Hannah had gotten the worst of the downfall. Her face and hair were white with dust. Thin trickles of blood oozed from her forehead, her shoulders.
Amanda rushed to her side. “Hannah! Are you okay?”
“No! What happened?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe it was an earthquake. I . . .”
Amanda suddenly registered the jarring nakedness on her arms. Her shirtsleeves were shredded. The fiber cast on her wrist had mysteriously vanished. Even her wedding ring was gone.
Oh no . . .
Three hours later, she sat in the medical lab, staring darkly at her lap while Czerny made a replacement cast for her.
“Your sister’s fine,” he assured Amanda. “She’s already sleeping. The damage—”
“I want to see the surveillance footage.”
Czerny paused his work. “I’m not sure that’s wise, Amanda.”
“I have to see it. Please.”
Soon she sat in his office, watching a bird’s-eye recording of the sisters in slumber. As Amanda writhed in bed, a thick and craggy whiteness expanded from the skin of her arms—snapping her ring, rending her cast. She threw her palms upward in somnolent fury. They exploded like fire hoses, shooting flowing cones of force at the ceiling camera. The video turned to snowy static.
The shock of the incident sent Amanda into self-imposed exile. She retreated to her new single, accepting no visitors, opening her door only for food trays and sedatives.
“I don’t care what it takes,” she told Quint over the phone. “I’ll consent to any test. Any procedure. Just find out what’s in me and get it out.”
At noon, Hannah shambled out of bed and joined the others for lunch in the bistro. She poked a feeble spoon at her chicken soup, her body wallowing under its many new aches and bandages.
“Has anyone spoken to my sister?”
“I did,” Mia replied, through a sickly rasp. “She’d only talk to me through the door. She won’t let anyone come near her until she’s cured of her thing.”
Zack shook his head. “There’s no cure. She just has to learn how to control it.”
“Tall order,” David griped. By all accounts, the boy was having his own weirdness issues—strange, ghostly sounds that plagued him day and night. Just five minutes before Hannah came downstairs, an invisible baby cried right in his ear. Zack and Mia heard it too.
“Maybe you can talk her out,” Zack said to Hannah.
She snorted cynically. “I was never able to convince her of anything. And after the awful thing I said to her last night, I’m better off . . . just . . .”
Hannah turned away for a soul-rattling sneeze. The moment it passed, she felt a deep chill on her skin. She saw her own spray fluttering lazily in the air, like tiny bumblebees. Her vision turned a deep shade of blue.
“Okay, this is strange. I . . .”
She noticed others staring at her in motionless silence, their eyes widening at a creakingly slow pace. The steam from David’s tea dawdled in fat, languid puffs.
Hannah launched from her chair. “Oh no. It’s happening again. Oh God. Someone get Dr. Czerny!”
She realized that none of them could understand her in her accelerated state. Her words were probably coming out as fast as shoe squeaks.
She made a stumbling exit from the bistro, praying to any available god to please, please, please let this madness be temporary. She couldn’t think of a worse hell than spending the rest of her life in prestissimo, an incomprehensible blur to the people around her.
Determined not to dislocate another shoulder, Hannah proceeded up the stairwell with tightrope caution. She knocked on the door to Czerny’s office, then pulled her hand back in agony. Her knuckles throbbed like she’d just punched a mailbox from the window of a speeding car.
By the time Czerny stepped outside, Hannah’s velocity spell had ended. He found her crouched against the wall, crying and holding her injured hand.
“What’s happening to me?”
After a baby spot, a hand splint, and a long night of rest, Hannah met with the physicists for her first controlled attempt at triggering her anomaly. She concentrated, meditated, ruminated for hours. Nothing. The next day, a stray thought accidentally brushed the ignition switch in her mind, triggering seventeen seconds of blue acceleration. Czerny patted her back and offered lyrical promises of a better day tomorrow.
He was right. At 8 P.M. the next night, Hannah excitedly knocked on her sister’s door.
“Amanda? It’s me. Open up.”
Amanda stumbled out of bed, her eyes drooped and bleary from opiates. “Hannah?”
“Yeah. I have good news but you have to open up.”
Amanda cracked the door three inches, studying her sister through an anxious leer. By now all Hannah’s cuts had healed into faint red lines. A new wire splint kept her sprained knuckles flat.
“Did I do that to you?”
“No. I did it. I had another attack but I’m okay. Dr. Czerny helped me find the trigger. I can control it now!”