“Deny it if you will,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter. We saved your life once. Now I come to do it again.”
Seeing the man through adult eyes triggered a disturbing new reaction in Hannah. She found him eerily scintillating now, like a housewife’s vampire fantasy. God only knew what he could get her to do without saying a nice word. Fortunately, she couldn’t sense a trace of desire in him. For all she knew, she stood as the same chubby-faced toddler in his eyes.
“W-what do you want with me?” she asked.
He spoke with a slight accent that she couldn’t recognize. She spun her Wheel of Uninformed Guessing. The needle stopped at “Dutch.”
“The answer would require more time than we have. All that matters now is that you—”
A sudden stillness gripped the area. All the car engines stopped. All the lights on the emergency vehicles went dark and still. All electrics great and small, all over the world, once again fell dead. This time, the power wasn’t coming back.
Panicked voices rose all around her. Bystanders scurried and stumbled in all directions. A shoving match broke out between two teenage boys.
As Hannah watched the chaos, she felt cool fingers on her skin. Something smooth and hard snapped together on her forearm with a loud clack. She jerked her hand away. Her right wrist now sported a shiny metal bracelet, a half inch wide and utterly featureless. It felt cheap and dainty like plastic, but it gleamed in the light like silver.
“What did you do?” she said. “What is this thing?”
The white-haired man grabbed her other wrist, scowling at her with frigid disdain. There was nothing appealing about him now.
“This is the end. For them, not for you. Now listen—”
“Get away from me!”
He squeezed her wrist with cool, strong fingers. Pain shot up her arm like current.
“Don’t test me, child. I’ve had a trying day. It pains me to see all my plans hinge on weak and simple creatures like yourself, but it seems we both have little choice in the matter. If you wish to endure, you’ll keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll be joined with your sister soon enough.”
“Wait, what—”
The white-haired man pressed two fingers to her mouth. “I’ve saved your life twice now. Don’t make me regret my decision. The strings favor you, but there are others who could just as easily serve our purpose.”
He walked away, leaving Hannah shell-shocked, speechless. A shrill scream in the distance briefly turned her around. By the time she looked back, the stranger was gone.
Hannah scrambled to process all the new and urgent developments around her. Her left wrist throbbed. Her right wrist glimmered. The temperature had dropped low enough to turn all breath to mist. The crowd fell into chaotic distress. They screamed and shouted and scrambled into one another like bumper cars.
This is the end. For them, not for you.
A booming gunshot emerged from the police cordon. More screams. A large man grabbed at the girl dressed like Catwoman, and an even larger man knocked him down. Another gunshot.
Hannah felt a strong vibration at the base of her hand. She gaped with insanity at her new silver bracelet. Mere seconds ago, it was a fat and dangly bauble, wide enough for a bicep. Now it rested snugly on the thinnest part of her wrist. Whereas once it appeared featureless, now it was split down the middle by a bright blue band of light.
She glanced up to discover the biggest adjustment of all. A curved plane of silky white light loomed all around her, closing two feet above her head. The outside world took on a yellow gossamer haze.
Hannah tried to relocate but ended up walking into the wall of her new surroundings. The light was warm, steel hard, and utterly immobile. She was stuck here, just a hair north of Commercial Street, in an eight-foot egg of light. That was enough to send her mind into blue-screen failure. She was in full rejection of the events onstage. Suspension of suspension of disbelief.
Nearby strangers caught sight of Hannah’s odd new enclosure. A befuddled young man rapped his knuckles against her light shell.
“What is this?” he asked, much louder than necessary. She could hear him just fine.
“I don’t know . . .”
“How are you doing this?”
“I’m not.”
“What’s happening?!”
Not this, she thought. This isn’t happening at all.
The Great Hannah Given: mental ward alumnus, habitual wrong person, and unreliable narrator. Ergo, no eggo. No crowd. No crash. No white-haired man.
Everyone froze as a thunderous noise seized the area—a great icy crackle, like a glacier breaking in half. Bystanders threw their frantic gazes left and right in search of the clamor until, one by one, they looked up. The eerie sound was coming from above. It was getting louder.