The Flight of the Silvers (25 page)

“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.

SIXTEEN

September 6 was a bad day to be a morning commuter on Highway V. A tempic police cordon blocked all northbound lanes at Terra Vista while bright lumic arrows diverted vehicles to the nearest clogged exit. The ghosted image of a U.S. flag slowly rippled above the barrier. A glimmering overlay asked drivers to be patient and kind to their fellow Americans.

Beyond the cordon, twenty state and local policemen gathered to investigate the odd standoff that had occurred here ninety minutes ago. The Terra Vista police chief scratched his jowls in confusion as he processed the testimony. He was a fat and hairy man of churlish disposition. No one had cause to find humor in the fact that his name was James Bond.

The chief was in a particularly foul mood this morning. Two of his men had been banged up in a high-speed road chase that went bizarrely awry. Another two were laid up with cracked ribs and punctured lungs. They rested on stretchers, waiting for the court recorder to arrive. Before their wounds and memories could be undone by revivers, they had to give their sworn statement about the woman who hurt them—a tall and skinny redhead who’d discovered a bold new way to resist arrest.

Everyone glanced up as a pair of ash-gray aerovans appeared above the treetops. The doors of each vehicle were garnished with the familiar golden logo of a spread-winged eagle, perched behind a large number 9. With a pair of steamy hisses, the vans unfolded their rubber tires and descended to the pavement.

Just as the chief expected, the Deps had come out to play.

The Bureau of Domestic Protections was formed in 1961, at the peak of the New Simplicity. The government’s goal was basic: to consolidate their national law enforcement agencies under one umbrella, with clear delineations of purpose between each of the eight new divisions.

In 1988, the Bureau created a ninth department to tackle the growing crimes of high technology. In addition to chasing down the new and savvy breeds of cracker (hacker), jacker (pirate), ripper (scammer), and creeper (pervert), DP-9 was tasked with curbing the felonious misuse of temporis. Each new method of bending time created at least a dozen new ways to break the law. The most common infractions involved swifting (causing mayhem in a speedsuit), rifting (accelerating only part of a victim’s body), clouding (vandalizing the sky with lumic projections), and tooping (using rejuvenators to create illegal copies of objects).

When the preliminary report of the morning’s altercation reached the federal wire, two words—
weaponized tempis
—raised eyebrows at DP-9 headquarters in Washington. A team was quickly dispatched from the Los Angeles office.

The policemen watched with cynical interest as eight agents emerged from the vans. Six of them were merely boys in suits, technicians with badges. Their leader was a gray-haired shellback with an Old West mustache and enough leathery experience on his face to ease the chief’s mind.

The final Dep was something else entirely.

While her companions were pasty, her skin was a smooth cocoa brown. She wore a short red skirt over stockings and a sleeveless white blouse that flaunted every curve of her sculpted arms. Intricate brass earrings dangled from her lobes like chandeliers. Most intriguing of all were her twelve-inch dreadlocks, finger-thick and scattered like fern leaves. It was an alien hairstyle in this country, even among the odd folk.

A dozen stares followed the woman as she surveyed the scene. She was certainly easy to look at, but between her strange hair and features—her overpronounced cheekbones and near-Asian eyes—she seemed far too exotic to be an agent of the Eagle.

The seasoned Dep-in-charge noticed the chief and approached him. They traded a firm handshake.

“Andy Cahill. Supervising Special Agent, DP-9.”

“James Bond. Poe-Chief, Terra Vista.”

“We hear six of your men came across some interesting sinners.”

“Four of my men,” the chief corrected. “The cycle jocks are State Patrol.”

“They get hurt too?”

“A few broken fingers each. Apparently some queer-looking swifter knocked the guns right out of their hands.”

“Queer-looking how?”

“She moved too fast to get a full eyeball, but the men say her speedsuit was torked to look like normal clothes.”

Cahill stoked his jaw. “Huh. That is strange. What prompted the chase in the first place?”

“My men noticed a bloodstain on the driver’s side of the vehicle. They attempted—”

“Sir, I apologize for cutting you off,” said the female Dep, “but it takes time to set up our drills. If you could point us to the location of the tempic attack, that would facilitate our work here.”

The chief blinked at her, befuddled. The woman spoke with a scholarly foreign accent, a quasi-British twang he’d never heard before.
Hell and wonders. She’s not even American.

Cahill smirked. “This is Melissa Masaad. Don’t let the skirt fool you. She’s smarter than us.”

Offering the friendliest smile she could muster, Melissa gave the chief a handshake that rivaled Cahill’s in pure ferocity. It was one of the first customs she learned here.

“Masaad,” said the chief, as if her name were all asterisks and ampersands. “That’s quite unique. What part of the world—”

“I’m sorry, sir. Where did you say this attack occurred?”

Melissa was born in British North Sudan. At seventeen, she moved to the motherland to attend Oxford, where she earned advanced degrees in mechanical science and criminology. She spent the next six years in London as an analyst for Military Intelligence, specializing in the study of temporal weaponry. Ten months into her tenure, she received a Royal Commendation for tracking the perpetrators of a deadly rift attack at a Cambridge aerport.

Two years ago, at age thirty, she was offered one of the four hundred immigration slots that the United States extended annually to exceptional applicants. She didn’t hesitate to renounce her British and Sudanese citizenship, one of the chief requirements of naturalization. America demanded sole allegiance from its adopted children. Melissa was prepared to give it.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Sir Edgar Ballott had warned her. He was an old British manatee, an Assistant Director-General of the Security Service. More than her mentor, he considered himself her father figure, albeit one who often imagined her naked.

“The United States may be a peaceful nation, my dear, but it’s teeming with racists, isolationists, and every other breed of regressive bigot. If you believe they’ll embrace a foreigner and a negress as their equal, then I fear you’re in for an abrupt education.”

Melissa had kept silent at the time. She saw no purpose in drawing out a futile conversation.

“I don’t care what the documents say,” Sir Edgar insisted. “England will always be your home.”

England had stopped being her home a long time ago, since the military began using her research to improve their temporic arsenal. She feared it’d be a matter of years, not decades, before His Majesty’s Armed Forces managed to squeeze an entire Cataclysm into the nose of a long-range missile. God help their enemies then. God damn her if she ever played a part in that.

The policemen watched the Deps assemble their devices on the highway—four black obelisks, each eight feet tall and covered in glass lenses. They were placed forty feet apart in a perfect square. Thick cables connected them to a portable computer.

As Melissa helped prep the towers, two state patrolmen eyed her through slitted eyes.

“Huh. I didn’t even know they had duskers in England.”

“Yeah. The limers set their flag in a bunch of savage countries. Guess they brought a few back.”

Melissa ignored them. In her thoughts, Sir Edgar Ballott raised a smug eyebrow.

A half hour later, the ghost drills were ready. Each system cost two million dollars and required five technicians to operate, at a taxpayer cost of seventeen thousand dollars per hour. All that expense and effort to achieve what David Dormer could do with a wave of his hand.

Inside the perimeter of the towers, the recent past came to light. The dilapidated Salgado van reappeared in front of a disembodied strip of white tempic barrier. The projections were as brown and grainy as a Civil War photograph until the technicians made their adjustments. Soon the van could almost pass as the real thing.

Cahill pointed at the ethereal vehicle. “Why are the back doors transparent?”

Melissa squinted at them. “I’ve only seen that effect during a double-echo, when you view the ghost of a ghosted image.”

“Ghosted van doors? We don’t even have that technology. What’s it doing on a ten-year-old junker?”

While setting up the drills, Melissa had kept an ear on the discussion between Cahill and Bond. She listened with great interest about the phantom truck that appeared on the highway, sending one police cruiser into opposite lanes. The ability to create a three-dimensional image of that size—on a fast-moving freeway, no less—was far beyond the capability of any lumic projector.

Suddenly a colorful streak emerged from the passenger side of the van, disappearing beyond the confines of the ghost field.

“Whoa! Did you see that?”

“Rewind and replay,” Melissa told her teammate. “Tenth speed.”

Even at slow playback, it took three attempts for the technicians to catch Hannah in motion, and then another twelve adjustments to achieve an unblurred freeze-frame. Now every law enforcer fixed their stare on the frightened young thing with the nightstick in her hand, a woman who moved at triple-digit velocity.

The Deps crossed into the image field, studying Hannah up close. Like breathing underwater or walking through fire, speeding was a perfectly mundane accomplishment with the proper gear. But in her flimsy cotton tank top and grass-stained running shorts, this woman did not have the equipment to do what she was currently doing.

Cahill tossed a muddled glance at Melissa. “I fig you never saw anything like this in Europe.”

“No, sir. Nothing even close.”

While Hannah’s speedy feat was enough to rattle all investigators, her sister’s angry hands truly shook their world.

Thirty-two more seconds of playback passed before Amanda emerged from the van. Though the ghosts were soundless, the lip-reader on the team relayed the tense words exchanged between the redhead and the two local policemen. A short teenage girl suddenly burst through the ghosted rear doors. One of the officers fired his gun in surprise. Then things got weird.

Now all the cops and Deps on scene stared in muted wonder at the frozen image of Amanda’s tempic outburst. The technician paused playback just as the policemen were slammed down to the pavement by her shimmering white hands, each one the size of a coffee table.

Melissa walked a slow, shambling circle around Amanda, straining her mind to find a sensible explanation. To accept this sight at face value involved pushing her skeptical boundaries five yards away from reason, toward the land of aliens and vampires.

She made several notes in her handtop before rejoining Cahill at the edge of the ghost field.

“So what are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking the Bureau may owe Wingo an apology, sir.”

Cahill chuckled. Alexander Wingo was a dark legend among the Deps. He’d been a rising star at DP-1, known all throughout the Bureau for his deductive brilliance and flamboyant eccentricities. Thirty-six years ago, a perplexing homicide investigation took him into strange territory, and he became obsessed with a secret society of time-bending superpeople he dubbed the Gothams.

Wingo soon quit the Bureau to become a full-time crusader. His best-selling book,
Children of the Halo
, inspired a generation of rumors, myths, and hoaxes. To this day, the Gothams remained a favored topic among the crackpot fringe.

“Let’s table the crazy stuff for a moment,” said Cahill. “What do you make of the people?”

“They’re all young and frightened. Given the state of the van, as well as their injuries, it’s clear they engaged in battle before the police discovered them. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find more casualties in their wake.”

“Motley assortment here. Four adults and two teens. I’d guess they were all kin if it wasn’t for the chinny. Where do you think he fits in all this?”

Melissa studied Theo’s ghost. “They wouldn’t have left him near the revolver if they didn’t trust him. Whoever he is, he’s one of them. He’s not Chinese, by the way.”

“How do you know?”

“The tattoo on his left wrist is Baybayin. It’s an old writing script of the Philippines, pre–Spanish colonialization.”

Melissa had been on Cahill’s staff for twenty-two months now. In her early days, he feared she was hopelessly out of her element, a fish in the desert. Now he wished he could clone a whole team of her.

“If you want to embarrass me further, you can tell me what the ink says.”

“It’s been years since I studied the language,” Melissa confessed. “Best I can figure, it says
rama
. Or possibly
kama
.”

“Kama?”

It wasn’t until she said it out loud that Melissa fit the pieces together. “Karma, sir.”

For the hundredth time, Cahill locked his gaze on Amanda and her great tempic arms.

“I get the sense that none of these people are out hunting for victims. They only attack when cornered. I suppose I should find some comfort in that. At the moment, I just want to break out the wet card and drink myself silly.”

“Understandable, sir. I imagine you’ll be postponing your sunset now.”

“Why in worlds would you think that?”

Melissa laughed. “Are you joking? A case like this?”

Andy Cahill was set to retire in three weeks. He’d been a Dep for over forty years, since the days before tempis and aeris, juving and shifting. Like the Silvers, he’d been born into a world where time only moved in one speed and direction. Cahill had adjusted to the new reality better than most of his generation.

But now it seemed the game had changed again, and this time he wasn’t ready to follow. He was old, he was tired, and he had Melissa now. She was sharper than anyone he’d ever worked with. She had decades left to her.