The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(61)

Quint moved on to a large steel apparatus that resembled an empty doorframe. As he turned a key at the base, the metal hummed with power. Amanda jumped in her seat.

The machine suddenly turned opaque with a waxy white substance that by now was familiar to everyone but Theo. He cocked his head in puzzlement.

“Tempis,” said Quint. “First discovered in 1984. Made commercially available in 1990. Some people refer to it as solid time, but that’s a misnomer. It’s merely air molecules, temporally manipulated into a uniquely solid state.”

David leered suspiciously at the bright white plane. “How can you adjust the speed of air molecules without creating a temperature shift? I mean we should be feeling it from here.”

Quint beamed. If he’d had more students like David, he wouldn’t have hated teaching.

“I’d love nothing more than to discuss it with you, one-on-one. For now, I’ll just say that tempis is one of the most perplexing substances known to man. It has the atomic structure of a hard transition metal but the weight of a noble gas. Somehow it exists in a paradoxical state in which it can be both airy and dense.”

“Huh. Just like Hannah.”

More people laughed as the actress irreverently narrowed her eyes at Zack. He shined her a preening smirk.

“Don’t start a battle you can’t finish, honey.”

“Oh, I’ll finish it.”

Determined to ignore them, Quint looked to Amanda. “I noticed you reacted to the energy before the barrier was even activated.”

“Yeah. It felt like someone tapping my shoulder from twenty feet away. What does that mean?”

“It suggests you have an innate sensitivity to all tempis. That’s fascinating.”

“Is it safe to touch?” Mia asked.

Quint thumped his fist against the surface. “Perfectly safe. Many specialized workers wear it as protective gear.”

“How?” David asked. “It’s a flat pane.”

“Tempis can either be projected through lenses, as it is with this barrier, or generated along conductive metal wires. Using a flexible mesh, the substance can be molded into virtually any shape.”

Zack noticed a thermos-size generator at the base of the frame. “So this runs on electricity.”

“No. Most temporic devices are powered by something called solis. That’s for another session.”

Amanda studied the barrier with heavy eyes. Now that she knew the name of the force inside her, she rolled it around her thoughts like a boulder. Tempis, tempis, tempis. She squeezed her golden cross, praying for the day this beast, this madness, this tempis-tempis-tempis stopped scaring the hell out of her. It didn’t help that her sister seemed equally frightened by it.

Quint peered at the clock on the wall. “Does anyone have any questions?”

“Yes,” said Zack and Hannah, in synch.

David raised a hand. “Me too.”

“Okay. Hannah first.”

“I once asked Martin Salgado what makes all the cars and ambulances fly, and he said ‘aeris.’ Where does that fit in?”

“I was going to save that for next time,” Quint said. “But since you asked, aeris is just an altered form of tempis, one that can be molecularly compelled to move in a specific direction, even up. With enough aeris, you can lift entire buildings. Since its introduction twenty years ago, aeris has replaced jet propulsion as the primary means of commercial flight. It can be found in roughly a third of all automobiles. I imagine in another twenty years, ground cars will be an antiquity. Zack?”

“Have there been any other cataclysms since 1912? And has anyone developed a weapon that more or less does the same thing?”

“Mercifully, no to both. The Cataclysm has been a one-time occurrence. And though temporis has certainly been weaponized in various ways, no one’s invented the means to re-create an event of that scale. If anyone does develop the technology, it’ll be either England or China.”

“Why not the U.S.?”

“America hasn’t been involved in war since 1898.”

Quint wasn’t surprised to see six hanging jaws in response. He sighed patiently.

“Again, a broader topic for another day. I’ll just say for now that among its many other effects, the Cataclysm drove us inward as a nation. David, you have a question?”

“Yes, I gather from your omission that there isn’t a device that does what Mia does. Correct?”

Quint emitted a smile that made Mia want to hide under her chair. “That is indeed the case. For all our advances, the act of time travel itself remains purely hypothetical. At least it did until our lovely young Mia came along. As far as science is concerned, she’s the first person in history to transport physical matter from one point in time to another.”

While Quint spoke, Zack furtively edged his sketchbook into Theo’s view. Among all the notes and doodles was a large query, circled twice.

What’s your weirdness?

Zack had left his pencil out for Theo’s use, but after five seconds of addled silence, he took it back to add a postscript.

Just being nosy. Forget I asked.

A few moments later, Theo commandeered the pad and wrote his reply. Zack eyed him in blinking turmoil. “Are you kidding?”

“Afraid not.”

“Wow. I don’t even know how to react to that.”