4.
Sienna
“What the hell is going on, Sienna?” Harry asked, hurrying to catch up to me. We were staying in a rental house not two minutes’ walk from the restaurant, which was fortunate, because now the rain was pouring down and I was striding on through it, in a hurry to get back under cover.
“Action. Adventure. Excitement,” I said, not bothering to turn back. “You know, the usual.” The rain was colllllllld, and I wanted to get out of it. Action, adventure and excitement were one thing, but my hair that I’d spent time straightening this morning getting completely frizzed by the downpour? Not so cool.
Harry caught up a few seconds later, feet splashing in the small puddles that were already beginning to accumulate on the pavement. “I did not see you disappearing and reappearing—it was not even an option available in the future until you did it,” he sputtered, clearly discombobulated, “and now—what the hell is going on?”
“You didn’t see it?” I asked, my cheeks pelted with rain. Another concern, because I was wearing makeup. I know, bleehhh, but it was part of my disguise, you know, looking like a normal person, and not Sienna Nealon, fugitive at large. “Time froze, Harry,” I said as he came alongside, jaw hanging a little low. I’d never seen Harry Graves flabbergasted before. I couldn’t decide whether to assume it was a good sign or a bad one. “The waitress just hung there, coffee paused in mid-pour—”
“You mean she stopped pouring.” He sounded like he was asking for reassurance.
“No, I mean the coffee stopped mid-pour. Steam hung in the air, unmoving. Total cessation of particle motion,” I said. “Like someone hit the freeze-frame on life. The pause button on the internet video of my saga. Which would explain a lot, if my life was actually an internet video. I wish it was a cute one, with wombats, but no, it’s some sort of Netflix original series gone completely off the tracks, superhero awesomeness one minute, then maybe a thriller for a little bit, and into a horror film the next. Now we’re going into, I dunno, sci-fi, maybe—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Harry exploded, stopping in the rain. “My powers, Sienna! They didn’t work! At all! I can see the freaking future and—”
Wow. Harry was freaking out. In the months we’d been together and all through our acquaintance before that, he’d never shown so much as a crack in his cool facade, even the time we’d been literally shot out of a plane over the Dakotas.
“—my powers are broken!” He paced in front of me, rain drenching him, his eyes shifting back and forth desperately. “I—I —”
“Time froze, Harry,” I said, keeping a little bit of distance between us. Sure, we’d been together for a few months, but … were we really together together? Calling our relationship for what it was, giving it a name, I’d have to say … early stage boyfriend/girlfriend. Maybe a little frozen there, too. “Time stopped. Everybody around me stopped. For minutes. That’s why your powers got effed. The probabilities changed while you were trapped in time and I was moving around freely.”
He stared up at me, blinking furiously, trying to put it together, hair completely soaked down, clothes clinging to his skin. “What?”
“It’s like this,” I started to say, but stopped when the rain quit.
No … it didn’t quit. It stopped moving. In midair. A thousand, a million drops, still hung there, motionless, in front of me.
The world had quit moving again. The usual crash of the waves upon the beach just a few hundred feet away? Silenced, utterly. The faint, constant hum of traffic and electricity through the town of Cannon Beach? Gone.
“Oh, Harry,” I said, looking at his face paused in time. He was watching me attentively, clearly trying to get a handle on his freakout. I tried to imagine being a guy whose power was knowing what was going to happen next, always, for the last hundred, two hundred, however many hundred years. (I’d never asked his age; there’s a point where the cradle-robbing gets Edward Cullen creepy, and I liked Harry too much to want to work through that psychological hurdle in addition to all the others I was laboring with.)
I looked at the frozen grey sky above me, unmoving and felt my shoulders sag. This was not good. Time was skipping a freaking beat every few minutes, and—
Everything surged back into motion like someone had pressed play on the world, and Harry’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head as he swung it around, meta-speed, trying to account for the fact that I’d moved a few feet closer to him while time had stopped, feeling like I should brush his skin or something with a sleeve, try and give him a little pat on the head or something to make him feel better.
“What the f—?” He stared bug-eyed at me when he caught up with my motion. I’d have to have moved way beyond meta speed to be where I was, nearly up in his grill, and he nearly tripped over his feet in surprise at my sudden appearance next to him.
“You’re kinda cute when you’re freaked out, Graves,” I said.
“How can you be calm about this?” Harry asked, hand on his chest like he was about to have a coronary. Good thing metas didn’t have those, but I would have to guess this series of events was probably elevating his pulse in a way that Harry Graves had maybe never experienced outside of cardio. Which he did not do. Still had a great body, though. “The world is coming off its freaking axis, time-wise—the—the—” He was sputtering violently, talking with his hands expressively, but the only thing he was expressing was being completely freaked out. “—This—is not right! The world—is—”
“Coming off its axis, yes,” I said, heading him off on that one.
“And you’re … completely calm about it,” he said. “Look, I know you’re really into projecting the aura of how awesome and experienced you are, and how you’ve been through enough ringers by this point that everything seems totally normal even when it’s coming apart at the seams—”
He froze again, mid-gesticulation. He had a point, and I pondered it during this hiatus in which my hair was no longer getting soaked by the rain. In fact, I took a moment to wring it out, and watched the water droplets freeze the moment they left my hair. They just hung there, as I stepped away, brushing aside the ones occupying the space I moved into. They were shunted aside, losing their downward appearance as raindrops. I pushed a few together, made a little ball of liquid, shaped it, made a little game of it. It stayed in place, didn’t wobble, didn’t shudder. I shaped it in midair until I had a little water ball, like a snowball without the cold.
It was kinda neat, being able to do this, separate from time. I thought about what Harry was saying, and took my little water bomb and moved around behind him, carefully placing it just outside his collar, then moving to his side where I could stand in his peripheral vision field.
Time started again a moment later, and the bomb of water slid down the back of Harry’s shirt as soon as gravity got hold of it. “—but really, this is—” He stopped mid-rant, like time had frozen again, and I watched his expression change as he realized two things: one, I wasn’t in front of him anymore, I was standing at the side, smiling to beat the band, and two—
He’d just gotten about a quarter gallon of water poured down the back of his collar, and it was not warm.
“Gah!” he said, doing a little goose step away from me. “What did you do?”
“Acted my age,” I said, a little impishly. “Listen, Harry—I’m not freaking out right now because time’s not stopping on me. I mean—it’s stopping, and I can see it stopping, but it’s not messing with my powers—”
“Oh, well, if it’s not messing with your powers, then everything must be hunky dorey,” he muttered.
“I didn’t say that,” I said. “I’m genuinely concerned about what’s going on here.”
“You just used a time freeze to put water down the back of my shirt!” He did not look as pleased by my juvenile prank as I was. “How does that display your concern?” He was hitting some mighty octaves there. “Shouldn’t you be, y’know—working on a solution?”
“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.