Time, page 18
“It’s pretty simple,” I said, folding my arms in front of me. “You told me at the time that I perform some great act of service for you here.” I looked around the waiting room, trying to figure out what exactly I could do to help this guy. “And that puts you in my debt. So …” I looked at him. “Whaddya need?”
Akiyama surveyed me with a wary eye, a very peculiar change over his somewhat skeptical curiosity from a moment before. I stood there, trying to be as lacking expression as him, but failing, as I waited for him to process my question and deliver me an answer so we could go on about the business of trading favors and saving the world.
“I … am fine,” Akiyama finally said, and then turned away from me, his suit jacket swishing in the wind caused by his abrupt move.
“Uhhhh … all evidence to the contrary there, chief,” I said, watching him start to walk away. There were a few potential exits from this retro waiting room, and he seemed to be heading down a long hallway.
“I only wish to be left alone,” Akiyama said, turning back to me, standing tall in the hallway, framed by the shadowy dark of this place and its selective lack of electricity. The hallway in front of him was lit, but not until about a hundred yards ahead, and the waiting room we were in was illuminated by a single fixture. Clearly someone had not been performing scheduled maintenance on the space between, cuz the hallway was riddled with holes while the waiting area still looked A-plus, if a bit retro.
“I know the feeling,” I said, taking a step closer, intending to follow after him. “Me, I was just chilling on the Oregon Coast, living life to the full, if you know what I mean …” No one knew what I meant because that was a lie. The only way I could be defined as ‘living life to the full’ would be if you considered long, languid days broken by infrequent sexual activity and occasionally lovey-doveyness with Harry to blunt the monotony as ‘living.’ I mean, don’t get me wrong, those parts were kinda fun, and our conversations were decent, but everything else …
God, I was bored. And emotionally … uneven, due to recent past events.
None of this needed to be said to the solemn Japanese fellow in front of me, though. “The point is,” I said, trying to get myself back on track as he frowned at me, lightly, “I don’t want to be here, you don’t want me here—that’s cool. Our desires are closely matched in this case. And I’d love to leave, but—and this is a big but, we’re talking pro-wrestler-in-a-way-too-tight-unitard style butt here—time’s coming unhinged out there.” I delivered this last bit with as little accusation as I could.
Akiyama took it in what appeared to be stride. “That is unfortunate … but not my problem.” And he turned to leave again, down the dark hallway toward the light at the end of it.
“I think,” I said, turning on the meta speed and cutting in front of him, which caused his eye to twitch at me, “that it’s not only your problem, but that whatever’s going on out there—time suddenly speeding up and slowing down and stopping, and catching and—anyway, it’s a real mess—I think it’s the sort of thing that affects the whole world. And that the point of origin is …” And I waved my hands all about like the Hokey Pokey and then pointed one finger at him, like I was narrowing it down for all involved. “Yeah.”
He possessed legendary restraint. His face moved maybe a millimeter in response to my accusation, then was still once more. I wouldn’t have wanted to put any money into a Texas Hold ’Em game with him. Way to live up to that stereotype about Asian inscrutability, Akiyama. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Dude,” I said, closing my eyes, “there’s literally no one else who can control time at this point. Passing the buck is not going to work.”
“I don’t know what you just said,” Akiyama replied, “but I wish you a good day. I will let your friends go from their current … position.” They were positioned, all right. Like dolls, waiting for someone to come play with them.
Note to self: referring to your boyfriend as a ‘doll waiting to be played with’ … sounds really awkward and also reeks of Wolfe-ishness.
Argh. Still hurts to think about.
“That doesn’t do me any good if time goes flying off its axle and comes to rest forever, does it?” I asked as Akiyama continued his slow-mo storm-off. Okay, so less a storm-off and more of a calm walk-off. Why couldn’t I ever manage one of those?
Oh, right. Emotional restraint. This dude had the brakes on his feelings, big time.
Akiyama did not turn back to me, and I was left with the distinct feeling that he wasn’t going to be swayed, at least not now, not even if I managed to run around in front of him—which I totally could have, given his slow, sweeping pace. His suit was ultra-outdated. I began to wonder what it’d take to wake his ass up to the peril, and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to do the unsubtle American thing and just say it.
“Time is ending in two days,” I said, and Akiyama slowed his pace of retreat a little. “My boyfriend—er, the guy with me—he’s sorta my boyfriend, I guess? Or a guy friend? Guy who’s more than a friend—you know what, it doesn’t matter right now. The point is, he’s a Cassandra. You know what that is?”
Akiyama turned slowly. “He sees the future.”
“Normally, yeah,” I said. “But right now he just sees the big freeze looming, where everything stops for good. No future beyond that, because we never come out of that last moment. Time ends, the wheel off the axle, laying flat on the road, spinning no more.” So poetic … and stupid. Way to go, Sienna. “It’s coming, okay? And given what’s happened so far when time stops, I’m going to either starve to death or die of boredom because I’m fresh out of conversation and bad guys to chase and … everything else.” I sagged. “Look, this is fated. You have a problem, I’m the problem solver. So come on, Shin’ichi … let’s get to it already.”
He just stared me down, and I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. “I am sorry you have come this far for nothing.” And he bowed to me, like that was that, and turned away again.
And even though he didn’t actually say the word NO, I heard it in every syllable of what he did say, the politest refusal, as the only guy on the planet who could help stop this cataclysmic shitshow just strode right off like nothing I’d just said mattered one damned bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jamal
“Those sandwiches are pretty good,” Augustus said, crunching down the last of a roast beef and fontina panini as we sat in a parking lot, staring out across a few empty rows. Walmart was off to our right, but we were parked a ways out from the store, staring across at the Chuck E. Cheese on the end of the little shopping plaza. I was still slowly working my way through a roasted chicken hoagie, wondering how long it was going to take Spiegel to show up, because I was pretty sure I’d already gotten a read on Charles Custis. He was in a Cadillac Escalade about two hundred feet away, vehicle facing the opposite direction. I’d tagged his plates using the security cameras all around the parking lot, and now was avoiding touching the local network, because I could feel someone else moving around at the edges of it with the same electrical skills I boasted.
“Uh huh.” I’d been mostly ignoring my brother the last few hours for the sake of avoiding argument. Also, the sandwiches were pretty good.
“I hate surveillance,” Augustus said after a few seconds of silence.
“You don’t say,” I muttered under my breath, not taking much in the way of pains to hide my irritation. I think I was at my breaking point with him, too, after all this time and effort at being civil and carrying his rash-acting ass through however many near-misses with death.
“Hey, man,” he said, a flash of his own irritation showing, “if you like sitting your ass in this car for hours, you could do it by yourself. You don’t need me for this part.”
“Yeah, maybe you should have stayed back at the hotel,” I said. “Chill with wi-fi, catch up on The Crown on Netflix.”
Augustus bristled. “Hey, that’s a good show, all right? It’s got real elegance to it.”
“Far be it from me to suggest otherwise,” I said, concentrating on my phone. Spiegel’s Prius came cruising up and stopped next to the Escalade, and a moment later, he got out, nodding at Custis.
Custis dismounted his big SUV a few seconds later, and together he and Spiegel wandered out in front of their cars. He’d picked a row out near where the Walmart shoppers tapered off and the next store over, a CrossFit studio, didn’t have quite as much of a crowd, so the place where they’d parked was pretty empty. They were standing in the middle of a field of concrete without a single sound sensor for a long ways, if you didn’t count Spiegel’s cell phone. Which I did count, because I backdoored it and then projected the sound through my own speakers, while recording it for posterity. Or law enforcement. One of those.
“That going to stand up in court if they say anything incriminating?” Augustus asked, eyeing my phone as Spiegel and Custis exchanged tense pleasantries.
“I doubt they will, but probably not,” I said, shrugging. I wasn’t a lawyer, but I was more interested in using anything bad they said to light up the press about their misconduct versus actually trying to burn them in court. This was a war for the truth about Sienna, not me building a careful criminal prosecution. After all, these people weren’t officers of the court, and if the Custis family did have evidence of Sienna’s innocence, I didn’t think they were even compelled to share it by force of law. They were total dicks if they were hiding it, but I doubted it would be illegal.
“It creeps me out you can do that,” Augustus said, staring at my phone as though it had a visual attached to it.
“Pretty useful, though, right?”
“Pretty invasive,” Augustus said. “You ever do that to me?”
“Why would I want to know what you’re doing in your off time?” I shot out before I really thought about it. “I don’t even want to be spending time with you right now, you think I’m going to waste my off-time digging so I can hear you and Taneshia talk about—I dunno, dumb British royalty shows?”
“I told you, The Crown is—”
“I. Don’t. Care,” I said, trying to spell it out for him.
Augustus’s eyes glimmered as he looked at me. “You telling me you’ve never been curious about what I say about you behind your back?”
I started to issue an angry denial but stopped short. “Why, what do you say about me behind my back?”
“Nothing,” Augustus said, suddenly withdrawing.
“No, no, no,” I said, “you don’t just toss that out there like bait and expect me not to bite on it. You’ve been talking shit about me?”
“Not shit, no—”
“What the hell—”
“I—”
“You son of a—”
“She’s your momma, too, watch it.”
“I—”
We both stopped as the conversation between Spiegel and Custis took a strange turn. “What the hell is th—” Custis was asking.
“Oh, shit,” Spiegel said. “That’s Augustus Coleman. They must have followed me. He’s got—”
I blinked. How had they seen us? We were a decent distance away, and I could see them turned, looking in the opposite direction of us. Someone was standing on top of the Walmart awning, and they had a massive piece of rock over their head. While I watched, they threw it, a boulder the size of a mini-fridge, and it shot through the air like it had been launched out of a jumbo slingshot.
“Look out!” Charles Custis said, leaping out of the way and behind the Cadillac.
Ray Spiegel, though …
He froze.
The boulder came launching through the air, like a car speeding down the freeway, toward him—
“Stop it!” I shouted.
“I can’t!” Augustus shouted back, hand extended almost to our rental car window. “It’s—”
The rock splattered Ray Spiegel all across the parking lot, tearing him to shreds before our very eyes.
And there was nothing we could do about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sienna
Chasing Akiyama was getting me nowhere, and having seen a conversation come to an abrupt, storm-off end a time or two, I figured I’d give the big guy some space. It’s what I tended to want when I did a storm-off, though I didn’t ever do it as quietly and gracefully as he had.
So I headed back down to the quay, taking him up on his invite to check on Kat and Harry. If he had restarted time around them, they’d probably be wondering where I went. So I picked my way through the debris that covered the island streets and squinted against the daylight as I strode through the wreckage of this abandoned island back toward the dock.
The whole island had a smell, like greenery mixed with decay. Ivy of some species crawled up some of the walls, grass had forced its way through cracks in the pavement. The whole island was slowly going back to nature, save for those parts that Akiyama had apparently instituted some kind of hold over. I thought about that waiting room turned hallway where we’d had our conversation, and how it still glowed with electricity, preserved in its 1950’s Japanese glory while just down the hall everything had gone to seed.
Weird. I passed a tree that had grown through shattered pavement, and thought … yeah. There was definitely something funky going on here with time. Big surprise, right? 1950’s waiting room, the rest of the island clearly deteriorated, sixty years of decay having taken its toll.
Walking down the slope toward the docks, I saw that Kat and Harry were still frozen. I frowned, wondering if Akiyama had broken his word. I started to jog down toward them, but when I was about twenty feet or so away, they sprang back to life as though someone had pressed play on a video.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’d want to hang around here … either …?” Kat’s comment turned into a question as she started into motion again and then halted at the sight of me suddenly looking her straight in the face. A moment earlier, by her perception, I’d been walking behind her, going the same way. I’d moved ahead of her and one-eightied in less than a second. Hardly impossible for a meta, but given that she hadn’t seen it, it probably didn’t look right. A flash of realization lit her eyes. “Time freeze?”
“Kindasorta,” I said, looking over at Harry, who stumbled a step, hitting a knee as he came out of it. “Akiyama froze you guys, and I had to go chase him down to have a chat.” I caught Harry under one arm, keeping him from keeling over cold. His breathing was suddenly very labored, and his eyes were nearly closed, squinted tight against what I imagined was a tremendous swell to his headache. “You going to be okay?”
“I think I’m going to die of an aneurysm of every single blood vessel in my skull,” Harry said. His face was so red that I had little trouble believing he felt that way. “And that’s if time doesn’t make me and every other person on the earth save my—uh—whatever you are—its permanent bitch.” He looked up at me through nearly-closed eyes. “So … yeah, I’m doing awesome. You?”
“I’ve had better days,” I said. “Or at least ones where I made more progress and spent less time bleeding many pints of my own blood.”
“But not many,” Kat said, smiling just a little. It released a smidgen of my tension, and we shared a smirk. “What’s up Akiyama’s ass?”
“That’s a really good question,” I said, and looked up to the building above us. It was the back side of the one that contained the hospital waiting room, and there, above me, in one of the windows, I saw a shadow.
Akiyama. So he was watching me—us—and that’s why he’d unfrozen time when I was almost back to them.
“Do you think you’re likely to get an answer anytime soon?” Kat asked. “Because I’ve got this publicity tour I’m not looking forward to next week—you know, interviews and such—”
“Gonna suggest if it includes one with Gail Roth, you avoid. She’s a shark.”
“Yeah, they booked me for it, but she’s always been a sweetie to me. I think you just kinda got on her bad side.”
“She asked me if I enjoyed the taste of human meat. Who does that?”
“That’s not quite what she asked,” Kat said.
“Well, that’s where it ended up.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Excuse me,” Harry said, voice strained, face still red like someone had poured tomato soup, or maybe my blood, all over it. “Guy in pain … here … world … time … ending … need …” And Harry passed out. I caught him before he went face down on the concrete quay, but only barely.
I rearranged him and lifted him up in my arms like I was carrying him over the threshold on our honeymoon. “That’s adorable,” Kat said, taking a quick snap with her phone of me carrying him like that. “And going in the blackmail file, assuming time doesn’t end.”
“Harry’s probably got bigger things to worry about,” I said, putting one foot in front of the other as I leaned in, walking back up the hill I’d just descended.
“Don’t we all,” Kat said. “Seriously—publicity tours suck. Time ending is a bummer, but the upside? Me not answering stupid questions about my hair—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t like talking about your hair, Kat.”
“I did at first, but it kinda loses its luster after, oh, I don’t know, a million questions, Sienna. It’s tiresome. I’m more than my hairstyle.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling the weight of Harry in my arms. “You’re also the dress, the ass, the shapely legs—”
“Ouch, sick burn.”
I smiled, something I doubted I would have done with anyone else, given the seriousness of the situation. “Thank you, Kat … again.”
She came alongside, taking care to avoid getting hit by Harry’s legs as we made our way up the hill to the hospital. “For what this time?”
“Being you,” I said, drawing a slow, steady breath. If there was a hospital, maybe I could find a place to lay Harry down, maybe treat him … somehow … with the total lack of medical training I had, and Kat’s powers being maxed out. Well, maybe I could find a nice place for him to lie down, anyway. “And for being here with me.”
Akiyama surveyed me with a wary eye, a very peculiar change over his somewhat skeptical curiosity from a moment before. I stood there, trying to be as lacking expression as him, but failing, as I waited for him to process my question and deliver me an answer so we could go on about the business of trading favors and saving the world.
“I … am fine,” Akiyama finally said, and then turned away from me, his suit jacket swishing in the wind caused by his abrupt move.
“Uhhhh … all evidence to the contrary there, chief,” I said, watching him start to walk away. There were a few potential exits from this retro waiting room, and he seemed to be heading down a long hallway.
“I only wish to be left alone,” Akiyama said, turning back to me, standing tall in the hallway, framed by the shadowy dark of this place and its selective lack of electricity. The hallway in front of him was lit, but not until about a hundred yards ahead, and the waiting room we were in was illuminated by a single fixture. Clearly someone had not been performing scheduled maintenance on the space between, cuz the hallway was riddled with holes while the waiting area still looked A-plus, if a bit retro.
“I know the feeling,” I said, taking a step closer, intending to follow after him. “Me, I was just chilling on the Oregon Coast, living life to the full, if you know what I mean …” No one knew what I meant because that was a lie. The only way I could be defined as ‘living life to the full’ would be if you considered long, languid days broken by infrequent sexual activity and occasionally lovey-doveyness with Harry to blunt the monotony as ‘living.’ I mean, don’t get me wrong, those parts were kinda fun, and our conversations were decent, but everything else …
God, I was bored. And emotionally … uneven, due to recent past events.
None of this needed to be said to the solemn Japanese fellow in front of me, though. “The point is,” I said, trying to get myself back on track as he frowned at me, lightly, “I don’t want to be here, you don’t want me here—that’s cool. Our desires are closely matched in this case. And I’d love to leave, but—and this is a big but, we’re talking pro-wrestler-in-a-way-too-tight-unitard style butt here—time’s coming unhinged out there.” I delivered this last bit with as little accusation as I could.
Akiyama took it in what appeared to be stride. “That is unfortunate … but not my problem.” And he turned to leave again, down the dark hallway toward the light at the end of it.
“I think,” I said, turning on the meta speed and cutting in front of him, which caused his eye to twitch at me, “that it’s not only your problem, but that whatever’s going on out there—time suddenly speeding up and slowing down and stopping, and catching and—anyway, it’s a real mess—I think it’s the sort of thing that affects the whole world. And that the point of origin is …” And I waved my hands all about like the Hokey Pokey and then pointed one finger at him, like I was narrowing it down for all involved. “Yeah.”
He possessed legendary restraint. His face moved maybe a millimeter in response to my accusation, then was still once more. I wouldn’t have wanted to put any money into a Texas Hold ’Em game with him. Way to live up to that stereotype about Asian inscrutability, Akiyama. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Dude,” I said, closing my eyes, “there’s literally no one else who can control time at this point. Passing the buck is not going to work.”
“I don’t know what you just said,” Akiyama replied, “but I wish you a good day. I will let your friends go from their current … position.” They were positioned, all right. Like dolls, waiting for someone to come play with them.
Note to self: referring to your boyfriend as a ‘doll waiting to be played with’ … sounds really awkward and also reeks of Wolfe-ishness.
Argh. Still hurts to think about.
“That doesn’t do me any good if time goes flying off its axle and comes to rest forever, does it?” I asked as Akiyama continued his slow-mo storm-off. Okay, so less a storm-off and more of a calm walk-off. Why couldn’t I ever manage one of those?
Oh, right. Emotional restraint. This dude had the brakes on his feelings, big time.
Akiyama did not turn back to me, and I was left with the distinct feeling that he wasn’t going to be swayed, at least not now, not even if I managed to run around in front of him—which I totally could have, given his slow, sweeping pace. His suit was ultra-outdated. I began to wonder what it’d take to wake his ass up to the peril, and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to do the unsubtle American thing and just say it.
“Time is ending in two days,” I said, and Akiyama slowed his pace of retreat a little. “My boyfriend—er, the guy with me—he’s sorta my boyfriend, I guess? Or a guy friend? Guy who’s more than a friend—you know what, it doesn’t matter right now. The point is, he’s a Cassandra. You know what that is?”
Akiyama turned slowly. “He sees the future.”
“Normally, yeah,” I said. “But right now he just sees the big freeze looming, where everything stops for good. No future beyond that, because we never come out of that last moment. Time ends, the wheel off the axle, laying flat on the road, spinning no more.” So poetic … and stupid. Way to go, Sienna. “It’s coming, okay? And given what’s happened so far when time stops, I’m going to either starve to death or die of boredom because I’m fresh out of conversation and bad guys to chase and … everything else.” I sagged. “Look, this is fated. You have a problem, I’m the problem solver. So come on, Shin’ichi … let’s get to it already.”
He just stared me down, and I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. “I am sorry you have come this far for nothing.” And he bowed to me, like that was that, and turned away again.
And even though he didn’t actually say the word NO, I heard it in every syllable of what he did say, the politest refusal, as the only guy on the planet who could help stop this cataclysmic shitshow just strode right off like nothing I’d just said mattered one damned bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jamal
“Those sandwiches are pretty good,” Augustus said, crunching down the last of a roast beef and fontina panini as we sat in a parking lot, staring out across a few empty rows. Walmart was off to our right, but we were parked a ways out from the store, staring across at the Chuck E. Cheese on the end of the little shopping plaza. I was still slowly working my way through a roasted chicken hoagie, wondering how long it was going to take Spiegel to show up, because I was pretty sure I’d already gotten a read on Charles Custis. He was in a Cadillac Escalade about two hundred feet away, vehicle facing the opposite direction. I’d tagged his plates using the security cameras all around the parking lot, and now was avoiding touching the local network, because I could feel someone else moving around at the edges of it with the same electrical skills I boasted.
“Uh huh.” I’d been mostly ignoring my brother the last few hours for the sake of avoiding argument. Also, the sandwiches were pretty good.
“I hate surveillance,” Augustus said after a few seconds of silence.
“You don’t say,” I muttered under my breath, not taking much in the way of pains to hide my irritation. I think I was at my breaking point with him, too, after all this time and effort at being civil and carrying his rash-acting ass through however many near-misses with death.
“Hey, man,” he said, a flash of his own irritation showing, “if you like sitting your ass in this car for hours, you could do it by yourself. You don’t need me for this part.”
“Yeah, maybe you should have stayed back at the hotel,” I said. “Chill with wi-fi, catch up on The Crown on Netflix.”
Augustus bristled. “Hey, that’s a good show, all right? It’s got real elegance to it.”
“Far be it from me to suggest otherwise,” I said, concentrating on my phone. Spiegel’s Prius came cruising up and stopped next to the Escalade, and a moment later, he got out, nodding at Custis.
Custis dismounted his big SUV a few seconds later, and together he and Spiegel wandered out in front of their cars. He’d picked a row out near where the Walmart shoppers tapered off and the next store over, a CrossFit studio, didn’t have quite as much of a crowd, so the place where they’d parked was pretty empty. They were standing in the middle of a field of concrete without a single sound sensor for a long ways, if you didn’t count Spiegel’s cell phone. Which I did count, because I backdoored it and then projected the sound through my own speakers, while recording it for posterity. Or law enforcement. One of those.
“That going to stand up in court if they say anything incriminating?” Augustus asked, eyeing my phone as Spiegel and Custis exchanged tense pleasantries.
“I doubt they will, but probably not,” I said, shrugging. I wasn’t a lawyer, but I was more interested in using anything bad they said to light up the press about their misconduct versus actually trying to burn them in court. This was a war for the truth about Sienna, not me building a careful criminal prosecution. After all, these people weren’t officers of the court, and if the Custis family did have evidence of Sienna’s innocence, I didn’t think they were even compelled to share it by force of law. They were total dicks if they were hiding it, but I doubted it would be illegal.
“It creeps me out you can do that,” Augustus said, staring at my phone as though it had a visual attached to it.
“Pretty useful, though, right?”
“Pretty invasive,” Augustus said. “You ever do that to me?”
“Why would I want to know what you’re doing in your off time?” I shot out before I really thought about it. “I don’t even want to be spending time with you right now, you think I’m going to waste my off-time digging so I can hear you and Taneshia talk about—I dunno, dumb British royalty shows?”
“I told you, The Crown is—”
“I. Don’t. Care,” I said, trying to spell it out for him.
Augustus’s eyes glimmered as he looked at me. “You telling me you’ve never been curious about what I say about you behind your back?”
I started to issue an angry denial but stopped short. “Why, what do you say about me behind my back?”
“Nothing,” Augustus said, suddenly withdrawing.
“No, no, no,” I said, “you don’t just toss that out there like bait and expect me not to bite on it. You’ve been talking shit about me?”
“Not shit, no—”
“What the hell—”
“I—”
“You son of a—”
“She’s your momma, too, watch it.”
“I—”
We both stopped as the conversation between Spiegel and Custis took a strange turn. “What the hell is th—” Custis was asking.
“Oh, shit,” Spiegel said. “That’s Augustus Coleman. They must have followed me. He’s got—”
I blinked. How had they seen us? We were a decent distance away, and I could see them turned, looking in the opposite direction of us. Someone was standing on top of the Walmart awning, and they had a massive piece of rock over their head. While I watched, they threw it, a boulder the size of a mini-fridge, and it shot through the air like it had been launched out of a jumbo slingshot.
“Look out!” Charles Custis said, leaping out of the way and behind the Cadillac.
Ray Spiegel, though …
He froze.
The boulder came launching through the air, like a car speeding down the freeway, toward him—
“Stop it!” I shouted.
“I can’t!” Augustus shouted back, hand extended almost to our rental car window. “It’s—”
The rock splattered Ray Spiegel all across the parking lot, tearing him to shreds before our very eyes.
And there was nothing we could do about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sienna
Chasing Akiyama was getting me nowhere, and having seen a conversation come to an abrupt, storm-off end a time or two, I figured I’d give the big guy some space. It’s what I tended to want when I did a storm-off, though I didn’t ever do it as quietly and gracefully as he had.
So I headed back down to the quay, taking him up on his invite to check on Kat and Harry. If he had restarted time around them, they’d probably be wondering where I went. So I picked my way through the debris that covered the island streets and squinted against the daylight as I strode through the wreckage of this abandoned island back toward the dock.
The whole island had a smell, like greenery mixed with decay. Ivy of some species crawled up some of the walls, grass had forced its way through cracks in the pavement. The whole island was slowly going back to nature, save for those parts that Akiyama had apparently instituted some kind of hold over. I thought about that waiting room turned hallway where we’d had our conversation, and how it still glowed with electricity, preserved in its 1950’s Japanese glory while just down the hall everything had gone to seed.
Weird. I passed a tree that had grown through shattered pavement, and thought … yeah. There was definitely something funky going on here with time. Big surprise, right? 1950’s waiting room, the rest of the island clearly deteriorated, sixty years of decay having taken its toll.
Walking down the slope toward the docks, I saw that Kat and Harry were still frozen. I frowned, wondering if Akiyama had broken his word. I started to jog down toward them, but when I was about twenty feet or so away, they sprang back to life as though someone had pressed play on a video.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’d want to hang around here … either …?” Kat’s comment turned into a question as she started into motion again and then halted at the sight of me suddenly looking her straight in the face. A moment earlier, by her perception, I’d been walking behind her, going the same way. I’d moved ahead of her and one-eightied in less than a second. Hardly impossible for a meta, but given that she hadn’t seen it, it probably didn’t look right. A flash of realization lit her eyes. “Time freeze?”
“Kindasorta,” I said, looking over at Harry, who stumbled a step, hitting a knee as he came out of it. “Akiyama froze you guys, and I had to go chase him down to have a chat.” I caught Harry under one arm, keeping him from keeling over cold. His breathing was suddenly very labored, and his eyes were nearly closed, squinted tight against what I imagined was a tremendous swell to his headache. “You going to be okay?”
“I think I’m going to die of an aneurysm of every single blood vessel in my skull,” Harry said. His face was so red that I had little trouble believing he felt that way. “And that’s if time doesn’t make me and every other person on the earth save my—uh—whatever you are—its permanent bitch.” He looked up at me through nearly-closed eyes. “So … yeah, I’m doing awesome. You?”
“I’ve had better days,” I said. “Or at least ones where I made more progress and spent less time bleeding many pints of my own blood.”
“But not many,” Kat said, smiling just a little. It released a smidgen of my tension, and we shared a smirk. “What’s up Akiyama’s ass?”
“That’s a really good question,” I said, and looked up to the building above us. It was the back side of the one that contained the hospital waiting room, and there, above me, in one of the windows, I saw a shadow.
Akiyama. So he was watching me—us—and that’s why he’d unfrozen time when I was almost back to them.
“Do you think you’re likely to get an answer anytime soon?” Kat asked. “Because I’ve got this publicity tour I’m not looking forward to next week—you know, interviews and such—”
“Gonna suggest if it includes one with Gail Roth, you avoid. She’s a shark.”
“Yeah, they booked me for it, but she’s always been a sweetie to me. I think you just kinda got on her bad side.”
“She asked me if I enjoyed the taste of human meat. Who does that?”
“That’s not quite what she asked,” Kat said.
“Well, that’s where it ended up.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Excuse me,” Harry said, voice strained, face still red like someone had poured tomato soup, or maybe my blood, all over it. “Guy in pain … here … world … time … ending … need …” And Harry passed out. I caught him before he went face down on the concrete quay, but only barely.
I rearranged him and lifted him up in my arms like I was carrying him over the threshold on our honeymoon. “That’s adorable,” Kat said, taking a quick snap with her phone of me carrying him like that. “And going in the blackmail file, assuming time doesn’t end.”
“Harry’s probably got bigger things to worry about,” I said, putting one foot in front of the other as I leaned in, walking back up the hill I’d just descended.
“Don’t we all,” Kat said. “Seriously—publicity tours suck. Time ending is a bummer, but the upside? Me not answering stupid questions about my hair—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t like talking about your hair, Kat.”
“I did at first, but it kinda loses its luster after, oh, I don’t know, a million questions, Sienna. It’s tiresome. I’m more than my hairstyle.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling the weight of Harry in my arms. “You’re also the dress, the ass, the shapely legs—”
“Ouch, sick burn.”
I smiled, something I doubted I would have done with anyone else, given the seriousness of the situation. “Thank you, Kat … again.”
She came alongside, taking care to avoid getting hit by Harry’s legs as we made our way up the hill to the hospital. “For what this time?”
“Being you,” I said, drawing a slow, steady breath. If there was a hospital, maybe I could find a place to lay Harry down, maybe treat him … somehow … with the total lack of medical training I had, and Kat’s powers being maxed out. Well, maybe I could find a nice place for him to lie down, anyway. “And for being here with me.”
