The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(54)

Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.

She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”

Two days later, Mia lunched in the bistro with Zack and David, chortling with laughter as they tried to one-up each other with tales of past social blunders. A small glow suddenly materialized above the table like a firefly. David and Zack jumped back in alarm.

“It’s okay,” Mia told them. “It’s mine. A note should come out any second.”

The men leaned closer to look, but nothing emerged. As she moved toward the portal, Mia was stunned to discover that, for the first time, she could glimpse through the keyhole. She saw her own face, red-nosed and puffy-eyed. Her future self was sick with flu. Again?

No. The more she saw through the portal, the more she felt through it. She could feel herself standing outside Amanda’s door, nodding off to Czerny’s blather.

“Oh my God . . .”

“What?”

“I’m looking at the past. That’s me two days ago.”

David squinted at the portal. “I can’t see a thing. How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. I just can.”

“So what does this mean? That you’re the Future Mia this time?”

“I’m not sure. I think so. I mean I got a note. I told myself to feel better.”

Zack watched the shimmering breach with antsy trepidation. “I don’t want to panic you, but you might want to do exactly that.”

Panicked, Mia flipped through her diary, scanning her archives until she found the right message. “Sorry you’re sick. Feel better soon.” [Pink paper, blue ballpoint.]

She’d been so ill and distracted that day, she never realized that the pink paper was from her diary itself. Mia ripped a half sheet from the back, then hurriedly scrawled the six-word message. She rolled it up and popped it through the hole. The portal disappeared in a blink.

The incident left her rattled for days. What if she’d sent different words on different paper? What would that do to her memories? What would that do to time?

“Paradox,” she uttered to David, as if the word was acid. “Maybe that’s what happened back home. Someone forgot to dot the ‘i’ on a time-traveling note and it ripped the whole world apart.”

The two young Silvers had embarked on a morning walk around the property, stopping at the thistle-covered tennis courts. As David jumped back and forth over the sagging net, Mia leaned against the fence, wrapping her fingers around the chain metal links.

“I don’t know,” David mused. “It seems like a paradox already. I mean you wrote ‘feel better’ because you thought you had to. And the Mia who sent your note presumably wrote the words because she felt she had to. So we have a chicken/egg conundrum. Who first chose the words? Who decided that ‘feel better’ was just the thing to say?”

Mia could feel her brain trying to jump out of her skull. Just three weeks ago, her biggest concerns were weight gain and the impending start of high school. Now she was trying to wrap her head around the mysteries of time, for health reasons.

Worse, Quint insisted that Mia spend four hours a day in a second-floor laboratory, twiddling her thumbs under a million dollars’ worth of monitoring equipment in the hope that a new portal would arrive. The sessions were excruciatingly awkward for Mia, especially with Beatrice on the other side of the table. The mousy young physicist was utterly humorless, and had a tendency to treat Mia like the Virgin Mary in her third trimester.

At the start of their sixth session, Beatrice surprised Mia with a large chocolate cupcake. A white-flamed lumicand protruded from the frosting.

“What is this?”

“A small thing,” Beatrice replied, in her nervous high voice. “I thought you might like some recognition.”

“For what?”

Beatrice cocked her head. “Isn’t this . . . ? I’m sorry. Our files say you were born on August 19.”

“I was.”

“Okay, well, that’s today. Today’s August 19. Happy birthday.”

As the calendar finally caught up with her, Mia covered her mouth and fled the lab. She spent the rest of the day sequestered in her room.

That night, David sauntered into her room without knocking and took a casual perch on her desk. He rolled a tennis ball over the back of his hands. Mia glowered at him.

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Never said you had to,” he replied. “However, if you’d like to see something interesting, put your socks on and come with me.”

She grudgingly followed him to the polished stone lobby. He stood at the reception desk and pressed his fingers to his temples.

“David, what are you—”

“Shhh. I need to concentrate for this.”

In a sudden instant, more than seventy people materialized across the vast marble floor—rich men in tuxedos, young women in cocktail dresses, bartenders, caterers, even a few photographers. A nine-piece orchestra played merry party music. Confetti and streamers flew everywhere.

Mia stared incredulously at the busy new scene. “What . . . what is this?”

“My issue,” David informed her, with a coy little grin. “My weirdness.”

For four weeks now, the boy had suffered a growing problem with ghosts. What started out as phantom sounds had evolved into strange visual anomalies that rattled everyone in the building. On August 10, the blurry upper half of a waitress interrupted the Silvers at dinner, passing through the bistro like a floating specter. Four days later, David’s evening stroll with Hannah was cut short by a week-old slice of sunshine that nearly blinded them both. And just last Thursday, David and Zack turned a hallway corner, only to pass through a day-old apparition of Zack himself.