“All right. Now gather around me. Sit closely.”
They clustered around the coffee table. David closed his eyes. Suddenly the first floor teemed with the recent ghosts of himself, a busy crowd of self-projections that walked, skipped, and hopped in every direction.
David formed a small bubble of space around the four solid Silvers. “This is the only way we can safely talk. If they see us in their ghost drills, they’ll read our lips.”
Mia wished she was in a state of mind to enjoy the new scenery. Her voice creaked with strain. “Are you sure that wasn’t her, Zack? I mean if you’re wrong—”
“I’m not.”
“—we’ll be leaving them. They’ll come back to an empty house with no way to find us.”
“He’s not wrong,” David said. “They’re in federal custody. There’s no time to debate this.”
“So what do we do?”
Zack bounced his busy gaze between Hannah and Mia. “You two pack our stuff. As much as you can. David and I will be back to pick you up.”
“Pick us up in what?”
Seeing Zack’s grim expression, the boy nodded with understanding. “Something borrowed.”
—
They cut through the rain in long-legged strides. Their closest neighbor lived a half mile down the road, in a humble wooden A-frame that was overdecorated with American flags and crucifixes. The owner’s Dixon Tumbril rested in the driveway, a boxy white minivan filled with clutter.
While David kept a wary eye on the lit windows of the house, Zack reversed the car doors to an unlocked state. They slid into the Tumbril in quiet synch and pulled down their rain hoods.
“Smells like dog in here,” Zack muttered.
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I wouldn’t call this begging. I’m wondering if we should just offer them cash.”
“We don’t have time to broker a sale, Zack, or soothe your criminal guilt.”
“It’s not guilt. I’m just afraid this won’t work.”
“It’ll work.”
During his nine days of power practice, Zack had conducted a few casual forays into temporal duplication, otherwise known as tooping. He learned thirty years after the rest of the world that metal objects cloned better than most, acquiring unseemly patches of rust but keeping most of their structural integrity.
He concentrated on the keyhole until it shimmered with a faint white glow. Soon a splotchy metal construct grew from within, forming the tip of a key, as well as a broken piece of key ring.
Zack marveled at his new creation. “Holy shit. That’s surreal.”
“Closest thing to magic I’ve seen yet.”
“Yeah, I’m the Merlin of car thieves. My mom would be proud.” His face crinkled with disgust as he touched the key’s surface. “It’s slimy.”
“You probably cloned some of the driver’s hand.”
Zack didn’t want to picture the mass of insentient goo that would result from a fully tooped human. He cleaned the key with his sleeve.
“All right. I’m ready. Do your thing.”
David looked to the house. “On my signal. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
With a flick of his hand, the property was consumed in a booming rumble, a perfect echo of the thunder that had blanketed Nemeth ten minutes ago. Zack started the engine under the loud noise cover, then checked the front window of the house.
“Good job.”
Now it was David’s turn to marvel. “Wow. I’ve never thrown thunder before. That was like something out of Norse mythology.”
On a better day, Zack would share in his godly thrill. All he wanted to do now was scream. The federal posse on their trail kept pushing them into becoming bigger and better criminals, larger and meaner threats. Zack could only imagine the cycle would spin faster and faster, until he and his friends were killing just for the privilege of living.
—
Mia and Hannah waited quietly on the porch swing, their collective belongings stuffed into duffels with little semblance of order. They’d packed their bags in grim silence, refusing to speak for fear of ghost drills, refusing to cry for fear of never stopping.
“The Deps wouldn’t hurt them,” Mia insisted. “I mean they still have rules.”
The actress nodded her head, scrambling for the sunniest scenario. “They’re probably sedated. I bet they’re just sleeping right now.”
Mia cast a dismal glance at the lightning. “She called it a storm.”
“Who?”
“The girl Theo and I met in the library. She said everything that was happening right now was a storm and we just had to weather it. Maybe that means we’ll get them back.”
Hannah hoped to God she was right. She’d just made peace with Theo. She’d finally started getting along with Amanda after ten years of thorny distance. Now the two of them were probably in a government plane, speeding away to some top-secret lab in the middle of nowhere.