The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(172)



She eyed the stores suspiciously. “Middle of a Tuesday morning. Why is everything closed?”

Hannah stroked her lip in bother. The whole city seemed eerily quiet at the moment. There were only a handful of pedestrians on each block, most of them dressed from head to toe in lily-white garments. A husky street vendor sold a wide assortment of white Venetian masks.

“Something weird is going on here.”

“It’s not just here,” said Zack. “Everything was closed in Jersey too.”

Mia’s eyes bulged at a masked young couple in white bathrobes and sneakers. The man brandished a hand-painted placard that said New York Thrives on 10-5.

“Commemoration,” she said.

“What?”

“Ten-five. Today’s the anniversary of the Cataclysm.”

The Silvers glanced out their windows with fresh unease. They recalled Sterling Quint’s discussion of the great temporic blast that destroyed half of New York City on October 5, 1912. The day had become a major holiday in the United States and a near-religious event here in the rebuilt metropolis.

The Arrow turned north onto 6th Avenue. Mia read the scrolling lumic banner that stretched above all lanes. This is our day, New York. The whole world is watching. Show them why this is the greatest city on Earth, now and forever.

Zack shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know if our timing’s really good or really bad.”

Mia plucked Peter’s day-old message from her shoulder bag and reread it. “We need to find a pay phone.”

“I’m looking.”

“Maybe we should look on foot,” Amanda suggested. “Get out and stretch our legs. If we can.”

One by one, the others checked on Theo in the front passenger seat. He’d spent the whole ride with his head against the window, twitching in restless slumber. Now his eyes were wide open and marked with deep red veins. His headaches had once again become bundled with visions, prophetic flashes too quick and obscure to make any sense. The only clear image he saw was Azral Pelletier. His harsh and handsome face popped up over and over, enough to erase all doubt. The white-haired man was coming back as sure as the moon, and probably sooner.

Theo glanced out at a distant flurry to the east. “I think I see where everyone went.”



The Ghostwalk was a ritual that dated back to the first Commemoration in 1913. It began as a silent procession down 3rd Avenue—fifty thousand mourners in white robes and masks, all marching for the souls of the lost. As the years progressed and cracked hearts slowly healed, the Ghostwalk grew a fluffy tail of musicians, dancers, and other sunny revelers who sought to honor the dead by celebrating life. The cavalcade expanded each year until it became known as the March of the Spirits.

Today the twin parades were joined in bipolar harmony, the yin and the yang, the grief and the joy. The event moved to Broadway in 1942, starting at 96th Street and ending at City Hall Park.

The Silvers caught the tail end of the Ghostwalk at 14th Street, at the corner of New Union Square. They hovered at the edge of the crowd, watching the parade through their newly purchased masks. They indulged the vendor when they saw aerocycle cops scanning the crowd from twenty feet above.

Mia felt ridiculous in her butterfly eye-mask, even though half the locals around her wore sillier disguises. She stood on her tiptoes in a vain attempt to peer over the wall of spectators.

David offered her a smirk and a hand. He looked like a superhero in his white domino mask.

“Let me give you a lift.”

Mia’s brow curled in worry. “You’re hurt.”

“My spine’s just fine. Come on.”

She climbed onto his back with wincing dread. To her amazement, he didn’t even grunt. Maybe she’d lost more weight than she realized.

“You sure this isn’t hurting you?”

“You’d know,” David sighed. “As you saw yesterday, I don’t handle pain very well.”

The procession continued past them. The majority of ghostwalkers wore plain white bathrobes. Some women sported snowy gowns. A few men were decked out in formal ivory vestments that had been passed down for three generations. The one item that never varied was the mask, an expressionless white face with black fabric eyeholes. The uniformity created an eerily powerful effect. For a moment Mia imagined she was watching the departed souls of her world, all the teachers and classmates and neighbors and cousins who didn’t get silver bracelets. And to think she’d snapped at the sisters for not realizing how lucky they were. She was alive. She was alive on the back of a beautiful boy with the heart of a lion and an unflinchingly deep regard for her. Mia never stopped replaying the scene on the highway, when David threatened to kill two Deps if they harmed a hair on her head. She wasn’t just lucky, she was blessed.

Mia locked her arms around David and heaved a warm sigh over his shoulder. “Don’t feel bad.”

“About what?”

“The way you acted yesterday. We don’t care about that. You’ve been there for us since day one and we love you. We’ll love you no matter what you do.”

She breathed a soft whisper into his ear. “I’ll love you no matter who you kill.”

Though the mask lay still on his impassive face, David’s voice carried a thin new tremor.

“You’re a rare and precious jewel, Miafarisi. I dread the day our paths diverge.”

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