The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(107)

“Sit down. You’re making us nervous.”

He rejoined them at the tree, rapidly drumming his thighs as he scanned the grassy distance.

“You never mentioned a girlfriend before,” Mia said.

“She was an ex,” Zack clarified. “We broke up two years ago but we still lived together.”

“That’s a strange arrangement,” Amanda mused.

Zack rolled his shoulders in a sullen shrug. “It was a good apartment.”

Sensing the end of his effusiveness, Amanda dropped the topic and ate another peppermint. Zack had noticed her popping them like crazy over the past fifteen minutes, ever since Hannah and the others crossed into worrisome tardiness.

As she reached for the last candy, an odd new thought occurred to him.

“Wait. Don’t eat that.”

She paused. “Huh?”

“Hold that mint. And hand me the box, please.”

Confused, she passed him the little square tin of Breezers she’d purchased from the motel vending machine. Zack brandished the container like a stage magician.

“Now, what do you think would happen if I reversed this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think I could refill this box with mints of the past?”

Amanda stared at him blankly as she pondered his premise. “I don’t like the idea of half-digested candies suddenly disappearing from my insides.”

“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.”

Zack placed the tin on the ground and concentrated until it gleamed with light. He opened the lid to a fresh new heap of white candies.

Mia’s mouth went slack. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Amanda said.

“Wow indeed.” Zack looked to Amanda. “Do you feel any less minty?”

“No. I feel exactly the same. I can still taste the last one I ate.”

“Yeah. These are doubles. Holy crap. I made copies.” He laughed. “David’s going to blow a synapse.”

For all his awe, Zack suspected his feat was pitifully mundane to the civilized natives of Earth. He was right. The process of tooping had been a part of modern culture for decades. Using any rejuvenator, a container could be reversed to create temporal duplicates of its former contents, whether they were mints or apples or shiny gold nuggets.

Unfortunately for wealth seekers, tooping was an inherently flawed process, one that always resulted in inferior copies. Precious metals became rusted and worthless. Gems turned cloudy and cracked. Most tooped foods were inedible, though certain grains and vegetables were able to survive the process with a tolerable loss of quality. There were over a thousand toop-friendly recipes that had been discovered through years of experimentation—pastas, breads, and rice dishes that were easily saved by fresh seasonings.

Though tooping was prohibited by federal law, the authorities could only do so much to stop it in the kitchen. In the end, nobody craved shoddy cloned sustenance. It was just the fiscal reality. The middle class had leftovers. The lower class had do-overs.

In the grassy wilds, Zack received a quick education on the limits of tooping. The moment he sampled a re-created mint, his face contorted in comical disgust. Mia and Amanda covered their laughs.

“What’s wrong?”

He spat his candy into the dirt. “It’s awful. Like eating a dust bunny.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I’m serious. Try one.”

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.