18.
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked from my place on the aisle. The seats were three across, like coach on an airplane, and Harry was at the window. The train was running so smoothly that I was barely aware of it moving at all.
Kat, sandwiched between the two of us, was looking a little disoriented, still waxy pale from draining her life to heal my wounds. But she was coming back herself quickly. After a quick look from side to side, she asked, “Why am I stuck in the middle?”
“Because you’re the youngest, clearly,” I said with a certain smugness.
“Ugh, bad deal,” Kat said, sagging back in her seat. Harry, for his part, seemed to twitch slightly at that.
“Privileges of soul age,” I said, and turned to look out the window. I had never been on a Japanese train before, but it was moving FAST. The terrain outside was sliding by at extreme speed, which begged the question—how fast were we going?
“200 miles an hour is the max speed,” Harry said absentmindedly. His precognitive reply suggested he was getting back on his usual footing. He turned his head to look at me. “Klementina’s going to do an internet search in a second.”
“What?” Kat asked, looking offended all over again. “I told you to stop calling me—whatever, it doesn’t matter.” She looked back down at her phone. “Creepo is right. They go 150-200 miles an hour.” She put her phone down and stared at me. “What do we do when we get to Nagasaki?”
“This is gonna be good,” Harry said, folding his arms and settling back in his seat, slightly amused.
I didn’t have to ask him what he meant; my reply supplied its own answer. “I … don’t know exactly.”
Kat’s eyes didn’t quite leap forth from her head, but close. “We crossed an entire ocean to get here … and you don’t know where we’re going other than the city?”
I shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”
“How?” Kat asked, a little more juiced than usual. “You want to ask at the visitor’s kiosk, ‘Hey, you guys seen any weird time breaks around here’?”
“Akiyama’s on his own island,” I said. “I’m sure we can figure out which island he’s on, assuming there’s more than one.”
“Do you know how many islands there are in the Japanese archipelago?” Kat asked.
“At least five,” I said, a little smartassedly. “Kyushu, Honshu … uhm … another shoe … maybe Jimmy Choo …”
Kat let out a breathy sigh. “The other two main islands are Hokkaido and Shikoku. Oh, and by the way—we have to change trains at Hakata in Fukuoka.” She sat back in her seat, a little surly and still pale.
“Okay,” I said. Were those cities? Stations? What the hell was I supposed to do with that information? She’d kinda tossed it at me all pissed. “How long is the trip?”
“About five hours to Fukuoka,” she said, staring straight ahead, “and then about two to Nagasaki.”
“That’s not bad,” I said quietly, as Kat frowned at me, looking at me like I was weird. “What? It beats the hell out of waiting for crew rest to end back in Tokyo.”
“Yeah, okay,” Kat said, and stared forward again, still surly.
“Thank you, Kat,” I said, and she looked at me again like I was out of my mind. “For all of this.”
“You got stuck in time in the airplane,” Kat said, in disbelief, “we ended up in the wrong city, and so far you’ve gotten in a fight in a public place and had the cops called on us. What the hell are you thanking me for?”
“Because,” I said, keeping my own expression utterly straitlaced, “this still beats the ever-loving hell out of the last international trip I took.”
Kat kept a straight face for about two seconds before she dissolved into laughter, the kind of deep, belly laughs that rang through the train compartment and had everyone looking at us. She looked right at Harry as she was laughing and then stopped, abruptly, all the joy sucked out of her. Composed once more, she looked back to me. “Well … for whatever it’s worth, you’re welcome. But I think we would have been better off without Mr. Invincible back there deciding to test his courage and power against ‘the great Sienna Nealon.’”
Something about what she said bothered me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, though. “Yeah,” I said instead, “it’d sure be nice if I could go somewhere and not get into a fight with random troublemaking strangers.” Actually, that wasn’t true. It’d be really boring if that happened. It’d be like the Oregon Coast, in fact, over the past two months. And Florida before that. My life had become a series of battles broken by intervals of peace.
And the sad thing was … it was the peaceful times I dreaded, not the fights.
“What do you think that guy wanted?” Kat asked. “Other than the obviously stated, ‘I want you to kill me’? Which was clearly just bravado.”
“I’m not so sure it was,” Harry said, leaning into our conversation. We’d switched to meta-low a while ago, as tended to happen when there were people about.
“What are you talking about?” Kat asked, frowning at him. Her feelings about him were not ambiguous in the slightest, and boy did she let it show. “Nobody wants to die.”
“People want to die every day,” Harry said quietly. “Suicide isn’t uncommon, especially in Japan. Imagine being an Achilles and wanting to kill yourself. What the hell do you do? Pills won’t work. Knives are pointless. Jump off a building? You’d break the pavement, not yourself. Drowning would fail, even a gun—assuming you could get one—wouldn’t do a damned thing.” He shook his head. “I think this guy was sincere, albeit a little crazy. I think he genuinely wants you to kill him, Sienna.”
“Then he shouldn’t put up a fight,” I said. “If you’re going to ask me to end your life, you could at least not start swinging on me as I try to oblige.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true,” Harry said, looking a little pensive. “Think about it—you don’t just kill random people who pose no threat, despite what the American press might say. If he’s studied you, he probably knows this, which means in order to get what he wants, he knows he has to present an actual, credible threat, otherwise you’re just going to knock him out and let the cops handle him afterward.” He shrugged. “Or so it seems from my seat. Maybe you see things differently.”
Harry had a point. “Hm,” was all I said, though. For all I knew, he’d read forward into the future and learned exactly why this guy was acting the way he was. I doubted it, but I didn’t want to ask in front of Kat, because things between the two of them … man, they were just weird.
We lapsed into a little silence, which gave me a chance to assess the Kat/Harry dynamic. They were sitting next to each other and yet Kat was treating Harry like he was a black hole in the seat. Harry, though, would glance over at Kat every once in a while, pretty much always when she wasn’t looking. If I had been the overtly jealous type instead of the sort who just quietly buried it and died inside, this would have been the sort of shit that would have definitely set me off.
I didn’t go off, though, because I was super mature and burying my feelings under mountains of internal turmoil. And also, I was pretty sure the Japanese police were probably wise to the fact that Sienna Nealon was now on their shores, and having a freakout in a bullet train seemed like a good way to pull more heat down on me.
Catching Harry looking at Kat again out of the corner of my eye, I tried to analyze the way he was glancing at her. There wasn’t anything overtly obnoxious about it; he didn’t have a twinkle of lust in his eye or anything. I tried to think back to what he’d said about the two of them, and it all came down to a couple conversations in Chicago almost two years earlier. In the first, he’d sort of inferred that they’d spent a romantic winter in Smolensk. In the second, he suggested it had lasted a lot longer than just a season.
It could have been a hundred years ago, for all I knew, when Kat was just coming into adulthood, but the fact that I didn’t know was the part that was making me just a tiny bit queasy, and the fact that Kat didn’t know was the ipecac icing on the thing. Of course, it wasn’t like I’d lived my life before Harry came along as a nun, and Harry, when I’d met him before, had been a heavy gambling, hard-drinking hedonist. The fact I hadn’t seen him drink a drop or play a game in the last few months … well, it was a little strange, I supposed.
But the idea he’d been chaste for however long he’d lived before I came along? Ridiculous. After all, however I felt about him, he’d surely had much longer relationships than our little two-month association. Right?
Clearly. And it just so happened I was sitting next to one of his exes right now.
I decided not to say a word of this aloud, not even a little bit, which I hoped meant that my thoughts would go completely unheard by Harry, who snuck another corner-of-his-eye look at Kat. And not at me.
Gag. Frustrating. That was how I found the whole thing. It wasn’t as though I wanted to make a notebook of my romantic history for Harry, and, hell, I didn’t even really want to know how long his was.
But … I was curious about his relationship with Kat, especially since it didn’t seem like he was totally … over her.
Kat was staring straight ahead, and I noticed a certain amount of storm clouds building under her usually sunny facade. “Stop looking at me,” she said, at normal volume, which was a lot louder than our conversations had been thus far.
“I haven’t looked at you for a couple minutes,” Harry said. Which was true. Clearly Kat had let it build for a short while before blowing her stack at him, which was probably why he hadn’t seen this coming and avoided it by looking elsewhere sooner.
“But you were looking before that,” Kat said, sound of ratcheting tension in her voice, which she made no attempt to lower to meta volume. “Constantly. Look, guy—you don’t know me—”
“All evidence to the contrary,” I said under my breath.
“You can deny it all you want,” Harry said calmly, “but I actually do.”
“No,” Kat said, so firmly it was like she was slamming a vault door in Harry’s face. “Maybe you knew a previous iteration of me. Maybe you even knew her well—”
“Same body, same skin, mostly same persona—yeah, I think I did,” Harry said.
“—but you don’t know me ,” Kat said, steel shining through every word. “Actual me. Not the lady I show on TV—”
“Whuuuut?” I asked, getting my sarcasm in. “Surely you don’t project a different persona on an unsuspecting television audience than you have in real life, Kat?”
“—or on the tours, or whatever,” Kat ignored me, probably strategically, “but the actual me. See, people think they know me all the time from watching me, but they don’t. You see what I want you to see. You only know what I want you to know.”
“I feel like the opposite happens with me,” I mumbled, “like people only see the bad things, like when I burn someone alive and it goes viral on the internet.”
“But you don’t know me, Harry,” Kat said, very forcefully. “Not who I am now. Maybe you wish you did,” and here she trotted out the starlet eyes, which made me cringe, because it was kind of an asshole move and she was fluttering them at my putative boyfriend, “you just don’t. So stop acting like you do. There’s literally nothing between us—”
“Except an armrest and about twelve inches of empty space,” Harry said, rolling his eyes and looking straight ahead.
“—so stop acting like there is,” she finished. In another circumstance, I probably would have applauded Kat for putting her foot down with someone so firmly, especially after she’d acted like a human carpet with at least one producer back in the day as he walked all over her for a year or better.
But in this case … it grated on me that first of all, she’d targeted Harry, whom I was fond of, and second, that she was really denying reality hard in favor of staying in her own, make-believe bubble that revolved around her not having any sort of past that she couldn’t remember. Reinventing yourself was all well and good—hell, I was due for one now that my redhead look had been exposed—but given the nature of Kat’s powers and their ability to drain her memory from overuse …
Didn’t it seem a little delusional to just pretend anything you didn’t remember … didn’t happen at all? That’d be like me denying that the invasion of Normandy occurred, simply because I wasn’t alive or there at the time, and yelling that ignorance in the face of a survivor of the battle.
“Uh, Kat …?” I started to say.
“Yes?” she turned to me, asking ever so sweetly. Her demeanor with Harry versus how she was speaking to me was like night and day. Harry was still silently fuming, looking straight ahead on the other side of her, seemingly unwilling to so much as glance in her direction now.
“Something I’m confused about,” I said. “Well, a couple things, actually—what does ‘bozshe moi’ mean?”
She blinked. “It means ‘my God’ in Russian. Why?”
“How do you know Russian?” I asked. “Have you ever been there?”
She frowned, creases appearing in her face. “I—what, no, I mean, I went through Moscow once, but—I don’t know.” She shook the question off like it was no more than an annoyance.
“How do you know Japanese?” I asked.
She let out a little rankled sigh. “I don’t know, Sienna. I just do. Because I’m awesome, that’s why.”
“I’m not disputing your awesomeness,” I said, genuinely. “I believe in your awesomeness. You’re a person who’s gone to great pains to save my life at times when no one else could have. You’ve got guts beyond belief, you’re the object of admiration of countless men and women around the world—that’s you, Kat. No one’s denying or taking that away from you, but …” I cleared my throat, trying to remain as far away from nettled and pissed off—basically as not Sienna—as I could as I asked this question: “Don’t you think … it’s kinda cool that you have all this … additional experience and skills to draw on? Even if you don’t remember how you got them?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked, her patience obviously fraying.
“Like … I don’t remember my childhood,” I said. “At all. From before the age of … I dunno, five or so? Before I got locked in my house. But that doesn’t mean I sprang, fully-formed, out of a test tube or something at age five. It just means that those memories were probably traumatic or something, and my child brain didn’t want to remember them.” Which seemed an eminently reasonable explanation given the horror that followed that period.
“Yeah, so?” She didn’t completely dismiss me, but she was plainly on the edge of severe irritation, which was … not very Kat-like.
I lowered my voice, which was already as close to soothing as I was capable of producing. “You forgot your relationship with Scott. Completely. I saw it all—or a lot of the parts that weren’t X-rated, anyway—and I know it happened. But you don’t remember it.”
“I think that’s probably for the better,” she said, her restraint fading, “especially given what you two did like a year later. I bet you remember those X-rated parts.”
I ignored her swipes with a cringe. “Isn’t it possible that some of the things Harry knows about you … might be true? In the same way that the things I remember about you and Scott were true?”
She stared at me dully. “I just realized something.” And she looked back at Harry, then to me, and thin amusement draped itself over her features. “You think he’s telling the truth? That Harry and I were an item at some point?” I caught a grimace from Harry behind her, like he could read what was coming. “I gotta ask—why do you keep dating my cast-offs, Sienna?”
Oof. She stabbed right to the heart of me on that one. I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Argh,” I said, cringing, my eyes closing almost of their own accord. “I have no answer for this, but know that it hurts me.”
“The truth often does,” Kat said, a little more peppy. “I don’t see why it matters, though, anyway. Even if I admitted you were right—which I totes don’t, by the way—who gives a fig about what happened in the distant past? If I don’t remember something—like my boyfriends before they rebound into you—then like a tree falling in the forest, it kinda didn’t happen.”
“I don’t think that’s quite how the saying goes,” I said, my eyes still squeezed mostly closed. “Listen—”
“No, you listen,” Kat said, and here she leaned over in my face, and I don’t think I’d seen her more serious, ever. “This is something you taught me, Sienna, about power and identity. You’re the biggest badass, and it’s not because you’re never vulnerable. You’re the biggest badass because you don’t let other people see you vulnerable. You define you, at least where everybody’s perception is concerned. You don’t let your weakness be seen outside your inner circle. And that’s awesome. I like that. For me, it’s a little different.”
She leaned back in her seat, confident self-assurance just flowing off her, skin back to her normal glow, paleness faded away. “For me … it’s about defining myself to everyone by showing them the best parts of me, and that means not even acknowledging the past stuff, because—again, let’s just say it was me, which it totally wasn’t—it’s not part of who I am now. None of it. It’s of the past. I’m of the present. Anything that happened before about—” And here she lowered her voice, “—1954 … I don’t remember. So it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else who’s not me. That’s all.”
I frowned. “Wait … you remember back to 1954?”
She let out a little sigh. “Yeah … Janus had Omega administer a serum to me before I lost my memory and became Kat, and what it does is … it kinda brings back memories that I lost on previous brain drains. So, after the Des Moines thing where I forgot Scott, I remembered … lots of stuff from before I became Kat.” She looked pretty cagey about that, and gave Harry a fiery glance. “But I don’t remember him, I don’t remember being Klementina, and I damned sure don’t remember coming to Japan before.”
“Huh,” I said, deciding to keep my response on this side of anything that might offend Kat. Harry might as well have been a stone statue for all his response to this revelation. He was as surly as I’d ever seen him, arms still folded in front of him like they were a brick wall that could keep out anything but the stuff that Kat was saying that annoyed him.
“Yeah,” Kat said, and she pulled a pair of wireless earphones out of her bag and put them in her ears. “And on that note …” And she winked at me, then adjusted her phone. The music coming out of them was loud enough to be distracting to me, even though I wasn’t wearing them. She put her head back on the seat rest and closed her eyes.
I thought about trying to talk to Harry over her, but he was just staring straight ahead, still as death. I decided against rocking the boat—or the train, in this case—and just settled back in my own seat, staring at the Japanese countryside flashing by—or at least what little of it I could see in the fading light of day—and rode on into night as the darkness fell outside our carriage and the silence stayed unbroken within it.