Amanda studied the barrier with heavy eyes. Now that she knew the name of the force inside her, she rolled it around her thoughts like a boulder. Tempis, tempis, tempis. She squeezed her golden cross, praying for the day this beast, this madness, this tempis-tempis-tempis stopped scaring the hell out of her. It didn’t help that her sister seemed equally frightened by it.
Quint peered at the clock on the wall. “Does anyone have any questions?”
“Yes,” said Zack and Hannah, in synch.
David raised a hand. “Me too.”
“Okay. Hannah first.”
“I once asked Martin Salgado what makes all the cars and ambulances fly, and he said ‘aeris.’ Where does that fit in?”
“I was going to save that for next time,” Quint said. “But since you asked, aeris is just an altered form of tempis, one that can be molecularly compelled to move in a specific direction, even up. With enough aeris, you can lift entire buildings. Since its introduction twenty years ago, aeris has replaced jet propulsion as the primary means of commercial flight. It can be found in roughly a third of all automobiles. I imagine in another twenty years, ground cars will be an antiquity. Zack?”
“Have there been any other cataclysms since 1912? And has anyone developed a weapon that more or less does the same thing?”
“Mercifully, no to both. The Cataclysm has been a one-time occurrence. And though temporis has certainly been weaponized in various ways, no one’s invented the means to re-create an event of that scale. If anyone does develop the technology, it’ll be either England or China.”
“Why not the U.S.?”
“America hasn’t been involved in war since 1898.”
Quint wasn’t surprised to see six hanging jaws in response. He sighed patiently.
“Again, a broader topic for another day. I’ll just say for now that among its many other effects, the Cataclysm drove us inward as a nation. David, you have a question?”
“Yes, I gather from your omission that there isn’t a device that does what Mia does. Correct?”
Quint emitted a smile that made Mia want to hide under her chair. “That is indeed the case. For all our advances, the act of time travel itself remains purely hypothetical. At least it did until our lovely young Mia came along. As far as science is concerned, she’s the first person in history to transport physical matter from one point in time to another.”
While Quint spoke, Zack furtively edged his sketchbook into Theo’s view. Among all the notes and doodles was a large query, circled twice.
What’s your weirdness?
Zack had left his pencil out for Theo’s use, but after five seconds of addled silence, he took it back to add a postscript.
Just being nosy. Forget I asked.
A few moments later, Theo commandeered the pad and wrote his reply. Zack eyed him in blinking turmoil. “Are you kidding?”
“Afraid not.”
“Wow. I don’t even know how to react to that.”
“Guess I don’t either.”
“Is everything all right?” Quint asked them.
“Yeah,” Zack replied. “Just a lot to absorb. I think our heads are about to spin off.”
“Well, why don’t we stop here then?”
Theo fled the room as fast as politeness would allow. Hannah watched him exit, then cautiously approached Zack.
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know,” the cartoonist replied, still vexed. When he asked Theo about his weirdness, he’d steeled his mind for yet another metaphysical brain-bender. But Theo’s answer truly threw him. A four-word deposition, delivered straight from right field.
I don’t have one.
—
That night, Theo ate his first dinner with the group. He kept a tense gaze at his food, forcing his eyes away from all the notable distractions—Amanda’s cast, Hannah’s chest, David’s teeming pile of raw sliced carrots. Even worse were Zack’s sporadic displays of time-twisting madness. He undid Theo’s bracelet with a tap of the finger, then proceeded on two separate requests to freshen up breads and vegetables. No one else seemed bothered by the sheer insanity of his table trick. And these were supposedly the people from Theo’s world.
Though he tried to stay quiet through the course of the meal, he was dragged through a gauntlet of idle queries by David. Maranan. Is that a Thai name? Filipino. Did you grow up in the Philippines? Nope. I was born and raised in San Francisco. How old are you? I’m twenty-three. Do you have any siblings? No. Just a whole mess of cousins.
“What made you decide on law school?” Zack asked.
Theo massaged his liberated wrist while he danced through the minefield of his past.
“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m from a big clan of overachievers. There was a lot of pressure to be someone. I think the plan was to get my JD, then a few years of public crusading, then local politics, then national politics, and then . . . I don’t know. My own monument, I guess. Something in a nice onyx.”
Zack smiled. He knew he liked Theo for a reason. “What did you do after you left?”