10.
Sienna
Things to do when you’re stuck on a private plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and everyone around you is frozen in time:
Try the internet and discover that the wi-fi is not working. Because time is frozen.
Talk to the people around you, who show as much reaction as statues. Because time is frozen.
Go to the bathroom and realize the toilet won’t flush. Because—well, you know.
Try the TV—no signal or replay or whatever.
Attempt to make your electronics work—not a chance, they’re as stuck as the people around you. Can’t even trigger the lock screen.
Look through the luggage of everyone else on board until you find a very aged paperback copy of Richard Stark’s The Hunter and settle down to read it while frantically glancing around every few minutes in hopes that time has resumed its normal course.
Spoiler alert: It hasn’t.
Feed yourself from the limitless bags of peanuts and chips in the steward’s galley, until your blood has the same approximate salt content as the water somewhere far, far below you.
Consider breaking your two-month sobriety with the approximately ten gajillion miniature bottles of liquor in the galley. Who would even notice? Or give a damn? Pass on that, mostly because drinking has never, not once, ever made me feel better.
Reach the middle of The Hunter and realize you’ve seen the movie of this, and it had Mel Gibson, and was maybe less mean in some places and yet meaner in others. Nervously glance around, hoping time has unfrozen.
Still a no.
Pace endlessly, probably wearing down the jet’s carpet. Take particular care in moving for fear that imparting too much strength to any particular motion will end up destroying the entire plane when time unfreezes—if time unfreezes—like Quicksilver speed-beating the shit out of people in the X-Men movies.
Begin to question whether this is it . That time is now frozen, forever, in this state, and that I will live out the rest of my days with a toilet that will not flush and eventually be forced to resort to cannibalism of people who won’t even feel it when I kill and begin to eat them.
I miss you, Wolfe.
“—but dresses like he dropped out of Leave It to Beaver ,” Kat resumed, picking up right where she left off. I jumped so hard I threw The Hunter into the bulkhead with enough force that it exploded in a cloud of bindings and torn pages. Kat jerked her head to look at me, now on a small sofa behind her, and saw the pages of the book floating down around me. “What the …?”
“It happened again,” Harry said, all memory of Kat’s insults apparently forgotten as he stood, wobbly-legged and looking kind of haunted, eyes vacant and searching. He touched his temple, closing his eyes for a second as though he’d just experienced a headache of the sort Kat used to cause me on the regular.
“Yeah,” I said as the flight attendant walked carefully up the aisle, looking at me as though I’d just managed some sort of miracle. Which I had. When she’d started from the galley I’d been in my seat; now I was twenty feet away, standing up from the little sofa. “It did.”
“This is what you called me for?” Kat asked, taking a drink from the attendant’s tray without even looking at her. Harry did the same and gulped down whatever she’d brought him in one good slug.
“Yes,” I said, and looked at the attendant, then made a shooing motion with my hand, which she got the hint on and started back up the aisle toward the galley. I moved closer to them and whispered, meta-low, “I’ve been stuck out of time for the last—I don’t know—a day, maybe? It was hard to tell without clocks or phones or—”
“Ewwww,” Kat said. “I hope that never happens to me. No wi-fi? Sounds like my version of hell.”
“Sounds like my version of heaven,” Harry muttered, passing his empty glass to the attendant as she went by.
“It’s terrible,” I said. “I was reading that book,” and I chucked a thumb at the remains of the novel, which was just coming to rest over a several square foot space next to the bulkhead, “and that was basically all I could do.”
“I wonder if your powers would work while time is frozen …?” Harry asked, still seeming pretty glazed.
“Why does that matter?” Kat asked.
“She might need to defend herself in a time freeze when we get to Japan,” Harry said with a shrug. “Just thinking ahead.”
I was pretty sure that was not what he was thinking of, but kudos to him for coming up with a graceful answer on his feet. “That’s not a bad point,” I said, “I—”
“Whoa,” Harry said, blinking, now staring straight ahead again. “That … is not good.”
“What happened now?” Kat asked, turning to face him. “Did you accidentally set off the creeper alarm in here?”
And a point to Kat for unexpected spiked sarcasm delivered with a straight face. She usually wasn’t good at that; Harry seemed to really bring out her mean streak. “No,” he said, seeming to take no notice of her flippant cruelty, “I’m looking forward—trying to see—” He was speaking quickly, frazzled, and I recalled the time he’d come to me in Chicago, seeking my help because of something about to happen that was the end of the metahuman world. He hadn’t seemed this shaken then. “It’s so much worse,” Harry said, still staring blankly at the bulkhead. Slowly, he turned to me, eyes wide and haunted. “So much worse … there’s … nothing … in three days …” He quivered, staring empty-eyed at me.
“In three days … what?” I asked, trying to wrap my head around this.
“In three days … it’s all over, Sienna,” Harry said, still staring at me, horror creeping into his gaze in a way that wrenched my stomach, “in three days … the world—the whole world … time … it just … stops.”