When he reached the underground parking lot, Quint finally screamed. He disappeared through the concrete and then continued in darkness. By the time he succumbed to suffocation, he’d already descended an eighth of the way into the Earth’s crust. His body kept on falling, all the way to magma.
Grim-faced and silent, the Pelletiers exited the complex. The moment they reached the front yard, Azral turned around and closed his eyes in concentration.
A dome of piercing white light suddenly enveloped the building—a bubble of backward time moving at accelerated speed. Inside the field, corpses vanished, plants shrank, mice perished as zygotes. The hint of past life appeared in split-second intervals, like aberrations in a flip-book.
By the time the dome disappeared, the entire structure had been reversed fifty-two months, reverted to the failed hotel that Quint had yet to purchase. Every file, every photo, every mention of the Silvers was now erased from existence.
Esis peevishly crossed her arms and addressed Azral in a foreign tongue, a byzantine blend of European and Asian languages that was still over two millennia away from being invented.
“I warned you not to overlook our ancestors, sehgee. You should have listened to me.”
“I know.”
“You and your father both.”
Azral held her hands, his sharp eyes tender with affection. “Just forgive us, sehmeer, and embrace the new course.”
Esis heaved a wistful breath and fixed her dark stare at the blooming sun.
“I can’t help but worry for those children. There are so many futures open to them now. So many strings.”
“There’s only one outcome that matters,” Azral insisted. “They go east. To Pendergen.”
“Assuming they don’t fall on the way.”
Azral wrapped his arms around Esis and cast a soulful gaze down the driveway.
“They will not fall,” he assured her. “Not the important ones, at least.”
—
Nobody knew where they were going, least of all Zack. His only goal now was to avoid looping back into police search paths. Every chance he got, he drove east into the rising sun.
Twelve miles from the site of their standoff, the engine fell to sickly whirrs. Zack veered onto a narrow forest road and pulled over to the dirt. He felt relatively good about ditching the van here in a desolate area, under the thick canopy of trees. He could only assume that the police hunt had extended to helicopters or whatever they used here to make pigs fly.
He gave everyone five minutes to gather their wits and scant belongings, but Amanda insisted on ten. She’d discovered a sterilized pack of sutures at the bottom of Czerny’s med kit and was determined to close Theo’s wound before they all proceeded on foot.
While the others exited, she remained with Theo in the back of the van. She saw him wincing with every stroke of the needle.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m an oncology nurse. I don’t do this very often.”
“You’re doing fine.”
Theo studied her as she made her final stitches. Her expression was tight and unsettled, like crumbling stone.
“They have those healing machines,” he reminded her. “Anything you did to those cops will be undone.”
“Not if I killed them.”
“I don’t think you did.”
Amanda didn’t think so either, but she couldn’t escape the grim possibilities. She’d pinned those men down with the hands of a giant. Another ounce of thought and she could have crushed them like eggs. It had taken her years to accept cancer as part of God’s great plan. She didn’t even know where to start with tempis.
Twenty feet away, Mia paced the side of the road, kicking tiny stones with vacant bother. She couldn’t shake the tickle from her cheek, the strip of skin that the policeman’s bullet had kissed with hot air. Someone just fired a gun at her face. And yet somehow she was still standing.
David chucked acorns at the treetops, startling numerous birds.
“What’s going on in that head of yours, Miafarisi?”
“I was just thinking how you saved my life back in that building. I never even thanked you.”
David shrugged as if he’d merely lent her a nickel. “No worries. Just glad we’re all still breathing.”
He caught his oversight and turned to Mia in hot remorse. She threw her dismal gaze inside the van, at the blanket-draped corpse of Constantin Czerny.
“Shoot. Mia, I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant,” she told him. “I just feel bad leaving him like this.”
“We can’t bury him,” David said. “There’s no time. No reason. The police will only dig him up.”
Mia didn’t think she had any tears left in her, and yet her eyes welled up again.
“He was nice.”
David pulled her into a soft embrace, resting his chin on her scalp. Such a sweet thing, this Miafarisi. Such a sweet child.