“Sounded like it,” said Zack. “It’s probably a glitch.”
Or a trick, he mused. Though Zack knew Quint wasn’t his biggest admirer, the little man had been far too cavalier about losing one of his alien specimens. He must have had something up his sleeve.
David stepped out of his room, fully dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He glanced around the hall, his handsome face lined with worry.
“Where are the others?”
Zack shrugged. “Still in bed, I guess.”
“Lovely. Why get up for something as trifling as fire?”
“I don’t think it’s a real fire,” Amanda said.
David knocked on Mia’s door three times before pushing it open. He scanned the room.
“She’s not in there,” he said.
“What?”
Amanda rushed across the hall and thumped on Hannah’s door. David hurried to the stairwell.
“Where are you going?” Zack asked him.
“First floor. She might be in the kitchenette.”
“Amanda’s right. It’s probably a false alarm.”
“It can’t hurt to see if she’s okay. And it won’t hurt you to check on Theo.”
As David disappeared down the steps, Amanda opened the door to Hannah’s room. She looked inside, then checked the bathroom. Her sister was nowhere to be found.
—
Three minutes earlier, just as Erin Salgado finished her sweep of the rear property, Hannah stepped out to the patio and stretched her calves. Her inner clock had become muddled from all the time-shifting she was doing. For the fifth day in a row, she woke up at the crack of dawn with no hope of falling back to sleep.
On Thursday, Charlie Merchant suggested that she try something called exertion therapy, a tight regimen of exercise and catnaps, all strategically timed to loosen the body’s circadian rhythm. Hannah wondered if it would be easier just to get her exertion from Charlie himself. He was kind of cute for an egghead.
Once her limbs were sufficiently loosened, she straightened her tank top and trotted along the path that looped around the property. She made it only fifty feet before the building alarm sounded. Hannah could only guess that she’d triggered it somehow, since no one else was awake at this ungodly hour.
Wincing at the thought of all the apologies she’d have to offer, she dashed back to the patio. She caught a quick gleam in the reflective glass of the door, then spun around. No one.
Something in the air felt strange, the same smoky aura that Hannah had come to associate with speeding. Once the alarm stopped, Hannah heard a noise that sounded like a flat and heavy drumroll.
The hairs on her arms stood up. A tiny voice in her head offered urgent advice.
Shift.
She flipped the switch in her mind. Once again the world turned blue and sluggish. The drumbeat slowed to the sound of hurried footsteps. She turned around in the shadow of a six-foot man in a motorcycle helmet. Another half second of hidden advantage and his sword would have lopped her head off.
As it was, Hannah had just enough time to scream and duck.
The man overshot, stumbling over a patio chair. White-eyed, Hannah jumped back. Unlike everything else around her, the man existed at a normal speed and color. She could see every glistening red speck on his blade, his clothes. Her throat closed when she considered the notion that she was looking at her sister’s blood.
Hannah fled, and the Motorcycle Man followed. He’d been walking at a brisk pace until his quarry decided to shift. Now he was forced to run.
—
Czerny paused in the stairwell, debating his next move. Should he go up and warn the others or go down and help Mia? The girl was safely barricaded in the security room, but there were also tools in there that could help the situation—weapons, surveillance monitors, a building-wide intercom system.
He went down.
Five steps into his descent, a tall man popped around the corner and stepped onto the landing. He and Czerny jumped at the sight of each other, then reflexively raised their hands in battle. Unfortunately for Czerny, his trigger finger was delayed by two perplexing observations about his opponent: his rubber Teddy Roosevelt mask and the fact that he’d aimed nothing but his bare palm. For a crucial split second, Czerny took it as a stop sign, a call for mercy to the man with the upper hand. It wasn’t.
A tempic tendril burst from the stranger’s fingers, snaking ten feet up the stairwell and embedding itself in Czerny’s gut. The physicist screamed as the Roosevelt Man twisted his thoughts, causing the engorged end of the projectile to expand and bloom thorns.
Half-blind with agony, Czerny raised the electron chaser in his hand and fired.