by N. D. Wilson
“Hey!” she yelled. “He’s dying in here. Dying!”
Outside, she heard only laughter. She pressed her mouth to the door and yelled again and again, until her throat tore and her forehead throbbed.
“Killers! Idiots! Open this door! You’re killing him! Cut him down! Hey!” She kicked the door again and again. She kicked until her toenails split and her bones ached. “I know you can hear me!”
The door opened, revealing a barrel-chested bearded man in a tight sweater. And Samra, with her arms crossed.
“He’s suffocating!” Glory shouted. “Get him down!”
The redhead’s eyes flitted up to Sam and then quickly back down to Glory.
“No!” The big voice echoed across the kitchen from out of sight. “I know who he is. I have read the picture stories. The boy stays.”
Samra stiffened and began to turn away. “My father says he stays.”
“If he dies,” Glory said, “I’m coming for you. I’m coming for all of you.” She stepped forward, ready to bite and kick if she had to, but the broad man shoved her back hard, slamming her into the shelves. Jars fell. Glass shattered and peaches and syrup slicked the floor. Glory slipped, staggered, and fell. Unable to catch herself, she landed on her side. After a moment of breathing through the pain, she rolled onto her stomach.
Glass shards were pricking into her forearm, and her cheek was swamped in syrup. Sweetness leaked into the corner of her mouth.
“It’s okay, Sam.” Glory rolled over, onto her bound wrists, ignoring the glass, ignoring the pain. “I got you.”
Sam said nothing. Glory couldn’t even hear him breathing. But it would be over soon. She could do this. Hooking both heels onto a shelf, she pulled her hips up off the floor. With hamstrings taut, she wriggled her rear closer to the shelves. Then she stretched her left foot up for the next shelf. And then her right. Slowly, gasping, with her head pounding and her whole body shaking, Glory walked her legs up the wall, pulling herself upside down until her chin was pinned to her chest and only the back of her head and shoulders carried all of her weight on the floor.
Careful not to lose her balance, Glory began to twist and shake and bounce as much as she could, focusing entirely on her right hip. She could feel the hourglass moving in her belted binocular case, but she needed the lid to pop open. It was old. It had popped open on its own many times. And the glass inside had to know she wanted it. It had to. Ghost had said it would become part of her. It would mark her.
Glory shimmied. Bracing her left foot as firmly on the shelves as she could, she kicked her right leg hard over and over in the air above her head.
And there it was. Pop. The flap opened partway. The glass emerged slowly, and sideways.
“C’mon!” Glory grunted. She kicked herself into a backward somersault.
Glory’s feet smashed through a shelf as she flipped. Pickles mixed with peaches rained down on her as she managed to land on her knees. Peach syrup spattered out of her ponytail as she sat up, whipping it backward.
The hourglass was swimming with the pickles beside her right knee and the scent of vinegar and brine mingled with the sweetness already in the air.
By the time Glory had the hourglass in her hand behind her back, she was once again lying on her side.
The smells were overpowering and she was trying not to think about the pricking of all the glass. She tried to focus only on what she wanted to accomplish, and where exactly she needed to divide time. Even so, she wasn’t sure how much control she would have over what actually happened when time’s sands became glass. She could end up cutting Sam’s hands off, along with the heads of his snakes. Or it could be Sam’s head along with his arms.
But she knew she wanted speed. She and Sam were going to exist at such an incredible rate of speed that none of the thugs outside the door would be able to see them, let alone hurt them.
Maybe.
If it worked.
And if her time blade sliced Sam’s ropes, but not Sam.
Black sand began to swirl and stir the mess on the floor around her, whipping the glass shards into itself.
Exhausted, terrified, and hurting, unsure of what she was doing, Glory laughed, and then laughed again out of surprise.
“Let’s be peaches, Sam,” she said. “The fastest peaches ever. Just need to make a jar around us.”
Although Glory could only waggle her wrist, the sand seemed to understand. She felt it rushing past her. Father Tiempo had told her that he rose out of time and let it move beneath him until he found the moment he chose to reenter. But how much practice had that taken? For now, she knew she could chop. She could fork time’s river and slow it down or speed it up before her fork merged back in with the whole. But right now, it didn’t feel like a fork. It felt more like she was grabbing part of time’s river in a cooler and slamming the lid shut. She and Sam would be like caught fish inside. She sensed the sand rising in a sphere around her, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Sam’s purple-mottled hands and the knots that bound them.
The temperature jumped as Glory’s sand began to glass. It was different being inside a ball, rather than riding a motorcycle through a tunnel, especially when she needed to control its edges perfectly. Syrup and vinegar steamed off the floor. Jars still intact on the shelves melted into the bigger jar Glory was making, spilling their contents as they rose and stretched and melded into the whole.
On both sides of the pantry, the webbed glass rose up through the shelves, cutting through wood and steel as easily as the canned fruit. The crystalizing shell of time bent inward, passing through Sam’s bonds within a breath of his knuckles, close enough to blister and scrape the skin.
And then the shell closed its dome just below the ceiling, absorbing the glass around the pantry’s only lantern and extinguishing the flame.
The time inside changed even faster than the darkness fell.
Severed shelves crashed and clattered down onto Glory. Sam Miracle slumped forward and crashed on top of the heap.
It hurt.
But Glory didn’t mind. While she fought for breath, Sam was already snoring on top of the pile. He was alive. She was alive. And they were in their own time stream. She was sure of it—hopefully moving much, much faster than the world outside. But she would have to wait for Sam to wake before she could get untied and find out exactly what she had managed to do.
Broken shelves shifted above her. Sam’s limp fingers and then one hand and one wrist slithered straight into her face and then froze up against her chin.
“Cindy?” Glory asked. “I know that’s you. Don’t you dare be nasty right now. I just cut you loose.”
In the darkness, Glory felt Sam’s hand twist around, sliding Cindy’s rough scales and horns across her cheek and neck. The snake pressed against her skin and was still. Cindy wanted warmth and that was all. Glory shivered, but of course, it could have been a lot worse with Cindy. The snake was a killer, and no matter how much control Sam might have, nothing would ever change that.
“Glad I could help,” Glory said. “No, no, don’t bother untying me. I just wanted to rest here on the bottom of this pile with the pickles and the peaches.” And with that, Glory surprised herself by yawning. As battered as she was, holding still was nice. She had successfully used what Ghost had given her. She and Sam might die soon enough. They might fail Peter, and the Vulture might win, but for now, she had wanted to save Sam, she had done something, and it had worked. After months of uselessness and frustration, it felt good.
Trying to block the sensation of the snake’s cold scales against her neck, Glory closed her eyes in the darkness, her mind and body relaxing.
SAMRA FINN STIRRED A COLD BOWL OF SOUP IN THE DIMLY lit kitchen while Bull and Dog and the rest of the men scoured the conquered house and the island for anything of value. Her father reclined on a large, white leather couch. She had stocked the fireplace and put fresh oil in the lanterns, but with the sun down and no electricity, the sleek modern house now fe
lt more like a campground.
Sam’s friends and his sister had all been hogtied and laid facedown in the living room. The boys who had tried to fight were all bleeding—some worse than others—but as far as she could tell, they were all still alive. For now.
Samra took a sip of the broth and looked at the pantry door in the flickering lantern light. Sam and Glory. They were the only two her father had separated from the rest. They were the only two he feared. And she didn’t blame him. She knew they were real, and it was still a struggle to believe that she had just met two characters that she had known in comic books through her entire childhood. And they were locked in the pantry . . .
“Dad?” she asked.
Her father grunted from the living room. But he didn’t sit up and he didn’t open his eyes.
“What will you do with them all?”
“I am Leviathan Finn, and I will do with my captives whatever I will.” Her father yawned as he spoke, a little too tired to be impressed by his own boasting.
“I know that,” Samra said. “But what do you will?”
“He’ll do what he’s told,” said a curly-headed boy who was tied up near the fireplace. The one called Jude with the scarred hands. He arched his back and looked up. “Your father claims he has no master. But he lies. Isn’t that right, Levi?”
Samra’s father sat up on the couch, looking across a row of bodies to the boy tied up beside the fire.
“Does the Vulture deliver his orders directly?” Jude asked. “Or does he make you trust messengers? And how do you contact him?”
“Fool.” Her father tugged the central spike on his beard. “Do you think I need you alive?”
“Let’s say, just as a hypothetical example,” Jude continued, “that you happened to capture the legendary Sam Miracle, who has walked through centuries. How do you get word to the Vulture? And what does he pay you to make dealing with him worth it?”
“Dad,” Samra said. “What is he talking about? Is the Vulture real, too? Are all the characters in the comics real?”
Drew, the wide boy with the missing finger, rolled up onto his shoulder not far from Samra’s feet.
“Hey Barto,” he grunted. “How many years can a battery last?”
Barto lifted his forehead up off the floor, with his glasses dangling off the tip of his nose. “Not many. Definitely not, say . . . twenty-one.”
“Ha! I get it!” Matt Cat, the doughy-looking blond boy, laughed out loud. “Man, that’s embarrassing.”
“Get what?” Samra asked.
“Yeah,” Flip said. “I’m with you, Samra. I don’t get any of this. Why is Drew talking about batteries? Why are we tied up? Why is your dad evil? That must be weird. I never knew my dad but I wouldn’t want him to be evil.”
The redheaded twins wriggled on the floor, almost completely in sync. “Spit it out, somebody,” Jimmy Z said. Johnny Z grunted agreement.
“Levi here is working for batteries,” Matt Cat said. Sir T turned his sharp face toward Samra and grinned. He cleared his throat and addressed the room.
“The girl has a battery-powered transponder to signal her pops. That’s how he tracked her here, which means he probably has batteries, too. But no batteries could possibly last the couple decades they’d need to since this place blew up.”
The boys all laughed, facedown or twisting into backbends and rolling onto shoulders to get a look at Samra.
“Well, well,” Jude said. “Leviathan Finn. You work for an arch-outlaw because he pays you in working batteries? Please tell me he gives you more than that. Are you going to tell your battery king you’ve caught Sam Miracle?”
Leviathan Finn rose to his feet. “Boy, what business is it of yours who I tell? Are you hoping to provoke me?”
Jude rested his face back on the floor and laughed. “I’m hoping to spare you some embarrassment, that’s all. If you haven’t sent your message yet, I wouldn’t bother. And if you have sent it already, well, I’d send a correction quickly, before your daughter finds out just how real the Vulture can be when he’s angry.”
“Dad . . .” Samra left her bowl and walked around the island in the kitchen, dragging her hand across the cool marble. A crossbow much like the one she had seen Sam carrying in the city, but with four strings, sat on the counter beside a bundle of what looked like freshly made arrows.
“And why would this Vulture be angry with me?” Leviathan asked. “The man who presents El Buitre with the Miracle boy could name his reward. Such a man could leave this century of destruction and live in any time with any measure of wealth he might desire. I could return to the city I love, when it still lived.”
“Yes,” Jude said. “If you believe the Vulture’s lies. But even so, you have one problem.”
Samra glanced from her father to the boy on the floor and back to the pantry door.
“I’m pretty sure Sam left,” Jude said. “A while ago. After all that crashing in the pantry.” He twisted, glaring across the floor at the pantry, and then sniffed. “Sand under the door. I felt the temperature go up. And under all the pickle smell, you can pick up the scent of burning.”
Samra’s father turned quickly, striding above trussed-up children straight into the kitchen and to the pantry door. Samra followed. When he jerked the door open, she smelled pickles, but she saw nothing. Grabbing a lantern off the counter, she held it up for her father. There wasn’t much to see. Shelves had been severed, but the amputated portions were missing. Jars had smashed, everyone had heard them, but there was no mess and no trace beyond the aroma. There was even a shallow crater in the floor where the mess should have been. Up higher, the ropes that had bound Sam’s wrists hung slack, with sharply severed ends. And only the top half of the lantern still dangled in the space where Samra had hung it.
“I told you,” Samra said, looking at her father. “You should have made friends. And now he’s loose.”
“How?” he asked, spinning around, anger boiling in his throat. “How did he do it?”
“I doubt he was the one who did,” Jude said.
Millie was the first to laugh. Across the living room floor, ten tied-up boys joined in.
“Good luck,” said Jude. “I’m pretty sure you’re looking for someone else you might have seen in the comics. Peter Eagle. He lives here. You don’t want to mess with him. And I don’t see him tied up on the floor with the rest of us.”
SAM MIRACLE WOKE TO THE SOUND OF VOICES. HIS WRISTS were torn on the outside and his shoulders felt torn on the inside. He was lying in the dark, tangled up in a foul-smelling pile of wood and glass and vinegar and sand and . . . Glory.
The snakes in his hands were both aware of her heat, and they knew her. If it had been anyone else, Cindy would have been rattling. Or striking.
“Glory?” he whispered. “Are you awake?”
Glory groaned and the pile shifted half underneath him. Sam slid as far away from the movement as he could. The stripe of light beneath the pantry door was enough to watch her struggle to rise. And fail.
“My hands are tied,” Glory said. “Behind my back. A little help would be great.”
Sam felt his way forward until he had found Glory’s arms. Tracking them down to her wrists, he tested the knots with his fingers.
“How long have we been in here?” he asked. “Did I imagine the guy with the spiked beard or is he really out there waiting for us?”
“We’ve been in here too long,” Glory said. “But I couldn’t wake you up, and I couldn’t untie myself. And yeah, that guy’s real. But he can’t touch us. We aren’t when he left us. I used the hourglass. We’ve been sleeping for a while, but if I did this right, out there only a couple of minutes have passed. At least . . . if I did it right.”
“Can you really do that?” Sam tugged the first knot loose and Glory’s left hand swung free and she exhaled relief. Her right—gripping her hourglass—was still tied to her belt. Sam jerked at the rope, hooked a finger through a loop, and then unraveled the whole thing.
Glory rose onto all fours, stretching and rolling her shoulders in the dim light. “As of today, I have done it twice,” she said. “Counting this time. But I really shouldn’t, because I have basically no control once the glass gets started.”
“So when are we?” Sam asked.
Glory climbed slowly to her feet. Sam followed her example, and they stood facing each other, dripping vinegar and peach syrup in the dark. Glory said nothing.
“Okay,” Sam said. “You have no idea.”
“Right.”
“Are we backward or forward in time?” Sam asked.
“Still forward,” Glory said. “But like I said, we’re faster. And I have no idea what it looks like outside that door. Open it and find out.”
Sam looked at the light seeping in under the door. He listened to the muffled sound of voices. Then he found the knob with his left hand, and he pulled it open.
The air in the doorway was more like a wall of water. The surface flexed and rippled gently but it was perfectly clear and incredibly light. Inside the air, floating like fossilized ghosts, like creatures woven from smoke, Sam recognized Leviathan and Samra Finn, both staring his way. While the entire submerged kitchen and dining room was visible, Sam could only see a single light—a lantern on the counter beside his ghostly bow. Long tendrils of fiery string were slithering like caterpillars slowly out from the lantern in every direction. In the entire underwater space, those strings were the only things visibly moving.
“I did it,” Glory said. “We’re still here, but everything else looks crazy, crazy slow.”
“They look like underwater smoke bombs.” Sam stepped backward. “What do we look like? Can they see us?”
“If they see us at all, I doubt we’re more than a flicker in the corner of the room. Remember what Ghost looked like at first? Basically invisible? I bet we looked like underwater smoke bombs to him.”
Glory squeezed past Sam and stood with her face just inches shy of the liquid. She flattened her palm above it. After a moment, she touched the watery wall with the tip of her pinkie nail and flinched back instantly.
“Whoa.” Glory looked at her pinkie and then squinted at the water. “It tore the edge of my nail right off. Now it’s just floating there, just a little smoky shape.” She looked back at Sam. Cindy was creeping forward. Speck was slithering Sam’s right arm up toward the ceiling. Sam jerked both of his arms back to his torso and crossed them tight.
