29.
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.”
“Like I said,” and Kat flashed that quicksilver smile, which I found strangely reassuring as we made our way up the hill, “regardless of how this is going, it still beats the hell out of a publicity tour.”