The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(193)

“In mind-set, not temperament. The boy has lived hundreds of years and yet he still fails to grasp the structure of time. He sees the past as his chalkboard, a single line to be erased and redrawn at whim. In truth, he undoes nothing. He merely jumps from train to train, forever dodging the consequences of his actions. I’m hoping you won’t be so linear in your thinking.”

Theo covered his face in hot distress. His friends were all suffering and Azral was giving him a primer in fiftieth-century metaphysics.

“What will it take?”

“For what?”

“For this guy to see consequences!”

Azral jerked a testy shrug. “His talents give him a unique perspective on events, which in turn provides us with helpful information. But perhaps I should reevaluate his usefulness.”

“I don’t want him dead. I just want him to leave us alone.”

“Yes. I thought I’d dissuaded him when last we spoke. Perhaps I need to make myself clearer.”

Azral studied Theo carefully as he reached for Hannah with an intangible hand. “You feel strongly for this one.”

“Yeah, but not the way you think.”

“You don’t know what I think,” Azral snapped. “If I deemed your love to be physical, we’d be having a different conversation.”

Theo looked to him in wide-eyed bother. “What . . . what do you mean?”

“Just take comfort that you won’t lose her. Not anytime soon.”

“I know.” He turned to Hannah again. “I see her all over my future. She’s everywhere I look.”

“You say it like it troubles you.”

“It troubles me that I don’t see the others as clearly. Can you please take me to Mia now?”

Azral nodded obligingly, though his handsome face turned grim.

“Come, then.”

—

He’d prepared himself for the worst, but what Theo saw in the magazine office sent his proxy form to chaos. He screamed and cried with two blurry heads, punched at the air with four hazy hands. He paced the floor in all directions while five ghostly duplicates fell to their knees. He was everywhere at once—an army of Theos, all thrashing and grieving over the youngest of the Silvers.

Mia lay cradled in Zack’s arms, her eyes wide with vacant horror as he pressed a bloody T-shirt to her chest wound. The cartoonist served a silent contrast to Theo’s raging sorrow, a snapshot image of a man in blanket shock. His tears had paused in mid-journey, lining his cheeks like scars.

Azral stood expressionless among the broken glass, calmly waiting for his protégé to collect himself.

“Theo . . .”

One by one, the doppelg?ngers vanished. A lone Theo crouched by Mia’s side. “How long does she have?”

“Moments,” Azral informed him. “She dies before the agents breach the barrier.”

“Oh God. There has to be something we can do.”

“I don’t know, Theo. Is there?”

“Don’t play games with me! I’m not in the mood!”

“It’s your mood that clouds you. Your emotions prevent you from seeing.”

“Seeing what?”

“The futures,” Azral said, with a sweeping hand gesture. “They reveal themselves in this place. They sing to us from every corner. Have you not wondered about the lights in the mist?”

Theo looked to the northern wall, at the tiny beads that twinkled within the fog. He’d glimpsed them everywhere he turned in this dreary gray world. He didn’t know why they scared him.

“What are they?”

“I said your talent was a violin, Theo. These . . .”

Azral moved behind him, plunging his fingers deep into the augur’s skull.

“These are the strings.”

Hot white strands of light converged on Theo from every direction. His consciousness erupted in a screaming torrent of images—a million parallel futures, all as different as siblings but knotted at the ends with the same painful traumas. Every string ended with his own cold death. Every string started with Mia’s.

“NO!”

Azral leaned in close, his imperious voice cutting through the chaos. “You see them now. All the branching possibilities. All the endless permutations and patterns. We’ve been so blind, Theo. Our species has lived for so long like moles in a tunnel. You’re among the first to step into the light and see time as it was meant to be seen. This is humanity’s greatest evolution. A whole new dimension of perception. It’s beautiful, is it not?”

“It hurts!”

“You hinder yourself.”

“She keeps dying!”

“You adopt the grief of your elder incarnations. For them, it’s too late to save her. Not for you. Detach yourself and perhaps you’ll find a brighter outcome hidden among the multitudes.”

With a raspy shout, Theo thrust his palms and cleared a six-foot ball of space around him. The strings now ended in a curved wall of pinlights. The bedlam in his thoughts dissipated.

Azral retracted his hands. “Good. Very good.”

The augur dropped to his ethereal knees, panting through imaginary lungs. “Go to hell . . .”

“I only seek to aid you. The girl can be saved.”

“You’re lying!”