The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(42)
“Only a weak man fails to honor his parents. You should be grateful. It was your father’s unique genes that saved your life today. Clearly I didn’t choose you for strength of character.”
As the fearsome stranger walked back to his white liquid portal, Evan suddenly found himself in a small pool of yellow.
“Pathetic,” said Azral, before disappearing into the breach.
Over the course of his long and lawless existence on Earth’s wild sibling, Evan would find many reasons to hate Azral Pelletier. Near the top of the list was the ridiculously short amount of time he’d given Evan to prepare for his great upheaval. He’d only just zipped his jeans over fresh boxers when the silver bracelet buzzed with life. Shirtless and barefoot in his father’s moldy bathroom, he was sealed in light, safely preserved as the house and sky collapsed around him.
It was in that final moment that he forgot his fear. In the space between worlds, the space between lives, he was briefly at peace with himself. The old Earth faded away to an empty white void, and Evan Rander felt nothing at all but gratitude.
—
As the proprietor of a dreary midtown mini-market, Nico Mundis was used to seeing odd behavior in his store. Aside from the typical assortment of ne’er-do-wells who would rob him at gunpoint or speedlift his wares, he’d suffered his fair share of rants, raves, threats, and propositions. The sexual come-ons always baffled Nico the most, as he was sixty-eight and quite obese.
His favorite strange incident occurred three years ago, when a group of egghead scientists traced an invisible signal to his canned goods aisle. The group leader, a spiky-haired Poler named Constantin Czerny, offered Nico three thousand dollars to let them affix a small device to his wall. Some kind of particle scanner enhancer thingy. Sure, why not? Money was money. At the end of the transaction, Czerny gave Nico his phone number and advised him to call should anything unique happen. Nico had no idea what Czerny meant by that and wasn’t sure if Czerny knew either.
Now, just minutes before opening for Saturday business, something unique happened.
As Nico filled the register, the overhead lights died. The table fan came to a stop. Even his electronic watch went blank. Only the white tempic barrier continued to function. It coated the windows from the outside, giving the shop a hazy, snowed-in look.
A flash of light filled the back of his store. Nico grabbed his shotgun and aimed it at the disturbance. He blinked through the dancing brown spots in his eyes and reeled to see a shirtless young man where previously there’d been no one.
Evan blinked twice at the gun, then raised his scrawny arms in terror. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Nico moved closer to survey the damage. The blast had taken a curved bite out of his store, leaving a concave groove in the wall and slicing half the cans and shelves around the intruder. Tiny wet vegetable morsels dripped onto the floor, covering broken pieces of bathroom tile that had come from God knows where.
“Who are you?” Nico shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“Look, just don’t shoot, okay? I have no idea! The last thing I—”
His eyes rolled back into his head and he launched into violent convulsions. Nico took an anxious step back. He couldn’t tell if the boy was suffering an epileptic seizure or an otherworldly possession. He wasn’t entirely wrong on either count, but what he was truly witnessing at the moment was nothing less than the death of the original Evan Rander.
As Evan stood and stirred, a tidal wave of cerebral data flooded into him. Millions of vivid new facts and memories. They filled his brain node by node, reshaping his psyche. On the outside, he was still a twenty-eight-year-old man with a seventeen-year-old face. In his altered consciousness, he was older now. Many years older and exponentially sharper.
His upgrade had arrived.
Evan breathed a weary moan, as if he’d just given birth. For a moment Nico feared the intruder would fall into tears, but Evan soon let out a delirious laugh.
“Oh man. Man oh man oh man.”
He swept his blinking gaze around the store. Nico was amazed at how differently the stranger carried himself. He looked fiercely confident now. Not even a tad confused.
With a hammy grin, Evan spread his arms out wide. “Nico! Nico-Nico Mundis! Ti kanis?”
The shopkeeper took another step back. “How do you know my name?”
“Ah, Nico-Nico. You and I go way back. You’re my Square One Buddy, buddy. Always here at the beginning to greet me with a friendly smile. And since we’re such good buddies, hey, why don’t you put down the boomstick?”
Evan was unsurprised to see the gun remain fixed on him. As he sighed and stretched, his hidden hand seized a can of string beans.
“Well, I figured it was a shot in the dark, no pun intended. Guess I can’t blame you for being sore. For years you’ve been praying for some young and topless beauty to pop into your Efta-Edeka, and here I am. You should’ve been more specific.”
He swung his gaze to the cloudy white doorway. “Oh, hello, bishop.”
As Nico reflexively turned his head, Evan hurled the can—a perfect throw that connected squarely with the shopkeeper’s temple, driving him down. Evan rushed around the counter and grabbed the shotgun off the floor. He jammed the barrel into Nico’s stomach, then his nose.
“Why must we do this dance every time, Nico? You know I don’t like hurting you.”