12.
I woke up as the plane touched down in Tokyo, and I was back to the land of the fully conscious by the time we’d taxied around to the terminal. I was yawning fiercely. Light streamed in from outside, as it had the entire flight, though here we lacked the heavy cloud cover that had formed a grey ceiling over the Pacific Northwest we’d left behind.
“You guys are so cute when you sleep,” Kat said, now letting out a yawn of her own. She unplugged her phone and tossed the charger in her sleek, pink backpack. It was one hundred percent Kat, that thing.
“Did you not get any …?” I asked, stifling another yawn. Harry was stirring to life again in front of me.
“Nah, I usually don’t crash until the early morning,” Kat said, yawning again. “Which … it probably is now, I dunno. Cuz I’m feeling tired. Maybe I can sleep on the train.”
I grunted an acknowledgment as the plane taxied slowly around. The flight attendant came down the aisle with coffee, and I gratefully took one, as did Harry. Kat waved her off. It was, fortunately, cool enough to drink, and I took a big slug down immediately.
“We’ll be pulling up in just a moment,” the flight attendant said. “Have your passports ready.”
“Sure thing,” I said. She’d checked our passports right after takeoff and hadn’t detected that mine was, in fact, an immense fake that was guaranteed to be detected at customs. Harry had seen that much before his powers most recently went flippety-askew. I looked at him now, and he was blinking awake. He caught my look, seemed to discern my intent, and nodded once, which I took to mean he was at least competent and awake enough to guide me through these dodgy next few minutes.
Harry slipped his bag over his shoulder once the plane stopped, and I grabbed my own. When you traveled as light as I did, one bag was almost more than you needed. But I had a feeling most shops in Japan weren’t going to carry much in my size, so this was pretty necessary.
“Okay, you guys,” Kat said, very seriously, “so, I’ve done some digging—”
“Can this wait?” Harry asked, and his voice was filled with tension. “These next few minutes? They might be kinda dicey for Sienna.”
“Oh! Sure,” Kat said. “We just need to get to Tokyo Station to catch a bullet train.”
“That’s easy enough to remember,” I said. “Got it. In case we get separated for some reason—”
“We’re not going to get separated,” Harry said tightly. “We’re going to follow my instructions carefully, and waltz right through the back corridors of the airport, free as birds.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, not dismissing him, but definitely throwing a little shade on his assertions about how easy it was going to be to bypass the customs service of Japan and airport security.
The plane came to a stop, and Harry tensed. “All right,” he said, as the flight attendant worked the door. “Get ready.”
“For what?” I asked.
He smiled again, tightly. “As soon as the door opens, let Kat go out and soak up all the attention.”
I looked at Kat. “So … do what we do every day?”
She looked distinctly unamused. “Oh, yeah, no, I totally don’t disappear when I’m in a room with Sienna Freaking Nealon, who has—without doubt—the broadest brand recognition on the planet.”
I frowned at that. “What the hell is my ‘brand’? Chaos? Screaming? Death?”
Kat gave it a second’s thought. “Probably some combo platter of all three of those, to be honest.” She paused, staring at what must have been my annoyed expression. “What? I didn’t say it was a good brand.”
Something occurred to me that caused me to leave aside Kat’s little snap. “Hey, is it going to be tough to navigate here without any of us speaking Japanese?”
“It’ll be fine,” Harry said. “I speak enough to get by, and Klementina over there is fluent.”
“What?” Kat asked, doing a double take at him. “I am not!”
She’d just made it to the ramp, where a waiting worker bowed to her like she was royalty and said something in Japanese. “Konichiwa, ” Kat replied in flawless Japanese. “Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. ” She promptly did another double take at Harry before her lip curled in disgust. “That’s really creepy. I didn’t know I spoke Japanese.”
“Well, as the kids say nowadays,” Harry said with a slight smile, “There. That’s a thing you know now.”
Kat made a little humphing noise as she preceded us down the ramp onto the tarmac and into the building ahead, shepherded by the airport employee that she had greeted. The lady was being incredibly solicitous to her, bowing deeply and showing deference well beyond what I would have considered necessary, even for my famous friend Kat.
Kat soaked up all the attention this woman lavished on her, bowing back—though not as deeply—and responding to her in fluent Japanese. I did my best, with the aid of a pair of overlarge sunglasses that Harry had handed me, as well as a baseball cap that said N7 for some reason (Reed had given it to me), to keep myself anonymous.
We were led into a terminal area, which made me sigh a little. I’d been hoping to do a quick bypass of customs, but apparently that wasn’t in the cards. Here we joined busy throngs moving through, going to and from gates, eyes forward, moving with the purpose and bustle I’d come to expect from airports the world over. You know, when I used to actually have to fly commercial every now and again.
“I need to use the little girl’s room,” I said, as loud as I could, to Kat. She made a strange face at me, probably wondering why I didn’t use the one on the private jet, but she shrugged and asked her envoy where the nearest restroom was. She got a bow of the head and we were led just a couple hundred feet to a restroom that was marked clearly enough that even I could have picked it out if I’d bothered to put in the effort.
But that was fine; I wanted to draw a little attention to my need to go to the bathroom, especially since this was where I was leaving Kat behind.
“I’ll wait for her,” Harry said casually. “You go on. We’ll catch up.”
Kat shrugged and motioned to her guide to go on. I had no idea who this poor woman was that they’d assigned to this thankless duty, whether she was an airport employee or just some rando who had been handed off to Kat by some local studio or something, but as they walked away I could hear Kat asking her something in Japanese, and I wondered if it was as trivial as her usual English questions. Maybe something like, “Where is the nearest Brazilian wax parlor?” or “Do you know where I can find a low-carb maki roll?”
“Be right back,” I said under my breath to Harry, and disappeared into the bathroom. I kept up appearances for the sake of the other people—holy Moses, there was an abnormal amount of flushing going on in there. I slipped into a stall, hung out there for a few minutes even though I actually had used the restroom before we’d deplaned, did a few extra flushes just to blend in, and then I slipped out and met Harry. Kat was long gone.
“Okay,” Harry said, falling in next to me, “this way.”
He led me through a long stretch of terminal before finally coming to a side door that was probably marked something like “EMPLOYEES ONLY,” but in Japanese script. It even had a keypad, which Harry punched quickly and surreptitiously. It beeped, the door opened, and he ushered me inside.
“Okay, we need to do this exactly right,” Harry said, pausing to concentrate once inside. The corridor ahead of us was empty, not a soul in sight, thankfully. “This way.”
He led me forward into the dimly lit hallway. It was a twisty warren inside, surprisingly so for a place that seemed like it would be pretty straightforward. He beckoned me on as we took a turn, then another, then yet another, and went down a flight of stairs. “Pause here,” he said, pulling me off to the side, gripping my arm and swinging me around in front of him as he stooped slightly, pushing his face almost up to mine.
“Hey,” I said, frowning as he got all up in my grill. I wasn’t that keen on PDA, but his lips were paused about an inch or two away from mine, and I started to say something else but soft footsteps behind me caused me to freeze.
I didn’t dare look back, and he put a hand on my cheek anyway to keep me from doing so. I held position, locked in place, and he removed his hand after a second or two to keep from getting his soul ripped out of his body. Harry always wisely removed his hand before things started to burn. It wasn’t bad at first, because it got progressively worse the longer you touched my skin, but even at its lowest, a succubus soul-burn wasn’t exactly straight-up fun. I could now vouch for that by hard experience.
After the footsteps behind us faded, Harry smiled. “You thought I was going to kiss you right here, didn’t you?”
“It occurred to me that you might use this inopportune moment to do a little macking,” I said, looking behind me. The corridor was empty, the intersection in the hall now clear.
“Well, I would, but I’m kinda busy keeping us out of trouble,” Harry said. “Come on,” and he put a hand on my upper arm and hustled me forward, “this next part, the timing gets tricky.”
“Oh, good,” I said, “I love added risk and difficulty.”
We took a few turns, then slowed. I let Harry set the pace, his hand still clamped lightly on my upper arm. I just followed his pace and kept up. When he ran, I broke into a run; when he walked, I did too. It wasn’t difficult, playing this non-verbal game of Harry Says, except just following his motion cues. Following other people was never my strongest suit, but now that I was in a strange land and already dodging the law, I was suddenly keen to be a follower.
We reached the last stretch of corridor before a door similar to the one we’d entered the employee-only corridors by. Harry tensed. “Now, just bear with me, because things are about to—”
And then, he froze, mouth half open, words stopped mid-sentence, hand still stuck on my upper arm.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered, his grip like concrete banded around my bicep. “Talk about bad timing.”
I struggled against his hold, weakly at first. There was no one in the corridor, and his grip was like cold steel, unmovable, around me. I stood there for a short interval, hoping time would just start back up again, but I got impatient after, I dunno—an hour? Or maybe thirty seconds? And claustrophobic shortly thereafter.
“Sorry, Harry,” I said, and figured out the weakest point of his grip, adjusting my arm. Once I’d lined myself up right, I yanked as hard as I could toward the direction where his fingers and thumb overlapped.
The reaction was immediate; his hand snapped open and I was free. I stumbled back a step and Harry stayed right where he was, not so much as a flicker of expression. His hand, I noticed when I looked at him, had moved, albeit subtly. I’d probably yanked it forward a good foot by my escape efforts, but the rest of his body was wholly unchanged. I shrugged it off; no big deal.
Looking at the door we’d been headed toward, I wondered if maybe this wasn’t a perfect chance for me to make good my escape from customs. Harry, after all, would be just fine; he could just follow his powers and leave anytime. Hell, even if he got pinched by the cops, he’d be able to perfectly calculate an escape route, like he had some sort of temporal GPS—”When this police officer walks past you, take a right.” I was not so fortunate.
“To hell with it,” I muttered. I needed at least something to do, especially if I was going to be stuck in time for hours again. I jogged to the door leading out of the hallway and froze.
It had a damned keypad on this side, too.
“Shit,” I muttered. I stared at it, hard. There was no real way for me to defeat that right now, since time was frozen. It wasn’t like it’d even accept inputs at this moment, because the CPU or whatever was suspended in time, like everything else. It probably wouldn’t even register my button presses—assuming I knew which buttons to press. Which I didn’t.
Writing that off as a failed idea and deciding that a worse one would be kicking down the door (which I totally could have), instead I started making my way back to Harry. I was already starting to feel antsy, especially since the one thing I’d had to entertain myself during the previous time stop was shredded back in the plane. And I’d been wondering how Parker was going to get himself out of trouble back there.
I was about halfway back to Harry when time sprung into motion again, and I do mean sprung . It wasn’t like a normal, gentle snap-back to time resuming; no, this was harsh, at least from the only frame of reference I had, which was Harry.
The moment time resumed, Harry lurched forward like someone had yanked him by the hand—the same one I’d escaped moments earlier, oops. He was jerked forward and slammed into the wall opposite, knuckles first and the rest of him following shortly—and sharply—thereafter. Bones cracked, concrete wall thudded, and somewhere in the midst of it all—
Harry let out a short, sharp scream of pain.
He bounced off and recovered his balance a moment later, but was clutching his hand, nursing it with the other as though someone had just hit it with a hammer. He was cringing, too, his cheek red where he’d slammed into the wall. He looked unsteady on his feet, and he caught a glimpse of me down the hall, one eye closed, and tilted his head like he couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing. “What are you—?” he actually asked, then stopped.
It took me another second to figure out why he was stopping. The noise reached my ears first—soft electronic chirping of someone pressing a keypad, then the sharp buzz of an electronic lock releasing. A moment later, the door behind me—the exit—started to open, and somehow I knew that Harry’s scream of pain had changed the course of events in our escape—and now the look on his face—pure panic—suggested to me that … well …
I’d screwed up now.