Amanda pushed his arm away. “I believe you!”
“God, that sucked. Let me have the original.” He took the mint from her hand, tested its structural integrity, and then ate it. “Yeah. Okay. I think Breezers were meant for one-time use.”
“Maybe they added a special chemical,” Mia said. “Like copy protection.”
Zack stared ahead in thought. “You know, I bet that’s one of the things that pawnbroker was testing for. To see if your wedding ring was a clone.”
“And I bet that’s why the cash here is all blue and glossy,” Amanda added. “It’s probably some fancy ink that can’t be duplicated.”
“Great,” Zack sighed. “Guess I can’t make a figurative mint either.”
Mia shook her head, frustrated. “We still have so much to learn about this place. I mean everything we figured out just now is stuff a third-grader already knows.”
“We’ll catch up,” Amanda assured her. “Someday.”
Once again, Zack looked out to the hills, rapidly drumming his thigh until Amanda pressed his hand still. As their fingers touched, he realized that she rarely mentioned her husband. He made a note to ask about him someday, carefully, when he had a few less items on his plate of worries.
“Where the hell are they?”
—
Hannah wasn’t sure which of her two friends would explain the Royal Seeker first. David and Theo circled the van at polar ends, one scanning the past, the other peering into the future.
After two revolutions, David seized the winning edge.
“Look, I adore Mia. I respect her rules for avoiding federal detection. But we’re well out of sight. It would be far easier to show you what I’ve learned than to tell you. May I?”
Before Theo or Hannah could answer, David closed his eyes in concentration. A ghostly copy of the Seeker appeared at the edge of the hill, rolling up the grass until it merged with its present counterpart. Soon a spectral door opened and a handsome young man in hiking clothes stepped into the sunlight. From his long blond ponytail and sideburns, Hannah figured he represented the haute couture of the Altamerican progressive.
The driver took a panoramic sweep of his surroundings, then shut his door. Hannah’s heart lurched as he moved to the edge of the fifty-foot drop.
“David, if he jumps, you tell me now. I don’t want to see that.”
“He doesn’t jump. Watch.”
For the next several seconds, he kept his expressionless gaze on the canopy of trees below him. Then, with triumphant fury, he threw the ignition key over the cliff.
“Oh no!”
“It’s all right,” David assured Hannah. “We’ll find it.”
The man procured a handphone from his pocket and pressed a single button. “Yeah, it’s me. It’s over. I’m out. Thanks for everything. Go fourp yourself.”
Satisfied, he chucked the phone into the trees, then turned around and left the way he came. The ghost disappeared in a ripple.
David beamed at his companions. “He walks back down the hill, still smiling. Whatever decision he made, it was a good one. For him and for us.”
“But who was he?” Hannah asked.
“Who cares? We have a vehicle now. An unstolen luxury van.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Theo said. “For all we know, this guy just quit his job as a car thief.”
David sighed impatiently. “It’s been sitting here for two days. If it was stolen, then it wasn’t reported. If it was reported, then it wasn’t tracked. This is our van now. We just need to find that key.”
They descended the hill and scoured the woods in a three-pronged sweep. The search felt like a needle-in-a-haystack conundrum to Hannah, but then she knew it was never wise to bet against David Dormer.
Theo took a break from his halfhearted hunt, wiping his brow with the lip of his T-shirt. Hannah was momentarily stunned by the sight of his finely muscled stomach, the hint of a scar on his left pectoral. She was wise enough not to ask about old wounds.
“You okay?”
“Headache,” he said. “Probably just lack of sleep. It’ll pass.”
“Did you see anything futurish when you looked at that van?”
“It’s hard to say. I got a bunch of vague flashes, but I can’t tell if they’re predictions or just my usual thoughts. Mia’s lucky. At least her future’s written out for her.”
“Well, were they good flashes or bad flashes?”
“Both,” he replied, with jittery uncertainty. “I feel like that van will take us all the way to New York, but that could just be wishful thinking. I also feel like that scene we witnessed up there wasn’t entirely genuine, but that might just be paranoia.”
Hannah grew tense all over again. There was something about the driver’s expression, right after he threw the phone, that slightly reeked of acting. She’d also filed the suspicion as paranoia. Certain parties had given her plenty of reason to be skittish.
“Found it!”
David bounded through the trees, grinning with triumph. He jingled a key chain in his hand.
“So who feels like driving?”