38.
Sienna
“Oh, geez, Shin’ichi,” I said, rubbing my forehead, which was filled with the tension of a furrowed brow. Suddenly … it all made sense. Or at least I thought it did.
“You do not know what this is,” Akiyama said, interposing himself between me and the scene of childbirth, as though I were going to walk in and start beating the shit out of these people while they were frozen in time.
“Really?” I asked him, the fully jaded Sienna coming out. “So it’s not your girlfriend or wife dying in childbirth?”
He paused, and I saw his mind racing to catch up. “I … very well, perhaps you do see what is going on here.”
“Yeah, I see what’s going on here,” I said, turning my back on the spectacle. “You’re not exactly the first person to try and hold on a little too hard to something they’re losing.” I opened an eye and cast a look back at the strange tableau. “You might be the first that can freeze time and hold onto the moment, though.”
“I only held on to what was mine,” Akiyama said, jutting out his chin, defiant. A mote of dust was frozen in his little suspension field, and the place was completely scentless, which I thought was a little bizarre until I realized that basically he’d stopped all particle motion within this room.
“Oh, so this doctor and these nurses are your slaves?” I quipped.
Akiyama’s eyes flitted away from meeting mine. “I let everyone else go. The entire island—it was evacuated in the middle of the night after … this.” He swept an arm around to indicate the scene in front of him.
“Why?” I asked, and he cocked his head at me, giving me a funny look. “Not why this ,” I said, sweeping my own hand over to encompass the frozen childbirth scene. “Why did you get them to evacuate the island?”
He took a hard breath, the tension in his shoulders making it look like he was carrying a lot of weight on his back. “I tried … many times … to create a different outcome. Roll time forward, do something different—and the same thing happened. Roll it back, months, even … but nothing fixed … this.” And here he cast a brief look at the scene, then jerked his head away quickly, as though he could not bear to see it. “Even now, I relive it each day. The moments … before, when hope was like a banquet before me. The future, laid out and gleaming, waiting. I remember every moment, every sensation, as it rolled on … and they … and she … began to slip away.” His eyes had a dark, haunted look to them. “I relive it every day, after watching the sunrise. And every day, regardless of what I do … it happens the same way.”
“Okay,” I said, wracking my brain. Kat was the immediate solution I came up with, but Kat was pretty damned incapacitated at the moment. If I could get her recovered, she could probably lay hands on Mama Akiyama and boom, problem solved. “I think we can fix this.”
Akiyama did not look at me. “There is no … fixing this.”
“Dude, I have a friend right outside who heals with a touch. She can fix almost anything. I say ‘almost,’ because, you know, there are limits. Broken heart is right out. Torn quilt, probably not in her purview—I don’t see Kat as much of a seamstress, but maybe buried under all that millennial bullshit she’s picked up, she actually knows how to stitch from the way olden days—”
“Your friend is from these days,” Akiyama said, straining to explain the obvious to an idiot—me. “My wife and child are in the past. You can only stand here, in this place, because you have some resistance to my power. To bring your friend in here would be to …” He waved a hand in frustration, almost uselessly. “… It would upset the timestream.”
I looked around, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I could be wrong, being new to this whole time business … but I think the timestream is already pretty pissed off.”
“Yes,” Akiyama conceded, a little more aggravated than I might have suspected. “I have held on to time too long. The tension has built over the decades, and now …” He shook his head. “We near a snap, for lack of a better word.”
“Time itself will freeze completely,” I said. “Because you can’t just hold onto a piece of it for this long without affecting the whole.”
He nodded and all the life seemed to go out of him. “So it would seem.”
I tried to gather all my tact for what I needed to say next. “Akiyama … you’ve got to let go, then.”
Now the tension gathered even tighter in his shoulders, and he looked so stiff I thought he might explode just standing there. “You do not know what you are asking of me.”
I took a deep breath. “Look … I know it probably feels like it right now, but … you’re not the only person who’s felt a loss in his life.” I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was back in the middle of wrecked Scottish village, the world on fire around me.
And my heart was gone, along with my breath.
“What is this?” Akiyama asked, and I realized he was next to me, that we were actually there, in Scotland.
“Holy hell,” I muttered. The flames engulfing the house next to me were frozen in time. I felt like I could reach out and touch them without being burned, so I tried it. Sure enough, there was no heat, because the moment was frozen in time.
“This is …” Akiyama slowly looked around. “… your work?”
“Geez, man, you’ve known me for like five seconds and you’ve already figured out I’m a human wrecking ball?” I looked around the empty streets of the Scottish village. “Yeah, it was kinda my doing. I ran across somebody here who …” I felt a lump in my throat, and couldn’t find the words. Akiyama didn’t interrupt, he let me think it out, and a couple minutes later I managed to squeeze, “How did we end up here?”
“Time is … fickle,” Akiyama said. “And it is fracturing. It drags any who touch it this close to the source of the problem … to moments in their past of great stress and import.”
“How the hell does it do that?” I asked, whispering. I could see the highland boob mountains around me in the foggy day. They loomed like hunchback giants in this place I wished I could have avoided forever. “Know what’s important to us?”
“I do not know,” Akiyama said. “Time remains a mystery to me in many ways. But there is a care, a force behind it, it would seem, guiding those close to it to places such as this.” He looked right at me. “You shudder at being here. It takes your breath away.” Here, he was composed, as though being removed from the scene of his family’s impending death took away all his excess emotion that leaked out. “What happened here?”
“I lost … almost everything,” I said, voice a hoarse whisper. “Nearly lost my life. My friends. My family. And I did lose …” I looked at the browned Scottish earth. “I lost people … I cared about. That helped …” There was no temperature, no wind, but I felt a chill anyway. “… That helped define me.” I looked back up at Akiyama. “Without them … I still struggle to know who I am, beyond … well, beyond a destroyer or something.”
Akiyama nodded subtly, as though taking this in and coming up with a judgment he didn’t wish to share. “And if you were given a choice of moments to return to, to relive …?”
I let out a gasping, mirthless laugh that leapt from my lungs. “I would have picked almost any moment but this one, yes.”
“Interesting,” Akiyama said, and the Scottish Highlands faded around us, back to the Japanese hospital, and the impending birth and death scene. He grimaced as it all blurred back into view. “And what do you—” He stopped, as though he’d been frozen himself, then lifted a finger and pointed behind me.
“Uh oh,” I said, and whirled to find—
Yeah. ‘Uh oh’ didn’t quite cover it.
“I … find you …” Prettyboy said, soaked to the skin, his suit torn across the chest, dripping on the floor just outside the door to the waiting room. He wore a maniacal grin and his eyes were—madly—focused on me.