5.
“I don’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.