32.
Sienna
In my relatively short life outside my house and the strict confines of my mother’s wrath, certain things remained of her ridiculously overdisciplined training. Outside of my recent brush with alcoholism, I’d mostly remained away from illicit substances. In fact, following my first encounter with booze, I really hadn’t indulged much until after I became a fugitive from justice. I preferred to bury my sorrows in work, perpetual and endless, then food, not alcohol or anything harder.
But of course once I lost my job and endured the forever-hell that was Scotland and Rose, booze was totally on the table as a coping mechanism.
That said, the remnant of my mother’s training was this: I’d never used a single illicit drug, even marijuana, in the years since I’d come out of my house. Not once.
But as the world shattered around me and I took a tumble through the crazy kaleidoscope of whatever the hell Akiyama had just done to me … I totally thought I was trippin’ balls. Or whatever the drug-addled kids say.
Shocks of red, blue, purple—shit, you name it—they all went flying past me like I was in a tunnel of rapidly changing LEDs. I didn’t have time to scream, nor a voice to use. My throat was raw and unworkable, and nothing came out, like someone had sealed my mouth shut with some sort of cement putty. There was nothing recognizable in the craziness going on around me, just wild, maddening colors that struck me as something out of a particularly cartoony video game, the kind Reed would probably have played back in the day when he had time for that sort of thing.
The world seemed to snap into focus for a second, and I was in a car next to a woman who seemed awfully familiar—Angel, I think her name was? From the Agency? Miranda’s cousin? And the sound of tires squealing filled the background as dark night closed in around us. Her face was set in determination, lips a thin line, and she looked at me for just a second before she said, “Bet you didn’t think it’d end like this.”
I wanted to say, “No,” but instead I was treated to another eye-burning blast of color and light as that brief spell of sanity returning evaporated back into what must have been an acid trip from hell, or possibly someone holding my face extremely close to the Freemont Street Experience in Vegas. More flashes made me think I was soon to discover what an epileptic seizure actually felt like, and then the world slowed for just a second into grayscale, and I saw dingy concrete walls, a confined space—
Coming out of it into more sparking lights, like someone having shot off their entire Fourth of July wad inches from my eyes, I was suddenly in a darker place, looking into the face of a man who was thin, whose face was in shadow, but somehow I knew, as he spoke, that his name—one of them, at least—was Vlad, and he was very, very old.
“This was always to be your fate,” he said with incredible gravitas and a hint of something else, as he stared at me, eyes like pools of shadow.
Then the light flashed once more and he was gone …
I streamed through more places, more sights—endless fields of fire, hot and smoky, fading into the sight of my own face, jaded, tired, drawn, questioning something—woods, sunlight streaming in above me, the sounds of crickets chirping, of bugs in the distance, of a spring or summer writ large all around me, stitching an indelible feeling of peace before I was yanked away, coming out underwater, breath impossible to come by, then thrust into ice, eternal, forbidding and cold, yet strangely appealing. I was dragged, more flashing, more sparking, through cities laid to ruin, smoking holes in the ground, and an infinity of voices parading through my mind as I came crashing out the other side into—
The hospital.
Japan.
With Akiyama standing before me, hand raised, eyes darting about, his perfect composure blown away.
“What … the hell was that?” I asked, as Kat lurched back into motion beside me.
Akiyama looked me dead in the eyes, and I could see that he was trying to get a grip, but his panic was still too near the surface. “I …” was all he managed to get out before he descended into stiff Japanese.
“Translation?” I asked, turning to Kat.
She stared at him for a second before shaking her head. “I dunno, he seems kinda out of it. Rambling about control, or something.”
“How do you not know what he’s saying?” I asked, losing my patience as Harry jerked in his sleep, within my arms. The smell of the decaying hospital was thick in my nose, and the weight of my beau in my arms required me to shift him, especially since he was twitching hard.
“Japanese is a subtle language, okay?” Kat tossed off a shrug. “It’s not easy to translate it precisely. Not every concept has a parallel, and I’m not exactly flawless at it, apparently. I’m flying on whatever’s left up here, okay?” She flicked her hair, indicating her head.
“Fine, I—” I started to say, trying to speak through Akiyama’s rambles. He’d moved during the little time-break interval, and was now standing between me and the door to the room. I was about ready to push past him, but something stopped me.
Harry was spasming in my arms. He wasn’t simply twitching in his sleep; he was undergoing a full-blow seizure, as though he’d been exposed to the same lights I had but instead of just being put off eating due to nausea, he’d gone full grand mal.
“Shit,” I muttered, trying to get him under control. If a human jerking under the pressure of seizing could cause limbs to fly freely, imagine what a meta with all their muscular power could do. He almost got me in the nose before I turned his arms away, ignoring the stray back kick that numbed my bicep. “I need a place to set him down.” I started toward the door Akiyama was now blocking.
“Dame! ” he said again, pushing himself in front of it once more.
“Dammit,” I said, looking him right in the eye, “there is something you are doing here that is messing things up, okay? You either know something or are doing something. Cop to it, and let’s fix this together.” I looked down at Harry, still spasming. “Before he gets hurt and time ends. Please.”
Akiyama just stared at me. “I have nothing to do with your problems. You need to leave.”
“My problems are becoming your problems, bub,” I said. If I’d had a stray hand, I would have jabbed a well-placed finger right in his face for emphasis. Unfortunately, I was too busy keeping Harry under control to be able to illustrate my point thusly. “Time is ending. That means an infinity of being stuck with the only other person on the planet who isn’t affected by the stoppages—i.e, me. You get that?”
“This is my place,” Akiyama said, stiff and resolute. “You will leave.”
I just stared him down. “I get it. You want to spend this forever frozen time solo. Meditating, maybe, on what you did to break time. That’s cool. I mean, not really, but …”
“I have nothing to do with this,” Akiyama said, evincing only a hint of anger, but it was enough to convey how he felt. I smelled denial. “Perhaps you are responsible.”
“Yes, me with these time powers I’ve never felt before now,” I said, and an idea occurred to me. “You know how I got the ability to resist what you’re doing? You shook my hand. For longer than you should have. I didn’t realize it at the time, because death was bearing down on me, but you totally put a shadow of yourself in me, and somehow it made me immune to the flow of time. I don’t really get how that works, but … there it is. You did this to me, Shin’ichi. You’re the reason why I’m here.”
“Lies,” Akiyama said. His calm was unraveling, and I realized this was the first time he’d closed his mind to the possibility of what I’d told him before, about our earlier meeting.
“You sent me here!” I shouted, Harry convulsing in my arms. “From your future to my past, so that I would come here now, when you needed my help!”
“You are mistaken,” Akiyama said with a hiss through gritted teeth, clearly trying to get a grip on his emotions, which were threatening to barrel out of control.
“Well, a second ago you said I was lying, so I guess we’re making progress,” I said, staring him down. “What have you done?”
He made a subtle movement to place himself more squarely in front of the double doors to the trauma room. “I have done nothing. This is not your concern—”
“Time’s ending, Shin’ichi. Color me concerned.”
“Sienna,” Kat said, and I looked up at her. Her gaze was rooted at me—no, not me, I realized as I followed her eyes down, down—
To where Harry rested in my arms, unmoving …
I lifted him up, bringing his face close to my ear—
He wasn’t breathing.
I felt everything drain out of me as he hung in my arms, limp.
Harry was dead.