The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(51)

“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!”

“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.