“Could you?”
“Yes,” I snarl, rapid firing now, eating up a Determinist’s ray gun, a Randomist’s club, a—wait, is that asword? I’m aware of Beckly lowering his ray gun to glance at me as I say, “But I’d sort of hoped for a quicker solution.”
“You’ll have it,” Lament says. “We’re just buying Avi time.”
“Time for—”What?I don’t finish, because at that moment someone throws a crowbar. It windmills through the air, heading straight for Beckly’s head. Only, Beckly isn’t paying attention. His eyes are still on Lament and me.
I may or may not sigh before shooting it.
“Oh,” says Beckly as he whips around, watching the cinders from the dissolved crowbar float over him like snow. He seems, for a moment, too stunned for words. “Um. Nicely done, Hartman.”
Lament’s hands return to my shoulders as he continues pointing me toward every new danger. It’s not lost upon me that if he’d ever let me fly with him, it’d probably feel something like this—Lament in command, pointing, guiding, while I blow shit to pieces. The air is hazed with fumes. His voice comes in close at my ear. “For the record, I wouldn’t have blamed you for letting that crowbar go.”
“The thought,” I say archly, “never crossed my mind.”
I continue disintegrating people’s weapons while Avi fiddles with a small grenade-like object she’s pulled from her backpack. Overhead, Ran Doc Min’s hologram motions as he speaks, still unaware that his audience is no longer hearing him. Toph has a microphone (though really, his voice is loud enough that he doesn’t need it) and starts bellowing, “Evacuate the area, Time Stopper incoming, you have sixty seconds.”
“What’s a Time Stopper?” I ask Lament between blasts.
“Jester’s invention. It goes off like an invisible bomb to freeze everyone in the immediate area.”
“Jester invented that?”
“He’s a genius,” Lament says. “Didn’t you know?”
Though I’m not familiar with the Sixth’s Time Stoppers, the crowd must be, because they hear Toph’s warning and begin to scatter. Avi holds up three fingers. Toph sees this and booms into his loudspeaker. “Final warning. Time Stopper in three, two—”
Avi unsticks the pin from her grenade and hurls it into the crowd.There’s a puff of air, a littlezinglike static, and then—nothing. No explosion, no crash or bang. I watch a shimmer ripple out across the crowd like heat over a fire. The noise abruptly dies. A swath of people freeze on the spot.
“Oh,” I say, lowering my gun. “Wow.”
It’s unclear whether the frozen people are still lucid. They’ve halted mid-action, like someone pressedpauseon a movie. There’s a man with his arm thrown over his eyes. A woman lifting her skirt to flee. The magmor with his loudspeaker. It’s a bit jarring how quickly this went from a battle zone to just… stillness. My ears are ringing in the sudden absence of noise. Ran Doc Min’s hologram is gone. The Time Stopper didn’t entirely cover the park, and a few stragglers on the fringes flee the scene. My eyes snag on one woman in particular, holding one of those yellow Determinist flags. She’s wearing a gray cloak with a hood, but she looks back at me, and I catch a slice of her face.
My blood goes cold.
As fast as she appeared, she’s gone, vanishing into the city with the rest of the Determinists, but that does nothing to slow my pounding heart. A breeze cools the sweat on my skin. I can feel every ridge of my ray gun where it presses into my palm.
That woman was my mother.
16
“Hartman.” Lament’S fingers gripmy wrist. He doesn’t pull, exactly, but he’s applying pressure, holding tight. “Hartman, come on.”
I wonder if Lament can feel my pulse pounding furiously through my skin.
I wonder if this is all an elaborate dream.
The world continues to spin. I hear the blare of a siren, the patter of retreating feet. There’s a charred stench in the air from Avi’s Time Stopper, mixed with Soto’s dense humidity and the sour tang of my own adrenaline. I inhale a breath that sounds like a gasp, because it is a gasp, because I can’t breathe.
Lament’s expression changes. “Hartman?”
Part of me thinks I must be hallucinating. That’s got to be it, right? I’m having some sort of waking nightmare, because if this isn’t a dream, if my mom is actually here on the planet where she dumped me and is now seemingly in league with a mob of Determinists…
I’m struck by a fresh wave of dizziness. My throat is shrinking, and everything looks too shiny. I make another noise, a strangled kind of half laugh, and set my hands to my knees. The road beneath my boots appearsdigitized. I can make out every crevice, every shadow and detail. Ants, bits of litter. Someone’s discarded cigarette.
“Hartman.” Lament’s voice has gone tight with worry. “What’s wrong?”
I saw my mom in the crowd. Nina Hartman is here, and she saw me too, and nothing is making any sense.
