“I have no idea what you’re—”
“My weirdness,” Hannah explained. “I can turn it on and off. Once I found the mental switch, it was so easy. Like going from talking to singing. If I can do it, so can you.”
Amanda eyed her jadedly. Hannah’s smile faded away. “Look, you’re going to have to do something. You can’t stay in there the rest of your life.”
“I almost killed you, Hannah.”
“Well, you didn’t. I’m fine now. And I’m not the only thing that got fixed up. Look.”
Hannah passed her a small item from her pocket, Amanda’s diamond and gold wedding ring. Despite its violent expulsion from the widow’s finger, the band seemed good as new.
“I found it in the wreckage,” Hannah told her. “The thing was so messed up, it looked like a half-melted horseshoe.”
“It looks great now. How did you fix it?”
“Zack. He says, ‘You’re welcome.’ And I’m saying come out and join us again. Please? We miss you. I miss you.”
The next morning, Amanda sat alone in a second-floor lab, surrounded by towers of elaborate monitoring equipment. A team of physicists watched her from the next room, assuring her through the intercom that it was safe to conjure the whiteness. Though Amanda tried for three hours, the creature wouldn’t come out. She was mostly relieved.
Hannah, meanwhile, continued to work with the scientists to gauge the limits of her velocity. On Monday, she crossed the lawn at an external clock speed of ninety-two miles an hour. On Tuesday, she topped out at ninety-nine. On Wednesday, she broke the three-digit barrier, then nearly snapped her leg when she tripped on a sprinkler nozzle.
“You need to be careful,” Czerny reminded her. “Though it doesn’t feel like it, you’re moving with ten, twenty times your usual momentum. In that mode, you’re all but made of glass.”
On Thursday, Hannah reached a running speed of 128 miles per hour. She fought a giddy cackle at the readout. Time had consistently gotten away from her in her old life, leaving her in a perpetual state of scrambling lateness. Now suddenly the clock bent to her will like a love-struck suitor. This world would be rushing to catch up to her.
“It is amazing,” David admitted. “You’ve been given a true gift.”
The two of them had made an evening custom of strolling the property together. They walked arm in arm inside the fenced perimeter, trading feather-light chatter and crooning soft duets of pop classics. Normally they refrained from discussing their burgeoning paranormalities, but things had been going uncommonly well for one of them.
“Well, let’s not go nuts,” Hannah said. “I’m just zipping around.”
“It’s not the speed I’m marveling at. It’s the way you experience more time than the rest of us. You could live a full hour in the span of a minute, or a day in the span of an hour. Now that we’re aware of how fragile the universe is, our time seems more precious than ever. And now you have the power to make more of it. That’s pretty incredible to me. But what do I know?”
Hannah studied David with uneasy regard. For all her protests, she knew she’d become a little infatuated with the boy. He was a world-class genius, a vegan, a thespian, a sweetheart. All that and gorgeous too. She was almost grateful that he was sixteen, and quite possibly gay. The actress had enough drama to handle.
She squeezed David’s arm and breathed a wistful sigh.
“You know plenty. For a kid.”
While Hannah continued to conquer her talents, Amanda languished in hopeless stagnation. Frustrated, she tracked Zack to the kitchenette. The cartoonist had grown tired of catered food tins and insisted on making his own meals. His culinary prowess didn’t extend far beyond cold cuts.
Amanda watched in bother as he reversed a burnt sandwich roll to a healthy golden brown.
“How do you do it, Zack?”
“If you’re asking about the science, you’re talking to the wrong nerd.”
“I’m asking how you got control,” she said. “You seem to have a perfect handle on your condition. I feel like I have a big white beast living inside of me.”
“Well, that’s your problem right there.”
“What is?”
“The way you’re looking at it. Whatever’s going on with us, it’s not a disease. It’s not a beast. It’s just a new muscle. You’re never going to control it if you’re too afraid to flex it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s easy for you to say. You heal things with your hands. I hurt things with mine. One wrong move and I could kill someone.”
“So?”