The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(191)

Azral smirked. “On the contrary. You’re more alive and awake than ever before.”

Awake was one of the last words Theo would use to describe himself at the moment.

You’re in my head.

“Yes.”

His mind flashed back to the results of the cerebral scan that Melissa had shared with him.

You put something in my brain. Some tiny metal ring.

“A harmless device,” Azral assured him. “It merely allows us to communicate in this state, little more.”

His “little more” struck Theo like a salesman’s asterisk. He felt a nervous lurch where his stomach used to be. “And where exactly . . .”

Theo balked at the new echo in his voice. Now he looked down to see a hazy facsimile of his body.

Azral nodded approvingly. “Already you adapt.”

Theo was surprised to find himself in his faded Stanford hoodie, his old khaki shorts and sandals. It was his favorite outfit, one that had comforted him through many drunken travels.

“What’s happening to me?”

“You’re an augur, Theo. Did you think you’d spend the rest of your life suffering random glimpses? No. You’re generations ahead of your peers, the so-called prophets of this age. Their talent is a crude cudgel. Yours is a violin. This is where the futures sing at your bow, my friend. This is your true gift.”

A thunderous shudder filled Theo. By the time it passed, he appeared as whole as Azral. He could feel the ground beneath his feet again, a simulation of life and breath inside him. The sensation was even more pleasurable than waking life. He felt wonderful now. Except . . .

“Mia. I saw her. She was shot in the chest. Did that really happen? Has it happened already?”

“It has occurred,” Azral calmly replied. “She fades from life at this moment.”

“No . . .”

“We can address the matter later. For now—”

“I have to find her!”

“Boy, look around you. What do you see?”

Theo took another wide-eyed glance around the office. The fat water droplet still dangled in the air. The clock on the wall remained rooted at 11:56 and 48 seconds, with no signs of letting go.

“So it’s not just here,” Theo said. “Time stopped everywhere.”

Azral emitted a soft chuckle, snugly perched between fondness and ridicule.

“You can’t stop time any more than you can stop a desert or a forest. Time is a landscape that stretches across all things. We’re the ones who move across it.”

Theo shook his head in hopeless perplexity. “I don’t—”

“If it helps, think of all the people of the world as passengers on a train. You travel through time at the same speed and direction, perceiving events through your own narrow windows. The concepts of past and future are entirely human constructs. We formulated them as navigational markers, like east and west. Only now—”

“I got off the train.”

Azral smiled again. “You’re not the first of your kind to achieve this state, though my ancestors only seem to come here by accident. They romantically refer to this realm as the God’s Eye. You’d do just as well to call it the Gray.”

Theo didn’t care what it was called. If he was forever stuck here at the cusp of noon, it was Hell.

“Is there . . . a way back on the train?”

“Of course. You can resume your journey at any time. I’ll show you how, but not yet. Come with me. If you wish to aid your companions, there are things you should see.”

Theo felt a gentle hand on his back. He’d only taken three steps out of the room when a cold force pushed him forward like a leaf in a gale. By the time his dizzy senses returned to him, he found himself outside the building.

“What . . . what just . . . ?”

“A quicker mode of transit,” Azral explained. “Foot travel is a needless formality here.”

Theo’s next question fizzled in the urgency of his surroundings. More than twenty federal agents now flanked the building—all paused in tense and busy actions. A ghost team fixed their imaging towers around the Silvers’ dusty red car while a second group wheeled a large metal device that reminded Theo of a supervillain’s death ray. He shuddered to think what it would do once the clock started ticking again.

“Shit. It’s worse than I thought.”

“Indeed,” said Azral. “In one hundred thirty-two seconds, their crude solic toy will breach the barrier.”

Theo looked to the eight gun-toting Deps in armored black speedsuits. He could only assume they were all assigned to take down Hannah. “We’ll never make it out of here.”

“You’ll escape. It’s the continuing presence of these government agents that troubles me. There may yet be a remedy.”

“What remedy?”

“It’s my task,” Azral curtly replied. “Not yours.”

Theo churned with stress as he recalled Azral’s remote-button slaughter of twenty-one physicists, another so-called remedy. They worked for you and you killed them. Bill Pollock got me sober and you killed him.

“I never wished to slay those scientists,” Azral replied, to Theo’s unease. “I saw the consequences of their continued existence, an elaborate chain of events that would have destroyed you and a great many others. It’s the burden of foresight. Our choices often seem questionable to those around us, even cruel. You’ll know this soon enough.”