36.
If you’re going to take a twenty-foot drop off a cliff into rocky waters, it’s always advisable to have a plan for your landing.
My plan: land on the invulnerable meta who was clutched tight in my arms, screaming(!) as I rode him into a rock below, my knee in his gut.
Prettyboy thudded against a giant boulder as we landed with a splash, his head catching stone and my kneecap slamming into his belly as his back flopped onto seemingly unyielding water. That left me with a pain in my patella that felt like someone had sledgehammered it, but it also caused Prettyboy to fold from either the blow to the skull or the sudden weight applied to his diaphragm. Either way, we lurched into the water with a lot of smacking and cracking of flesh against rock, flesh against flesh, and invulnerable skin against succubus knee.
What a rush.
Also … ow.
Once the impact was over, sharp, stunning, sudden—we were underwater. I’d had just enough time to draw a breath before I plunged into the chilly deep. The sun overhead shone, rippling across the surface of Prettyboy’s face as I held onto him, riding him down a few feet. There were other bodies here, nobody moving, mostly just floating at the surface like chum for the sharks, a little tinge of red in the water, either from the sunlight or their blood. Maybe Prettyboy’s, but I doubted I’d made him bleed—yet.
I held onto my breath like it was life itself, because—well, it kinda was. Water churned and bubbled around us as Prettyboy struggled, and I held onto him and scissored my legs. I’d driven the air out of him on the way down, fortunately, probably mostly out of surprise from the skull-thumping and my knee catching him off guard. I doubted I’d done as much damage to him as he’d done to my knee with his frigging invulnerable skin, but the goal was achieved nonetheless:
Sienna had a lungful of air to work with and Prettyboy was gasping and desperate, sucking in deep breaths of water.
I rode that bastard down to the rocky bottom and he thrashed wildly the whole way, kicking out desperately but without much actual effect. I locked my eyes on his, predator on prey, and he lashed about, not really able to look at me because his drowning instinct had kicked in fully, and he couldn’t use anything but his lizard brain. He was grabbing hard at me, not realizing I was doing everything I could to aid in our descent. When we bumped against the seabed below, it was the fulfillment of all my (on the fly) plans and probably not what he’d planned at all.
This is what you get when you mess with me, asshole.
I held him down, bubbles streaming out of his lips, the last of his residual oxygen flooding out. My lungs were tight, like iron, and I kept my breath in as though it were gold and I was the cheapest Midas sonofagun to ever walk the earth. Prettyboy struggled, and scrabbled, and clawed some. I kept my face out of his reach and held him down with all my strength as he bucked and freaked out and generally offered the resistance of an unthinking wild man. Because that’s what he was. He didn’t have two ounces of conscious thought to rub together, drowning instinct having taken over. All the advantages to being an invulnerable meta, to being able to hold your breath for—I dunno, probably an hour if he’d really tried—were out the window because this dumbass had trod hard on his Boris Grishenko, “I am invincible!” philosophy and never bothered to train for when shit goes horribly wrong.
Thanks, Ma.
It took about three minutes for his resistance to flag. The bubbles had gone to almost nil by five.
And at about seven minutes … Prettyboy went limp, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Which was good, because I was starting to get bored.
I looked around for a boulder, and when I found one about ten feet away, I dragged Prettyboy over there and then rolled it on top of him, saving him for later. I knew high powered metas couldn’t actually be killed by asphyxiation, but I had bigger fish to fry—like time coming to an end in the next day or so—and figured I’d just deal with his ass in earnest later.
Or never, preferably, since I was fresh out of nuclear warheads with which to scourge off his skin.
Oops. Forgot I was in Nagasaki. My bad. (Too soon?)
I broke the surface by the docks a few seconds later to find myself surrounded by yelling Japanese voices. One of them was the boat captain, sounding quite put out and maybe a little scared. The other was the yakuza who’d been tasked with guarding him, and he sounded put out, too, but for different reasons.
Quietly cutting the distance between me and the fishing boat, I got up to the side, listening to the shouting. It was all in the other direction and sounded like the yakuza was looking up the hill, probably trying to rouse some of the dead bodies I’d left lying there. Which included a guy with a knife through his face, one that was nearly cut in half, and another missing his head, so I’m really not sure what he thought he’d accomplish, but that was the direction he’d chosen to yell, impotently.
I was over the side of the boat and all up in that guy’s grill before he knew what hit him. His head came around to face me but his body stayed facing the opposite direction, as I gave him a good twist with my meta strength. If he’d been a stubborn jar of pickles, I definitely would have popped him open. Alas, he was human, so he just died with a GURRRRRK! I tossed the carcass overboard without missing a beat and then looked right at the captain.
“Wait here,” I said. “You understand me?”
He nodded furiously.
“Wait here,” I said again, then made the finger across the throat gesture. “How long will you wait?”
He burst out in a furious load of Japanese, and I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know what that means.”
“He said … ‘Forever, if you command me,’” Akiyama’s calm voice wafted over to me, and I looked over to find him standing there at the edge of the dock, staring across the water at me.
“Good answer,” I said to the captain. “Remember that.” And I started hopping my way over the planks back to the quay.
“Did you kill him?” Akiyama asked once I’d landed back on the concrete quay. He seemed genuinely curious, and about as emotionally involved as I’d have been watching a soccer game. (Because soccer is boring, guys.)
“I doubt it,” I said, “but he’s under control for now. I’ll deal with him more permanently after I’ve solved all these other burgeoning crises that are blowing up in my face.”
Akiyama cocked an eyebrow at me. “How … is he ‘under control’?”
“I drowned his ass and put him under a boulder for safekeeping,” I said, moving past him and heading back uphill, water streaming out of my clothes and squishing out of my shoes as I ascended. I grabbed my hair and wrung it out, breathing out my impatience and trying to breathe in some serenity. It wasn’t going so well.
“I see,” Akiyama said, keeping pace with me. “And those yakuza you killed?”
I tossed off a look that probably wasn’t that friendly at him. “What about them?”
He seemed to back off an inch or two, and when he spoke again, it was a lot more gently than anything he’d said to me thus far. “You killed them all.”
“I’m running a touch low on mercy,” I said, “and those assclowns—or some others of their stripe—have been dogging me since Tokyo. I don’t have time for all this shit.” I put my eyes forward again as I threw open the door to the hospital without regard for how loud it slammed this time. “Apparently the world needs me to save it—again.”
“You have … saved the world before?” Akiyama asked, and now that his reserve was evaporating, he sounded almost a little … impressed?
“Yeah, I’ve lost count,” I said. “First there was Sovereign—he wanted to kill all the metas and enslave all the humans. Then came Harmon—he was just going to skip straight to the enslavement. Then came Rose—and I mean, there was other stuff in there, too, like the time I saved Chicago from a meteor strike—” I stopped, my shoes still squishing out water on the worn floor of the waiting room. “You know what? None of this matters right now. What matters now is you helping me save time from ending.”
Akiyama stiffened, his reserve returning. “I … don’t know what you mean.”
I stared him down, and it must have been classic Sienna Grade-A RBF, because he melted back another step, albeit subtly. “You know exactly what I mean,” I said, not giving an inch. Then I turned, and pushed my way through the door into the decaying hallway, where Harry lay next to Kat, both pale and pasty, but breathing, I noted—
Then I turned toward the doors beyond, and made a beeline for them.
“Wait!” Akiyama shouted, and came after me with his hand raised. “Do not—”
“I’m here to save the world,” I said, slapping his hand away and causing him to spin slightly off balance. “If I don’t have time for the yakuza’s shit, how much do you imagine I have for your ceaseless denials?” Akiyama caught himself against a half-wall to the ICU ward, raising his head to look at me with alarm. “I can’t control time, Shin’ichi,” I said, hoping my use of his first name would get it through to him that I was fresh out of patience for his stalling, obfuscating bullshit. “I have to work with what I have, and in this case—it ain’t much. So forgive my rudeness,” I said, and back-kicked the door to the trauma room open.
“NO!” Akiyama shouted, thrusting out his hand as if to stop me. I turned, before he could reach me, and strode into the room he’d tried so hard to keep me out of.
Strode in …
And froze. Not literally.
And my jaw hit the floor. Also not literally.
But I did stop. And I did stare. And I did wonder how the hell I could have missed it.
Because there, in the midst of a hospital room, was a scene frozen in time.
A doctor.
Two nurses.
And the patient …
Was a Japanese woman on a bed, legs in the classic pose of childbirth …
And based on the scene before me, I knew …
This woman was either dead or close to it.
And somehow I knew, just by looking, that the baby …
Was probably soon to follow.