The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(52)

“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?”

Amanda blinked at him. “What do you mean ‘so?’”

“I mean ‘so what?’ You think this is the first time you’ve been at risk of killing someone? You’re a nurse. The wrong injection and boom, dead patient. That never stopped you from working. You could run over three people on the way to the office. That never stopped you from driving. You did these things, despite the risks, because you knew they were necessary to living. Well, guess what? Controlling this thing of yours is now a necessity. It’s your new day job. So if you’re as strong as I think you are—and I think you are—you’ll stop worrying about the maybes and do your job.”

On August 13, Amanda successfully summoned the beast. The whiteness neatly emerged from her hands and only mildly spiked when a physicist approached her. The next day, she formed solid blocks around her arms, then just as quickly dispatched them. Contrary to Zack’s assumption, Amanda found her talent worked less like a muscle and more like a language. Each construct was a sentence, one she could make long or short, crude or elegant. The choice was hers, as long as she kept calm.

Two days later, she indulged Zack’s request for a demonstration by forming little shapes around the tips of her fingers. Cubes, spheres, pyramids, cylinders. She coated an arm in a sleek sheet of whiteness, an opera glove that moved perfectly with her wiggling fingers.

Zack leered in bright marvel. “Holy crap. That is . . . wow, you’re like Green Lantern without the green. I’m officially jealous.”

“I’d trade you if I could,” she told him. “I’d rather heal mice.”

“Come on. You have to like it a little now.”

She didn’t, but she hated it less. Though Amanda now wore her wedding ring on a cheap string necklace, she no longer worried about fatal outbursts. She’d acquired enough control to move forward, into the larger issues.

“I still don’t know what this stuff is,” she told Czerny, at the end of a long practice session.

He promised her the answer was coming. Dr. Quint was preparing a presentation that would soon explain many things.

The following week, Amanda dazzled her fellow Silvers with an eight-inch snowflake, beautifully complex and symmetrical. It balanced on the tip of her finger, slowly rotating like a store display. She took a satirical bow to the applause of her friends.

Though Hannah had joined in on the clapping, her cheer was half performance. She didn’t know the name of Amanda’s aberrant energy. She just knew that it was the same white death that had rained down on their world, toppling buildings and crushing bodies. Since the eve of her sister’s sleeping attack, Hannah had suffered a few nightmares of her own. In her cruel visions, Amanda didn’t just bring down the ceiling. She brought down the sky.

—

While the other Silvers wrestled with their formidable new talents, Mia Farisi became a growing enigma to the Pelletier physicists. Unlike her companions, who brazenly broke the laws of time and nature, the girl had yet to display a single hint of chronokinetic ability.