The Silvers Series Character Guide

The Orphans

The Pelletiers chose ninety-nine people from ten different parts of the world and transported them to a parallel Earth, where an energy called temporis runs rampant across the globe. As a result, each of these orphans has acquired different abilities to manipulate time.

Some of the orphan groups, like the Golds of New York, were nearly wiped out of existence by enemies they never even knew they had. Others, like the Silvers of San Diego, managed to survive against the many new forces that are trying to kill or capture them.

Here are the orphans you got to meet in Books 1 and 2, plus their age at the start of The War of the Givens.

Hannah is a shifter, with the power to slow down time and move faster than the people around her. Unfortunately, she pushed her abilities past their natural limits in The Song of the Orphans, and now can’t use her power without causing neurological damage.

Hannah is the younger sister of Amanda Given. While they never had the best relationship on the old world, their life-or-death struggles have forged them into the tightest of siblings.

The events of The Song of the Orphans has left Hannah in pretty rough shape. She has neurological damage from overusing her powers, making every new speed run a risk to her life. And her kind-heareted boyfriend, Jonathan Christie, was murdered right in front of her by her nemesis, Evan Ranfer. She can barely rest until she finds and kills the bastard before he takes another loved one from her life.

Amanda is a tempic who projects hard white force from her hands. Though her powers can stray with her emotional state, she’s trained herself to keep control, and even learned a few new tricks since The Song of the Orphans.

Her romantic relationship with her fellow orphan, Zack, has caused them both endless problems with the Pelletiers, who want all the Silvers to breed with Gothams. Through Zack, they made a take-it-or-leave it deal that allows him to be with Amanda, as long as he tries to conceive a child with Mercy Lee once a month, and as long as Amanda does the same with Peter. They all reluctantly accepted.

Zack’s a turner, with the ability to reverse or advance time in a localized area. His talent gives him the power to heal and hurt people, though he much prefers the former.

The Pelletiers have not been kind to Zack, especially in The Song of the Orphans. Their capture and mental torture of him has left a permanent scar on his psyche, and has put him on a vendetta course with the three most dangerous beings on Earth.

Theo is an augur, with the ability to see the future and its many branching possibilities. His unique ability to visit the God’s Eye at will sets him apart from the other augurs of the world. To some, he’s considered a messiah.

Despite the high regard that his people have for him, Theo can barely stand his foresight and the responsibility that comes with it. Nevertheless, he’s obsessed with finding a way to save this Earth from the destruction that claimed the old one.

Theo left the group at the end of The Song of the Orphans to wander the world in search of answers.

There’s just one problem: his entire life is a lie. It’s revealed toward the end of The Song of the Orphans that David is actually Semerjean Pelletier: the patriarch of the family who disguised himself as a teenage boy to keep the Silvers alive and to manipulate them from within.

Once his ruse was exposed, Semerjean abandoned the “David” persona and rejoined his wife and son. Though he still claims that he wants the best for the Silvers, their feelings for him have taken a much darker turn.

Mia’s a traveler with the ability to create portals in space and time. While at first she used them to receive prescient notes from her future selves, she learned from her mentor, Peter Pendergen, how to teleport herself through the present. By the end of The Song of the Orphans, she’d established herself as a traveler of incredible potential.

Of all the Silvers, Mia had the closest relationship with “David,” and feels the most betrayed. It didn’t help that, as Semerjean, he reversed Mia’s girlfriend, Carrie Bloom, two years—erasing all the girl’s knowledge of Mia and their relationship. Now Mia wants nothing more than revenge against Semerjean, even if the world has to die as a consequence.

Like Amanda, Heath is a tempic, though he channels his power in the form of self-acting creatures, most typically wolves.

Heath was one of the last two survivors of the Golds of the New York, along with the musician named Jonathan Christie, who Heath loved like a brother. Sadly, Jonathan died at the end of The Song of the Orphans, leaving Heath as the last remaining Gold. Hannah has since resolved to take Jonathan’s place as Heath’s chief guardian and emotional lifeline.

Evan’s unique ability to send his consciousness back in time has put him in an awful situation. He lives the same five years over and over again, trapped between the end of his native world and the death of the new one. Jaded, angry, and more than a little crazy, Evan chooses to spend his time tormenting his fellow Silvers, most especially Hannah, for slights and transgressions that they made against him in previous timelines.

While Evan spent most of The Song of the Orphans in Pelletier captivity, they released him without explanation or condition. His latest strike against the Silvers was the murder of Jonathan Christie, a vicious act that’s cemented his place at the top of Hannah’s kill list.

Now the teenage Coppers call her Mother, and she gave them all new names to reflect their temporal abilities.

Though Zack and Mia tried unsuccessfully to recruit the Coppers in The Song of the Orphans, the group found their way to the underland at the end of the book, and are now fully integrated among the Silvers and Gothams.

Born Nadiyah Al-Marri, See is an augur with a skill that rival Theo’s. Her foresight has saved the Coppers on multiple occasions, and has made her a trusted ally to her new friends in the underland.

Like Mother above and Caleb below, See will play a significant role in The War of the Givens.

The Gothams

Unlike the orphans, the Gothams are all natives to the alternate Earth, having received their chronokinetic abilities through good, old-fashioned genetics. Their grandparents or great-grandparents had been devolping in utero in the outskirts of the Cataclysm when it destroyed half of New York City in 1912, altering their DNA.

After nearly two decades of living alone in secret, the first generation of Gothams found each other  and formed a clandestine community in the town of Quarter Hill, New York. By the time the orphans arrived on the new world, the clan was 1,100 strong, with a whole secret village buried beneath Quarter Hill where they could use their powers freely.

Though the Gothams had been misled into treating the orphans as enemies, they overcame their differences in The Song of the Orphans and adopted the Silvers and Heath into their clan. Many Gotham characters were introduced in Book Two, and many of them died after the U.S. government invaded the underland.

The following are some of the most notable survivors who play a sizeable role in The War of the Givens.

When the orphans and Pelletiers arrived in their world, triggering visions of apocalypse among the clan’s augurs, Peter was the only Gotham to insist that the orphans weren’t responsible for it. In fact, one of the group, Theo Maranan, held the key to saving the world.

After his plea fell on deaf ears, Peter left the Gothams to help protect and guide the Silvers. Ever since, he’s been a loved and trusted member of the family. He’s been a father and teacher to Mia Farisi, who shares his portal-making abilities. And thanks to circumstance and the subtle manipulations of Semerjean, Peter has entered into a complex and troubled romance with Amanda.

He is now a trusted friend to the Silvers, though the Pelletiers see him as a perfect breeding partner for Mia.

Even before the Gothams made peace with the orphans, Mercy left Rebel’s violent crusade and became a friend and ally to the Silvers. Her relationship with Zack evolved into a casual romance, until Mercy finally realized that he’d never get over Amanda, and broke up with him.

Unfortunately, the Pelletiers aren’t done with them. At the end of The Song of the Orphans, they coerced her and Zack to make a child together…or to have their loved ones suffer the Pelletiers’ wrath.

But as punishment for Mia trying to kill his wife, Semerjean reversed Carrie from age 15 to 13, erasing all her memories from the past two years, including everything she knew about Mia. Rather than try to fill in the gap, Mia has chosen to leave Carrie alone, lest the Pelletiers try to hurt her again.

Stan is only partly grateful, preferring keep him and his daughter away from the Silvers, in case another one of them is a secret Pelletier.

Through her tense liaison with Semerjean, she makes sure that none of the prophets in her clan reveal any damning knowledge about future events, especially those that could thwart the Pelletiers’ plans. She also played a crucial role in getting Zack and Mercy together for procreation purposes.

But unlike Peter, Michael never enjoyed his life among the Gothams, as their social structure wasn’t especially kind to gays and lesbians.

He left the clan five years ago to live his own life, then made a startling decision to “come out” with his precognitive abilities. Now the whole world knows him as Merlin McGee, the only known prophet in human history with a verifiable track record. His predictions of upcoming natural disasters have saved countless lives, making him a hero to millions.

Though Peter sees Michael as selfish for having abandoned the whole “save the world” crusade in favor of fame and riches, Theo suspects that “Merlin’s” motives are a lot more complicated than they seem.

Integrity

The National Integrity Commission was formed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1913, in the wake of the New York Cataclysm. Their mission: to root out all foreign and supernatural threats before another American city is destroyed.

But for most of its existence, Integrity has been infamous around the world for its unchecked violence and subterfuge.

The Gothams learned this the hard way, when a ruthless senior agent named Oren Gingold found their underground hideout and staged a massive raid. Though the Gothams ultimately prevailed, more than the ten percent of the clan was killed, along with half the invading government force.

And there’s was no putting the genie back in the bottle. All Integrity could do, unless the wise counsel of its new leader, was form a skittish peace accord, in the which the Gothams continued to live as freely as possible, though under the watchful supervision of Integrity.

By The Song of the Orphans, she was recruited into the Integrity by Cedric Cain, a good-natured man who shared her view that the Silvers weren’t criminals, but victims of greater forces.

With Cain’s help, Melissa formed an uneasy alliance with the Silvers, even saving their lives during Integrity’s siege of the underland.

Now Melissa serves as Integrity’s chief liaison and den mother to the orphans, and has become a trusted partner in their fight to prevent the coming apocalypse.

After Oren Gingold’s botched and costly raid of the underland, the President of the United States promoted Cain to Acting Director of Integrity, and gave him carte blanche to handle the orphans and Gothams as he sees fit…as long as he does it quietly. The last thing any of them want is for word to get out that the United States has a secret society of timebending superpeople.

The Pelletiers

These are the ones who started it all, a three-member family of powerful beings from a future that’s close to utopia. The only problem they have is terminus, a debilitating disease that affects all timebenders eventually, and can’t be cured by any advanced means.

It was Esis Pelletier, the matriarch of the trio and a brilliant neurogeneticist of her era, who speculated that a cure could be found in the DNA of their earliest chronokinetic ancestors: the Gothams of Quarter Hill, New York. If their genes could be merged with select people from an alternate past (a.k.a. the orphans), the very last disease of their era could be cured, paving the way to immortality.

But for three staunch crusaders of life, the Pelletiers sure do kill a lot. As far as they’re concerned, the Earth of the Silvers and the Earth of the Gothams are both dead-end branches of history. These people are nothing but a means to an end for the powerful Pelletier family.

He also makes the big decisions, having invented a special form of temporis that not only allows the Pelletiers to survive time travel, but to move laterally across the strings of the multiverse, though not without damage to the alternate Earths they visit.

Azral is so cold and aloof in demeanor that the Silvers half-wonder if he’s a robot. Only a few of his enemies have learned the hard way that the man does indeed have a temper.

Her mind, however, has evolved for centuries. But thanks to her late-stage terminus, she’s slowly losing her mind and faculties.

But her temporal powers are strong as they ever were, and she tends to use them as the slightest provocation. That makes her the least stable and most dangerous of the family.

Unlike Azral and Esis, who are consistently off-putting (some might say “terrifying”) to the orphans and Gothams, Semerjean is a natural charmer and a master of emotional manipulation.

It was his idea to de-age himself and pose as a young Australian Silver named David Dormer, a scheme that furthered the Pelletiers’ plans while limiting their collateral damage.

Despite all the hurt he’s caused as “David,” Semerjean strongly believes that he and his family are the true moral heroes of the story. After all, they’re fighting to save trillions of lives from their era, while the Silvers are scrambling to save a mere couple of billion from a world they barely know.

In a Class by Herself

Her only consistencies are the two parallel watches that she wears on her right wrist, plus her ability to see the past, present and future in all its many forms.

Though she’s helped the Silvers before with her prescient knowledge, she’s also caused them damage. In The Song of the Orphans, our heroes learn that it was Ioni who’d initially misled the Gothams into treating the orphans as enemies, a lie that nearly killed them all, and claimed the lives of six young Golds.

Even worse, Ioni persuaded Mia to fire a gun at Esis Pelletier, promising that the bullet would kill her. It didn’t. It merely enraged both Esis and Semerjean, with dire consequences for Mia and her girlfriend Carrie.

Whoever she is, Theo remains convinced that she’s on their side, and is playing four-dimensional chess for the greater good. At the very least, he’s absolutely sure of two things about her: that she wants to stop the coming apocalypse, and that she truly hates the Pelletiers.

Some Dead Folks Worth Remembering

His talent for turning objects intangible and “dropping” them through the floor of the Earth had saved more than one friend’s life on occasion.

Unfortunately for Jonathan, he began a romantic relationship with Hannah, which stood in the way of the Pelletiers’ plans for her. At the end of Book 2, Azral gives the greenlight to Evan Rander to take Jonathan out of the picture, and Evan gleefully complies.

Jonathan’s death remains a painful scar on everyone who knew and loved him, especially Hannah and Heath.

Rebel’s constant threat to the orphans put him on the wrong side of the Pelletiers, with awful consequences. In addition to witnessing the death of several teammates, Rebel lost his twin sons while they were still in his wife’s womb: a horrible act that the Pelletiers were all too happy to take credit for.

Since then, all of Rebel’s vengeance turned sharply onto the Pelletiers. He died at the end of The Song of the Orphans, after nearly killing Semerjean and Esis with a well-placed bomb in his prosthetic hand.

Sadly, Esis killed Ivy first, with a time-traveling bullet that Rebel had fired at Esis’ head seven months prior.

These days Ivy is a cautionary tale for Zack, Mia, and anyone else who’s in danger of letting their hatred for the Pelletiers overtake them.

After Ivy was killed by Pelletiers, and Rebel made an uneasy peace with the Silvers, Gemma put together a team of preadolescent Gothams to take out the Silvers once and for all. Ironically, it was David, a.k.a. Semerjean, who came closest to death during her sneak attack.

In retaliation, Esis sent Gemma’s consciousness back in time to her infant body, where she’d be forced to live her young and turbulent life all over again. Her body back in the present day survived as an empty husk for three weeks before its systems shut down forever.

Jealous of the steamy romance that Jury and Hannah had enjoyed in previous chronologies, Evan found Jury just minutes after arriving on the new world, and then stabbed him to death in a back alley.

Though Hannah has no memory of Jury, Evan went out of his way to tell her what she lost. He gave her Jury’s old driver license as a teasing reminder of the handsome man she’d never meet now, and Hannah’s kept it with her ever since.

Once Semerjean’s ruse was finally exposed, he told Yvonne the ugly truth and prepared to let her go. Unfortunately, Esis wasn’t feeling as charitable and snapped the poor girl’s neck.

It was at Yvonne’s funeral that all the Gothams assembled into the underland, which made it a perfect time for Integrity to lay siege to the place.

But then things went wrong—very wrong—and the underland descended into chaos. Gingold was the first to die in the Gothams’ retribution.

Though Integrity is trying to maintain a respectful détente with the timebenders of Quarter Hill, the Gothams aren’t quick to forget the slaughter at the hands of the government.