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Daniel Price -The Flight of the Silvers


 


Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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New York, New York 10014

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A Penguin Random House Company

Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Price

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

“Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets),” from Damn Yankees. Words and music by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.

Copyright © 1955 Frank Music Corp. Copyright Renewed and Assigned to the J & J Ross Co. and Lakshmi Puja Music Ltd.

All rights administered by the Songwriters Guild of America. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Price, Daniel, date.

The flight of the silvers / Daniel Price.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-62004-5

I. Title.

PS3616.R526F55 2014 2013030273

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

 

 


CONTENTS

ALSO BY DANIEL PRICE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

 

PART ONE | SISTERS

PROLOGUE

ONE

 

PART TWO | SILVERS

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

 

PART THREE | TEMPORIS

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

 

PART FOUR | ALTAMERICA

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

 

PART FIVE | STRINGS

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 


 


PROLOGUE

Time rolled to a stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Construction and wet weather clogged the westbound lanes at Chicopee, turning a breezy Sunday flow into a snake of angry brake lights.

Robert Given puffed a surly breath as his Voyager merged with the congestion. Two long hours had passed since he hugged the last of his grieving siblings and herded his family into the minivan. The rain had followed them the whole way from Boston, coming down in buckets and thimbles by turns. Now the sky dribbled just enough to make the windshield wipers squeal at the slowest setting.

After five squeals and ten feet of progress, he pushed up his glasses and studied the speedy trucks on the overpass. He had no idea which highway he was looking at, aside from a better one.



“Don’t,” said Melanie, from the passenger seat.

“Don’t what?”

“I see you putting on your explorer’s hat. I’m saying don’t. I’d rather be stuck than lost.”

His wife had spoken the words gently, and with a small twinge of irony. Melanie was typically the flighty one of the duo, the titsy-ditzy actress who rarely reached noon without making some heedless blunder. Today’s reigning gaffe was her choice of funeral dress, a clingy black number that was a little too little for the comfort of some. Worse than the sneers and leers of her stodgy in-laws was the scorn of her ten-year-old daughter, who chided her for disrespecting Grandpa with her “showy boobs.” That hurt like hell. It wasn’t so long ago that Amanda needed help buttoning her blouses. Now the girl had become the family’s stern voice of propriety, the arbiter of right and wrong.

Melanie straightened her hem, then turned around to check on her other brown-haired progeny, the sweeter fruit of her womb.

“You all right, angel?”

Hannah warily chewed her hair, unsure if it was safe to be honest. At five years old, she was too young to understand the grim rituals she’d witnessed today. All she knew was that she had to be on her best behavior. No whining. No showboating. No wriggling out of her itchy black dress. She’d spent the morning on cold metal folding chairs, staring glumly at her feet while all the grown-ups sniffled. It was a strange and ugly day and she couldn’t wait for it to be over.

“I want to go home.”

“We’ll be there soon,” Melanie said, prompting a cynical snort from her husband. “You want to sing something?”

Hannah’s chubby face lit up. “Can I?”

“Sure.”

“No,” said Amanda, her stringy arms crossed in austerity. “We said no songs today.”

Her mother forced a clenched smile. “Sweetie, that was just for the funeral and wake.”

“Daddy said it was for the day. Out of respect for Grandpa. Isn’t that what you said, Daddy?”

Melanie winced at the buckling to come. She knew Robert would eat his own salted fingers before disappointing Amanda.

Right on cue, he bounced a sorry brow at Hannah in the rearview mirror. “Honey, when we get home, you can sing all you want. Just not now, okay?”

Friends often joked that Robert and Melanie Given didn’t have two children, they each had one clone. Nearly all of Amanda’s genetic coin flips had landed on her father’s side. She bore his finely chiseled features, his willowy build, his keen green eyes and ferocious intelligence. The two of them doted on each other like an old married couple. Rarely an evening passed when they weren’t found curled up on the sofa, devouring one heady book after another.

Hannah was Melanie’s daughter through and through. While Robert and Amanda were made of sharp angles, the actress and her youngest were drawn in soft curves. They shared the same round face, the same brown doe eyes, the same scattered airs and theatrical temperament. Hannah had also been born with a gilded throat, a gift that came from neither parent. The child crooned like an angel and never missed a note. She could perform any song flawlessly just by hearing it twice. Her mother worked with her day and night, honing her talent like a fine iron blade. Hannah Given would carve her name in the world one day. Of this, Melanie had no doubt.

Sadly, the skews in parental attention—the balanced imbalance—were starting to bear bitter fruit. With each passing day, Amanda treated her mother more and more like a rival while Hannah increasingly saw her father as a stranger.

And the girls themselves weren’t the tightest of sisters.

Magnanimous in victory, Amanda rummaged through her neatly packed bag of backseat boredom busters. “Look, why don’t we do a puzzle out of my book?”

“Why don’t you shut up?”

Both parents turned around. “Hannah . . .”

Amanda fell back into her seat, matching her sister’s pouty scowl. “I was trying to be nice.”

“You’re not nice. You’re bossy. And you don’t want me singing, ’cause I’m better than you.”

“That’s enough,” Melanie snapped. She rubbed her brow and blew a dismal sigh at the windshield. “This is our fault.”

“No kidding.” Robert rolled the Voyager another ten inches, tapping the wheel in busy thought. “Maybe next weekend, Hannah and I—”

The piercing screech of tires filled the air, far too close for anyone’s comfort. The Givens spun their gazes all around but no one could see movement. Every vehicle was stuck on the flytrap of I-90.

The noise gave way to a thundering crunch. A long and twisted piece of metal rained down on the Camry in front of them, shattering the rear window.

Melanie covered her mouth. “Oh my God!”

Robert raised his wide stare at the overpass, where all the trouble was happening. A speeding tanker truck had flipped onto its side and skidded through the guardrail. Now the curved metal trailer teetered precariously over the edge. Robert barely had a chance to formulate his hot new worry before the Shell Oil logo bloomed into view like a mushroom cloud.

No . . .

The truck toppled over, plummeting toward the turnpike in a messy twirl. The parents froze, breathless, as their minds fell into an accelerated state of alarm. While Melanie forced a hundred regrets, Robert hissed a thousand curses at the invisible forces that brought them here, all the cruel odds and gods behind their senseless demise.

After an eternity of wincing dread, they heard the dry squawk of the wiper blades, the rustling scrapes of Amanda’s black taffeta.

“Daddy?”

Robert and Melanie opened a leery eye, then stared at the fresh new madness in front of them.

The fuel truck hung immobile in the air, a scant nine feet from impact. Floating bits of debris twinkled all around it like stars in the night. In every other vehicle, silhouetted figures remained flash-frozen in terrified poses. Only the thin wisps of smoke from the cab’s engine seemed to move in any fashion. They rippled in place with the lazy torpor of sea plants.

Amanda leaned forward, her face slack with bewilderment. At ten years old, her universe had settled into a firm and tidy construct. Everything fit together with mechanical precision, even the squeaky gears of her little sister. But now something had gone horribly wrong with the clockwork. Amanda was old enough to know that things like this simply didn’t happen. Not to the living. Not to the sane.

“Daddy, what . . . what is this?”

Robert turned around as best he could, struggling to rediscover his voice. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Just stay where you are. Don’t do anything.”

Melanie unclasped her seat belt and reached a trembling hand for Hannah. “Sweetie, you okay?”

The child shook her head in misery. “I’m cold.”

Now that Hannah mentioned it, the others noticed the sharp drop in temperature, enough to turn their breath visible. They glanced outside and saw a strange blue tint to the world, as if someone had wrapped their van in cellophane.

Amanda flinched at the new life outside the window.

“M-Mom. Dad . . .”

The others followed her gaze to the center of the freeway, where three tall and reedy strangers watched them with calm interest. The man on the left wore a thin gray windbreaker over jeans, his handsome face half-obscured by a low-slung Yankees cap. The woman on the right sported a stylish white longcoat and kinky brown hair that flowed in improbable directions, like Botticelli’s Venus. Her deep black eyes locked on Amanda, holding the girl like tar.

Hannah and her parents kept their saucer stares on the man in the middle.

He was the tallest of the group, at least six and a half feet, with a trim Caesar haircut that lay as white as a snowcap. He wore a sharp charcoal business suit, eschewing a tie for a more casual open collar. Melanie found him beautiful to the point of unease. His skin was flawless, ageless, and preternaturally pale. His only color seemed to come from his irises, a fierce diamond-blue that cut through glass and Givens alike.

The trio stood with the formal poise of butlers, though Robert found nothing helpful or kind in their stony expressions. Melanie gripped his shoulder when he reached for the door.

“Don’t. Don’t go out there.”

The white-haired man blew a curt puff of mist, then spoke in a cool honey bass that might have been soothing if it wasn’t so testy.

“Calm yourselves. We just saved your lives. If you wish to keep living, then do as I say. Come out of the vehicle. All of you. Quickly.”

He spoke with a slight foreign accent, a quasi-European twang that didn’t register anywhere in Robert and Melanie’s database. Despite all floating evidence in support of the man’s good intentions, the elder Givens had a difficult time working their door handles.

The stranger shot an impatient glower through the driver’s window. “I took you for a man of reasonable intelligence, Robert. Must I explain the danger of staying here?”

Robert once again eyed the fuel truck at the base of the bridge, now six feet from collision. Suddenly he understood why the smoke rippled slightly, why the hovering bits of metal sporadically twinkled. The clock hadn’t stopped, just slowed. Their fate was still coming at the speed of a sunset.

Robert pushed his door open. “What’s happening? How—”

“We’re not here to educate,” snarled the female of the trio, through the same odd inflections as her companion. “We came to save your pretty rose and songbird. Would you rather see them perish?”

“Of course not! But—”

“Then gather your daughters and come. Bring the cow if you must.”

While Melanie and Robert scrambled outside, the white-haired man kept his sharp blue gaze on Hannah. She’d never seen anyone more beautiful or frightening in her life. He was a Siberian tiger on hind legs, a snowstorm in a suit.

Robert opened the side hatch and pulled her into his quivering arms. “Come on, hon.”

“I don’t like it here.”

“I know.”

“It’s cold in the bubble and I want to go home.”

Robert didn’t know what she meant by “bubble.” He didn’t care. He clutched her against his chest, just as Amanda climbed out the door and wrapped herself around Melanie.

“Mom . . .”

Thick tears warmed Melanie’s cheeks. “Stay with me, sweetie. Don’t let go.”

Soon the family stood gathered outside the minivan. Robert held his wary gaze on the strangers. “Can you please tell me what—”

They ignored him and split up. The man in the baseball cap turned around and moved a few yards ahead. The woman took a shepherding flank behind the Givens. The white-haired man stayed in place, bouncing his harsh blue stare between Robert and Melanie.

“We walk now,” he said. “Tread carefully and stay within the field. If even a finger escapes, you won’t enjoy the consequences.”

They began traveling. Robert noticed that everything within thirty feet of them existed at normal speed and color, a pocket of sanity in the sluggish blue yonder. The field seemed to move at the whim of the man in the Yankees cap. He walked with strain, fingers extended, as if pushing an invisible boulder.

Battling his panic, Robert retreated into his head and imagined the analytical discussion he and Amanda might have in a calmer state of mind.

“Daddy, what did he mean about the finger and the field?”

“Not sure, hon. I’m guessing it’s not healthy for a body to move at two different speeds.”

“Did they slow down the world or did they speed us up?”

“Good question. I don’t know. In either case, I figure we’re just a blur to the people in the other cars.”

“How is this happening?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. It’s entirely possible that I’ve lost my mind.”

He looked up and saw exactly where the drizzling rain stopped, a perfect dome that extended all around them. A bubble.

Suddenly his inner Amanda posed a dark new stumper.

“Daddy, how did Hannah know the shape of the field?”

Robert’s heart pounded with new dread, enough for Hannah to feel it through his blazer. She wrapped her shivering arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder. The air outside the dome carried a thick and smoky taste in her thoughts, like a million trees burning. She just wanted it to go away, along with the freezing cold and the scary white tiger-man.

Her mother and sister trailed five feet behind them, their arms locked together. Melanie’s stomach lurched every time Amanda threw a backward glance at the fuel truck. For all she knew, one more peek would turn the girl into a pillar of salt.

“Honey, don’t look. Just keep moving.”

“But there are still people back there.”

“Amanda . . .”

“We can’t just leave them!”

Melanie bit her lip and winced new tears. Though her daughter often wielded her morality like a cudgel, there was no denying the depth of her virtue. The girl was good to the core.

Five feet behind them, the female stranger shined a soft smile at Amanda. “You’re a noble one to worry, child, but little can be done. Even those who survive have short years ahead. I see the strings. I know the death that comes.”

Amanda had been nervously avoiding eye contact with the woman, but now drew a second look. She was a shade over six feet tall, with an immaculate face that put her anywhere between a weathered thirty and a blessed sixty. Whatever her age, she was jarringly beautiful, at least on the outside. Her dark eyes twinkled with instability, like matches over oil.

“W-what do you mean?” Amanda asked.

Melanie tugged her forward. “Don’t talk to her.”

“It’s no matter,” the woman replied. “Just take comfort that you have a future, my pretty rose. I’ve seen you, tall and red.”

“Leave her alone,” Melanie hissed.

The stranger’s smile vanished. Her stare turned cold and brutal.

“Be careful how you speak to me, cow. We spare you and your husband as a courtesy. Perhaps we should slay you both and rear the little ones ourselves.”

“NO!” Amanda screamed.

The white-haired man sighed patiently at his companion. “Sehmeer . . .”

“Nu’a purtua shi’i kien Esis,” said the other man, without turning around.

The madwoman pursed her lips in a childish pout, then narrowed her eyes at Melanie.

“My wealth and heart oppose the idea. Pity. Your flawed little gems would thrive in our care.” She tossed Amanda another crooked smile. “We’d make them shine.”

The Givens moved in tight-knuckled silence for the rest of their journey—past the turnpike, over the guardrail, and up a steep embankment.

The tall ones stopped at the peak and surveyed the falling truck in the distance. The fuel tank had just touched the concrete and was starting to come apart.

“Brace yourself,” said the white-haired man, for all the good it did.

In the span of a gasp, the bubble of time vanished and a thunderous explosion rattled the Givens. Robert covered Hannah as a fireball rose sixty feet above the overpass. A searing blast of heat drove Melanie and Amanda screaming to the ground.

The strangers studied the swirling pillar of smoke with casual interest, as if it were art. Soon the madwoman swept her slender arm in a loop, summoning an eight-foot disc of fluorescent white light.

The family glanced up from the grass, eyeing the anomaly through cracked red stares. The circle hovered above the ground, as thin as a blanket and as round as a coin. Despite its perfect verticality, the surface shimmied like pond water.

Before any Given could form a thought, the quiet man in the windbreaker pulled down the lip of his baseball cap and brushed past the family with self-conscious haste. He plunged into the portal, the radiant white liquid rippling all around him. Robert watched his exit with mad rejection. It was the stuff of cartoons, a Roger Rabbit hole in the middle of nothing.

The dark-eyed woman gave Amanda a sly wink, then followed her companion into the breach. The surface swallowed her like thick white paint.

Alone among his rescuees, the white-haired man took a final glance at the Givens. Melanie saw his sharp blue eyes linger on Hannah.

“Just go,” the mother implored him. “Please. We won’t tell anyone.”

The stranger squinted in cool umbrage, clearly displeased to be treated like a common mugger.

“Tell whoever you want.”

Robert stammered chaotically, his throat clogged with a hundred burning questions. He thought of his minivan, which no doubt stood a charred and empty husk on the road. Suddenly the father who’d cursed the gods for his horrible fortune knew exactly what to ask.

“Why us?”

The stranger stopped at the portal. Robert threw a quick, nervous look at Amanda and Hannah.

“Why them?”

The white-haired man turned around now, his face an inscrutable wall of ice.

“Your daughters may one day learn. You will not. Accept that and embrace the rest of your time.”

He stepped through the gateway, vanishing in liquid. Soon the circle shrank to a dime-size dot and then blinked out of existence.

One by one, the survivors on the freeway emerged from their vehicles—the injured and the lucky, the screaming and the stunned. In the smoky bedlam, no one noticed the family of mourners on the distant embankment.

The Givens huddled together on the grass, their brown and green gazes held firmly away from the turnpike. Only Hannah had the strength to stand. She was five years old and still new to the universe. She had no idea how many of its laws had been broken in front of her. All she knew was that today was a strange and ugly day and her sister was wrong.

Hannah moved behind her weeping mother and threw her arms around her shoulders. She took a deep breath. And she sang.

 

 


ONE

On a Friday night in dry July, in the Gaslamp Quarter of downtown San Diego, the Indian-dancers-who-weren’t-quite-Indian twirled across the stage of the ninety-nine-seat playhouse. Five lily-white women in yellow sarees flowed arcs of georgette as they spun in measure to the musical intro. The orchestra, which had finished its job on Monday and was now represented by a six-ounce iPod, served a curious fusion of bouncy trumpets and sensual shehnais—Broadway bombast with a Bombay contrast. The music director was an insurance adjuster by day. He’d dreamed up his euphonious Frankenstein three years ago, and tonight, by the grace of God and regional theater, it was alive.

The curtain parted and a new performer prowled her way onto the stage. She was a raven-haired temptress in a fiery red lehenga. Her curvy figure—ably flaunted by a low-cut, belly-baring choli—brought half the jaded audience to full attention.

The spotlights converged. The dancers dispersed. All eyes were now fixed upon the brown-eyed leading lady: the young, the lovely, the up-and-coming Hannah Given.

With a well-rehearsed look of sexy self-assurance, she swayed her hips to the rhythm and sang.

“Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.

And little man, little Lola wants you . . .”

She shot a sultry gaze at the actor sitting downstage right, a handsome young man in a cricket player’s uniform. He was theatrically bewitched by her. In reality, he was mostly bothered. Her neurotic questioning of all creative decisions made rehearsals twice as long as they needed to be. Still, he was casually determined to sleep with her sometime before the production closed. He wouldn’t.

“Make up your mind to have no regrets.

Recline yourself, resign yourself, you’re through.”

A sharp cough from the audience made her inner needle skip, throwing her Lola and dropping her into a sinkhole of Hannah concerns. She fished herself out on a gilded string of affirmations. Your stomach looks fine. Your voice sounds great. Gwen Verdon isn’t screaming from Heaven. And odds are only one in ninety-nine that the angry cough came from the CityBeat critic.

You know damn well who it was, a harsher voice insisted.

She narrowed her eyes at the dark sea of heads, then fell back into character. The rest of the song proceeded without a hitch. At final-curtain applause, Hannah convinced herself that the whole premiere went swimmingly aside from that half-second skip. She figured the misstep would haunt her for days. It wouldn’t.

She wriggled back into her halter top and jeans and then joined the congregation in the lobby, where half the audience lingered to heap praise on the performers they knew. Hannah had given out five comp tickets, including two to her roommates and one to the day job colleague she was kinda sorta a little involved with. None of them showed up. Lovely. That only left the great Amanda Ambridge, plus spouse.

Hannah had little trouble finding her sister in the crowd. Amanda was a stiletto pump away from being six feet tall, with an Irish red mane that made her stand out like a stop sign. She stood alone by the ticket booth, a stately figure even in her bargain blouse and skinny jeans. At twenty-seven, Amanda’s sharp features had settled into hard elegance, a brand of uptight beauty that was catnip to so many artists. Hannah felt like a tavern wench in the presence of a queen.

Amanda spotted her and shined a taut smile. “Hey, there you are!”

“Here I am,” Hannah said. “Thanks for coming.”

After a clumsy half-start, the two women hugged. Hannah stood five inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier than her sister, though she’d squeezed it all into a buxom frame that drove numerous men to idiocy. Amanda felt hopelessly unsexy in her company, the Olive Oyl to her Betty Boop. Her husband did a fine job fortifying her complex tonight. The only time Derek didn’t writhe in agony during the awful show was when Hannah graced the stage with her grand and bouncy blessings. Amanda had hacked a sharp cough at him, just to throw sand in his bulging eyes.

Hannah scanned the lobby for her brother-in-law, a man she’d met six times at best. “Where’s the doc?”

“He’s getting the car. He’s tired and we both have to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay. Hope he didn’t suffer too much.”

“Not too much.” Her smile tightened. “He really enjoyed your performance.”

“Oh good. Glad to hear it. And you?”

“I thought you were terrific. Better than . . .”

Amanda stopped herself. Hannah’s brow rose in cynical query. “Better than what? Usual?”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Then just say it.”

“I thought you were better than the show deserved.”

A frosty new leer bloomed across Hannah’s face. Amanda glanced around, then leaned in for a furtive half whisper.

“Look, you know I like Damn Yankees, but this whole idea of turning it into a Bollywood pastiche was just . . . It was painful, like watching someone try to shove a Saint Bernard through a cat door. But despite that—”

Hannah cut her off with a jagged laugh. Amanda crossed her arms in umbrage.

“You asked me my opinion. Would you rather I lie?”

“I’d rather you say it instead of coughing it!”

A dozen glances turned their way. Amanda blinked at her sister. “I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Now you’re lying.”

“Hannah—”

“You just couldn’t hold in your criticism. You had to let it out in the middle of my big number.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Bullshit. You know what you did.”

“Hannah, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Oh my God.” The actress covered her face with both hands. “You do this every time.”

“Well, I’m—”

“‘—sorry you’re upset,’” Hannah finished, in near-perfect synch with her sister. “Yeah. I’m well acquainted with your noble act by now. You might want to change it up a little. You know, for variety.”

Amanda closed her eyes and pressed the dangling gold crucifix on her collarbone. This, Hannah knew all too well, was the standard Amanda retreat whenever her mothersome bother and sisterical hyster became too much for her. Give me strength, O Lord. Give me strength.

The lights in the lobby suddenly faltered for three seconds, an erratic flicker that stopped all chatter. Hannah furrowed her brow at the sputtering laptop in the ticket booth.

Amanda checked her watch and vented a somber breath at the exit. “He should be out front by now. I better go.”

“Fine. Say hi for me.”

“Yup.”

The sisters spent a long, hot moment avoiding each other’s gazes before Amanda turned around and pushed through the swinging glass doors.

Hannah leaned against the wall, muttering soft curses as she gently thumped her skull. Between all her regrets and frustrations, she found the space to wonder why a battery-powered laptop would flicker with the overhead lights. She pushed the concern to the back of her mind, in the dark little vault where strange things went.

Seventeen years had passed since the madness on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Givens never spoke a public word about the bizarre circumstances of their rescue. With each passing year, a welcome fog grew over their collective memories, until the family embraced the cover story as the one true account. They saw the truck teetering. They fled before it fell. That was just how it happened. End of subject.

Eight years after the incident, death came for Robert a second time and won. His cancer and passing had shattered Amanda in ways even her mother couldn’t divine. She spent her final summer at home like an apparition and then disappeared to college, coming home once a year with thoughtful gifts, a practiced smile, and at least one major change to her state of being. First she found God. Then Hippocrates. Then a credible shade of red. And finally, during her brief stint at medical school, she found Dr. Derek Ambridge, who was eleven years her senior. From there, the arc of her life went into gentle downgrade.

Hannah, meanwhile, had cratered early. A spectacular nervous breakdown at age thirteen ended both her and her mother’s resolve to turn her into a child star. After a year of therapy, she landed comfortably on the civilian teenage track, where she became lost in a routine tsunami of highs and lows, LOLs and whoas, breakups, makeups, and adolescent shake-ups. Upon graduation, she went west to San Diego State, where she dyed her hair black and experimented with all-new mistakes. On the upside, she rediscovered her theatrical ambitions. She stayed in town after college, found an office job, and began the slow process of rebuilding her résumé.

Six months ago, fate reunited the sisters when Derek accepted a partnership at a private oncology practice in Chula Vista, California, nine miles south of San Diego. For Melanie, the move was a golden opportunity for her daughters to finally connect.

“I want you to see Amanda as often as you can,” she ordered Hannah. “Because she’s going to leave that guy sooner or later and she’ll be the one who moves away.”

Though Hannah promised to try, she’d only met with Amanda three times in the last half year. Their first two encounters had been brisk and cordial and as tender as a tax form. No doubt their mother would be even less pleased with how the Great Sisters Given fared tonight.

With a thorny glower, Amanda emerged from the theater onto J Street, where her hybrid chariot awaited. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s side.

Amanda slung herself into the passenger seat. Her husband tensely tapped ashes out his window.

“In case you’re keeping score, I lost five IQ points tonight. Plus my faith in man.”

“I know,” Amanda sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Derek was two years shy of forty. Though nature stayed kind to his boyish good looks, he regarded his impending middle age like a Stage 3 carcinoma. He worked out every day, ate raw vegetables for lunch, and overtook the medicine cabinet with pricey creams and cleansers. Nicotine was his last remaining vice. He was never happier to have it.

“If you love me, hon, you won’t make me go to her next musical.”

“I don’t even know if I’ll go,” Amanda admitted with a hot blush of shame.

“What’s the matter? You two have a fight?”

“Yeah. I tried to tell her she was good tonight and somehow she took it as a personal attack.”

“Well, you always said she was a minefield.”

“I know, but there’s something else behind it. I think she resents me for moving out here. Like I’m crashing the nice little world she built for herself.”

Derek jerked a weary shrug. “I’m sure you gals will work it out.”

He propped the cigarette in his mouth and merged into traffic. Two blocks passed in dreary silence.

“I’ll say this for your sister, she’s got quite a set of pipes on her. Quite a set of everything. Jesus.”

“That was classy, Derek.”

“I know. I’m a real charmer after ten. If it’s any consolation, you have the better face.”

Amanda snatched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She spat smoke out her window, at an illuminated bank sign. The digital clock had become hopelessly scrambled, forever stuck in crazy eights.

“Just drive.”

The electricity continued to surge and dip throughout the night. Citywide power fluctuations were spotted in various pockets of the globe, from Guadalajara to Rotterdam. The night owls screeched and the utility workers scrambled, but most of the West slept through the muddle. In London, the morning commute was hamstrung by a chain of mini-blackouts. In central Osaka, the sun set on a flickering skyline.

And then at 4:41 A.M., Pacific Time, the entire world shut down for nine and a half minutes. Every light and every outlet. Every battery. Every generator. Even the lightning storms that had been swirling in 1,652 different parts of the world were extinguished by invisible hands. For nine and a half minutes, the Earth experienced a mechanical quiet that hadn’t been felt in centuries.

At 4:50, the switch flipped again, and the modern world returned with confusion and damage.

The American power network was as complex and temperamental as the human psyche. In some areas, the electricity came back immediately. In other regions, the circuits stayed dead forever. On some streets, people struggled to help their neighbors out of stalled elevators and plane-wrecked buildings. In others, there was panic and violence. Accusations. Tribulation.

Throughout all the chaos, the sisters slept.

Amanda woke up an hour after sunrise, her alarm clock blinking confusedly at 12:00. She made a sleepy lurch to the shower and heard Derek’s off-key crooning over the running water. She used the other bathroom.

“Power failure last night,” he said twenty minutes later, as they both dressed.

“Yeah. I noticed.”

“I’m not getting a signal on my phone either.”

Her shirt still undone, Amanda turned on her smartphone and patiently waited for the little image of a radar dish to stop spinning. She gave up after a minute.

Derek crossed into the kitchen and nearly slipped on a pair of magnets. Yawning, he stuck them back on the refrigerator. Amanda flipped on the living room TV. Channel after channel of “No Signal” alert boxes. She peered out the front window and relaxed at the normal procession of cars and joggers, the comforting lack of screams and sirens. Aside from the all-encompassing power burp, life seemed fine in Chula Vista.

Soon her mind drifted back to the mundane—chores and cancer, Derek and Hannah. Her bleary thoughts kept her busy all the way to the medical office. She didn’t notice the two separate plumes of black smoke in the distance, spreading like stains across the flat gray sky.

Two of the nurses failed to show up for their Saturday shift. From the moment she threw on her peach-colored coat, Amanda became a whirlwind of activity, spinning between the office’s endless rooms and needs. Along the way, she picked up morsels of chatter about the blackout. Her fingers curled with tension when one of the patients mentioned something about a crashed Navy jet.

Tommy Berber eyed Amanda balefully from the far end of the hall. He was a barrel-chested biker with a bandana skullcap and a bushy gray beard that hung in knotted vines. Mechanical beeps emanated from inside the chamber.

“Yeah, hi. Remember us?”

She held up a bag of clear liquid. “I’m here. I have it.”

Berber followed her into the treatment room, where his son Henry lounged in a plush recliner. The sweet and skinny twelve-year-old had already lost his left arm to osteosarcoma. Soon he’d lose his hair, his lunches, and any last semblance of a normal adolescence. But his long-term chances of survival were mercifully good. Out of all today’s patients, Henry was the luckiest of the unlucky.

Amanda shined him a sunny smile, then adjusted his chemo dispenser until it stopped beeping.

Henry grinned weakly. “Thanks. That was getting old.”

“Twenty minutes!” Berber yelled. “We’ve been waiting twenty minutes!”

Amanda nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re short staffed today and our computers are down.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better about this place?”

“Dad . . .”

Amanda replaced the empty bag of doxorubicin with a fresh dose of cisplatin. She reprogrammed the machine, then tapped the plastic tube until the liquid started to drip.

“You’re going to feel a hot sensation,” she warned Henry.

“Right. I remember.”

She watched the liquid flow into his arm. “All right, my darling. You’re all set. Anything you need?”

“Yeah, a sedative. For Dad.”

“Oh, he’s just mad because you and I are eloping. We’re still on for that, right?”

Henry laughed. “Absolutely. Did you tell Dr. Ambridge yet?”

“Nah. I’ll call him from the road.”

The moment she left the room, she heard Berber’s heavy footsteps trail her down the hall. He had to wait for a shrieking emergency vehicle to pass the building before he could speak.

“That can’t happen again, nurse. You hear me?”

Amanda turned around to face him. “Mr. Berber—”

“I don’t want his chances going down just ’cause you people don’t have your shit together. You get him his doses on time. You understand?”

She understood all too well. In her two years as a cancer nurse, Amanda had seen every breed of desolate parent—the weepers, the shouters, the sputtering deniers. The tough dads were always the worst. They wore their helplessness like a coat of flames, scorching everything around them.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Berber. I’ll do better next time.”

“You’re just giving me lip service now.”

“I am,” she admitted. “Ask me why.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t fix computers and I can’t conjure nurses out of thin air. All I can do is apologize and remind you that your beautiful son has a seventy-eight percent chance of outliving the both of us. Being twenty minutes late with the cisplatin won’t affect those odds. Not one bit.”

“You don’t know that for—”

“Not one bit,” she repeated. “You understand me?”

Berber recoiled like she’d just sprouted horns. Amanda had seen that look countless times before on others. You can be a little intense, Derek had told her. You may not see it, but it’s there.

Soon the biker’s heavy brow unfurled. He vented a sigh. “Got any kids of your own?”

Amanda’s face remained impassive as a cold gust of grief blew through her. She once had a son for seventeen minutes. Those memories stayed locked in the cellar, along with her father’s last days and the incident on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

“No,” she said.

Berber eyed her golden cross necklace. “But you do have faith.”

“Yes.”

“How do you reconcile? How do you spend all day with sick, dying kids and then thank the God who lets it happen?”

Still fumbling in dark memories, Amanda lost hold of her usual response. I thank Him for the ones who live. I thank Him for the ones who have loving parents like you.

All she could do now was roll her shoulders in a feeble shrug. “I don’t know, Mr. Berber. I guess I’d rather live in a world where bad things happen for some reason than no reason.”

Her answer clearly didn’t comfort him. He scratched his hairy cheek and threw a tense glare over his shoulder.

“I should get back to him.”

“Okay.”

Amanda heard a high young giggle. She turned her gaze to the reception desk, where Derek charmed the fetching young office clerk with his witty repartee. The moment he caught Amanda’s gaze, his smile went flat. His eyes narrowed in a momentary flinch that filled her with unbearable dread and loathing.

Her fingers twitched in panic as the chorus in her head told her to run. Run. Run from the husband. Run from the house. Run from the sister and the sick little children. Don’t even pack. Just pick a direction. Run.

The overhead lights flickered. A second, then a third chemo dispenser began to beep. Another wave of emergency vehicles screamed their way down the street. Things were falling apart at record speed. To Amanda, this seemed a perfect time to go outside for a smoke.

Three hours after her sister rolled out of bed, a half-dazed Hannah finally joined the world in egress. Her Salvador Dalí wall clock—now warped in more ways than one—told her it was 9:41. In actuality, it was nine and a half minutes short. But to Hannah and millions of other battery-powered-clock owners, 9:41 was the new 9:50. There was little reason to think otherwise.

She woke up in a foul mood carried over from last night. An hour after her spat with Amanda, she came home to an unscheduled hootenanny in the apartment. Her two flighty roommates had ditched her premiere in favor of barhopping and eventually stumbled back with a trio of frat boys from the alma mater.

Knowing she’d never sleep in this racket, the actress stayed up with them, brandishing a forced grin as she nursed a Sprite and suffered their drunken prattle. Sometime after the group blacked out, and shortly before the world did, Hannah retreated into her room and drifted off into uneasy sleep.

Now the apartment smelled like stale beer, and every device seemed nonfunctional. Hannah showered, dressed, and gathered her belongings. She had no intention of going back there before tonight’s show. She’d just go to the office and enjoy the Saturday solitude. Maybe she’d update her acting résumé. Maybe she’d send some e-mails. Maybe she’d scan the local apartment listings. Or maybe not so local. In her mind, all the recent annoyances gathered into a clump, like tea leaves. They predicted a bleak future unless she made changes. Maybe it was finally time to consider Los Angeles.

By the time Hannah stepped outside, the sky had turned from misty gray to fluorescent white, a disturbingly uniform glaze that looked less like a mist sheet and more like an absence. To Hannah, it seemed as if God, Buddha, Xenu, whoever, simply forgot to load the next slide in the great heavenly projector. It didn’t help her nerves that the temperature was ten degrees cooler than it should have been for Southern California in July.

She wasn’t alone in her anxiety. As she walked down Commercial Street, an old man urgently fiddled with his radio, testing its many squeals and crackles. A teenage girl shook her cell phone as if it had overdosed on downers. A middle-aged woman tried to control her German shepherd, which hysterically barked at everything and nothing. A young jogger launched a futile cry at a fast-moving police car. “Hey. HEY! What’s going on?”

Nearly three dozen people congregated at the train stop. Hannah opted to walk to work. Two lithe young women broke away from the crowd and nervously followed her.

“Excuse me,” said one. “Can you help us? We’re not from around here.”

That much was obvious. One of the pair was dressed as Catwoman, whip and all. The other was decked out in a blond wig and white-leather corset ensemble, clearly some other super-antiheroine that Hannah didn’t recognize. She did, however, know exactly where both women were going. All veteran San Diegans were familiar with Comic-Con, the annual gathering of sci-fi, fantasy, and funny-book enthusiasts that occurred downtown for four days in July. No doubt these gals were shooting for an easy surplus of leers from the geek contingent.

Hannah smirked at them. “Let me guess. You’re trying to get to the convention center.”

Catwoman snickered. “Yeah. Bingo.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with the train. If you think your heels will hold up, you’re probably better off walking. I’m going that way. You can come with me.”

“Oh thank you,” said the fake blonde, rubbing her arms for warmth. “The power went out at the place we’re staying. Our phones don’t work. We’re totally screwed up right now.”

After twelve blocks and twenty minutes, Hannah regretted her decision to serve as vanguard for the vixens. The women were maddeningly slow in their clacking heels, and their worried chatter made her increasingly tense. Not that they lacked cause for concern. As they moved closer downtown, they could see thick plumes of smoke rising up above the buildings. Soon Hannah spotted the edge of a vast rubbernecker pool, hundreds of people gathered at the base of some tumult.

They rounded the corner, turning north onto 13th Street. Just one block away, beyond all the cordons and emergency lights, stood the broken tail cone of a jumbo jet. The buildings around it were devastated with ash and debris. One apartment complex had crumbled to rubble.

Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

More than a hundred thousand planes, jets, and helicopters had been up in the air seven hours ago, when all the world’s engines fell still. A third of them plummeted into water. Another third hit the hard empty spaces between human life. The final third just hit hard. San Diego had suffered twenty-two crashes within its borders.

Hannah gaped at the tall gray clock tower of the 12th & Imperial Transit Center, just a hundred yards away. It was a local landmark, one she’d passed a thousand times on her way to work. Now it had been de-clocked, decapitated. Every window on the south side of the building was shattered, with burn marks all over the frame.

All around her, people fretfully chattered. A stringy blond teenager brandished a transistor radio, declaring to anyone willing to listen that he’d heard voices through the static. People in other cities were talking about the same things.

“This is happening all over,” he insisted. “Everywhere!”

Agitated bystanders shouted at him. Hannah took an anxious step back. Perhaps it was time to stop playing Sherpa for the Comic-Con chicks and move on to a much nicer elsewhere.

“Keep your head,” said a cool voice from behind.

She turned around and lost her breath at the sight of the pale and handsome stranger, as tall as any she’d ever seen. He wore a sharp gray business suit without a tie and sported deep blue eyes that nearly blinded her with their intensity. Most striking of all was his neatly trimmed hair, which was chalk-white and achingly familiar. Hannah blinked at him in stupor.

“You remember me, child?” he calmly inquired.

She shook her head, even as old recollections came flooding back. She was just a little girl when she first laid eyes on the white-haired man. Seventeen years and the guy hadn’t aged a day. Hannah was almost certain he was wearing the same suit.

“I don’t . . . know you.”

“Deny it if you will,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter. We saved your life once. Now I come to do it again.”

Seeing the man through adult eyes triggered a disturbing new reaction in Hannah. She found him eerily scintillating now, like a housewife’s vampire fantasy. God only knew what he could get her to do without saying a nice word. Fortunately, she couldn’t sense a trace of desire in him. For all she knew, she stood as the same chubby-faced toddler in his eyes.

“W-what do you want with me?” she asked.

He spoke with a slight accent that she couldn’t recognize. She spun her Wheel of Uninformed Guessing. The needle stopped at “Dutch.”

“The answer would require more time than we have. All that matters now is that you—”

A sudden stillness gripped the area. All the car engines stopped. All the lights on the emergency vehicles went dark and still. All electrics great and small, all over the world, once again fell dead. This time, the power wasn’t coming back.

Panicked voices rose all around her. Bystanders scurried and stumbled in all directions. A shoving match broke out between two teenage boys.

As Hannah watched the chaos, she felt cool fingers on her skin. Something smooth and hard snapped together on her forearm with a loud clack. She jerked her hand away. Her right wrist now sported a shiny metal bracelet, a half inch wide and utterly featureless. It felt cheap and dainty like plastic, but it gleamed in the light like silver.

“What did you do?” she said. “What is this thing?”

The white-haired man grabbed her other wrist, scowling at her with frigid disdain. There was nothing appealing about him now.

“This is the end. For them, not for you. Now listen—”

“Get away from me!”

He squeezed her wrist with cool, strong fingers. Pain shot up her arm like current.

“Don’t test me, child. I’ve had a trying day. It pains me to see all my plans hinge on weak and simple creatures like yourself, but it seems we both have little choice in the matter. If you wish to endure, you’ll keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll be joined with your sister soon enough.”

“Wait, what—”

The white-haired man pressed two fingers to her mouth. “I’ve saved your life twice now. Don’t make me regret my decision. The strings favor you, but there are others who could just as easily serve our purpose.”

He walked away, leaving Hannah shell-shocked, speechless. A shrill scream in the distance briefly turned her around. By the time she looked back, the stranger was gone.

Hannah scrambled to process all the new and urgent developments around her. Her left wrist throbbed. Her right wrist glimmered. The temperature had dropped low enough to turn all breath to mist. The crowd fell into chaotic distress. They screamed and shouted and scrambled into one another like bumper cars.

This is the end. For them, not for you.

A booming gunshot emerged from the police cordon. More screams. A large man grabbed at the girl dressed like Catwoman, and an even larger man knocked him down. Another gunshot.

Hannah felt a strong vibration at the base of her hand. She gaped with insanity at her new silver bracelet. Mere seconds ago, it was a fat and dangly bauble, wide enough for a bicep. Now it rested snugly on the thinnest part of her wrist. Whereas once it appeared featureless, now it was split down the middle by a bright blue band of light.

She glanced up to discover the biggest adjustment of all. A curved plane of silky white light loomed all around her, closing two feet above her head. The outside world took on a yellow gossamer haze.

Hannah tried to relocate but ended up walking into the wall of her new surroundings. The light was warm, steel hard, and utterly immobile. She was stuck here, just a hair north of Commercial Street, in an eight-foot egg of light. That was enough to send her mind into blue-screen failure. She was in full rejection of the events onstage. Suspension of suspension of disbelief.

Nearby strangers caught sight of Hannah’s odd new enclosure. A befuddled young man rapped his knuckles against her light shell.

“What is this?” he asked, much louder than necessary. She could hear him just fine.

“I don’t know . . .”

“How are you doing this?”

“I’m not.”

“What’s happening?!”

Not this, she thought. This isn’t happening at all.

The Great Hannah Given: mental ward alumnus, habitual wrong person, and unreliable narrator. Ergo, no eggo. No crowd. No crash. No white-haired man.

Everyone froze as a thunderous noise seized the area—a great icy crackle, like a glacier breaking in half. Bystanders threw their frantic gazes left and right in search of the clamor until, one by one, they looked up. The eerie sound was coming from above. It was getting louder.

More screams from afar. More gunshots. As the crackling din grew to deafening levels, the sky above turned cold and bright.

A teary young redhead scratched at the wall of Hannah’s light cage. The actress could see lines of frost on the tip of the woman’s nose, though the air inside the enclosure was as warm as July.

“Please!” the stranger screeched. “Help me!”

“I can’t! I don’t know how!”

Suddenly the tallest buildings in the skyline began to splinter at the highest levels, as if they were being crushed from above. Metal curled. Stone cracked. Windows exploded. With a grinding howl, an ailing structure gave out at the middle, causing all floors above to topple and fall in one great piece. Hannah pressed her hands against the light as she watched the other buildings crumble. The sky wasn’t just getting brighter and louder. It was getting closer. The sky was coming down.

Shrieks and cries rose from every throat in the mob. There wasn’t an empty square inch around her egg now. More than a dozen people pounded at the wall, weeping and begging.

The skyline was gone. Now the great white sheet descended on the clockless clock tower, cracking the jagged neck of the structure and sending huge chunks of stone flying everywhere. One of them demolished a police car, along with everyone near it.

Hannah fell to the pavement—wincing, crying, desperately trying to shut out the horrible noises. In the final few seconds, the cruelest part of her mind forced her to open up and see the world one last time.

Everyone around her was at long last quiet. Frozen dead.

Then, with a shattering crunch that would haunt her for the rest of her life, the ceiling came down and smashed all the corpses into shards. It devoured the ground and just kept going.

The actress had no idea how long she existed there in the blank white void of existence, kneeling on a floating disc of concrete and sobbing at the nothingness all around her.

Soon the void swirled with smoky wisps of blue and the nothing became something. By the time Hannah’s eyes adjusted, the glow of her bracelet had faded and the eggshell of light was gone. Beneath her feet and her fallen handbag lay the same round patch of 13th Street, but it was now fused into concrete of a lighter color.

She craned her neck and saw blue sky and white clouds, the distant gleam of several tall buildings. She didn’t recognize a single one.

Her hands quaking wildly, Hannah smeared her eyes and sniffed the warm summer air. Her last few working neurons struggled to process her new state of existence but all they could tell her with any degree of confidence was that right now at this very moment, she was alive. And she was elsewhere.

 


 


TWO

It had been twenty-two years, three months, and seven days since Hannah Given last came screaming into a world. She’d emerged from her mother with little muss and zero fuss, the textbook model of a healthy childbirth. Growing up, she occasionally lorded that knowledge over her older sister, who’d formed a kneeling breach in the womb and had to be delivered by crash Caesarean. Hannah loved hurling that pebble, especially when Amanda was acting a little too cavalier in her role as the Impeccable One.

Unfortunately, there was nothing joyous or natural about Hannah’s second nativity. This time she popped into the world as a five-foot-five adult, clothed in a navy blue T-shirt and stretch jeans and saddled with a ninety-dollar hobo bag filled with clutter from the previous life. This time her arrival caused an electrical disturbance for a thousand feet in every direction. And this time, in a baffling circumstance she would lord over no one, she emerged from an egg.

She struggled to absorb the strange new environment. What was once a plane-wrecked intersection was now a clean and expansive parking lot, peppered with ficus trees and flanked on all sides by jarringly unfamiliar businesses—Peerless Spins, Sunshine Speedery, Jubel’s Juves & Shifters. Even more perplexing was the fact that every storefront was barricaded behind a smooth white wall of . . . something. At first glance, it looked like plastic. But the surface carried a faint shimmer, as if it were reflecting light from some nearby swimming pool. Protruding from the center of each barrier was a small placard that listed the store’s hours of operation, plus a digital clock that was currently as blank-faced as Hannah herself.

Only one store stood open for business: the sprawling SmartFeast that stretched across the north edge of the lot. Hannah could see people—calm, living people—bustling about inside.

She mindlessly moved toward the supermarket, staggering ten clumsy steps before a painful tremor overtook her. Her muscles burned with acid. Her extremities flared with hot needle stings, as if her limbs had all just woken up with a vengeance.

Hannah dropped to her knees between two parked sedans, then sobbed into her fists.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop. Please.”

A shrill and tiny voice in her head urged her to stay perfectly still. It assured her that she’d gone quite insane, and that a single wrong move could turn her into steam or glass or a flock of small birds. Her knees could grow mouths that sang “Eleanor Rigby.”

Four wretched minutes later, her panic and pain subsided enough for her to clamber back to her feet. She cleaned her face in a car’s side mirror, then continued shambling toward the SmartFeast.

Now she could see the casual mayhem inside. Throngs of impatient shoppers congealed at every checkout stand while cashiers dawdled helplessly. Another blackout. Or perhaps the same blackout. Hannah exhaled with relief when the lights flickered back to life.

Just outside the entrance, a slender teenage girl kept a lazy vigil behind a cloth-covered table. Hannah reeled at her strange blond hair—short on the sides but ridiculously long in the back and front. She reminded Hannah of a Shetland pony.

Both her table and her sleeveless black turtleneck were covered with buttons, each one containing a photo of an adorable dog or cat, plus a bold-faced call to action. Stop Pet Extensions.

Hannah stared at the activist for a good long minute, trying to make sense out of her and her cause. Eventually the girl noticed Hannah. She studied the actress through a curtain of bangs, then took a long swig of bottled milk. It had a picture of a maniacally happy cow on the label. The brand name was Mommy Moo, and the drink was boastfully fortified with something called Casamine-4.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” said Hannah, in a parched rasp.

“You stretched?”

“Huh?”

“I’m asking if you’re okay,” the girl attested. “You look like you’re not.”

A bleak chuckle escaped Hannah’s lips. She felt light-headed and horrendously fragile, as if a stiff breeze could crack her to pieces.

“No, I’m not okay. I can’t even . . . Listen, my name is Hannah and I’d like to ask you something. I know how crazy this’ll sound, but I’m really screwed up right now and I’d appreciate a straight answer. Am I . . .”

She took another shaky glance around the lot, then sucked a jagged breath.

“Is this Canada?”

The question earned her five seconds of stony silence from the girl.

“Are you rubbing me?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you making some stupid joke at my expense?”

“No! I’m not! I’m really not, okay? If there’s any joke going on right now, it’s at my expense. I’m lost. I’m scared. I’m sick to my stomach. And I don’t recognize a single thing around me.”

The girl continued to eye her with doubt.

“I’m not ‘rubbing’ you,” Hannah insisted. “I’m not making a joke. Please. Just tell me where I am.”

At long last, the blonde brushed away her bangs. She had radiant green eyes, just like Amanda. Having grown up brown with envy, Hannah found the strength to wonder why the hell anyone would hide eyes that pretty.

“You’re in San Diego,” the girl informed her. “Downtown. Just a few blocks from the harbor.”

Hannah pressed a fist against her forehead, as if struggling to hold her brain in.

“Thank you.”

“You want me to call someone for you? A doctor? A friend?”

“No. I appreciate it, but I think I just need to . . . uh . . .” She felt distracted by all the girl’s weird buttons and stickers. Pet extensions?

“I should just go.”

“Okay. Keep walking.”

Hannah cocked her head in fresh bafflement. Though the girl’s words were dismissive, she’d delivered them with cordial warmth, as if she were merely wishing Hannah a pleasant weekend.

The actress slung her bag over her shoulder and made her wavering escape from the lot. Five minutes after she turned a corner, the other stores began to open. The waxy white barricades popped out of existence one by one, like soap bubbles.

Hannah drifted down the quiet avenue, praying to stumble back into some familiar part of the city. Signs informed her that she was on West Earl Boulevard, a street that didn’t exist anywhere in her memory files. The area teemed with glassy office buildings, each one sporting a café or bistro at the ground level. One eatery brandished boastful signs about its “10× booths.”

Her attention was captured by a twelve-foot street advertisement, a morbid image of a sheet-draped corpse on a coroner’s slab. A thin female arm dangled out from under the covers, her dead hand clutching an unlabeled pill bottle. Grim black text flanked the bottom of the picture.

SHE CERTAINLY DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING.

PREDICTIVES: UNTESTED. UNLAWFUL. UNSAFE.

Under the tagline, a call to action urged citizens to contact the American Health Bureau at #99-17-18384.

Hannah stared at the poster for a long and restless minute before forcing herself onward. At the next corner, she mindlessly averted her gaze from the clear glass front of a newspaper box. She was overstocked on calamity at the moment. The last thing she needed was another dose of disruption in the form of a


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 705


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