The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(62)

“Guess I don’t either.”

“Is everything all right?” Quint asked them.

“Yeah,” Zack replied. “Just a lot to absorb. I think our heads are about to spin off.”

“Well, why don’t we stop here then?”

Theo fled the room as fast as politeness would allow. Hannah watched him exit, then cautiously approached Zack.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” the cartoonist replied, still vexed. When he asked Theo about his weirdness, he’d steeled his mind for yet another metaphysical brain-bender. But Theo’s answer truly threw him. A four-word deposition, delivered straight from right field.

I don’t have one.

—

That night, Theo ate his first dinner with the group. He kept a tense gaze at his food, forcing his eyes away from all the notable distractions—Amanda’s cast, Hannah’s chest, David’s teeming pile of raw sliced carrots. Even worse were Zack’s sporadic displays of time-twisting madness. He undid Theo’s bracelet with a tap of the finger, then proceeded on two separate requests to freshen up breads and vegetables. No one else seemed bothered by the sheer insanity of his table trick. And these were supposedly the people from Theo’s world.

Though he tried to stay quiet through the course of the meal, he was dragged through a gauntlet of idle queries by David. Maranan. Is that a Thai name? Filipino. Did you grow up in the Philippines? Nope. I was born and raised in San Francisco. How old are you? I’m twenty-three. Do you have any siblings? No. Just a whole mess of cousins.

“What made you decide on law school?” Zack asked.

Theo massaged his liberated wrist while he danced through the minefield of his past.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m from a big clan of overachievers. There was a lot of pressure to be someone. I think the plan was to get my JD, then a few years of public crusading, then local politics, then national politics, and then . . . I don’t know. My own monument, I guess. Something in a nice onyx.”

Zack smiled. He knew he liked Theo for a reason. “What did you do after you left?”

Theo’s dark chuckle was enough to make Zack regret the question. “Let’s just say I bummed around for a while.”

Hannah stroked her lip as she recalled their first conversation. He’d called himself a rehab washout, a blight on the family tree who’d tried to hang himself at least once. She didn’t think a lousy time at law school would be enough to send him on such a spiral.

David stirred his carrots with an idle fork. “How long have you been an alcoholic?”

“David!”

He looked to Amanda in surprise. “What? We’re all friends here. Must we pretend?”

In the wake of Mia’s stern glare, David sighed at Theo with grudging reproach. “If I crossed any lines of decorum, I sincerely apologize.”

Theo grinned softly. If anything, the faux pas made him appreciate David now. The kid was a fellow misfit, all brains and no wisdom. He reminded Theo of himself, in better days.

“It’s okay, David. You’re not the first one to bring it up. And you’re right. I’ve had a problem for . . . shit, it started about two years after law school, so it’s been at least five years.”

“That’s a long time,” David said.

“You’re telling me.”

Zack furrowed his brow. “Wait. You said you’re twenty-three.”

“I am,” Theo responded, with a weary exhale. Here we go again.

“And yet you dropped out of law school seven years ago.”

“I did.”

Hannah shook her head in amazement. “Holy crap. You were sixteen?”

Theo shrugged nonchalantly. “I told you I came from a clan of overachievers.”

“That goes beyond overachieving,” Amanda remarked. “You’re a full-on prodigy.”

He shrugged again. “Well, that’s what they called me, but I never thought I was particularly brilliant. Just good at tests. In any case, I did a fine job squandering any promise I might have had. I flamed out early, then went on to do very stupid things. I won’t bother you with details. I’ll just say that when my karma finally comes rolling around, you’re not going to want to be anywhere near me. You’re going to want to find another planet.”

Upon seeing the heavy sets of eyes around the table, Theo felt a pang of guilt for darkening their day. His inner demon wanted to keep on pushing, to list his crimes and grievances in such exquisite detail that none of them would speak to him again. He’d become quite adept at burning bridges, and there was a certain comfort in setting these five flames in advance.

Indeed, just twelve hours later, Mia received a rolled-up warning from future times.

Don’t let Theo push you away. He’s a good man who’s hanging by a thread. He needs you all. The time will come when everyone will need him.

And I mean everyone.

—

Three days after the presentation, Quint finally agreed to remove the clamp from the lumivision. Czerny unlocked the console to the whole broadcast spectrum—thirty-nine channels, no waiting.

“Just thirty-nine?” Zack asked.

Czerny assumed Zack was joking. To Europeans like himself, even thirty-nine channels smacked of American overindulgence.