, wearing Theo’s face and clothes, his karma tattoo. It took five rounds of furious debate for him to accept that he was somehow looking at himself. What? How is this . . . ?

The mist on the eastern wall suddenly darkened and swirled like thunderclouds. A tall, reedy figure emerged from the depths, trailing smoky black wisps as he moved.

Azral Pelletier shined a cordial grin at the empty space where Theo’s consciousness lingered.

“Welcome, child.”

He looked majestically dapper in his stone-colored business suit and tieless white oxford. His flawless skin was now as colorless as his surroundings but his eyes remained a vibrant blue. The good cheer on his face did little to quell Theo’s panic.

“Ease yourself,” said Azral. “Your mind is still adjusting to the transition. Soon your senses will compensate and give you form.”

Though his lips moved when he talked, Azral’s cold honey voice hit Theo like a second set of thoughts. He struggled to reply, unsure if his words were spoken or merely imagined.

What happened to me? Am I dead?

Azral smirked. “On the contrary. You’re more alive and awake than ever before.”

Awake was one of the last words Theo would use to describe himself at the moment.

You’re in my head.

“Yes.”

His mind flashed back to the results of the cerebral scan that Melissa had shared with him.

You put something in my brain. Some tiny metal ring.

“A harmless device,” Azral assured him. “It merely allows us to communicate in this state, little more.”

His “little more” struck Theo like a salesman’s asterisk. He felt a nervous lurch where his stomach used to be. “And where exactly . . .”

Theo balked at the new echo in his voice. Now he looked down to see a hazy facsimile of his body.

Azral nodded approvingly. “Already you adapt.”

Theo was surprised to find himself in his faded Stanford hoodie, his old khaki shorts and sandals. It was his favorite outfit, one that had comforted him through many drunken travels.

“What’s happening to me?”

“You’re an augur, Theo. Did you think you’d spend the rest of your life suffering random glimpses? No. You’re generations ahead of your peers, the so-called prophets of this age. Their talent is a crude cudgel. Yours is a violin. This is where the futures sing at your bow, my friend. This is your true gift.”

A thunderous shudder filled Theo. By the time it passed, he appeared as whole as Azral. He could feel the ground beneath his feet again, a simulation of life and breath inside him. The sensation was even more pleasurable than waking life. He felt wonderful now. Except . . .

“Mia. I saw her. She was shot in the chest. Did that really happen? Has it happened already?”

“It has occurred,” Azral calmly replied. “She fades from life at this moment.”

“No . . .”

“We can address the matter later. For now—”

“I have to find her!”

“Boy, look around you. What do you see?”

Theo took another wide-eyed glance around the office. The fat water droplet still dangled in the air. The clock on the wall remained rooted at 11:56 and 48 seconds, with no signs of letting go.

“So it’s not just here,” Theo said. “Time stopped everywhere.”

Azral emitted a soft chuckle, snugly perched between fondness and ridicule.

“You can’t stop time any more than you can stop a desert or a forest. Time is a landscape that stretches across all things. We’re the ones who move across it.”

Theo shook his head in hopeless perplexity. “I don’t—”

“If it helps, think of all the people of the world as passengers on a train. You travel through time at the same speed and direction, perceiving events through your own narrow windows. The concepts of past and future are entirely human constructs. We formulated them as navigational markers, like east and west. Only now—”

“I got off the train.”

Azral smiled again. “You’re not the first of your kind to achieve this state, though my ancestors only seem to come here by accident. They romantically refer to this realm as the God’s Eye. You’d do just as well to call it the Gray.”

Theo didn’t care what it was called. If he was forever stuck here at the cusp of noon, it was Hell.

“Is there . . . a way back on the train?”

“Of course. You can resume your journey at any time. I’ll show you how, but not yet. Come with me. If you wish to aid your companions, there are things you should see.”

Theo felt a gentle hand on his back. He’d only taken three steps out of the room when a cold force pushed him forward like a leaf in a gale. By the time his dizzy senses returned to him, he found himself outside the building.

“What . . . what just . . . ?”

“A quicker mode of transit,” Azral explained. “Foot travel is a needless formality here.”

Theo’s next question fizzled in the urgency of his surroundings. More than twenty federal agents now flanked the building—all paused in tense and busy actions. A ghost team fixed their imaging towers around the Silvers’ dusty red car while a second group wheeled a large metal device that reminded Theo of a supervillain’s death ray. He shuddered to think what it would do once the clock started ticking again.

“Shit. It’s worse than I thought.”

“Indeed,” said Azral. “In one hundred thirty-two seconds, their crude solic toy will breach the barrier.”

Theo looked to the eight gun-toting Deps in armored black speedsuits. He could only assume they were all assigned to take down Hannah. “We’ll never make it out of here.”

“You’ll escape. It’s the continuing presence of these government agents that troubles me. There may yet be a remedy.”

“What remedy?”

“It’s my task,” Azral curtly replied. “Not yours.”

Theo churned with stress as he recalled Azral’s remote-button slaughter of twenty-one physicists, another so-called remedy. They worked for you and you killed them. Bill Pollock got me sober and you killed him.

“I never wished to slay those scientists,” Azral replied, to Theo’s unease. “I saw the consequences of their continued existence, an elaborate chain of events that would have destroyed you and a great many others. It’s the burden of foresight. Our choices often seem questionable to those around us, even cruel. You’ll know this soon enough.”

Theo saw the dreadlocks dangling from an armored agent’s helmet and struggled to avoid all thoughts of Melissa. If the Pelletiers identified her as the face of their federal problem, she was dead.

Azral put his hand on Theo’s back. “Come.”

In a windy swirl, the scenery changed once more. Now they stood in the vast marble lobby, a place that had seen much violence since Theo left it. Furniture all around the room had been smashed and singed and spattered with blood. Two wet and gory strangers lay facedown in the elevator bank while a third corpse languished on the stairwell.

Theo looked to the inanimate couple at the eastern wall, poised inches from a glowing white portal. Though the alluring Indian woman was a stranger to him, he had no trouble recognizing the bald and brawny thug who’d shot him in Terra Vista. A stagnant curl of smoke extended like coral from the barrel of Rebel’s revolver.

“Goddamn it. It was him, wasn’t it? He shot Mia.”

Azral glared at Rebel. He’d only just now caught up on the battle in the lobby—the savage beating of his mother, the timely intervention from his father. His voice dropped a cold octave.

“You won’t have to worry about him much longer.”

“Why is he trying to kill us? What did we do to him?”

Azral shook his head in scorn. “Beneath all that bulk, Richard Rosen is nothing more than a frightened child. He sees a dark event coming and he can’t bear the thought of it. So his weak mind conjures a theory, an enemy, a brutal solution. He’s hardly the first man in history to blame his troubles on immigrants.”

Theo scanned the room and caught David hiding behind a support pillar, his pistol raised high in frozen readiness.

“Oh no . . .”

Azral bloomed a small grin. “He’ll be fine. The boy’s remarkably capable for his age.”

Theo was all too aware of that. Azral gleaned his flip-side worry.

“You believe he’ll kill this pair.”

“I don’t know.” Theo eyed the pregnant bulge in Ivy’s bodysuit. “I hope not.”

“Why would you show concern for those who would slaughter you without hesitation?”

“I’m mostly concerned for David. I don’t want to see him go down a dark path.”

“Have you?”

Theo had to think about it. He’d suffered countless premonitions over the last several days, but only just now realized how very few of them involved David. His future seemed to fall in a blind spot.

“No.”

“Have faith in him then,” Azral said. “Let us continue.”

The next jaunt took them up to the fifth-floor walkway that overlooked the lobby. The mist was ten times thicker here. Theo had to stand next to Amanda to see her on the cushioned bench.

“God, her leg . . .”

Azral studied her broken ankle. “Yes. Strange that my mother didn’t heal her. She favors this one. The child must have angered her.”

“You’re talking about Esis.”

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t look old enough to be your mother.”

“She would adore you for saying that.”

“I’ve only seen her in visions.” Theo scowled in hot contempt. “She keeps killing Zack.”

Azral frowned. “Trillinger is a buffoon and a nuisance. I see now why Quint found him so vexing.”

“He’s my friend!”

“If you seek to keep him, his fate is easily prevented.”

“How?”

Azral raised a long finger at Amanda. “She knows.”

The white-haired man floated deeper into the fog. Theo scrambled to keep up with him, even as his screaming thoughts urged him to flee.

“Why is it so hazy here?”

“Even in this realm, none of us are omniscient. As we move farther from our own sphere of influence, our view grows weaker. Should we venture but one floor higher, I wager we’d glimpse nothing but mist.”

That’s why you’re teaching me, Theo surmised. You need me to see the things you can’t.

If Azral heard his thoughts, he didn’t acknowledge them. He led Theo into a small office that looked like a low-grade law firm. Through the swirling mist, he spotted Hannah inside a small tempic cage. She gripped the bars, her face contorted in a silent scream.

He had to move closer to spot the source of her anguish.

“Jesus Christ! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Evan Rander was dressed in the stately beige uniform of a security guard, an ensemble that looked silly on his scrawny frame. Theo could only guess the outfit was part of his personal escape plan. He’d probably put on his best Barney Fife impression for the Deps, give a few shaky statements, and then slip away while no one was looking.

The rogue Silver wore a nasty grin as he fired a bullhorn-shaped device at Hannah.

“What’s he doing to her?”

“He inflicts her with a low electric charge,” Azral replied. “He seeks to torment, not kill.”

“Son of a bitch. Why does he hate her so much?”

“He hates both sisters. The reasons hardly matter. Rander is nothing. A pathetic fool. I only show him to you as a cautionary example.”

“What, you’re afraid I’ll become like him?”

“In mind-set, not temperament. The boy has lived hundreds of years and yet he still fails to grasp the structure of time. He sees the past as his chalkboard, a single line to be erased and redrawn at whim. In truth, he undoes nothing. He merely jumps from train to train, forever dodging the consequences of his actions. I’m hoping you won’t be so linear in your thinking.”

Theo covered his face in hot distress. His friends were all suffering and Azral was giving him a primer in fiftieth-century metaphysics.

“What will it take?”

“For what?”

“For this guy to see consequences!”

Azral jerked a testy shrug. “His talents give him a unique perspective on events, which in turn provides us with helpful information. But perhaps I should reevaluate his usefulness.”

“I don’t want him dead. I just want him to leave us alone.”

“Yes. I thought I’d dissuaded him when last we spoke. Perhaps I need to make myself clearer.”

Azral studied Theo carefully as he reached for Hannah with an intangible hand. “You feel strongly for this one.”

“Yeah, but not the way you think.”

“You don’t know what I think,” Azral snapped. “If I deemed your love to be physical, we’d be having a different conversation.”

Theo looked to him in wide-eyed bother. “What . . . what do you mean?”

“Just take comfort that you won’t lose her. Not anytime soon.”

“I know.” He turned to Hannah again. “I see her all over my future. She’s everywhere I look.”

“You say it like it troubles you.”

“It troubles me that I don’t see the others as clearly. Can you please take me to Mia now?”

Azral nodded obligingly, though his handsome face turned grim.

“Come, then.”

—

He’d prepared himself for the worst, but what Theo saw in the magazine office sent his proxy form to chaos. He screamed and cried with two blurry heads, punched at the air with four hazy hands. He paced the floor in all directions while five ghostly duplicates fell to their knees. He was everywhere at once—an army of Theos, all thrashing and grieving over the youngest of the Silvers.

Mia lay cradled in Zack’s arms, her eyes wide with vacant horror as he pressed a bloody T-shirt to her chest wound. The cartoonist served a silent contrast to Theo’s raging sorrow, a snapshot image of a man in blanket shock. His tears had paused in mid-journey, lining his cheeks like scars.

Azral stood expressionless among the broken glass, calmly waiting for his protégé to collect himself.

“Theo . . .”

One by one, the doppelgängers vanished. A lone Theo crouched by Mia’s side. “How long does she have?”

“Moments,” Azral informed him. “She dies before the agents breach the barrier.”

“Oh God. There has to be something we can do.”

“I don’t know, Theo. Is there?”

“Don’t play games with me! I’m not in the mood!”

“It’s your mood that clouds you. Your emotions prevent you from seeing.”

“Seeing what?”

“The futures,” Azral said, with a sweeping hand gesture. “They reveal themselves in this place. They sing to us from every corner. Have you not wondered about the lights in the mist?”

Theo looked to the northern wall, at the tiny beads that twinkled within the fog. He’d glimpsed them everywhere he turned in this dreary gray world. He didn’t know why they scared him.

“What are they?”

“I said your talent was a violin, Theo. These . . .”

Azral moved behind him, plunging his fingers deep into the augur’s skull.

“These are the strings.”

Hot white strands of light converged on Theo from every direction. His consciousness erupted in a screaming torrent of images—a million parallel futures, all as different as siblings but knotted at the ends with the same painful traumas. Every string ended with his own cold death. Every string started with Mia’s.

“NO!”

Azral leaned in close, his imperious voice cutting through the chaos. “You see them now. All the branching possibilities. All the endless permutations and patterns. We’ve been so blind, Theo. Our species has lived for so long like moles in a tunnel. You’re among the first to step into the light and see time as it was meant to be seen. This is humanity’s greatest evolution. A whole new dimension of perception. It’s beautiful, is it not?”

“It hurts!”

“You hinder yourself.”

“She keeps dying!”

“You adopt the grief of your elder incarnations. For them, it’s too late to save her. Not for you. Detach yourself and perhaps you’ll find a brighter outcome hidden among the multitudes.”

With a raspy shout, Theo thrust his palms and cleared a six-foot ball of space around him. The strings now ended in a curved wall of pinlights. The bedlam in his thoughts dissipated.

Azral retracted his hands. “Good. Very good.”

The augur dropped to his ethereal knees, panting through imaginary lungs. “Go to hell . . .”

“I only seek to aid you. The girl can be saved.”

“You’re lying!”

“Look again. Search the strings more carefully. You’ve no reason to hurry. We don’t age here. Our bodies don’t clamor for food or sleep. In this realm, time is our servant. Use it.”

Theo raised his head and squinted at the array of tiny lights. Glancing at it was like staring into an endless crowd of suffering children, searching for the one who smiled. And Azral expected him to do this for days, weeks, years on end. Is this how you learned the strings, you murderous shit? Is this what turned you cold and white?

He squinted his eyes shut. “I can’t do this! I can’t keep watching her die!”

“Then she is indeed lost.”

“You know how to save her. Just tell me!”

“Am I indebted to you, boy? Are you the one who rescued me from a dying world, or was it perhaps the other way around?”

“I never asked you to give me a goddamn bracelet! And you wouldn’t have saved us if you didn’t need us for something. So just tell me! Tell me how to keep her alive!”

Azral sighed defeatedly, a reaction that nearly made Theo burst with jaded laughter. Though he was new to the Gray or the God’s Eye or whatever this place was called, he was a decorated veteran in disappointing people. The familiarity soothed him like a warm shot of whiskey.

“It seems I overestimated you, Theo.”

“You found me drunk at a bus stop. What did you expect?”

“I found you long before that, but no matter.” Azral touched Theo’s back. “Come.”

Their final journey was different from the others. Instead of twirling around like a leaf, Theo shot forward at blurring speed, his vision a tableau of bright, streaking colors. Occasionally he felt a shift in direction, as if Azral steered them down a branching path. Forks in the road, Theo mused, though he imagined it was hardly so binary. There were likely millions of options at every juncture, millions of variations and subvariations, even a few minor miracles.

After an indeterminate period—nestled somewhere in the space between “soon” and “soon enough”—the pair emerged into a sparse but cozy living room. Venetian blinds filtered afternoon sunlight. Taped moving boxes lined the bare walls. A group of mismatched chairs and couches stood in sloppy formation around a circular glass coffee table. The cushions were occupied by five people Theo readily recognized, including himself.

His twin stretched out on a plush recliner, locking his arms around Hannah’s waist as she wearily leaned against him. Zack, David, and Amanda all slouched alone in their sofas. Amanda wore a makeshift splint of broken broomsticks and duct tape. The others sported numerous bandages.

The spectral Theo peeked over David’s shoulder and examined his wristwatch.

“It’s a quarter after one. A little over an hour from now.”

Azral cracked a patronizing grin at Theo’s muddled notion of “now.”

“Where is this?” Theo asked.

“Approximately five miles east of the office tower.”

Theo peeked out the window at a red-leafed sycamore tree. “Brooklyn. Jesus, we really did get out.”

“In this string, yes.”

“But what about—”

Hannah cut him off with a melodious yawn, startling him. He thought the scene was a still frame like all the others. His friends were merely languishing in dull stupor.

Now he heard the clinking of ceramics through the kitchen door. His eyes bulged when Mia entered with a tray of steaming mugs. Though her face drooped with fatigue like all the others’, she looked healthy enough to live for decades.

She placed a cup on the end table next to Amanda. “He doesn’t have milk. Sorry.”

The widow stared ahead in dead torpor, her voice a flimsy wisp. “Okay.”

The spectral Theo continued to study Mia in slack awe. “God. It’s like she was never shot. How did that happen? Was there a reviver in the building?”

“There was a reviver in that very room,” Azral replied. “You simply failed to see it.”

“Well, how do I find it then?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I go back. How do I make this the future that happens?”

Azral eyed him with dark disbelief, as if Theo were lost in a broom closet.

“This is happening, child. Every path of time exists on the landscape, one as real as the next. Did you think I merely brought you here for instruction?”

Now Theo was truly lost. “What are you telling me?”

“I said you could resume your journey at any time. You have only to concentrate to take your place in that chair. Your life will continue seamlessly from this moment. Is that not preferable?”

Theo blinked distractedly, his mind twisting in furious dilemma. As tempting as it was to be done with all the day’s traumas, he couldn’t shake the subtle air of incongruity that kept him detached from this scene. These friends didn’t feel exactly like the people he knew. This was Zack with an asterisk, Hannah with a caveat.

Azral studied him warily. “What troubles you now?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. I mean if I do this, what happens to the other timeline?”

“It continues.”

“Without me?”

“Very much with you.”

“How does that work?”

“Far beyond your understanding,” Azral replied, with crusty impatience. “To explain it now would be like explaining a sphere to a circle. You’re not ready. Perhaps you never will be. You’re more like Rander than I feared.”

Theo crossed his arms and stared at his other self sandwiched comfortably between a soft chair and a warm actress. There had to be a catch to this bow-wrapped present. This string had to have its own strings attached.

“Is this what you do, Azral? You pick and choose the futures you want?”

“As I said—”

“Right. It’s beyond me. There’s no denying that. But I’m not like Evan. The thought of jumping trains right now makes me queasy. It feels like I’m leaving my friends behind.”

Azral shook his head in brusque bemusement. “You beg me for hints and now reject the full answer. You’re a fool.”

“I am a fool,” Theo admitted. “I’ve been one as long as I can remember. But you know what? You came at me on the second-worst day of my life. You showed me everyone I care about in horrible danger and then somehow expected me to grasp the intricacies of the universe. For a master of time, you have shitty timing. You also killed Bill Pollock. So no, I don’t trust this answer of yours. And I don’t believe for one second that you just happened to save us from a dying Earth. I’m pretty sure it was healthy until you came along.”

In the sharp and frosty silence, Theo grew convinced that Azral’s next move would be lethal. Instead the white-haired man merely summoned a single strand of light from the wall. The moment it hit Theo, he felt a vague sense of familiarity, like a numb hand on his arm.

“What . . . what is this?”

“The path of return,” said Azral. “This string will lead you back seventy-six minutes to the place you and your companions still suffer. If you proceed slowly enough, you’ll witness events in reverse and note all the timely decisions that enabled your escape. Perhaps you’ll succeed in duplicating this outcome. Perhaps you’ll fail and lose more than one friend in the process. It seems a needless risk to take when you’re already here, but I suppose fools will do as they do.”

Long seconds passed as Theo pondered the heavy new task ahead. Azral shined his cool blue eyes on Hannah.

“Seh tu’a mortia rehu eira kahne’e nada ehru heira.”

Theo eyed him strangely. “What was that?”

“An old expression of my people, a rallying mantra for the soldiers and scientists who kill for the greater good. ‘I shall feed Death before I starve her.’”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You think me a monster when I’m merely a crusader. My parents and I fight for the greatest purpose of all. If we succeed in our endeavor here, we’ll save countless trillions of lives. We will starve Death like none other before us.”

Theo narrowed his eyes. For a cynical moment, Azral looked as silly as a biologist explaining the benefits of cancer research to his lab mice.

“Small comfort to the ones you serve to her,” Theo groused. “When’s it our turn?”

“We didn’t bring you here to kill you. On the contrary, we’ve labored to keep you all alive. Do you think it was fate that rescued you from your coma? Was it the hand of God that pulled Hannah from the brink of a fatal concussion? We’ve provided you with comfort and aid at every turn, Theo. And yet even now as I offer a means to save the child Farisi, you see me as an enemy.”

“How am I supposed to know what you are to us when you won’t tell us what we are to you?”

“Crucial,” said Azral. “There are those among you who are crucial to our plans. I would think that’d be obvious by now.”

“But what do you want with us?”

Azral regarded him with a jaded leer. “I see the futures better than you, child. Telling you now serves no benefit. You’ll know when it suits us.”

Theo chucked his ethereal hands. “So we just go about our lives in the meantime, hoping we don’t do anything to piss you off.”

“If you hinder us by accident, you’ll be duly warned as the elder Given was.”

And if we hinder you on purpose? Theo wondered, before he could stop the thought.

The mist on the wall grew dark and stormy. Azral floated toward the swirling exit, then turned around to bathe Theo in an icy stare.

“Look to the strings, boy. See what becomes of our enemies.”

He disappeared into the fog, leaving Theo alone in this quiet scene, this teasing preenactment of better times. It seemed utterly daft to throw himself back into the fray and risk Mia’s life in retrospect. And yet the more he thought of Azral, the more he feared the numbing effects of this talent. If he had access to a billion Mias, how long before he stopped mourning the loss of one or two of them? How long before he shrugged off the death of one measly Earth?

He worked his hands around the lone strand of light and found it as solid as a rope. With a hearty tug, he pulled himself toward the past, determined to reverse engineer their escape from the office building. Theo didn’t care how long it took him. He had all the time in the world to get it right.