“Wow. You do move fast.”
No one appreciated the joke, least of all the sisters. As he cooked in the heat of their smoldering glares, his inner Libby shook her head at him. You never learn.
David wound his finger impatiently. “I’m glad Theo’s okay, but can we please get to the main topic at hand?”
Once again, Czerny deferred to his superior. Quint took an expansive breath.
“I know Dr. Czerny has told some of you about our organization, but for those who came in late, let me explain again. The Pelletier Group is a privately funded collective of physicists, all specialized in the study of temporal phenomena. We’re not beholden to any college or corporation. Our only mission is to follow the science, no matter where it takes us. It was through keen observation and a little dumb luck that science took us right to you.
“There’s a unique subatomic entity called a wavion that’s been fascinating physicists for decades. It moves differently, spins differently, clusters differently than any particle known to man. Though we still have much to learn about it, we know for a fact that wavions, when positively charged, move backward in time.”
David opened his mouth to speak. Quint cut him off with a curt finger.
“Thanks to their atypical nature, wavion clusters are easy to detect with the right technology. In fact, one of our first discoveries, four years back, was a fist-size concentration in a San Diego parking lot. Soon we discovered a handful of others, all scattered within a ten-mile radius. They were all the same size, all expanding at the same slow rate. After thirty months, the clusters had each grown into the same specific form.”
“An egg,” David mused.
Quint grinned at him. “Yes. Each eighty-one inches tall and fifty-five inches wide, all invisible to the human eye but very perceptible to our scanners. The images became even more interesting, one year ago, when we began to notice a distinct hollowness inside each formation. To our amazement, every gap took the frozen shape of a human being. Although we’re seeing you today for the first time, we’ve been familiar with your silhouettes for nearly a year.”
The room fell into addled silence. David shook his head. “That’s insane. You’re saying you’ve been observing us for months when it all just happened a few hours ago.”
“Like I said, charged wavions move backward in—”
“He gets the concept,” Zack said. “We all do. We’re just having a hard time stapling it to reality.”
David nodded at Zack. “Exactly. Yes. Just the notion of anything traveling back in time. I mean the logistics, the paradoxes . . .”
The physicists exchanged a brief glance, filled with quizzical interest and—in Czerny’s case—deep astonishment. They’re surprised, Mia noted. Surprised at our surprise.
Quint stroked his chin in careful contemplation. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past five decades, it’s that time is more . . . flexible than we ever imagined. That’s the gentlest explanation I can offer at the moment. You seem like a smart young man, Mr. Dormer, and I’ll be happy to discuss it more in the days to come. But for now, in the interests of keeping things manageable—”
Zack cut him off with a bleak chuckle. “Oh, I think that ship has sailed and sunk, Doctor. But here’s something you can answer. You say you spent four years watching us from a distance, waiting for our eggs to hatch. I wasn’t anywhere near mine when your security goons got me.”
“Me neither,” Amanda added. “I was at least two miles away. How did you find us?”
“You’re still teeming in wavions,” Czerny replied. “They’re emanating from the silver bracelets you share. It’s nothing to fear. The particles are harmless. But they did make you easy to track.”
Zack curtly shrugged. “Okay, fine. But none of this explains how we got here.”
“Or where ‘here’ is,” Hannah added.
“Or what these things are,” said David, brandishing his bracelet.
Quint nodded at them with forced patience. “Yes. These are all pertinent questions. Mr. Trillinger, we don’t have an answer for you. Not yet. We can’t even offer a working theory until we speak with all of you in detail and get a better sense of the events leading up to your arrival. Mr. Dormer, we don’t have an answer for you either. Not yet. Now that we have the broken pieces of Ms. Given’s bracelet, we’re very eager to study them.”
Hannah didn’t learn until Czerny’s introductions that Amanda had dropped her married name. She’d thrown her sister a baffled look, only to get a vague and heavy expression in reply.
Now Quint turned to Hannah. “In answer to your question, I can only tell you what you already suspected. You’re on Earth, but a far different version than the one you knew.”