“No!” I scream. “No, I don’t want that!” If my August won’t listen, I’ll have to try the new one. “You give me five minutes,and I’ll tell you exactly how I did it. In more detail than he ever could.”
Navy Coat August clacks his tongue, then drops his very first words to me. “You know, I can very easily just kill you both.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be very nice, would it?” my August quips at the guy holding a gun on him.
Fuck, I love this man.
Navy Coat August takes a few steps back towards the wall so he can move the gun easily between us. He looks way too relaxed with that thing, like he uses it a lot. “I’m not actually very nice. I’m actually very evil. Sorry to have to tell you that. I will kill one of you, and if I don’t get the truth right now, I will kill both of you.”
“I did it,” I try to convince him, not the slightest tremor in my voice. “Kill me.”
“Very well.” At the first movement of his arm, I slam my eyes closed. A shot rings out, and I wait. Wait for the bullet. Wait for the pain.
When neither come, I open one eye, then the other. My gaze falls on my own spectacular August, arm lengthened, with his gun in his hand pointed directly at Navy Coat August. His shoulders are dusted with the chunks of concrete August’s bullet blew off the wall just above his head.
But Navy Coat’s still got his gun on me.
August doesn’t flinch. “Is his life really worth dying for?”
Navy Coat smiles, long and slow. “Not remotely. I’m only doing it for the bounty. He can destroy all the worlds he likes. Just drop the gun, and I’ll let you both go.”
“What bounty?” August asks, his gun steady.
Navy Coat laughs, then tilts his head in a magnanimous way that sets me on edge. “I realise you wouldn’t understand. You’re very… old-fashioned… uneducated…” He twirls his spare hand in the air. “A bit simple.”
“Then explain it,” August grits out.
Navy Coat August fixes sharp eyes on him. “They saw you coming, whichever one of you has been ripping holes in the multiverse. Some of the more advanced universes sent people for you. But recently, we noted your direction changed. That you were on a direct collision course with this world. So all I had to do was wait.”
“W-why you?” I stutter out. “If there’s a bounty, then how is it an August who intercepts me?”
“Me,” my Augusts argues. “Interceptsme, the criminal August.”
I frown hard at him, but Navy Coat gives him a grin. “Because they don’t have this.” He reaches into his deep pocket and pulls out a small blue device with one big red button on it. “A Particle Stasis Displacement Pulser. I made it myself.”
A what now?“A what now?”
He rolls his eyes. He’s such a dick. “In simple terms, I can lock onto our signal, Augusts only, and freeze anyone else. The police use it to stun suspects in our time, but they don’t have the ability to hone it to such advantage.”
“Or the need to murder for payment,” August sweetly defends the London police force of the year twenty-five twenty-five.
“Perhaps not. But they, and everyone else, missed a trick. Any other bounty hunter in the vicinity, I can take them out. Unless they’re another August, of course.” He chuckles weirdly to himself. “Either way, now the fifty million credits are mine.”
“Fifty million!” August gasps out.
“Is that a lot?” I ask hopefully.
Bottom lip jutting out, Navy Coat informs us, “Not really, no.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“You’d think they’d take it a little more seriously,” I mutter.
A scuff of boots on concrete echoes up the walls of the alley, followed by a shout behind me that I recognise. “Let me go!” Asshole August comes crashing down a few metres away, and I glance over in horror to discover who threw him.
It’s an August.
