25.
Sienna
Cleaned, scrubbed, shining, hair somewhat straightened in the short bit of time I had, and with some of Kat’s cosmetics applied and feeling slightly like a geisha girl because her color wheel was not my color wheel, we made our way down to the Nagasaki docks. It was a slow journey, especially with Harry still unsteady on his feet, but he’d at least regained consciousness enough that he could lean on me and it only looked like he was slightly drunk, no more need to carry him on my shoulders.
“You going to make it there, cowboy?” Kat asked, walking a few paces ahead of us, luggage rolling behind and two bags hung over her shoulders.
“I would like time to resume its normal shape,” Harry said, sounding very much like a guy with a hangover, voice scratchy and his entire body carrying the manner of a weary, weary man. “And stop ripping up my brain as everything changes.”
“Working on it,” I said under my breath, his arm heavy on my shoulders. Not so heavy it was tough to bear the weight, but still—I could feel the added pounds draped across me. “It’d go quicker if you could walk under your own power.”
“I wish I could,” Harry said, a trace of longing in his words. “But I’m a little worried that I’m going to go tumbling off a dock if I try.” And he eyed the water to either side as we walked over the slatted boards, Kat’s roller suitcase thumping its wheels at the joints where each met.
The docks smelled of sea and fish, that salty, stinky aroma I’d forever associate with certain ports I’d visited in Alaska. Juneau, Seward—pretty places, at least in summer. This was like that, not so very different save for variations in the style of boats and the utter lack of snow. I sighed, bearing Harry’s weight across my shoulders. I tried to make it look natural, like he was just showing me some affection, but it probably looked more like Weekend at Bernie’s than a date.
There were some rocks and such out in the water, the topography reminding me a lot of Cannon Beach back in Oregon, though the supervillain island rocks were not nearly so foreboding here. Ahead, I could see some of those rising rock formations coming out of the water, way beyond this place where all the fishing boats were moored. “Harry? Any suggestions?” I asked.
“Keep going,” he said, voice evincing strain. “Up ahead, there’s a guy we should talk to. Or Kat should. You and I should keep our mouths shut, and you should keep your head down.”
“Great advice for life,” Kat chirped. “Everybody else shut up and keep their heads down, and let Kat do the talking.”
“I agree it sounds like a great idea for a shopping strategy if you want to spend tons of money,” I snarked back, “but for everything else, I should probably be involved.”
“This guy up here,” Harry said, nodding at a fisherman just a few boats ahead. He was walking around the dock doing … I didn’t really know what he was doing, not being that familiar with boats or sea-man-guy kind of things. He was raising the topsail, for all I knew. Except his boat didn’t actually have sails.
“You want to take a crack at this?” Kat asked, turning to smirk back at me.
“Oh, very funny,” I said. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“Do not talk to him until we’re in the boat and offshore,” Harry said, looking at me very seriously, “and even then, it’d be better if you didn’t say anything or make eye contact, because he will recognize you if you give him enough time.”
“Then why are we using this guy?” I asked. “We should go with someone who won’t recognize me.”
Harry grunted, taking up a little more of his weight as he turned on me, and I saw a flash of impatience in his eyes as he looked down at me. “There’s no one on Earth who won’t recognize you if given enough time. Your disguises aren’t going to work much longer, Sienna. You’ve been seen in too many of them, and you’re famous worldwide.”
“Brand recognition,” Kat singsonged under her breath.
“Well, that sounds grim,” I said, a little taken aback, and—dare I say it?—humbled. “What happens if he recognizes me?”
“He’ll inform the Nagasaki police when he gets back to the dock. And since he’s the one who’ll have dropped us off, he knows exactly where to find us.” Harry’s strain showed through in his current annoyance, which was unlike I’d seen from him before. “So, I hate to say this, because I know how much you love people telling you what to do, but … please sit down and shut up once we’re on the boat. I’ll do likewise, and we’ll play like we’re totally in love and oblivious to the world, and he’ll actively avert his gaze out of discomfort at our PDA and never be the wiser that you were on his boat.”
My face was burning. “Fine,” I said tightly. “We can do that, and I’ll do my level best not to accidentally take your soul in the process.”
“Much appreciated,” he said with some tightness of his own, as he turned to follow Kat again. She had already hailed the fisherman, speaking to him in Japanese.
I hung back with Harry as she spoke to him and leaned in close to his face as he put his arm over my other shoulder. Now we looked like we were embracing, though I suspected my body language hinted that I’d rather have shoved him off of me and gotten far, far from him right now. “Seriously, this affection thing right now? It’s—”
“Going to be a real acting effort,” Harry said, taking the words right out of my mouth. “Don’t I know it.”
“Oh, are you pissed at me right now?” I asked, meeting his gaze sharply. “Because I feel like I’ve kinda got the high ground here, what with certain recent revelations—”
“I’m not mad at you, no,” Harry said, but everything about his manner said this was a lie, “but I can certainly feel the tension in the air from your direction, and it’s not making things any easier during what’s already the single most stressful time of my life.”
I started to snap a response to that, something along the lines of, “Oh, is this a stressful time for you? Must be a walk in the park for me!” but Kat interrupted, coming over from where she’d had a chat with the boat guy.
“Hey, you guys,” Kat said nonchalantly, clearly trying to gloss past our little snit. “The uhm … driver? He says he knows the place, and he’s agreed to take us there for a lot of money. Like, hundreds of thousands of yen.”
“A hundred thousand yen is only a thousand dollars,” Harry said with a frown.
“Oh,” Kat said, then shrugged. “I can cover that, then. I guess I’ll pay him and we can go. But he said can’t come back and get us until late in the day, after he’s done his fishing, so …”
“Got it, it’s a one-way trip—for now,” I said tightly, tearing my eyes off Harry but keeping close to him, as ordered, his arm draped over my shoulder, and not for support, this time. “Let’s get this ship of fools underway.”
We loaded up, stepping onto the old fishing boat without further ado. I managed to find a quiet spot with Harry on a worn old cushion, and we sat down, Harry still staring off into the distance and me trying to avoid his gaze without attracting the attention of the fisherman. I didn’t even dare look at him too closely, instead paying attention to the busy-ness of the docks or Harry, when I dared to look at him.
The boat got underway a few minutes later, Kat taking up the responsibility of distracting the fisherman pretty seriously. I heard her laugh at something he said, and I could tell she was turning on the full flirt, vintage Kat. She did well in those situations, and the funny thing was, if I’d been doing what she was trying to do? I couldn’t have pulled it off. I’d tried to talk to guys who I wasn’t interested in in the past, to distract or keep them busy, and it generally didn’t work because people had a knack for figuring out if you … well, weren’t remotely interested in them.
It could have been that Kat was way better at feigning sincerity than I was, but I had a more likely explanation after knowing her for years:
Kat was genuinely interested in people, at least up to a point. She was probably asking the fisherman questions out of genuine curiosity. It was another way we different; once you got past the newly-ish painted Valley Girl persona she’d adopted, she had an actual like for the masses of humanity.
Meanwhile, her polar opposite, over here sitting in my chair? I had a love for humanity, enough to want to protect and save it, but “like,” on an individual basis? Meh. I tolerated most people, and by “tolerate,” I mean, “didn’t murder them all on sight.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding as Kat laughed, her soft coos echoing over the outboard motor thrumming as we put out to sea and left the docks behind. Just another massive contrast between Kat and I.
Glancing at Harry, I saw his eyes move, darting toward me just for a second. “Yeah, you guys are different,” he said, as though helpfully confirming my own thoughts for me.
“Gee, thanks for that searing insight,” I said. “That’s a mighty hot take there.”
He rolled his eyes a little. “I don’t know why you think I’d be interested in Klementina, especially over you.”
It kind of stung when he said it as baldly as that. “Gee, Harry, what would give me the idea that you might ever have been interested in Kat?”
He didn’t cringe, but one of his eyes fluttered, and his lip curled at the corner. “Incomplete information.”
My jaw dropped slightly. “Well, complete it for me, then,” I said, more than a little hotly, but fortunately still meta-low. I saw Kat’s shoulders tighten in the wheelhouse of the small fishing boat, and I knew she was hearing our conversation, every word of it, even over the engine.
“That’s not going to lead anywhere we want to go right now,” Harry said, his words thick with stress. He kept his arm around me, but he looked so tense that it seemed like it’d take a jackhammer to get his muscle groups to release.
I clammed up in favor of saying something I’d probably regret later. And not even much later; more like after I heard the words leave my lips. I sat like that for a good while, the sun crawling up overhead and the boat revving up as the fisherman took us what looked to my eyes like south, though the sun was now high enough it was getting harder to tell.
An hour passed without a word exchanged, and still we maintained our close proximity. It was painful being this near to Harry and having him silent, almost resentfully so right now. It felt like he could have said something, anything, to defuse the tension, but he stayed dead quiet.
Part of me wanted to brain him, just to see if that would get him to make a noise, but instead I settled back and listened to the interminable sound of the engine running and Kat making steady conversation with the fisherman in Japanese. I didn’t understand a damned word of it, but she had him talking now. Laughing, too, occasionally. Damn, she was a master at this.
No wonder Harry had been interested in her.
The boat slowed as we approached an island. It had kinda crept up on us, and I hadn’t realized it was our destination until we turned, making an unmistakable beeline for it. It wasn’t what I expected, like an empty island with palm trees or tiki torches or—I dunno, Easter Island heads.
It was like a full-on, developed island, with a crumbling six-story building on the edge immediately facing us like the bow of a ship. The windows were empty, some of them broken by time or maybe rocks thrown by passing vandals. The facade was crumbling, and beyond it I could see other buildings on the island, which stretched maybe a half-mile or so. It was a full-on industrial complex, and it almost looked like a ship rising out of the water and from the horizon, until I realized what it actually was.
“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath, “Akiyama really does have his own island.”
Harry just grunted, drawing another fantasy out of me in which I slapped the back of his head and got him to cough up some intelligible and soothing conversation. If he read this as a possible future, however, he did not mention it, which was probably wise on his part.
A small dock, the boards deteriorating, waited before us as we puttered up, the engines making a fraction of their usual rumble as the fisherman steered us expertly up against it. Staring at the dock, I realized this was going to be a little dicey. There were a few boards missing, and those that were still there looked rotted and unstable.
“Okay,” Harry said, studying them for a second. “I’ll go first. Follow me exactly.”
He jumped up on the edge of the boat and landed on the dock a few planks in. It squealed under his weight, but after he steadied himself, he leapt to the next, and I started to follow, bag slung over my shoulder.
Kat was wrapping up with the fisherman, exchanging some kind parting with him in Japanese. I hopped after Harry, taking great care to follow him exactly. “Klementina,” he called over his shoulder, not looking back, “fourth board, and mind your suitcase.”
“Don’t call me that,” Kat said, irritation just flooding out. I heard her jump behind me, though, and the board caught her, squeaking.
“Eyes front, Ms. Succubus,” Harry called over his shoulder, and it took me a second to realize he was talking to me. He must have avoided using my name to keep the fisherman from hearing it. “Don’t look back now.”
I followed Harry’s lead to the concrete quay, letting loose a breath I’d been holding when my feet touched solid ground and left behind the moldering planks. Harry reached out a hand and caught mine, just briefly, yanking me forward. I didn’t look back, and heard the boat’s engines rev up as the fisherman started to leave.
“Don’t touch me,” Kat said, her final hop bringing her down next to me. She waved off Harry’s helping hand and set the roller suitcase down, telescoped the handle, then flipped her hair, looking pretty put out. Not by having to come here, but because of Harry, I suspected. “What now?” she asked me, in a considerably nicer voice. Kinda confirmed my suspicions.
“Work our way to the interior of the island until we find Akiyama, I guess.” I looked around now that the boat was pulling away, and since Harry didn’t stop me, I figured I was probably safe to do so. I felt a little weird seeing the boat head off, cutting through the mild chop, the fisherman’s back turned to us, off to ply his trade while we … lurked on an abandoned island. “When is he coming back for us?”
“He’ll drop by tonight,” Kat said, looking a little forlornly at the boat. “If we’re here waiting, he’ll pick us up. Otherwise, he said he’d pass by tomorrow morning and again tomorrow night. I didn’t negotiate any farther than that, but I got the feeling he wasn’t going to come looking if we weren’t at the dock.”
“Smart move on his part,” I said, taking a breath and looking up again. From where we stood, the quay rose into a road that led past the edge of the building before us. No entrance to said building waited on this side, though a bunch of windows looked down at us, all of them empty and dark, kinda spooky. “I’m guessing Akiyama is behind the ghost stories. Probably wanted to dissuade people from stopping by. Makes me wonder what he did to dissuade them from—”
A belligerent shout from somewhere ahead caused me to jerk my head around. There was nothing there, just the dying cry echoing through the island’s buildings, coming toward us from somewhere ahead, up the winding path that led up the hill into the island’s interior.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” I muttered to Kat, then turned to find her—
Frozen. A quick look confirmed that Harry, too, was trapped in time, face stuck in wide-eyed surprise, looking up for the source of the howl.
And here I was, standing on the edge of a dock on a mystery island in Japan, the howl of someone supremely pissed off the only thing waiting for me ahead … and time frozen around me.