30.
“I bet the identity of your daddy … is classified, too … even from you,” I said, holding my sides. Darkness was closing in around me, the man I had taken to calling the Terminator looming over me, fist raised high, ready to bring it down and crush me once and for all.
And this was my last gambit. A “yo daddy” joke. One step above the rhetorically classic “yo mama.”
But the funny thing was …
The Terminator actually hesitated. He kept his fist high, his face scrunched up in concentration, and he asked, somewhere between confusion and disgust, “What?”
I lifted my leg in a hard jerk and slammed my foot into his groin. It wasn’t much; it still activated enough muscles in my core to completely wreck my ability to hold myself upright, triggering pain against all those broken ribs, and I slumped and fell over immediately afterward.
If I’d been a normal human, it’d have been a good, solid kick in the balls, one that would have sent my opponent to his knees, clutching his groin, wondering if my “yo daddy” joke distraction had just cost him the ability to be a daddy himself someday.
But I was freaking metahuman.
And I punted his ass across the damned road, his crotch riding at about the level of his shoulders as he Team Rocket’d over the car behind him and landed somewhere in the ditch beyond. “You shoulda made like a squirrel,” I muttered as he flew, “and learned to protect your nuts.”
I heard the landing over the screaming of my ribs. It sounded like it hurt.
Without a moment to spare, I heaved myself off my knees and fought against the pain surging through my body. I moved nearly bent double, clutching my chest as I navigated around my own SUV, now partially in the other lane, casting only a look behind me to see if the mother and her three kids had escaped the car behind me.
They had. Whew.
The mom was holding her baby tight as she ran for the exit ramp, the driver of the van next to her running alongside her, grabbing a couple of the kids to help them along. It was nice to see strangers helping each other, even if I had to watch it while bent double and hauling ass across lanes of parked traffic under the wide, watchful eyes of lots of drivers probably wondering what the hell they’d just witnessed.
I crossed the median, leaping over the barrier between lanes with a seething grunt as the landing made me almost scream. Pain ran through me with every movement, and I felt like I was blacking out on my feet. Near-instant healing was something I was sorely missing at the moment, as someone honked at me and I dodged a Cadillac Escalade by a matter of inches. The draft current almost knocked me down as it whizzed behind me at seventy miles an hour.
Lucky for me that whatever was causing this traffic jam had slowed things down in the eastbound lane, too. I managed to make it across the freeway with no major incidents.
I was looking around for Harry and the others, but I didn’t see them anywhere. Sirens were going in the distance, and I knew that I had to make myself really scarce before they showed up, because the last thing I needed was legal entanglements right now.
There was a tall embankment and a ten foot fence dividing Interstate 94 from the world beyond. Darkness was still creeping in on the edges of my vision, and I was afraid I was going to pass out any second. I looked left, then right. Ahead, some few hundred yards, I could see the Radio Drive eastbound onramp. Flashing police lights told me that going that way was a terrible idea. Looking right, I saw nothing but empty freeway back to the Woodbury Drive exit, and that was a bad idea, too.
I looked at the fence, almost beseechingly. Couldn’t it be shorter?
There was nothing for it, though, so I jumped it, damned near catching a foot on it because I was trying to leap with a shattered rib cage. My right foot brushed the top bar and then I descended in a steep dive.
I hit the ground and rolled, not intentionally or in an aikido way meant to diffuse the force of impact, but rather in a my-freaking-lungs-just-collapsed-oh-my-merciful-heavens-arghhhhh kind of way. I stayed on the ground for a minute, an hour, who knew at that point? All I had was pain, pain, and the world was probably ending around me. All I could hear was blood rushing in my ears, the coppery taste of it in my mouth, and the smell of wet, cold air seeping into my lungs.
Ah, home. If only I’d been in a reasonable condition to appreciate the fact I was kissing Minnesota soil again. Well, snow, anyway. But since it was Minnesota, and January, that was basically the same thing.
I was cursing under my breath when a car came to a coasting stop on the road in front of me. I hadn’t even really noticed it was there, but it was, a frontage road that ran up to a well-lit shopping strip a hundred yards away that bore a tower with the words, “Woodbury Lakes,” lit up on it.
There were no flashing red or blue or white lights to indicate that whoever had stopped next to me was a cop, but I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for escape by this point. My ribs were so wrecked I would have been lucky to fight off an aggressive caterpillar at this point—and fortunately there were none of those handy. Because Minnesota. In January.
A car door opened, and I heard solid heels clicking on pavement. Through the veil of blanketing pain, I realized I was being regarded by someone, very slowly, as they approached. But steadily; they weren’t hesitating or hanging back. Strong hands gripped me beneath my underarms, and I was lifted, tearing a gasp from me as my entire rib cage realigned again.
“Don’t fight it,” came a female voice as smooth as an aged Lagavulin. It sounded familiar, but hell if I could have placed it, even with a gun right to my head. She dragged me, effortlessly, a few feet, until I heard the opening of a car door. I was lifted, bodily, into the passenger seat of a vehicle—I could tell because I could see the windshield right in front of me between seething gasps for air—and I settled into the least painful position as my savior walked back around and got in the driver’s side, shutting the door behind her.
“W … who … are … you?” I managed to squeeze out in agonized gasps as she slowly turned the car around and eased it back the way she’d come. I could only see her out of the corner of my eye, and blurry, because my vision was clouded by tears of pain.
She had brownish hair with traces of highlights, and it was in a kind of cool, wavy coif, something that looked like it had taken some time to make happen. I couldn’t see her skin, but she didn’t look old, just … mature, I guess. She had the strength of a meta, maneuvering me around like that, but I couldn’t really make out her eyes, or her face.
“You don’t remember me, then?” she asked, turning to favor me with a look. “Remarkable.”
“It’s not that remarkable,” I said, still struggling to find a less agonizing position. “I recently suffered … tremendous memory loss.”
“Is that so?” she murmured with a kind of disinterest that sounded funny at the time. Later, it occurred to me that she’d either known about it or else didn’t care. Either/or.
“Yeah,” I said. “Now my brain’s like, all Swiss cheesey.” I was mumbling, heading toward unconsciousness. “There are holes … big enough to drive Harvey Weinstein’s ego through.”
“That’s a big hole,” she said.
I looked at her; for a moment I thought she was Ariadne, but no, I remembered clearly what Ariadne looked like. “Seriously … I know you from somewhere.”
“Of course you do.” Such a smooth voice. Mm. Scotch.
“Where do I … know you from?” I asked.
“The past.” Crisp. Elegant. Totally evasive.
“Well, no shit. I didn’t figure we’d met in the future. Though … that actually did happen to me once.”
“Akiyama?”
I blinked and a little tear dripped down my cheek from where I’d wept it a little earlier. From pain, purely. I turned to try and look at her again. “How do you know about Akiyama?”
“How many ribs do you think you’ve broken?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“How many … are in the human body?” I gasped a little as it felt like a sharp piece of rib bone hung in my side. It felt like getting stabbed. “Because I would say that number … plus a hundred more.”
“You don’t even stop when you’re in agonizing pain,” she said. “Same Sienna.”
“You know me?” I asked.
“Well enough.” Her voice melodic, and I stared at her through the wet veil that obscured my sight, blurring the world around me.
“Wait …” I peered closer. That hair, the way it was styled, the color, the voice … “Are you Sigourney Weaver?” I slumped a little more in my seat. “Wrong movie again. She was in Aliens, not Terminator.”
“This is no movie,” she said. “And since you don’t remember me … maybe I’m just a figment of your imagination.”
“Figments of my imagination don’t carry me away from the scene of my certain capture,” I muttered, keeping my hands absolutely still. I’d found a position of pure equilibrium, where I didn’t feel the need to pass out in pain, though the sensation of agony was lurking around the edges of my consciousness. “It takes an actual accomplice to do that.”
“Accomplice after the fact, perhaps,” she murmured, and I got the feeling she wasn’t even necessarily talking to me anymore. She had such composure, though. She really did remind me of Ariadne in that way, but the voice was way smoother. Octaves lower, far more confidence.
Oh, and superpowered. Let us not forget that.
“Were you in Scotland with me?” I asked, feeling a wooziness set in.
“No,” she said simply, and—I thought—with a tiny hint of regret. “But I’m pleased you made it through that ordeal.”
“Ordeal?” I almost laughed, but it hurt too much. “Hell, that wasn’t an ordeal, that was a freaking apocalypse.”
“Yet still you stand.”
“I’m really more slumping right now. Trying not to move.”
“For now,” she allowed. “But nothing keeps you down for long, Sienna.”
“You know that about me, do you?” I asked, my head slumping against the seatback. It was comfortable, and I’d been sleeping in a car for the last day or more. Why not again now?
The darkness started to seep in, stealing my consciousness as she answered. “I know that about you,” she said, and she sounded definite about it. “That … and so much more …”