The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(44)

With no memory at all of Evan’s prior clemency, the shopkeeper raised a thick hand, crying. “No! Please!”

“Sorry, buddy. I forgot I had my reasons for doing this.”

“Please, sir! Please!”

Unfortunately for Nico, Evan was no longer surprised or charmed by the honorific. He fired the shotgun. A cracking boom. A spray of blood. A good portion of Nico spattered onto Evan.

“Oh great. Lovely.”

Evan rewound ten seconds, this time killing Nico from a slightly safer distance. He left the store clean.

As a hopeless perfectionist with a very unique talent, Evan Rander was no stranger to repetition. The act of undoing and redoing had become as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes the tedium was enough to drive him crazy. But it sure as hell beat living the one-take life, with all its indelible gaffes and consequences. Regret was something Evan had abandoned a long time ago. It died on his native Earth, with his father, his debt, and his crippling insecurities.

He returned to the street and hailed the first cab he saw. Evan knew the driver’s name before the car even stopped, but chose to play dumb.

“Take me downtown, my good man. Childress Park. I’m on a squeeze, so 10× and aer it.”

Before the driver could question him, Evan pressed two blue twenties against the glass. Proof that he could afford the speed and flight surcharges.

With a steamy hiss, the vehicle ascended forty feet to the taxi level, then folded its tires inward. The doors and windows locked shut, the classic winged-foot icon lit up on the fare meter, and the cab shot off like a bullet.

It took sixty-three seconds to cross five miles of urban scenery. Inside the taxi, eleven minutes passed. Evan stared out the window at his slowed surroundings. He spotted a puffy plume of chimney smoke that, in the sluggish blue tint of the world, reminded him of Marge Simpson’s hair. He sighed with lament. They had nothing like The Simpsons here in Altamerica. Satire escaped these fools.

—

The taxi landed at the edge of an enormous green park, a lush oasis in a field of modern glass office towers. Like the rest of the business district, the place was sparse of life on Saturday.

Evan tossed sixty dollars at the driver. “Don’t go away. I’ll be back in five.”

As he exited the cab, the synchron on his wrist beeped, informing him that it had readjusted to local time. By external clocks, it had only been seven minutes since he and his fellow Silvers crash-landed into this part of existence.

Some crashed harder than others.

In the middle of the park, on a flat patch of grass between picnic tables, a fetching young blonde lay sprawled on her back. Unlike the scattered homeless dozers who malingered here on weekends, the woman was barefoot in a lacy pink nightgown. The silk was marred with dirt and gashes. Only her silver bracelet remained spotless.

She fixed her cracked red eyes on Evan, speaking through wheezes and bloody gurgles.

“I can’t move. I can’t feel anything. I don’t know what’s happening. Please help me.”

Evan kneeled by her side, clucking his tongue with sarcastic pity. She must have been ten stories up when the whole world changed on her.

“Oh, Peaches,” he said, in a mock Savannah drawl. “I do declare this is not your day.”

Evan made a habit of visiting Natalie Tipton in her dying moments. By his twentieth encounter, he’d pieced together her life in fragments. She was born Natalie Elder in Buford, Georgia, the only child of a waitress and a rail worker. She’d overcome dyslexia to earn a full scholarship to Emory University, where she studied to become a veterinarian until a well-placed kick from an ailing mare shattered her knee and ambitions.

But life had a way of working out for the terminally pretty. She soon met Donald Tipton, a campus football legend. They fell in love, got married, then moved out west when Donald scored a place with the San Diego Chargers.

If there was any drama during her time as a footballer’s wife, Natalie didn’t say. In the face of her demise, her only regret was not finishing college and becoming a veterinarian. She’d confessed this to Evan, back when he bothered to feign sympathy.

Having no recollection of their previous encounters, Natalie stared in terror at this creepy, grinning stranger.

“W-what happened to me?”

“You’ve taken a dreadful fall, sugah. And now you’re bone soup, ah say, bone soup from the neck down.”

“Please. Call an ambulance. I’m begging you.”

“Oh, I’ve tried that, darling. But it’s a big park. The paramedics never find you in time. Shame too, because they have a machine that could fix you right up. Reverse those injuries like they never happened.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not the pilot of this plane wreck, sweetie. Just a passenger with a better seat. If you’re looking to file a grievance, the people you want are the Pelletiers. Though in their defense, I’m pretty sure they warned you to stay on the ground floor.”

He was right. Natalie had woken up in the utility room of her building, twenty floors down from her penthouse suite. A hand-scrawled note on the floor strongly advised her to stay where she was. She didn’t listen. When the power died, she was stuck in the elevator between the eighth and ninth floors. Then her bracelet shook, the scenery changed, and Natalie Tipton had nowhere to go but down.

“I don’t understand why this happened,” she cried.