by Daniel Price
For their first two weeks in Terra Vista, Hannah and Amanda lived in quiet hope that the churning forces inside them would simply go away—a one-time outbreak, like chicken pox.
Fearing that anger was the catalyst of her unholy white weirdness, Amanda kept an iron lid on her temper. She sat calmly through her daily scientist interviews, answering all questions with clenched-jaw amenity. She held her tongue when Hannah voiced her growing attraction to David, and held her scream when David spoke glowingly of Esis. She ignored all the puns, cracks, and antics of Zack Trillinger, a man who irked her even when he was being nice.
Though the restraint nearly burned her an ulcer, Amanda’s perseverance paid off in exactly the way she hoped. For fourteen days, her hands remained blessedly pink and normal.
On August 7, illness and sibling disharmony eroded the walls of her composure. The sisters were the first and worst victims of the invading virus. They spent the afternoon laid up in their room. By nightfall, their foul moods turned on each other.
“I’m just saying he’s sixteen, Hannah. It’s not healthy.”
“Would you shut up about that? I told you we’re not doing anything. We’re just taking walks together. Jesus.”
“Well, you need to be careful. You don’t always make the best decisions when you’re grieving.”
Hannah covered her face. “Oh my God.”
“What? Am I wrong? Do you not remember—”
“No, Amanda, you’re absolutely right. I make cruel and awful decisions. Like, you remember how I dropped my married name an hour after my husband died? Oh wait. That was you.”
Amanda raised her head from the pillow. “I can’t believe you said that. I honestly can’t believe you just said that.”
“Yeah, well, here’s a cross and some nails. Have fun up there.”
After an hour of livid silence, Amanda fell into fevered dreams. She replayed her final moments with Derek in the waiting room—the frost on his nose, the bitter rage in his voice. I’m actually glad we’re going to different places. What does that say about you?
A thunderous crash jerked her awake. Coughing in dust, Amanda turned on the lamp and found half the room covered in broken plaster. The outer shell of the ceiling had rained down on them, leaving a rug-size patch of dangling wires and cracked wooden beams.
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!”
“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 onl
y 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?”
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.
In truth, Mia had been struggling with her weirdness from the day she arrived. Her temporal quirk was too subtle for the cameras to register, too insane to share with others. She figured even Zack wouldn’t believe her when she showed him her precognitive paper scraps. He’d probably assume her mind had cracked into split personalities. She wasn’t ready to rule out the possibility herself.
On her third night in Terra Vista, Mia returned to her bed and found a tiny new roll of paper on her pillow. Unfurling it revealed a fresh missive, once again scribbled in her handwriting.
I know you’re freaking out right now. So was I. I know you’re skeptical about these notes. So was I. But trust me when I say that our power’s a blessing, not a curse. I’m loving it now. And I’m only six months older than you.
She continued
to manage her problem in secret, receiving at least one new dispatch each night. The messages ranged from the obscure to the inane.
Took my first ride in a flying cab today. Holy @$#%!
Commemoration has to be worst holiday ever. Learn to dread October 5th.
If you see a small and creepy guy with a 55 on his hand, run. That’s Evan Rander. He’s bad news.
There are no words to describe what they did with New York. So beautiful, it brings me to tears.
On her fifth night, Mia finally saw a portal up close. A shimmering disc, as small as a button and as bright as a penlight, hovered a foot above her pillow. Its tiny surface rippled like a thimble of milk. Before Mia could get a closer look, the portal spit a new note and then shrank out of existence. She unrolled the paper.
Don’t trust Peter. He’s not who he says he is.
Ten minutes later, she was awoken by another tiny breach just inches above her face. A new piece of paper dropped onto her nose.
Disregard that first note. I was just testing something. Peter’s good. He’s great, actually.
Daunted by all the baffling new intel, Mia asked Czerny for a journal. “Just to collect my thoughts,” she told him, with loaded candor.
The next day, he indulged and insulted her with a ferociously girlish pocket diary—neon-pink, and covered in cartoon hearts. She tepidly thanked him, then transcribed every note she’d received. The original papers were flushed into the sea.
Soon it became routine for the others to find Mia scrutinizing her journal, tapping her pen in deep contemplation.
“What are you writing in there?” David asked her one night. He playfully peeked over her shoulder. “Anything about me?”
She slammed the book shut. “No. Go away.”
Despite his blistering intelligence, David often displayed the social tact of an eight-year-old. He openly guessed that the scar on Hannah’s wrist was self-inflicted. He idly observed that Amanda and Zack had nearly identical builds. He informed Mia that she would suffer fewer stomachaches if she ate more sensible portions. After each thoughtless gaffe, he turned sheepish in the heat of his victim’s stare.