“ACCORDING TO GOOGLE Maps, it’s 10.3 miles from here to the county line. Round trip just over 20.5 miles.”

[...]

 Shade closed her eyes for a moment, centering herself, trying to shut out everything else: Malik, Cruz, her father, all the people whose lives she had ruined. The instant she was morphed, the Dark Watchers were on her, like whispering ghosts.

She kicked off with a powerful thrust and ran, arms pumping, legs a blur, energy from who knew where. She ran down the highway, easily passing cars and trucks doing seventy, passing them so fast they seemed to be crawling.

Faster and faster until those speeding cars were mere blurs, until the desert landscape was nothing but a tan smear, until the jeans and T-shirt she wore over her angular, insectoid morph shredded, with a piece of it actually burning from the air friction.

The experience of moving at top speed was not like what she’d seen in movies. The passing world could be a blur, but because her perceptions were also accelerated, she could shift focus and see the passing world clearly as a series of still shots, like isolating one frame of a movie.

Sound was distorted, though, and there was no help for that. Her speed was nothing compared to the speed of light, but it was close to and occasionally exceeded the speed of sound. Sounds that were coming toward her from in front, from the direction of travel, arrived at a much higher pitch than normal. Sounds coming from behind were either low and draggy if she was below Mach 1, or fell away completely above that point.

She passed Mach 1, confirmed by the rumble that vibrated through her body, followed by a deepened silence, but as a regular thing breaking the sound barrier was a bad idea—it advertised her presence with a loud crack.

There were things to be learned about this power and how to exploit it. For example, she understood now that she could be effectively invisible, somewhat like an airplane propeller: an observer would feel the wind, hear the sound, and see something, but that something would be at most a blur. And the human brain had certain weaknesses that could be exploited, like persistence of vision, the human tendency to go on seeing what they’ve already seen; and confirmation bias, the human tendency to see only what they expected to see. People could be amazingly blind to what was right in front of their faces.

Ten miles. It passed in forty-five seconds. She decelerated for the last half mile, tapped the county line sign, turned around, and raced back.

“One hundred and seven seconds,” Cruz said, holding up the phone as proof.

Shade said something in her hyper-speed buzz, then de-morphed and repeated it. “About eight hundred miles an hour. Give or take. Faster in a straight line where I don’t have to turn around.”

Villain, Chapter 8