The ground dropped away and I tumbled up, losing my balance, flailing my arms, tilting forward, watching the wash drop below me, like I was looking out of a rising glass elevator. The drop slowed almost immediately, and several stories above the sand I stopped rising and began dropping again, watching the sand come up faster and faster like the water in the bottom of the pit.

I did end up back under the bed this time.

Don't even think about it, young lady.

Ha.

I kept my eyes open the next time and tried to stay balanced, reaching for that right pitch and volume of shrieking air, of flapping clothes, and I was flying up, like a thrown rock. I still tilted forward when I bent my head to watch the ground, but not as much. I waited for peak altitude and the beginnings of the drop, then jumped back to the sand below.

I laughed out loud.

Happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts.

It was purely ballistic, like basic physics classes. If I was starting with the same velocity reached at the end of a fifty-foot drop, then I was rising fifty feet before gravity killed my upward velocity. I knew the relevant equation. I sang it out loud. "Distance equals one half A T squared."

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I'd clearly done it enough times when my heart stopped pounding as I shot into the air.

I thought about the girls on the basketball team. I crouched and leaped, doing the velocity jump at the same time. How many people do you know who can jump fifty feet into the air?

I let myself drop most of the way to the ground before I killed all velocity by jumping back to the sand.

If I tried the same thing in the gym I'd crash into the ceiling.

Less velocity. Less noise? Certainly less air rushing by.

I worked on that same leap-jump, reducing the amount of velocity until I slowed to a stop with my head about twelve feet in the air.

Bet I could slam dunk a basketball. Tall as the girls on the basketball team were, I didn't think any of them could.

If I could reduce the velocity, could I increase it?

What would four times as fast be like?

I tried to imagine what four times as fast would sound like, crouched, and leaped up into the sky.

I wore my nicest kimono to supper with the full katsura wig in the shimada hairstyle, and the white pancake makeup. The kimono and obi are normally a real pain to put on by myself. This time it was almost impossible. My feet made knocking sounds as I walked across the wooden floor in my willow-block okobo.

"Why are your eyes so red?" Dad asked.

"I got face powder in 'em."

"Ouch."

I bowed politely and covered my face with my fan.

So far, so good.

It must have been at least ten times as fast.

I'm guessing-I certainly didn't have an airspeed indicator, but it was like hitting a wall and, in the instant before I flinched away to the pillow cave under the bed, the wind ripped off my clothes, wrenched at all of my joints, and blackened both my eyes.

I hadn't really gotten face powder in my eyes.

I finally found my second boot in a stand of prickly pear. I never did find one of the socks, and my jeans were completely ruined, ripped in two separate pieces, with several additional tears in each leg. My flannel shirt stayed on but was ripped at the shoulders and pocket, and the sports bra never even shifted.

The panties were in the middle of the wash near the first boot.

Don't even think about it, young lady.

Well, maybe Dad did have a point.

Mom arrived, took a look at me, and bowed formally from the waist, hands on her thighs, "Konban wa o-genki sou desu ne, Cent-san."

"Arigato, okaasan." I bowed. "Uh, you look nice, too."

"Are we having Japanese?"

"Indian, actually," Dad said. He looked back at me. "You want to go change into a sari?"

I shook my head. It was the makeup that mattered.

I moved very carefully when we sat down.

"Don't fall off your shoes," Dad teased.

"Leave her alone," said Mom. "I think she's doing very well."

In truth, my knees and ankles hurt so much that I was afraid I'd collapse.

Eating was difficult. Managing the sleeves of the kimono put more stress on my shoulders and elbows. I should've dressed as a mime, instead.

I bent over my plate and tried to move as little as possible. I was hungry.

Mom said, "I saw Becca Martingale this afternoon."

Dad, using his fork to pile some dahl onto a piece of naan, froze. "How did that happen?"

"She was attending a meeting in the same facility as mine. I said hello."

Dad licked his lips. "That's taking a chance, isn't it?" He remembered the naan in his hand and took a bite.

Mom shrugged. "She's not our enemy."

"Is she still with the bureau?"

"She retires next year."

"What did you tell her?"

Mom sighed and shook her head. "Just that we were well, that's all."

Dad's eyes shifted sideways to me and Mom said, "No, I didn't mention Cent."

His shoulders dropped a little. "What did she have to say?"

"Hyacinth Pope was transferred out of her high-security penitentiary to a low-security facility, ostensibly because of prison crowding."

Dad's calm evaporated-his voice raised. "Is she still there?"

"She never arrived."

"Bastards!" Dad whispered, but it sounded more vehement than if he'd shouted it.

"Well, yes," said Mom. She was calm but she didn't look happy. "It probably was them, though you can't discount personal initiative."

Dad was staring at across the room, focused on nothing. His mouth twisted. "No. Not with Hyacinth."

"I've heard that name before," I said, tentatively.

Dad bit his lower lip.

"Yeah," Mom said. "She's the one who drugged your father, when-" She did air quotes with her fingers. "-they got him. She murdered Brian Cox, your father's NSA contact. She also tried to snatch me, more than once."

Dad said, "I'm not sure we should be-"

Mom laughed but there was no humor in it. "You can't have it both ways, Davy! You want Cent to be careful, to watch out for them, but you don't want to tell her about them? Remember our first fight?"

Dad blinked at the sudden shift in topic. "When you called my New York apartment and got the police?"

Mom nodded. "What did we agree, after that? When we finally got back together?"

Dad said, almost reluctantly, "Never lie to each other."

"What kind of lie caused the fight in the first place?"

"Lying by omission." Dad shrugged. "It's not that simple. Cent is our child. I don't lie to her, but she's our child; I don't tell her everything, either." He looked at me and smiled sadly. "And I know she doesn't tell me everything."

I tried to look offended.

Mom said, "Cent is a young woman who can be thousands of miles away in a heartbeat, going places you cannot follow. You can't control her but you can educate her. You can give her the information she needs to be safer."

Dad pushed his food around on the plate without taking a bite. Mom watched him, eyes narrowed, head tilted slightly forward.

Me, I froze in place, looking at the table, trying to become invisible. I wouldn't disturb this conversation for the world.

Finally, Dad turned to me. "All right, Cent, I guess it's time you knew."

I turned to him, eyes wide.

He cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with the napkin. "I may have been less than honest about that Santa person. And the Easter Bunny? Total fabrication."

I hit him with my fan.

After supper, Dad built a fire in the big stone fireplace, the one that's for show, and we gathered around it while he and Mom told the story again, but in a new way. This time they named the characters, they described them, and they even showed me photographs.

Not of the dead, mind you. No point, there. But they showed me a picture of Hyacinth Pope from sixteen years before and from four years before, taken in prison, that Mom pulled off of an online wanted poster after she talked to the FBI agent, Becca Martingale.

They talked a lot about drugs and darts and tracking devices and being handcuffed to immovable objects. Mom talked about the time they'd flooded her apartment with anesthetic gas in hopes of knocking her out before she could jump away. Dad talked a bit about the device they'd implanted in him and the conditioning they'd used to keep him in specific areas.

They'd told me the story before, but this time they talked about about how helpless they'd felt-Dad when he was chained to walls or electronically tethered to one location; and Mom when she was stuck in the Eyrie, before she could jump, and later, when she could jump but had no idea where Dad was.

She looked at me sideways. "I was falling off a cliff the first time I jumped. Your Dad was escaping a beating with the buckle end of a belt."

Dad blinked. "Huh. Wasn't that your first time, Cent? When I made your mother cry?"

I hid my face behind the fan.

Mom laughed softly. "What did you say earlier, Davy? 'I know she doesn't tell me everything.'"

Dad's eyes widened. "You mean-"

"Avalanche!" I blurted. "A cornice gave way."

Mom nodded and Dad went white. White as, well, snow.

"An avalanche? The only way you could've gotten caught in an-" Dad's voice started low and steadily rose until Mom held up her hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop halting oncoming cars. Dad actually stopped midword.

"Zip it, dear."

"She was snowboarding, without clearing it with us!"

Mom shook her head. "And you wonder why she doesn't tell you everything?" She looked back at me. "I'm guessing Dad's wet ceiling was involved."

I covered my face with the fan.

Mom gently moved it to one side. "You know that pancake keeps us from seeing your cheeks blush but your ears still give you away."

Damn. I gave in. "Yeah. Several cubic yards of snow."

Dad sagged back on the couch, opened his mouth, and then closed it again after Mom tilted her head at him.

"I tried to get it all up, but more of it melted than I'd realized."

"That's why you washed all the cushions," Mom said.

"Them I just dried. Needed the washer for all the clothes on the floor-they were all wet and most of them were dirty, too."