Time, page 3
“Can’t work up a solution until I get there,” I said.
“Get wh—” He paused, and I assumed he was reading ahead in our conversation. He did that all the time. “Why are we going to—”
Time froze once again, and rather than wind him up more, I just stood there and waited for it to start again. It took a few seconds by my reckoning, and I composed the rest of the planned conversation in my head outside of his ability to read it, waiting for him to surge into motion again.
“—Japan?” he finished, and then looked like he’d been slapped. “Did time just … stop again?” He blinked, surprise etching itself along the lines of his forehead.
“We’re going to Japan because I think that’s the origin of the trouble,” I said. “With a guy named Shin’ichi Akiyama. We’ll find him on an island off the coast near Nagasaki.” And I calmly turned away, heading back toward our rented house, cold water streaming, again, from the sky, soaking me. I felt warm anyway.
“How do you know all thi—” He started to ask, and then he must have caught the answer without me having to say it.
“Because I’ve been waiting for this moment—or something like it—for almost seven years,” I said, with a little buzz of anticipation.
It was time.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Idon’t understand,” Harry said when we were back in our apartment. I’d already started packing my limited wardrobe. I didn’t want to have to do any shopping once we got to Japan, and I was mentally working through how best to make this happen. Only a few years ago, when I’d had access to private jets or could fly myself, it had seemed like it’d be pretty easy to get to there when this day came. No planning necessary.
Now that I was an international fugitive, I doubted customs in the land of the Rising Sun was going to happily stamp my passport. Especially since I could no longer fly in under the radar, sans plane, this complicated things.
“That’s because I’m not bothering to explain things as yet,” I said, throwing a pretty nice halter top that I had yet to wear into my suitcase. It was black, and exposed just enough skin to actually kill people and also make the Oregon spring seem far too chilly for even this Minnesotan. I wondered what the weather was like in Japan right now, and decided it was probably not all that different from here.
“Which is another thing that’s driving me slightly nuts,” Harry said, pacing behind me. He’d packed in about two seconds once he’d seen me do so, and I was pretty sure he’d forgotten his toiletries in his haste. Men. “How long have you known this was coming? This time freeze and whatnot?”
“I didn’t know it was going to be this, exactly,” I said, folding the halter top clumsily and putting it in the suitcase. “But I’ve only seen this time control power on display before from one type of meta. There’s only one of those still alive on the planet that I know of, and we have a destined meeting, ergo this is probably Shin’ichi Akiyama, and the time has come for us to, y’know, meet for the first time.” I blinked. “Well, his first time. My second.”
Harry’s voice sounded like a plaintive squeal. “What the hell does that even mean? First? Second? This isn’t explanation, this is like an Abbott and Costello routine.”
“Today is the catcher,” I said, “Tomorrow is the pitcher.”
“I like that you get that—” Harry started to say.
“My mom was into the classics.”
“—but this is not helping allay my concerns, which are many and varied,” Harry snapped, and I sensed he was about to blow a gasket. What do you get for the guy who’s always been able to see the future and quietly reveled in the control that gave him?
Uncertainty. Change. I suspected I could have been with Harry all the days of his life and not seen him as freaked out as I was seeing him right now. He was trying to hide it, now that he’d had a little time to try and calm himself, but he was still about two seconds from losing his shit, and I didn’t need future-predictive probability powers to see that.
“Relax, sweet cheeks,” I said, probably a little too condescendingly, “this is all going to work out in the end.”
“How do you know this?” Harry asked, with some fervency. He just couldn’t quite keep a lid on his freakout. And he had pretty good reason.
“Because it all worked out before,” I said, slamming my suitcase closed and zipping it.
Harry’s head sagged into his hand. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah, time travel is confusing like that,” I said, picking up my suitcase. “I gotta grab a nap.”
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” he said in a strained voice. This was not going well for him, but God bless him, he was trying. This was probably already the most strenuous year of his life just based on the last hour.
I probably wasn’t helping with my reaction to it all, but I figured he’d catch up sooner or later, provided time didn’t skip him past my explanation. “Yeah, but I gotta line up my ride to Japan.” I paced over to the bed, which was a saggy double. We were staying in someone’s part-time home, Airbnb-ing it in the off season.
“Will you please just stop for a moment and at least consider explaining this to me in a manner that isn’t—” He stopped, eyes moving back and forth like he was reading invisible text. Which he wasn’t. He was reading the future, and my responses to his slowly unspooling sanity as he searched for answers. “Who’s Weissman?”
“He was a huge tool and a buddy of Sovereign’s,” I said. “At the close of the war with Sovereign, he was the second in command of Century and was running the extermination of our people.”
“And he could control time,” Harry said, reading along with me, but not jumping ahead as he usually did. That told me how freaked out he was. He was more solidly stuck in the near-term present than I’d ever seen him, unable to look forward very far at all. He’d told me that his powers were based on his ability to basically stay calm and calculate, but this was proving it beyond a doubt. He was like a computer most of the time—just calmly chunking along, reading the most likely probabilities as he went, seeing a few minutes ahead in time and measuring the probabilities of the various outcomes of the paths we could choose.
But now his head—his Random Access Memory, where he stored all the current thoughts and considerations—was jammed up by panic for the first time in his life, and he couldn’t hold enough data in his head to see more than a few seconds out.
“Yeah, Weissman could control time,” I said. “Stop it, start it again. He was basically invincible, and he would have completely annihilated every metahuman on the planet, happily, except—”
“Except there was someone out there with his same power,” Harry said, “and that made them immune to his abilities. Shin’ichi—”
“Akiyama,” I said with a nod and a tight smile. “More powerful than Weissman, and apparently keeping an irritable eye on him from afar. They had an agreement. Akiyama let Weissman play with time some, provided he didn’t push it or freeze it, whatever—too much. He had limits, imposed by Akiyama—”
“Like your big brother telling you that you could only play with his toys for thirty seconds at a time,” Harry said, eyes still dashing back and forth as he tried to make sense out of stuff that honestly didn’t make a ton of sense, even when you’d lived through it like I had.
“If my big brother tried to do that, he’d get his ass kicked.” Well, he would have before. Now that he was more powerful than me … pfft, I’d still kick his ass if he tried dictating to me. And I bet he knew it.
“But—you’re saying this Akiyama didn’t leave his island—” Harry started. I hadn’t said that, obviously—he was reading ahead in the conversation again.
“He hasn’t left his island in years,” I said. “Hundreds, for all I know. All the big deal metas in the world know about him and leave him way the hell alone. Even Century didn’t mess with him, because he could have killed every last one of them without breaking a sweat. He can freeze time,” and I gestured around me, “and so, obviously—”
“He’s the one doing this,” Harry said. “But how do you—” He paused, blinking. “How did you meet him? You just said he hasn’t left his island in years.”
I let a subtle cringe escape. This was where things got complicated. I moved my suitcase to the door while I contemplated how best to explain this without losing Harry, and it occurred to me that I was going to have to jump ahead. “I met his future self. After he left the island.”
Harry just stared at me, his eyes very still, which I took to mean he was firmly in the moment with me and had stopped trying to understand what the hell was going on seconds and minutes ahead. “My head hurts,” he said, and sagged onto the bed.
“When I met him almost seven years ago, it was the future Akiyama I encountered, coming back in time to … thank me or pay me back for some great service I had done him in the future,” I said, putting the travel bag down and working my way slowly back to Harry. “I’m guessing here, now, that it’s finally time for me to perform said service. In return, he came back in time to seven years ago and allowed my mother to kill Weissman, making the war … winnable.” I felt my voice take a slightly scratchy quality. “She sacrificed herself to end him with Akiyama’s help, and … she couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t suspended Weissman’s powers, so …”
Harry had a hand over his mouth and was blinking furiously again. “So … it’s coming time to ante up for your favor … that came seven years ago? And resulted in the death of your mother?” He gave me a wary look. “Forgive me, but that does not sound like a great favor.”
I shrugged. “It saved the world.”
“At the cost of your mother’s life.”
“Shit happens. People die.” My voice was suddenly very scratchy.
“So you think this is Akiyama.” Harry looked around the room. “This time skipping thing. That the time has come to pay—or pay back—or forward—or whatever—this shitty debt of yours to him.”
“Seems like, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, putting his face in his hands. “The future, the past, the probabilities being askew … none of this makes sense to me.”
“It’s okay,” I said, taking a couple steps over to him and putting my hand on his back, which was still soaked from the rain. I’d changed before I’d packed. Harry, on the other hand …
Well, his head was elsewhere. Understandably.
“How do we even get to Japan?” Harry asked, clearly too frazzled to look ahead the ten seconds it’d take to get the answer. Then he looked up at me, sighed, and said, “Greg Vansen? That’s not going to work. Your sleep schedules are too far apart, you won’t be able to get ahold of him for at least forty-eight hours via dreamwalk, and if you try to contact him conventionally …” He concentrated hard. “Yeah. Ninety nine point nine percent chance the cops come crashing down on us. There’s no path to Japan that way.”
“Shit,” and then I was furiously reconsidering. And then, after a minute, I said, “Okay, plan B.”
“Oh. Geez.” He lurched forward, catching his head in his hands. “For the sake of a—”
“Will it work?” I asked, as he buried his face in his fingers, not looking up. He didn’t move, just sat there, looking as … hell, I dunno, I’d never seen this kind of a thing from Harry before.
“Insult to frigging injury,” he muttered under his breath. “Of course it’d be—” He lifted his head out of his hands and blinked at me for a few seconds, sighed, and said, in a voice that sounded drained of life, “Yeah, that’ll work—but only if I can keep my head about me and steer you through customs and all the snares that are going to be coming. It’s a pretty tight path we’ll have to walk.”
“I’m good at following instruction,” I said with a tight smile, and watched his frustration evaporate to be replaced by something mildly amused—and maybe a little annoyed. “Well, I can follow instructions … from time to time … when I see a reason to.”
“Uh huh,” he said, pushing his face back into his hands. “I don’t mean to put any pressure on you, but you should probably get to sleep if you want to pull this off. Your window for a nap and catching—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, getting in bed and closing my eyes. As if trying to oblige me, time seemed to have stopped again, the sound of rain tapping at the roof ceasing into silence. Even Harry had frozen, though his face betrayed …
Worry. And hints of … something else, his forehead lined heavily, his eyes staring off past me in contemplation.
I stifled a yawn as I pressed my cheek to the soft pillow. Maybe if I hurried, I could get to sleep before time started again.
With that in mind, I cleared my head save for thoughts of one person, in particular, whose help I needed. A vision of them carefully in mind, I tried to relax, and a few minutes later, before time had resumed its course, I drifted off in the lightest of naps.
CHAPTER SIX
Jamal
“You lazy, no good, after-market, shit-level, made in a fourth-world-country-sweatshop-quality supervillain,” Augustus said as he stormed up on the guy smoking his cigarette, eyes wide at the big black dude stomping toward him. “You are going to get off your lazy ass and get to work on this petty crime shit you got going on or I am gonna put my foot up your ass—”
“Augustus!” I shouted, trying to catch up with him as our mark just stared, cigarette dangling from his lips in shock. I wasn’t sure how the cops would view this scene if they saw it play out, but I had a feeling the law wasn’t technically on our side if my brother kept carrying on like he’d lost his damned mind, trying to entrap our mark into something more illegal than smoking on the sidewalk.
“When I haul my ass out of bed in the morning, I expect a certain level of commitment from my criminals,” Augustus said, now up in the guy’s face. He flicked the cigarette right out of the dude’s bulging lips. Our mark watched it sail through the air, ash flicking loose as it twisted in a slow arc down onto the pavement. “I expect them to get their ass to work robbing stores or shaking people down, and then I expect I’m going to have to kick their ass senseless, drag them to the nearest authorities, and then pull their sorry ass back to the Cube where they can spend some serious time thinking over all the bad shit they’ve done. You feeling me, here?”
The guy just blinked. “Who … who are you?” He sounded a little scratchy, like maybe he was still strung out.
“My name is Augustus Coleman, and I’m going to be your arresting officer for today,” my brother said, all thinly restrained and polite.
“What … what did I do?” the guy asked, smacking his lips. I think he hadn’t quite put together that his cigarette had been knocked free. Even though he watched it happen.
“You know what you did!” Augustus thundered, becoming the substitute teacher from the Key and Peele sketch before my very eyes.
“Augustus, I’m not so sure—” I started to say, and my phone buzzed. I raised it up to look at it. You’re looking in the wrong place. Again. “That’s not very helpful,” I muttered. I looked up, searching for nearby cameras. There weren’t any obvious ones, but for all I knew, Arche could have hacked every cell phone nearby and was watching this play out in real-time.
“I … I don’t know what I did,” the guy said, very subdued, meek, eyes still glazed over. “Was it bad?” His voice was cloudy, and I wondered if he even remembered Augustus’s approach, let alone anything he might have done in the last twenty-four hours. To say nothing of going further back. “Was it bad?” He sounded genuinely curious.
“Was it b—can you believe what he’s asking us?” Augustus shot a look at me. “Are you hearing this?”
I was torn, trying to look away from my phone, which I hoped would buzz with something less cryptic and more helpful, given that I was caught between trying to talk my brother down from a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy and a conversation I really wanted to have. “I’m—yeah, I hear it. I don’t think this is our g—”
“What did you do?” Augustus asked, getting eyeball to eyeball with our subject, who had paled a good dozen shades just in the last few minutes since we’d rolled up on him. The guy looked like he wanted to retreat but didn’t know quite how to. “I’m asking you,” Augustus said, “what’d you do? I know you remember.”
“I … I …” the guy’s voice wavered. He was pitifully thin, still smacking his lips, and he gazed past Augustus, staring into space, “… I … got high …?” He ended on a somewhat comic note, like he was simultaneously seeking approval and also confessing.
“No shit you got high,” Augustus said, and ripped the guy’s sleeve down to reveal a ton of needle marks. My gaze caught on them as my brother lifted his arm up. “It wasn’t even a question that you got high. The question was—what’d you do while you were high—and what are you going to do now, motherf—”
“Augustus,” I said, raising my voice loud enough to cut him off. “This ain’t our guy.”
My brother rounded on me, still holding the junkie’s arm up. “What are you talking about? He’s admitting—”
“He’s admitting he’s an addict,” I said, and nodded at his arm. “But he ain’t much of anything else.”
Augustus brandished the guy’s arm. “How do you think he’s getting his drugs? Paying for them?” He spun back to the junkie. “How do you pay for your drugs?”
“Uhm …” The guy stared into space. “I … sell stuff sometimes.”
“What stuff?” Augustus was like a dog on a bone, unwilling to let anything go. I didn’t bother to break in and inform him that there was a pretty obvious reason this was not our guy, not our case.
“Uh …” The guy stared into space, his voice taking on a dreamy quality. “… Stolen … stuff?”
Augustus turned back around to me with triumph in his eyes. “See? You see that? Stolen stuff. He’s our thief.” I shook my head. “What are you shaking your head for?” my brother asked. “He just admitted it.”
