At least the men do, she thought. Her sister had the directional skills of a leaking balloon.
Once Amanda caught Zack’s gaze, she motioned to Mia’s free hand. He took it in his grip. Though he offered her a weak smile, he had to suppress his other new concern. If things were this tough in the grasslands, they didn’t have a prayer of making it through the desert.
—
Hannah’s calves burned with fury as she climbed the steep ridge. Her only comfort was the malevolent twinge of glee she drew from Theo’s matching strain. She’d forcibly volunteered him for the water-gathering mission, the Jack to her Jill. Though the task hardly required three people, David insisted on coming along. The boy barely broke a sweat.
“You could have left your backpack with the others,” he told Hannah.
“It’s okay. It balances the weight up front. Not that you ever noticed these.”
David eyed her with perplexed indignity. “I noticed. I just never said anything. Was I supposed to?”
“No, but you’re a teenage boy. I should have caught you looking by now.”
He jerked a tired shrug. “I don’t get the fascination with large breasts. I won’t say it’s a purely American fetish, but it does seem to be rampant in this culture and era. I admit I’m intrigued by the unique disparity between you and your sister. From what I can see, she barely has a chest at all.”
Hannah slapped Theo’s shoulder. “See? David knows how to get on my good side.”
“If I acknowledge your superior endowments, will you stop being mad at me?”
“Just tell me what Evan said!”
“He said you’d flirt with me soon!”
Hannah stopped at the top of the hill and stared at Theo in puzzlement. “That’s it?”
“That’s the bulk of it. Yes.”
“Jesus, that’s nothing. I flirt with people all the time. I flirt with David.”
The boy nodded. “It’s true. She does.”
“Theo, why did you think that would bother me?”
He flicked a tense hand. “I don’t know. He said you’d flirt with me by default, that you can’t exist without a man to wrap around your finger, which I thought was pretty unkind.”
“It’s also kind of true,” Hannah admitted. Throughout her adult life, the actress had rarely gone a week without some fling, tryst, or other quasi-romantic dalliance. She gravitated toward partners who were meek enough to put her on a pedestal, a handy way to control the terms of the relationship. She wasn’t proud of it, but she was aware enough to recognize the pattern. The real mystery was how Evan knew it.
“There was one other thing,” Theo cautioned. “He told me you used to have a fourth option, but he removed it.”
Now Hannah was bothered. For the twentieth time, she procured Jury’s license from her pocket. Evan’s teasing note still burned fresh in her mind. You would have liked him.
“I don’t understand. How could he say I had the option if I never got a chance to meet him?”
“He must have his own temporal talents,” David mused, as if merely discussing the weather. “We know from Mia that it’s perfectly possible to tamper with the past. Maybe Evan can do the same. Maybe we exist in a branching chronology that he created, an alternate-alternate timeline where Ernesto Curado never became part of the group.”
Hannah trembled as she tried to wrap her mind around the implications—a human being removed not just from life but from the memories of everyone who knew him. She couldn’t think of a crueler thing to do to a person, and yet Evan clearly took joy in his feat. Worse, he was determined to fill in the blanks for Hannah, to make sure she knew exactly what she lost.
David continued to ponder the idea. “Actually, given how much Evan knows about us, I’m starting to think he used to be part of our group as well. Maybe he’d been with us from the beginning, until he decided to change that. What I can’t figure out though—”
“David . . .”
“—is how his own memories would be preserved.”
“David, stop.”
At Theo’s words, the boy glanced up at Hannah’s pained face. He flinched with remorse. “Sorry. I was channeling my father again. I could be wrong about all of this. I probably am.”
She rubbed her eyes. “It’s all right. Let’s just keep going.”
Eight minutes later, they reached the MerryBolt chargery, a facility that looked less like a gas station and more like a drive-in theater. The lot contained over two dozen generator spaces for cars. A large screen kept motorists distracted with commercials and cartoons.
Thankfully, the place included a mini-market that was stocked to the roof in ice-cold refreshments. After downing a full cherry vim, Hannah felt her inner gauges swing back into the green. She blithely locked arms with her companions, like Dorothy in Oz, as they proceeded down the road with their new bags of bounty. She considered talking about her breasts again, just for positive attention, then cursed herself for being so damn insecure.
A hundred yards from the chargery, David came to a sudden halt. He aimed a curious gaze up a long dirt hill.