Zack was all too happy to stop. From the moment the sky came down on the convention center, he’d retreated to his own private cineplex. He watched himself from the front row, confident that the hero would survive and all would be explained by the end of Act I. It wasn’t until he encountered Hannah that the fourth wall crumbled and he fell into the messy reality of his predicament.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Zack said. “I don’t know why we were singled out for bracelets. If your guy was as scary as mine, then . . . I don’t know. I don’t think they’re in a hurry to bring us into the loop.” He darkly eyed his silver band. “So to speak.”
Hannah sucked a sharp breath as she suffered her third and worst attack of hot needle stings. She huddled forward on the bench, wincing. “So what did . . . what did this guy say when he gave you your bracelet?”
Zack jerked a nervous shrug. “It didn’t make any sense. I don’t even know if I heard it right.”
“What was it?”
“He said, ‘Any other weekend, you’d be one of the Golds.’”
Hannah eyed him in dim bewilderment. “One of the Golds.”
“Yeah.”
“That makes no sense.”
“No kidding.”
“Jesus, Zack. What are we going to do?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t rightly know. I guess sticking together is the first step, if you can tolerate my company a little while longer. We’re going to need cash, or whatever passes for—”
The world fell abruptly silent as Hannah flinched in agony. Her skin stung like she was covered in firecrackers. Her heart rate doubled. Her vision took on a deep blue shade.
She pressed her palms to her face. “Oh God. I think I need a doctor.”
Oddly, Zack didn’t reply. She caught him staring ahead at the ocean, perfectly still and expressionless. He didn’t even blink.
“Zack, did you hear me? I feel like I’m dying!”
She jerked his sleeve, tearing a three-inch hole in the shoulder seam. The fabric felt tough somehow, like Zack had over-starched it. And he still didn’t acknowledge her.
Hannah struggled to her feet and moved directly in front of him. “Zack! Snap out of it! Please! I need you!”
Now his head tilted upward with all the speed of a sunrise, his eyes blooming wide in bother. A small voice in Hannah’s head insisted that she’d seen all this before as a child—the slowness, the blue haze, the odd taste of burning ash.
“What . . . who’s doing this?”
She frantically scanned the area. All over the marina, people moved at an absurdly lethargic pace, as if they all colluded on a silly pantomime. A middle-aged jogger creaked through a bounding stride. An Irish setter charged after a tennis ball with slow-motion pomp. A trio of seagulls spun in the air like a nursery mobile.
“WHO’S DOING THIS?”
Hannah turned back to Zack, who now watched her in rigid horror. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bubble. Maybe he could explain it. Except . . . except . . .
Except there was no bubble this time, no white-haired man with his finger on the clock. It was just Hannah and the world moving at two different speeds.
It’s you, her higher functions insisted. You’re the one doing this.
“No . . .”
The last working piston in her mind told her to run, and so she ran. She ran over the grass and out of the marina, through the alley and all the way back to the business district. Wherever she went, she couldn’t escape the smoky blue haze. Everywhere she looked, cars moved like pedestrians and pedestrians moved like turtles. Litter scraps fluttered in the wind like lazy bumblebees.
Suddenly a large shadow enveloped her. She turned around and looked up.
A massive metal saucer, the size of a Little League field, emerged over the building tops. It floated hundreds of feet above the asphalt, slowly spinning on its own axis.
Unlike everything else in Hannah’s trudging blue world, the ship moved at a decent pace, at least twenty miles an hour. From below, it looked like a giant metal wagon wheel. Each wedge was filled with a fluorescent white light.
Once the silver hub came into view, Hannah saw a tableau of man-size letters.
ALBEE’S AERSTRAUNT
ALL-AMERICAN CUISINE
2-HOUR BRUNCH ROUNDS @ 8X
FOR RESERVATIONS CALL #49-95-ALBEE
Her last thread of perseverance snapped. A shriek rose up from the core of her being. She ran again, her frantic gaze fixed on the high-flying bistro. Her wind sprint lasted fifteen feet, ending smack at the side of a parked Metro bus. A crunch. A crack. A wall of pain. And then Hannah’s whole crazy world, her terra insana, went from blue to black.
—
She opened her eyes to white clouds. The heads of a dozen bystanders formed a popcorn string around the edge of her vision. She could feel the cold, hard sidewalk beneath her aching body. The deep blue madness had ended, thank God. Her onlookers moved and talked at normal speed.
As soon as Hannah tried to get up, a sharp agony seized her left shoulder. She cried out.
A new head eclipsed her view—a stout, middle-aged man with beady brown eyes and a thick walrus mustache. He wore an authoritative green uniform that Hannah didn’t recognize. A cop? A guard? A forest ranger?
“Try not to move,” he told her. “You wrenched yourself pretty good.”