The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(84)

“There’s only one outcome that matters,” Azral insisted. “They go east. To Pendergen.”

“Assuming they don’t fall on the way.”

Azral wrapped his arms around Esis and cast a soulful gaze down the driveway.

“They will not fall,” he assured her. “Not the important ones, at least.”

—

Nobody knew where they were going, least of all Zack. His only goal now was to avoid looping back into police search paths. Every chance he got, he drove east into the rising sun.

Twelve miles from the site of their standoff, the engine fell to sickly whirrs. Zack veered onto a narrow forest road and pulled over to the dirt. He felt relatively good about ditching the van here in a desolate area, under the thick canopy of trees. He could only assume that the police hunt had extended to helicopters or whatever they used here to make pigs fly.

He gave everyone five minutes to gather their wits and scant belongings, but Amanda insisted on ten. She’d discovered a sterilized pack of sutures at the bottom of Czerny’s med kit and was determined to close Theo’s wound before they all proceeded on foot.

While the others exited, she remained with Theo in the back of the van. She saw him wincing with every stroke of the needle.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m an oncology nurse. I don’t do this very often.”

“You’re doing fine.”

Theo studied her as she made her final stitches. Her expression was tight and unsettled, like crumbling stone.

“They have those healing machines,” he reminded her. “Anything you did to those cops will be undone.”

“Not if I killed them.”

“I don’t think you did.”

Amanda didn’t think so either, but she couldn’t escape the grim possibilities. She’d pinned those men down with the hands of a giant. Another ounce of thought and she could have crushed them like eggs. It had taken her years to accept cancer as part of God’s great plan. She didn’t even know where to start with tempis.

Twenty feet away, Mia paced the side of the road, kicking tiny stones with vacant bother. She couldn’t shake the tickle from her cheek, the strip of skin that the policeman’s bullet had kissed with hot air. Someone just fired a gun at her face. And yet somehow she was still standing.

David chucked acorns at the treetops, startling numerous birds.

“What’s going on in that head of yours, Miafarisi?”

“I was just thinking how you saved my life back in that building. I never even thanked you.”

David shrugged as if he’d merely lent her a nickel. “No worries. Just glad we’re all still breathing.”

He caught his oversight and turned to Mia in hot remorse. She threw her dismal gaze inside the van, at the blanket-draped corpse of Constantin Czerny.

“Shoot. Mia, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she told him. “I just feel bad leaving him like this.”

“We can’t bury him,” David said. “There’s no time. No reason. The police will only dig him up.”

Mia didn’t think she had any tears left in her, and yet her eyes welled up again.

“He was nice.”

David pulled her into a soft embrace, resting his chin on her scalp. Such a sweet thing, this Miafarisi. Such a sweet child.

Zack leaned against the driver’s door, nervously tapping his foot. Between all the traumas of the recent past and all his worries about the near future, he found the energy to mourn the sketchbook he’d left behind in Terra Vista. It was the last surviving relic of his old life. Now he had nothing left but memories.

Hannah emerged from the woods, red-faced and puffy-eyed. She’d gone into the trees to vomit, but it turned out all she needed was a few good minutes of unabashed weeping. She wiped her eyes and rested against the van.

“You okay?” Zack asked.

“Yes. Thank you. You’re still an *.”

He’d already apologized twice for making her run after the van. She didn’t care. She was suffering the second-worst morning of her life and she needed to be irrational about something.

He took her hand and pushed a small silver disc into her palm. “There.”

“What’s this?”

“Restitution. I found it in the cup holder.”

Hannah studied the coin. It was twice the size and value of a standard quarter, and bore the side-profile portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. She found the inscription under his head—We Persevere—to be ominously cryptic. She could only guess it had something to do with the Cataclysm.

“That’s all the money you found?” she asked.

“That’s all the money we own.”

She pocketed the coin. “Fifty cents. Lovely.”

A red sedan turned a sharp corner onto their road. Hannah tensed up and squeezed Zack’s arm. He squinted at the approaching vehicle.

“It’s okay. It’s not a cop car.”

Loud country-rock music blared from within as the vehicle rolled to a slow stop beside Zack and Hannah. The young driver turned off his radio and leaned over to the passenger side, whistling in wonder at the dilapidated van.

“Hoo-EE! I’ve seen some threeped-up rides in my time, amigos, but that is one unhappy son-of-a! You folks doing all right here?”