and if all goes well I will join in. My name is Bobbie Quicksilver. I may not be one of you, but I share your dreams. Together, we can make things happen.
The first concert was in a derelict depot near Pittsburgh, where Quicksilver sang for an hour in front of a hundred stunned spectators before vanishing (some claimed literally) just ahead of the cops.
A week later, Silverheads commandeered a vacant lot in McKeesport, withheld announcement of the event until ninety minutes before the show, and got Quicksilver for nearly two sets. Some said he would have played longer if a television crew hadn’t arrived with satellite van and cameras.
“We’re not about publicity,” Quicksilver wrote in a post the next day. “When people are ready, we will reveal our agenda. Until then, we’ll play in the shadows.”
Soon fans were staging five to six shows a month, with Silverheads commandeering locations as far west as Indiana. But not everyone who discovered the concerts became a true believer, and some of the skeptics posted blogs warning of hidden threats, secret agendas. Inexplicably, such comments soon disappeared, and their sources never posted on the subject again.
Ariana’s preliminary survey of the Quicksilver scene ended with her announcing she was one such skeptic. Unlike the others, however, she claimed to possess the journalistic acumen to expose the mystery. She wrote: “This screed has been timed to go live while I’m attending Quicksilver’s most recent show. Later tonight, I intend to report what I see. Check back. All will be revealed.”
It was nearly midnight. I refreshed my screen, hoping Ariana had posted her update. But instead of getting a new blog entry, I was soon staring at 404 Error: Page Not Found. Her site had vanished. I hit the browser’s reload; the error message reappeared.
I was in the process of reentering the URL from my palm when a sudden buzzing broke my concentration.
Someone was downstairs, ringing to be let in.
I crossed the room, pressed the talk button. “Yeah?”
“Lorcan!” It was Ariana, sounding even more unhinged than when we’d been running from the Silverheads. “Lorcan! Help me!”
I put my finger on the unlock switch, hesitated, then hit the talk button once more. “Hold on. I’m coming down.”
“Lorcan!” Her voice echoed in the hall outside my apartment, rising up the stairwell. With it came a frantic pounding, as if she were slapping her hands against the glass. “Help me!”
I hurried down, bare feet slipping on the nappy carpet, trying to get to her before she broke the window. But when I reached the front hall, I stopped cold.
“Lorcan! Help me!”
Handprints covered the pane, smeared and streaked, almost hiding her face behind a haze of blood.
Quicksilver had ambushed her as she rode away. But it wasn’t the Quicksilver I had seen in the warehouse. That image had been a lie.
“You didn’t see the truth, Lorcan.” She lay in my bathtub, cleaning her wounds, her clothes a bloody heap on the bathroom floor. “What you saw tonight—what you and all those other people saw, it wasn’t the real Quicksilver.” She had three gashes running from her left temple to the corner of her mouth. One gash just missed her eye, but another had snagged her ear and ripped out the gage. Her lobe dangled, split in two.
“I should take you to the hospital.”
“No, Lorcan. No way.”
“I don’t think I can patch you up myself.”
“You’re going to try.” She sat up, sloshing in the bloody water. In spite of her wounds, she was beautiful. I shouldn’t have noticed that, considering her condition. But there it was, and she must have sensed what I was thinking because she said: “We could get it on if I wasn’t so messed up, Lorcan.”
“That’s okay, Ariana.”
“What? That I’m messed up?”
“Not that.”
“That we can’t get it on?”
“You know what I mean.”
She reached for me, pushing back the collar of my robe, seeing how the worst of my scars extended to my chest. “Tell me about this.”
“It’s from another life, Ariana.”
“You said that before. Now tell me the rest.” She shifted again, wincing deeper this time. “Come on. I’m in a pretty good position to sympathize. Tell me.”
I turned away, thinking it through, deciding where to begin, how much to tell. “I was in Afghanistan,” I said at last. “I’d gotten into some trouble. I was lost.”
“Like tonight?”
“Yeah, but that’s not typical. I almost never get lost, even in unfamiliar terrain. I have an intuitive sense of direction, but that night I’d been injured.” I raised my robe