46.
Sienna
Akiyama came down the road to the dock at a slow walk, taking his sweet time. The fisherman was still waiting there on his boat, clearly still too terrified of me to consider disobeying my directive. Kat was on her cell phone, speaking in crisp Japanese, in what sounded like a grateful tone, while Harry …
Harry was leaned against me, and I against him, just watching the sun come up as Akiyama shuffled toward us at a glacial pace.
“The plane’s going to be in Nagasaki in a couple hours,” Kat announced as she hung up. She took in Harry and me intertwined with each other, using each other as support columns, and smirked a little. “They’ll refuel and be ready to go an hour or so after that.”
“Can we sneak aboard?” I asked Harry. He nodded. “What about customs on the other side?”
He nodded again. “No problem.”
“Nice to have you back,” I said, and he sparked a little smile at me.
“Yeah,” Kat said, with a lot more meaning. “It’s nice to have you back, Harry.” And they shared a look of their own.
“I do have one question for you, though,” I said, trying to get this last one in before Akiyama arrived. “Why not just tell us that Kat was your mom?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Have you met the no-memory Kat? How do you think she would have reacted to that unprompted revelation? ‘Hey, it’s me, your son. I know I look and act older than you, but you totally are my mom. Gimme a hug’?”
Kat laughed. “That’s legit.” Her smile faded. “I was so driven to be … not Klementina. There’s no way I would have accepted … any of that.”
Harry adopted a pained smile. “I know. Besides …” He shrugged, and the pained part of it left. “I knew it was just a matter of time before the truth came out on its own terms.”
“Saw that in the future, did you?” I asked, poking him in the ribs. He did not avoid my move, laughing instead. “Even through the cataclysmic crashing of all of time?”
“Yep,” he said, taking my pokes with a good-natured laugh. “I knew that if time survived, that’d all work out. But of course time surviving was kind of touch and go there for a while …”
I tried to put aside my amusement as Akiyama arrived, cutting off our laughs and infusing our little group with a drift of seriousness. “Shin’ichi,” I said, a little stiffly.
“Sienna,” he said, bowing to me. “Thank you for what you did.”
“Yeah, about that …” I said, feeling a little remorse for ripping his memories of loved ones out of his head. “I know I had to and all … but I’m still sorry.”
“Your apology is unnecessary,” Akiyama said, back to that steely reserve. “You did what needed to be done. I do not feel any regret for your conduct. You helped me in the only way that you were able … and that is enough for me.” He paused, taking a long breath. “Now … I believe I owe you something in return.”
I felt my muscles tighten. “Yes. Well.”
Kat was suddenly at my side, and she pulled me a step away, holding up a finger to Akiyama. “Just a sec.” She only dragged me about a foot or so, and spoke in a normal voice everyone could hear, so I had no idea what the hell the point of this apparent aside was, since we had no privacy. “Sienna … you could get your mom back.”
I blinked at her; surprise flooded through me.
Mom?
“I am sorry,” Akiyama said, shaking his head. “If her mother has already died … there is no changing that. It would … break time far worse than what you saw here to try and change that part of the past.”
That breath of hope I’d felt for just a second—the idea that my mom could come back—died just as quickly as it arrived, and my shoulders fell subtly. “That’s all right,” I said, though truly I felt like it was anything but. “You know me,” and I did a little smile-forcing of my own. “I’m not much for looking back or living in the past, and that … well, it was a long time ago.”
Akiyama stirred. “Or … very soon to come, in my case.” He gestured toward the boat. “I will need to make my way to … where we are to meet, if I’m to do this.”
Kat just stared at him, eyebrows pushing together. “Can’t you just … teleport there?”
Akiyama smiled. “I can move through time, not space.”
“I’m sure we can get you a ride to Minneapolis,” I said, looking at the boat, waiting for us. Harry stirred into motion first, skipping carefully over the unsteady boards to show me the way to follow. I did, and Kat followed me, with Akiyama bringing up the rear, and soon enough, the fisherman was throttling up and we were pulling away from the dock.
Akiyama gave the island a last look; it was tough to tell from just his face what he was thinking, but I felt like there was an element of relief there, like some weight had been lifted from him. Finally, he turned to me and, speaking under Kat’s chatter to the fisherman as she apparently tried to smooth over all that poor guy had been involved in over the last couple days, Akiyama said, “So.”
I glanced at Harry, who waited, on the seat next to me, supportive, listening. He nodded, and brushed my shoulder. It wasn’t like I needed his reassurance, but after all I’d been through … hell, my whole life … it was nice to have it anyway. “Yes?” I asked, turning back to Akiyama.
Akiyama smiled, again, this quicksilver thing. “Tell me … about our first meeting.”