The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(37)

“Me neither,” Amanda added. “I was at least two miles away. How did you find us?”

“You’re still teeming in wavions,” Czerny replied. “They’re emanating from the silver bracelets you share. It’s nothing to fear. The particles are harmless. But they did make you easy to track.”

Zack curtly shrugged. “Okay, fine. But none of this explains how we got here.”

“Or where ‘here’ is,” Hannah added.

“Or what these things are,” said David, brandishing his bracelet.

Quint nodded at them with forced patience. “Yes. These are all pertinent questions. Mr. Trillinger, we don’t have an answer for you. Not yet. We can’t even offer a working theory until we speak with all of you in detail and get a better sense of the events leading up to your arrival. Mr. Dormer, we don’t have an answer for you either. Not yet. Now that we have the broken pieces of Ms. Given’s bracelet, we’re very eager to study them.”

Hannah didn’t learn until Czerny’s introductions that Amanda had dropped her married name. She’d thrown her sister a baffled look, only to get a vague and heavy expression in reply.

Now Quint turned to Hannah. “In answer to your question, I can only tell you what you already suspected. You’re on Earth, but a far different version than the one you knew.”

Hearing it out loud, delivered so bluntly, was enough to make several stomachs churn with stress.

“We’ve made tremendous advances in the field of temporal science,” Quint continued. “But for all our progress, our understanding of alternate timelines has never advanced beyond hypotheticals. I’ve devoted my career to these theories, but it’s not until today that I’ve been graced with proof. Actual living proof. Trust me when I say that your arrival is unprecedented. There’s nothing on record that’s even remotely similar to what we’re seeing now.”

Zack threw his hands up in frustration. Quint pursed his lips.

“You still seem to have a problem, Mr. Trillinger.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Look, don’t get me wrong. You’re excited and I’m happy for you. But at the moment, you have five people—sorry, six—who couldn’t give a crap about the advancement of temporal science. We’re confused and scared as hell. If you don’t have answers to the big questions, then at least tell us what you plan to do with us. And before you say we’re not prisoners here, you can drop the whole Mister/Miss thing. It’s not helping my tummy ache.”

Quint leaned back in his chair and eyed the cartoonist for a long, cool moment. “As you correctly guessed, Zack, we’re not holding you here. You can leave anytime you want. But you seem like a clever man, so I probably don’t need to tell you that you’re not equipped to venture out on your own. You have no contacts, no valid identity, no legal currency, and little to no information about your new environment. You’re not just foreigners here. You’re aliens. It would be in your best interest to stay with us, at least in the short term.”

“As it stands, I agree with you, Sterling. But I’m thinking ahead. And I believe I speak for the others when I say we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives as specimens.”

“Understandable, but—”

“Good. Now surely a smart man such as yourself realizes that without options, we are prisoners here. So I suggest a deal, a Quint pro quo if it tickles you. We tell you everything we know about our world, you tell us everything you know about yours. We give you our time, our testimony, our spit samples, whatever. In exchange, you give us money. A thousand dollars a week for each of us. You can keep it all in a safe until we choose to leave. I don’t care. The important thing is that when we do leave, we won’t be as helpless as you so eloquently described.”

All eyes turned back to Quint. He studied Zack through a face of stone.

“That all sounds perfectly reasonable.”

“Good. See? We’re connecting now. But before we shake on it, I’m adding a rider. No invasive medical tests without our consent. You tell us what you’re doing before you do it, and if we don’t like it, you stop. That’s a deal breaker.”

Quint narrowed his eyes in umbrage. “You seem to have a sinister notion about our methods.”

“I don’t know crap about your methods. I’m just covering all bases. As you said, we’re aliens here. Should we happen to do alien things, like sprout a third eye or levitate, I just want to make sure there are limits to your scientific curiosity. If you were in our shoes, you’d want the same comfort.”

Amanda suddenly realized, with dizzying inertia, what a good thing it was to have Zack around.

“That’s easy to agree to,” said Quint, “as we’re not in the habit of vivisection. Anything else?”

“Actually, yes. Not a rider. A question.” Zack launched a cursory glance around the room, studying every corner of the ceiling. “Got any hidden cameras in the building?”

In the all-too-telling silence, Mia felt a hot rush of blood behind her face. Oh God . . .

“It’s not a big deal,” Zack said. “You’ve known for a year that those eggs would hatch people. I assume you prepared for us. You know, cameras, beds, a medical lab. Makes sense. I just want to know.”

David saw Czerny’s knuckles curl tightly around his pen. Quint remained stoic.