The group watched Czerny with puppy-headed interest as he inserted a small cartridge into the machine. For the next two hours, the Silvers sat wide-eyed, mesmerized by their first taste of lumivision. Crystal-clear sounds filled the room from every corner. The colors popped off the screen like oil paint. Mia couldn’t spot the image pixels, even when pressing her eyes to the glass.
They were soon given a teeming box of blockbuster movies, enough to keep them busy for months. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the films were all space operas and fantasy sagas, nothing that would shed light on the world outside their window. Once Mia figured out the console controls, she confirmed Zack’s suspicion that the physicists blocked their access to live broadcast channels.
“It’s nothing sinister,” Quint later assured them. “We’re merely trying to limit your culture shock. Have patience. When the time is right, we’ll tell you everything we know.”
None of them were convinced, but at least now they were distracted. The Silvers gradually settled into their routine like office drones, cooperating with the scientists by day and retreating into escapist entertainments at night. By the end of July, even Zack had grown lazy in limbo. The shock of apocalypse had settled into a more enduring malaise. He wasn’t in a hurry to have his mind jostled again.
On August 6, a million angry pathogens invaded the property on the skin of a sniffling physicist, clobbering the foreign immune systems of every guest. Only David got off lightly with a runny nose. The rest were thrown deep into flu.
For Beatrice Caudell, part-time biologist and full-time germaphobe, this was Armageddon. She squeaked a litany of worst-case scenarios to Czerny—tales of viral mutation and global decimation. None of her fears came to pass. But when Hannah sneezed her way into a whole new velocity, when a fever dream caused Amanda to pulverize the ceiling, when Mia received a get-well note from her future self, and when everyone started hearing the voices in David’s head, there was no more hiding from the issue. For Sterling Quint, his physicists, and the poor beleaguered Silvers, it was finally time to address the weirdness.
—
Zack was the first to get a handle on his new peculiarity.
From the moment he grasped the temporal nature of his talent, he embarked on a cautious secret mission to study it. He retreated under his blanket with a penlight, squinting at the pencil strokes on his sketch pad until they disappeared at will. Zack found it a basic but slippery trick of concentration, like spelling words backward.
After a mere day’s practice, he was able to banish all sorts of paper-related maladies to a state of never-happenedness—crumples and smudges, rips and spittle. Anything doable was suddenly undoable, a prospect that terrified him as much as it thrilled him. He began smuggling fruits into his room to unslice and de-ripen.
On the day the flu virus invaded his body, he tried to send an orange on an accelerated journey back to its infancy. Instead he accidentally aged it rotten. To Zack’s astonishment, he could spin the clock in both directions, though it would be weeks before he gained control of his fast-forward feature.
On August 9, he warily revealed his weirdness to his hosts. Quint, Czerny, and a trio of associates eyed him from the far end of the conference table as he blew his nose into a tissue.
“Okay, this cold’s knocking the crap out of me, so I’ll keep it short. I seem to have acquired the ability to affect time. I can reverse or advance the chronology of small objects, like a sheet of paper or a piece of bread. I don’t know how or why this is happening. I just know that I’m too freaked out to keep it to myself anymore. I’ll also stab the first one of you who tries to dissect me. Questions?”
They had questions, enough for Quint to assign a dedicated team to study Zack’s new talent. The physicists observed him in a laboratory, recording and measuring as he worked his way through an endless gauntlet of test materials. Glass, metal, bresin, stone—there was seemingly nothing he couldn’t de-age. He even restored the missing leg on a wooden horse figurine, though the new limb looked bleached by comparison.
When Zack described his feat to David at their next dinner, the boy became vexed.
“That’s insane. I assume the original horse leg still exists somewhere. Did it magically teleport from its location when you restored the figurine? Or did you somehow create a duplicate?”
“The eggheads seem to think it’s a duplicate.”
David shook his head in agitation. “I can’t tell you how much that violates the basic laws of science.”
Zack had expected to see the same amount of hair-pulling from the scientists themselves, but they remained oddly placid. If anything, they seemed more interested in the biology behind Zack’s power than the physics.
Soon Zack felt daring enough to test his magic on his silver bracelet, with surprising results. Just a small bit of reversing caused the band to break apart into four even quarters, all perfectly polished at the edges.