The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(6)
Six months ago, fate reunited the sisters when Derek accepted a partnership at a private oncology practice in Chula Vista, California, nine miles south of San Diego. For Melanie, the move was a golden opportunity for her daughters to finally connect.
“I want you to see Amanda as often as you can,” she ordered Hannah. “Because she’s going to leave that guy sooner or later and she’ll be the one who moves away.”
Though Hannah promised to try, she’d only met with Amanda three times in the last half year. Their first two encounters had been brisk and cordial and as tender as a tax form. No doubt their mother would be even less pleased with how the Great Sisters Given fared tonight.
—
With a thorny glower, Amanda emerged from the theater onto J Street, where her hybrid chariot awaited. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s side.
Amanda slung herself into the passenger seat. Her husband tensely tapped ashes out his window.
“In case you’re keeping score, I lost five IQ points tonight. Plus my faith in man.”
“I know,” Amanda sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Derek was two years shy of forty. Though nature stayed kind to his boyish good looks, he regarded his impending middle age like a Stage 3 carcinoma. He worked out every day, ate raw vegetables for lunch, and overtook the medicine cabinet with pricey creams and cleansers. Nicotine was his last remaining vice. He was never happier to have it.
“If you love me, hon, you won’t make me go to her next musical.”
“I don’t even know if I’ll go,” Amanda admitted with a hot blush of shame.
“What’s the matter? You two have a fight?”
“Yeah. I tried to tell her she was good tonight and somehow she took it as a personal attack.”
“Well, you always said she was a minefield.”
“I know, but there’s something else behind it. I think she resents me for moving out here. Like I’m crashing the nice little world she built for herself.”
Derek jerked a weary shrug. “I’m sure you gals will work it out.”
He propped the cigarette in his mouth and merged into traffic. Two blocks passed in dreary silence.
“I’ll say this for your sister, she’s got quite a set of pipes on her. Quite a set of everything. Jesus.”
“That was classy, Derek.”
“I know. I’m a real charmer after ten. If it’s any consolation, you have the better face.”
Amanda snatched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She spat smoke out her window, at an illuminated bank sign. The digital clock had become hopelessly scrambled, forever stuck in crazy eights.
“Just drive.”
—
The electricity continued to surge and dip throughout the night. Citywide power fluctuations were spotted in various pockets of the globe, from Guadalajara to Rotterdam. The night owls screeched and the utility workers scrambled, but most of the West slept through the muddle. In London, the morning commute was hamstrung by a chain of mini-blackouts. In central Osaka, the sun set on a flickering skyline.
And then at 4:41 A.M., Pacific Time, the entire world shut down for nine and a half minutes. Every light and every outlet. Every battery. Every generator. Even the lightning storms that had been swirling in 1,652 different parts of the world were extinguished by invisible hands. For nine and a half minutes, the Earth experienced a mechanical quiet that hadn’t been felt in centuries.
At 4:50, the switch flipped again, and the modern world returned with confusion and damage.
The American power network was as complex and temperamental as the human psyche. In some areas, the electricity came back immediately. In other regions, the circuits stayed dead forever. On some streets, people struggled to help their neighbors out of stalled elevators and plane-wrecked buildings. In others, there was panic and violence. Accusations. Tribulation.
Throughout all the chaos, the sisters slept.
Amanda woke up an hour after sunrise, her alarm clock blinking confusedly at 12:00. She made a sleepy lurch to the shower and heard Derek’s off-key crooning over the running water. She used the other bathroom.
“Power failure last night,” he said twenty minutes later, as they both dressed.
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“I’m not getting a signal on my phone either.”
Her shirt still undone, Amanda turned on her smartphone and patiently waited for the little image of a radar dish to stop spinning. She gave up after a minute.
Derek crossed into the kitchen and nearly slipped on a pair of magnets. Yawning, he stuck them back on the refrigerator. Amanda flipped on the living room TV. Channel after channel of “No Signal” alert boxes. She peered out the front window and relaxed at the normal procession of cars and joggers, the comforting lack of screams and sirens. Aside from the all-encompassing power burp, life seemed fine in Chula Vista.
Soon her mind drifted back to the mundane—chores and cancer, Derek and Hannah. Her bleary thoughts kept her busy all the way to the medical office. She didn’t notice the two separate plumes of black smoke in the distance, spreading like stains across the flat gray sky.
—
Two of the nurses failed to show up for their Saturday shift. From the moment she threw on her peach-colored coat, Amanda became a whirlwind of activity, spinning between the office’s endless rooms and needs. Along the way, she picked up morsels of chatter about the blackout. Her fingers curled with tension when one of the patients mentioned something about a crashed Navy jet.