Time, page 14
It was hardly world-ending for him, being about half as hurtful as the last impact he’d made, but it kept him from running me over. As he rose from the debris of his hard landing, though, his face showed that he’d upped his game to double-pissed, or maybe triple-pissed now. It wasn’t a great look, but hey, I was happier that he was all bellicose rather than coolly calculating how best to use his superpowers to my immediate detriment.
He came at me again, even less cautiously if that was possible, and this time he caught a face full of concrete as I tossed him even higher into the air, and he came crashing down on the concrete a dozen feet away.
I had my doubts about how long even pissed-off Prettyboy could continue to enjoy the insanity loop—doing the same thing and expecting different results—and sure enough, as he peeled himself off the broken pavement where he’d come to rest after landing, he did so a little more cautiously than the last two rounds.
“You …” he said, grunting, unsteady on his feet. I wasn’t sure if that was because I’d rung his bell or if he was feeling some other form of bodily discomfort. I suspected the former.
“Why does everybody always say, ‘You … ’? when they’re looking at me and wondering how they got to be in such a state?” I asked, genuinely curious. “It’s like an insult no one can ever quite finish. Like ‘You bitch, I can’t believe you’re beating my dumb ass senseless’? Or ‘You heinous individual, how dare you violate my person in such a way, you’ve hurt my feelings!’ Hm? Whaddya think, Prettyboy?” I needed to goad him back into stupid action, if possible. I figured if he had any other easily exploitable flaws, one of them was probably failure to do cardio. Not that that’d be an immediate boon to me, because metas tended to be able to go longer than normal humans in almost every circumstance, but maybe over the long haul I could wear his ass out.
He rose back to his feet, breathing heavily but not nearly heavily enough. “You … will kill me … or I will kill your friends … and your family … and every one you love … until you give me … peace …”
“Man,” I said, staring at him as he started to walk, way too calmly, toward me, “seriously. This is way new for me. That last part makes a huge difference. No one’s ever really asked me for—well, okay, one guy kinda did, but—”
Prettyboy was just walking toward me, and then suddenly everything seemed to … blur.
Harry and Kat were fighting off to my right, doing their thing, taking out the other guys, and suddenly Harry and his nearest opponent launched into fast-motion speed. The guy came at Harry with a baton that blurred with speed and Harry dodged it perfectly. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head to look—
And suddenly Prettyboy was right there in front of me, and then I felt something unbelievably hard hit me in the midsection—then another something—then another, as though someone had positioned a construction piston of the sort they used to utterly destroy concrete right over my abdomen and switched it on hyperspeed.
Now it was my turn to fly through the air and catch a shopfront, shattering glass and smashing through shelving. I didn’t know how it had happened, but time had just turned on me, hard, snapping into high speed around me while I remained nearly still. Prettyboy had walked right up and beat the living snot out of me, and when time had resumed—
I’d gone flying. I lay in busted shelves, glass shards sticking out of my bleeding arms and back, and I stared up at the ceiling. Unlike Prettyboy, I didn’t have the advantage of invincible skin when I sailed through the plate glass window. I could feel pieces of it embedded in a few places along my back, and they all hurt, my life’s blood draining out into cardboard boxes that surrounded me.
Prettyboy loomed into my view and stared down at me, his rage replaced by a near-disgust, lower jaw jutting out. He made no threatening move toward me, but looked down at me as though I were unworthy of anything. Then he spit, right in my face.
“Baka,” he said, his contempt obvious. “Now … I will kill your friends. And when next we meet … when you are healed … it will be upon the terms I dictate. You will give me what I want.”
And he started to walk away, back toward where Kat and Harry waited … and I knew, in my heart …
They didn’t stand a chance against him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“No,” I moaned, trying to get to my feet. I was bleeding, sick to my stomach, the trauma of what my body had just been through coming out in the physical reactions of shock. I was blinking, hyper-fast, trying to stimulate my body back into motion when it didn’t want to do anything but lie down and die right there … or at least try to be still and heal so I wouldn’t die.
I pulled a long shard of bloody glass out of my shoulder and hurled it at Prettyboy’s fading back. It shattered across his left shoulder like one of those beer bottles that you see in the movies, smashing to tiny pieces. I had enough strength to do that, even wounded and weak, and Prettyboy turned around to look at me as I pushed to my knees.
“Don’t … even … think about walking away from … me …” I said, barely able to remain upright even on my knees. I pulled another shard out of my left trapezius, this one larger than my hand, and beckoned to him with the bloody glass. “Come on, asswipe. You wanna die? I’m working up to granting your fondest wish.”
His lips split into a feral smile, and he looked at me just a second longer than he really should have. Harry blindsided him with a chunk of concrete, and while it shattered over his head into dust, it also staggered him for a second, letting Harry slip past and give him a forceful shove that launched him back, head over heels.
Harry slipped in between us, interposing his own body between Prettyboy and myself. I tried to get to my feet and failed, but Harry motioned to me with a hand behind his back, urging me to stay down. “Hey,” he said, and added some unintelligible Japanese that felt like it held the aura of an insult, “… your fly is down.”
Prettyboy stared at him for just a second, and then bent over to look at the front of his pants. I couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that, but then, Harry did presumably know before he tried it that it’d work. Or maybe not, since he couldn’t read his own future.
It didn’t last long. A second later, Prettyboy was looking up again, a tired smile draped across his lips. “You think this will stop me?” He threw his head back and gave the appearance of a deep laugh. “This will not make quit my pursuit of—”
Squealing tires heralded the arrival of something else, and a small Japanese car slammed into Prettyboy, destroying the front end but also launching him into the air. It arrested its own momentum in a heartbeat, bouncing off him and going back about ten feet, coming to rest just outside the shop door as Prettyboy was ejected from my field of view with all the violence of a football being punted.
“Come on,” Harry said, grabbing me by the elbow. “We don’t have much time.”
“Wha …?” I managed to get out before he jerked me along, practically carrying me out of the wreckage. Kat was just extracting herself from the ruined car, a little blood running down her forehead as she joined up with us. She scooped up her suitcase as well as my bag and Harry’s as he pulled me over the fallen yakuza, some of whom didn’t seem like they’d be waking up anytime soon.
Kat ran ahead and flagged down a taxi extremely-mini-van, yelling at them in excited Japanese and then opening the side door as Harry tossed me in and followed. Our bags landed in the seat behind me, thrown by Kat, and she yelled at Harry to get in the front seat while she slipped in next to me. Harry was already moving, though, and they were in the car seconds later. Kat shouted something else at the driver and he floored it, taking the corner at high speed as we left the station forecourt behind. We were on the main road a second later, and suddenly my world started to clear up.
“Just chill,” Kat said from beside me, hand on mine. She had a waxy look on her face already, and the blood was still seeping from the injury on her forehead. She was looking pretty drawn by the time she withdrew her hand from mine, and my skin was tingling at her touch in the most pleasant way. I’d heard a faint voice in my head, reminiscent of the souls I’d so recently—and dreadfully—lost, but this one was higher, more pleasant.
I could hear Kat in my head. Faintly, like she was whispering outside a room I was in, but still … it was a pleasant, if somewhat painful, reminder of what I’d lost.
“Thank you,” I croaked, dragging myself upright again.
Kat plucked another shard of glass out of my arm and opened the window, tossing it out. “You’re welcome,” she said, looking white as a glass of milk. She pulled a few more shards out, whatever hadn’t fallen out on their own as Harry had pulled me through the promenade. I removed one on my left side myself, and handed it to her for disposal. Points to skinny, pale, delicate-looking Kat—she didn’t blanch at all as she tossed the blood-soaked glass shard out the window.
The cab driver was stiff, eyes pointed straight ahead, not daring to look back at us and shaking in his seat. Kat said something to him quietly, and he nodded, shoulders quivering as he moved.
Harry looked back at us, tense. “He’s going straight to the cops as soon as we’re out,” he whispered, meta-low. “We’re going to need to change vehicles and get to the docks at uber-speed.”
“I can’t imagine why he’d be terrified to the point of wanting to run to the lawful authorities,” I murmured, low enough he couldn’t hear it. “I mean, his cab was only just hijacked by three people fleeing a metahuman brawl at the train station, one of whom is bleeding liters all over the back of his livelihood.”
“There’s no path to dissuading him, either,” Harry murmured. “Unless either of you is in favor of taking stronger measures?”
“I’d be okay with knocking him out,” I said, “or I could steal his memories. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.”
Harry concentrated for a moment, staring into empty air. “That’d be enough. Take his memories, it buys us a lot of time. Hours, actually. Just wait until we get out.”
“Okay,” I said, settling back in my seat and closing my eyes.
“Sienna,” Kat said, suddenly an ominous and hovering presence right next to me, “what the hell happened back there?”
“Ugh,” I moaned, still keeping it low, like the others. “Time snapped into superspeed for me. Prettyboy pummeled me while I was basically standing still, unable to do a damned thing about it. Hence my sudden flight into the glass.” I plucked a small shard out of my left forearm and presented it to Kat, who palmed it and tossed it out the window without comment.
“How does that even happen?” Harry asked.
“I dunno, Harry,” I said. “How does time stop for everyone else but remain constant for me? It’s all kind of a mystery until we can talk to Akiyama and get the straight dope from the horse’s mouth … or whatever, in an unmixed metaphor way. The truth, I guess.” I felt exhausted, probably more from travel and blood loss than the brawl I’d just been in on its own. Nothing felt broken anymore, thanks to Kat, but I definitely had bruises aplenty to show for our most recent squabble with Prettyboy. “All I know is this—if time does that again during a clash with Prettyboy, my goose is probably well and truly cooked, because I was barely holding my own, and I don’t think he was even using all his strength.”
“I don’t envision any more clashes with him soon,” Harry said, eyes darting. “Things are … well, fragile in terms of probabilities, but that one’s relatively clear, at least for the next few hours.” His lips settled into a thin line.
“And are we still on track for the end of time in the next couple days?” I asked.
With a grudging, almost pained nod, Harry grunted. “Yeah.”
“Awesome,” Kat said, slumping back in her seat. “I hope I don’t feel this crappy at the end of time, because it’d suck to feel this way into perpetuity.” She seemed to give that a thought. “How does that even work? Like a permanent time stop?”
“Looks that way to me,” Harry said as we took a turn onto a side road. Like in Britain, everyone was driving on the wrong side of the road, but I didn’t have the mental energy to give as much of a damn about it as usual. Or maybe Scotland had simply drained all the relative dread out of it for me. “It’s like all probabilities, branching paths, everything that happens normally with my power—it just stops. Everything ends beyond that moment.”
“What fun—” Kat started to say, but her words stopped as a flash of light blasted through the cab and I felt like someone had jerked me out of my seat.
I opened my eyes into bright light, blinding almost, and then it faded as a blurry world seemed to coalesce around me.
The back of the cab was gone, the Nagasaki streets were gone, everything I’d experienced a moment ago was gone. In its place was a sterile white room, with a single bed in the hospital style, white sheets covering it. They were clumped and wrinkled, wrapped around a petite figure who lay in the middle of it, a lump on her chest.
Kat. Her blond hair was tangled and matted, and there was a thin veil of relief shining through the weariness on her face, a glow that shone, almost lighting up the small room.
A Japanese nurse stood off to one side, her delicate features showing a faint smile, her hands on the bundle that rested on Kat’s chest. “Do you have a name?”
I stared at the lump in Kat’s arms, the little bundle wrapped in a blanket, the object of all her attention and—more than I’d ever seen from Kat in all the years I’d known her—her happiness.
“Yes,” she said, not taking her eyes off the baby in her arms.
Someone stepped out of the blurring at the edge of my field of vision. Dark hair, taller than me, he stepped over to the bed and leaned over, kissing the baby on the cheek. His back was to me, but his figure oh so familiar.
Harry.
He was looking down at the baby in Kat’s arms. I could see over his shoulder, but just the start of his profile, because of the way he was facing. “What should we name him?”
Light flashed again, and the scene in the hospital was gone, the cab returning and the chaotic Nagasaki streets appearing again, Harry in the seat in front of me and Kat to my side. Her face lacked the peace it had held in my vision, and instead her eyes were wide, saucer-wide, moon-wide, and her mouth was slightly open. “What … the hell was that?” she asked, and I had a suspicion—maybe more than a suspicion—that I hadn’t been the only one to see the hospital room and what happened there.
“It kinda looked like you and Harry having a baby together,” I said, jealousy marring every syllable of my trademark sarcasm. “But that couldn’t happen, because of course you two were never together before, especially in that way, amirite, Kat?”
“Dude,” she said, “I told you, if I don’t remember it, it didn’t happen to me.” And at this, she crossed her arms in front of her. Behind that facade, though, her eyes moved around a little more than usual, making me think that maybe—just maybe—this vision had rattled her a little.
“Harry?” I asked, turning my attention to him and probably lashing at him with a tone that demanded explanation.
But Harry had his fingers massaging his forehead with both hands. “What?” he asked, eyes closed.
“Would you care to explain this?” I asked, trying to keep from sounding like the crazy, jealous girlfriend I was heading toward being.
“I don’t really have much to say.” He kneaded his fingers into his forehead. “I have a headache.”
“Isn’t that convenient,” I grumbled, looking at Kat, who just shrugged at me. I could almost feel her mentally disengaging from what we’d just seen, as though backing away from thinking about it would make it not have happened.
“Having an excruciating headache is not really that convenient, no,” Harry said, head still in hand, and his voice sounded ragged enough that I believed it. “I think all this shifting around of events is physically hurting me now. The probabilities change so dramatically after most of these stoppages—thanks mostly to you—but this … vision thing just now … man, it really put a mule in my brain and let it double-kick me.”
I wanted to be sympathetic, so I bit my tongue and let us ride in silence until Harry waved for the cab driver to pull over. He did so, shaking all the while, and Harry looked at me, eyes still squinting in pain. “It’s time,” he said.
“Hilarious pun,” Kat said, throwing her door open. We’d pulled off in an alley, and the cab driver was muttering low under his breath in what sounded an awful lot like a prayer.
“Hey,” I said, trying to be soothing, and putting my hands on the back of his neck. “It’s all right. We’re not going to hurt you. We were just trying to get away from some yakuza.” All true. He didn’t exactly loosen up under my grip, though, just kept saying the same things, under his breath.
“I don’t think he believes you for some reason,” Kat said, a half smile twisting her lips, which lacked their usual red glow and looked faded.
“Which is weird, because I’m such a sincere and warm person,” I said, letting my fingers hang on the back of his neck gently. He felt the first strains of my power and tried to jerk away, and here I had to be a little firmer with him. “Just for the record—absorbing peoples’ memories sucks and is not nice.”
“Kinda like you,” Kat said lightly as she pulled my bag and her suitcase out of the back. I found it amusing my 10,000 megawatt reality TV star friend had quietly become my pack mule instead of vice versa. “Because of the soul draining, y’know, and your constant talk about being the Queen of Mean or whatever.”
“I think that was Leona Helmsley,” I said, neatly dragging the memories of the cab driver’s last half hour of absolute terror out of his mind. Not for the first time, I regretted being unable to plant something more pleasant in their place, because if you’re going to jack the memories of a person anyway, it doesn’t feel like it’d be any worse—and maybe even, ethically, a little better—if you could put some peace back in for them.
