Time, page 25
I moved over to check on Kat. Her breathing was steady, pulse was fine, but when I pinched her finger, she fluttered her eyes. Lack of pain reflex would have been mildly concerning, but since I didn’t have a ton of time to be concerned at the moment, a little relief washed over me as she raised her head, blinking at me.
“Sienna? What happened?” Kat asked, sounding pretty groggy.
“Good news,” I said, actually relieved for real, “you didn’t forget me.”
“No,” she said, looking utterly bewildered. “Why would I forget you?”
“I dunno,” I said, settling back on my haunches. “I figured, what with you being a modern day, meta-equivalent of the Kardashians, the first thing you’d forget would be the little people, like me.”
She just stared at me. “What’s … a Kardashian?”
“You forgot that?” I asked, laughing. “I think I speak for most of the world when I say, ‘Lucky you.’”
“Oh—okay,” Kat said, and sat up, a bit unsteadily. “What’s … going on with Akiyama?” she asked, nodding at the open door.
“He’s got a trauma going on in there,” I said, “which makes sense, cuz it’s the trauma room, right? But … yeah … he’s holding on to the past in a big way, and it’s causing time to snap back, hard. Or stop, I guess.”
“How does that work?” Kat asked, still sounding really sleepy. Her eyes were only half open, and she was blinking furiously.
“Have you ever seen me pop out of a flying Delorean with wild, white hair, wearing a white lab coat and—why am I bothering, you probably don’t even remember—”
“I remember Back to the Future, okay?” Kat rubbed at her head.
“So far it’s looking like it’s all big wins in the memory department for you,” I said. “Anyway, near as I can tell without being Doc Brown, Akiyama has held onto this moment in time so long that if he doesn’t let go soon, the rest of the world gets … well, cocked up because his hold spreads. Or something. I think.”
“Lot of qualifiers there,” she said, getting to her knees. “Okay. What do we do to make Akiyama let go? Knock his ass out?”
“I don’t think that’s going to do it,” I said, rising with her. “And the answer to the first question is, I dunno. I have enough trouble letting go of my own issues and past traumas, so I’m probably the last person who should be in charge of coaching others on this—what?”
Kat was just shaking her head, lips curled in a smile of unmistakable amusement. “You’re the first person who should help, given all the shit you’ve been through.”
“I’m not a counselor, Kat,” I said, “and I’m not sweet. I took a pass at it just now, and—I’m telling you, he’s dug in. A bomb could not dislodge Akiyama from his current course of action.”
“Why not?” she asked, hobbling over to the door to the room. “What’s so important—” She stopped, staring in at the scene, which was frozen again, at least temporarily. “Oh.”
Akiyama was on all fours again, staring at the paused time.
“Hey,” I called in, “any chance you’ve reconsidered letting g—”
“I CAN’T!” Akiyama drowned me in fury as he shouted over his shoulder at us. Then he turned back to the scene, which, apparently prompted by his outburst, spun to life again.
“See?” I turned to Kat.
She stared into the room, then shook her head. “I don’t think I can do anything. I don’t even think I could manage to walk over there right now, so unless you want to bring him over here for a heart to heart—” And she sagged against the door frame.
“I don’t think he’d be amenable to that,” I said, catching a glimpse of him in profile. Beads of sweat were rolling down his face, and he was taking in the horrifying scene as it played once more, for probably the millionth time. It made my stomach twist, looking at his face with each viewing.
However many times Akiyama had seen this … the pain was just as fresh as the first.
Kat looked up at me from where she’d collapsed once more. “Then I think … this one’s on you. Again, Sienna. No pressure. World in your hands. This is old hat for you by now.” She forced a smile that could only be described as encouraging, and then shut her eyes.
“But this sucks so much,” I said, letting my own emotions flow, “putting this all on me, like I haven’t just lost—” I shut up. “He won’t heal, Kat, because he doesn’t want to.” She didn’t stir. “He can’t let go.” I pictured that village in Scotland, the one I’d seen in my dreams for the last few months, and a chill broke out over my skin. “I know how he feels. God knows—I know exactly how he feels, because sometimes I wish I could just forget—”
The emotion overwhelmed me, crawling up my throat, threatening to spill out in word and—other ways. Weepy ways. But that wasn’t why I stopped talking in the middle of the sentence.
“Oh,” I said. Because I got it. Finally.
I knew what the service was that I had to perform for Akiyama. And with a last look at Kat, who was peacefully out, and a worried one at Harry, who twitched in his sleep like he was having a fever dream, I crossed the threshold into Akiyama’s trauma room … to do the only thing I could for him.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Shin’ichi,” I said quietly as I entered the room. He didn’t turn, but I saw him stiffen as he watched the scene unfold again, his wife screaming in pain. I must have missed this part before, but it was an agonizing cry, the sound of labor, or maybe labor gone terribly wrong. It was a wrenching note, and I wanted to cringe away from it.
But I couldn’t. Not any more than he could.
“I won’t let go,” Akiyama said, still on his knees. He was watching from a few feet away, staring at the event—the scene—like it was the last thing on earth that he cared about. Because it kind of was.
I came up behind him slowly. “I know,” I said. The screaming had stopped, and she’d gone limp on the table. Her stomach bulged, and the doctor started to talk furiously, yelling at one of the nurses.
“I have lived here for so long,” he said, as I slipped down to sit next to him. “I cannot imagine a life without … her.” He had a single tear tracing its way down his cheek. “I lived as a god before I met her, and I gave it all up to be here, with her, after but a chance look.” He glanced at me. “I saw her in a line after the bombing. The country was a smoking ruin … but when I saw, her, I saw … beauty amid the ashes, like a cherry blossom on a lifeless tree.” He turned his gaze toward her again as the scene snapped back to the beginning. “We were together for over a decade, but … it was longer, of course. I would relive the good moments, over and over. My life with her was …” His voice trailed off, breaking, before he composed himself, “… perfect.”
“I wouldn’t know what a perfect life feels like,” I said, the hard floor biting into my ass as I sat patiently and listened to the doctor give commands in Japanese. “But I know what life feels like—and it’s not supposed to be just the same moments on repeat, forever.” I looked at him, he looked at me. “Once upon a time, I might have thought you were fortunate to have the power you do, cuz … control of time, it’s a pretty cool one. But this …” I shook my head at the spectacle before, the reheated torment that Akiyama consumed every day like a poison that would never actually kill him, only make him wish for death. “I don’t think the reason you have this power is so you can torture yourself until you break time.”
“What do you know about power and the reasons for it?” Akiyama threw at me, anger burning through his tone.
“I know that when we have these time flashes, it always seems to be critical moments from our lives and not just a random Tuesday where you’re clipping your toenails,” I said, thinking of the village in Scotland. “Now maybe that’s just the default setting for a cold and indifferent universe that doesn’t give a damn about us, but … to me, it seems like the sort of thing that’s … not so much random.”
“What does that matter?” Akiyama asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” I said with a shrug. “Everything, maybe. But I guess it doesn’t do much for you at the moment.” I looked right at him. “I can’t let you wreck time.”
His gaze hardened. “You can’t make me leave.”
“I don’t want to make you do anything,” I said, taking a deep breath as I stared into his dark eyes. Now I could see it, now that he was so close to the edge. “I want to help you. Time … may not be able to heal this wound of yours, but only because you won’t let it.” I put a hand on his shoulder, gently, and he started to flinch away, but controlled himself, staring at it suspiciously.
“I know time better than anyone,” Akiyama said, tearing his gaze from my hand on his shoulder to look at me, directly. “The idea that it, on its own, has some magical healing property—is laughable. Time does not heal anything; your pain only diminishes the further you get from its infliction. It fades, at best, a remedy of the forgetful.” He looked at the scene as again, his wife let out the last shriek and passed out as the doctor began to panic in earnest. “I don’t wish to forget. Ever.”
“I know, Shin’ichi,” I said, raising my hand from his shoulder … to the side of his neck. “And that’s the problem.”
He turned his head, slowly, to look at me, baffled at my placid agreement. I let my fingers stay on the side of his neck, kneading into the muscles. He looked at my hand briefly and said, a little tautly, “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, but it won’t—”
The first strains of my power must have hit him just then, because his face fell, and I could see the wheels turn as he tried to assess where the dull burn was coming from.
“I’m sorry,” I said, moving to clamp my other hand on his cheek, holding him tight so he couldn’t wriggle free, not that he had much strength left to do so at this point. “But this is the only way.” I looked him in the eyes and saw panic rising, the fear, as the pain grew where my skin touched his. “Your pain is so great, you’d stop the world in its tracks to keep drinking deep of your own torment. These memories are like poison, Shin’ichi, but they won’t just kill you—they’ll ruin everything and everyone.”
I stared down at him, and he started to jerk, feebly, in my grip. “So … I need them. At least … some of them.”
My power propelled me into his mind, and I tried to decide how deep I needed to excise. Performing memory surgery was something I’d done more than a time or two, and while I’d never exactly relished it …
Now? After what Rose had done to me?
I hated it more than ever before.
“This isn’t about taking your past,” I murmured, the words squeezing out into the real world as I existed in the blue flashes of Akiyama’s memories. “It’s about making sure that you—and everyone else—has a future.”
To that end, I locked onto a certain point in time, in his memory, and entered the very moment when everything had gone wrong for the first time.
Akiyama stood at the side of the scene. The doctor had shouted, and Akiyama had burst into the room from the waiting room, hearing it through his meta hearing.
“This,” I whispered, seeing Akiyama’s face frozen in fury, in anguish. “This is the moment.”
And I took it, as I always did when viewing someone’s memories from within them.
There were a few more, all from after that point. Moments of high emotion, all of which tied back to this one, where he made the decision to lock his powers on a single space of time, and never let go.
I could feel the threads of his will slipping away as he let go, the emotional ties to keeping up his nigh-eternal war against its passage in this room, in this place unbound one by one by my removal of the memories that bound him here.
With a last gasp, I pulled my hands from him and fell over, the heat of my power burning through my flesh like fire in my blood, a little too titillating to make me feel good about experiencing it in semi-public. I thudded to my back, staring at the ceiling, which was black with the decay of time.
“I am sorry, my—” And here Akiyama said something in Japanese, something I hadn’t absorbed through the memories I’d taken. He was sitting there, that tear still streaking its way down his cheek.
But his wife … and the doctor … and the nurses …
And the baby, the one that had never drawn so much as a breath …
Were all gone.
In their place was a broken wall, a trauma room ravaged by time and ruin, and a sky that looked out on the setting sun over the empty sea.
“I’m sorry, too, Shin’ichi,” I said, but he did not move, did not look at me, did not even acknowledge my presence, “but it had to be done.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Ileft Akiyama sitting there, staring into the sunset, motionless, speechless. He seemed like a vegetable, for all intents and purposes, and I would have felt bad about leaving him as such except I didn’t want to disturb him, either. I was pretty sure he knew, in general, what I’d done to him, and poking the bear after you’ve ripped apart his memories? Didn’t seem like either the smart or the kind move.
“Man, my head feels like someone decided to have a hell of a bender,” Harry said as I walked back into the ruined corridor outside the ward. He was sitting up now, looking at Kat, who was similarly sitting up, leaning against the doorframe to the trauma room. “Makes me sorry I missed it.”
“The only thing that got bent was time,” I said, trying to disguise my relief that he appeared to be more or less back to normal. Play it cool, that’s the Sienna way. Or at least play it cool until you get pissed, then unload a vengeful rain of hell upon your foes. That’s maybe more the actual Sienna way.
“So … is time all better, then?” Kat asked, looking around. “Did it get … fixed? In the non-pet, spaying/neutering sort of way?”
“Time remains intact, so far as I can tell,” I said, looking around for any of those obvious fractures that Akiyama had produced when he’d gotten overly emotive. “It certainly seems to be chugging along normally—”
Of course I shouldn’t have said that, because tempting time was apparently as smart an idea as tempting fate. The world went psychedelic around me, and once more I found myself in that other Japanese hospital room, with Kat on the bed, baby laid atop her chest, and Harry’s broad shoulders stooping over her.
“Why the hell did I have to go and open my big yap?” I mumbled, standing just outside the little family circle, over Harry’s shoulder. “Because of course I’ve now got to be treated to a nice dose of jealousy-inducing flashback to the time when my friend Kat was schtuping my current boyfriend—”
“What should we name him?” the man was asking, and I realized, with a little bit of a chill—
That was not Harry’s voice. It wasn’t totally dissimilar, but it wasn’t Harry.
“Harrison,” Kat said, staring in obvious, googly-eyed glee at her newborn baby joy. “Harrison Aleksandr Graves.” She looked up. “I want to name him after my brother.”
“Holy shit,” I said, as the kaleidoscope of colors blew past me with a fury once more, and I was deposited back at the entry to the trauma room in the present day. I hit my knees, totally from the passage of time travel and the flashback and not at all from the touching tribute to my friend Aleksandr, now lost, that Kat had performed some sixty years ago.
“Holy shit, indeed,” Kat muttered. She did not seem that taken aback; a little smile perched on her lips.
I stared at her, she met my gaze evenly, and I caught a hint of knowing in her eyes. “You remember?”
She nodded, once. “The stuff Omega gave me, before I was ‘retrieved’ by the Directorate? Whenever I use enough of my powers to trigger memory loss … some old memories come bubbling back up. I kinda recalled this, but now that I’ve seen it, in living color …” Her voice drifted off, and she looked at Harry, who was staring back at her in a very restrained sort of way … “I remember you … Harry.”
Harry choked back a little sniffle. “Good,” he managed to get out. “That … that’s good. What all do you, uh … do you remember?”
Kat settled her head back against the wall, as if drifting back into a pool of soothing memory, a peaceful smile on her face. “I remember raising you around the world. I remember spending a winter in Smolensk. I remember a summer in Oslo … a year in Yokohama.” She opened her eyes, and her smile turned sad. “I remember losing your father in Ulaanbaatar.” Now the smile faded. “And almost losing you in Prague.”
Harry sniffled. “That was where, uh … where you used your powers and—”
“And forgot you,” Kat said, and her eyes were full. “I’m so sorry, Harry. I tried to save your life and—I forgot you.”
“You did save my life,” Harry said, nodding, but not looking up. “You did. I would have died if you hadn’t. And because of what you did …” He threw his arms wide and forced a smile. “Here I am. Alive and kicking. Still moving about the world. And—”
“Sleeping with Sienna,” Kat said, and her lips tightened together.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
Whoops.
“Hey, I totally did not know he was your kid,” I said, finally inserting myself into this blissfully sweet and tear-filled family reunion. “I mean, I don’t know that it would have stopped me, especially at certain, uh … junctures … of our relationship, but still … didn’t know.”
“I’m just ragging on you, Sienna,” Kat said, shoulders shaking with amusement, her smile telling me that she was totally busting my ass. “He’s a big boy. Older than you.” She turned her gaze to Harry. “I’d tell you to find someone your own age, but … I don’t think you could do much better than her.”
That sounded like a compliment. Or maybe an insult to Harry. “Thanks,” was all he said, and it was kinda strained.
“Need a hand?” I asked Kat, offering her one.
“Sure,” she said, and seized my arm up the sleeve in order to lever herself up with my help. Once she was on her feet, she leaned against the wall. “I’ll be back up and running here in just a minute. I think.”
