FutureImperfect (9 page)

Siara and Jeremy drove to within a few blocks of the Valis building before the traffic forced them to park. Siara worried Jeremy might lose her on foot, but as they ran, adrenaline enabled her to keep pace with the high school football star. They raced along the sidewalk, but when that became too thick with people, they hit the street and sped between stopped cars.

Siara's heart hammered as she neared the police cordon and approached the mob gathered at its perimeter. She tried to push her way through, but couldn't. The mass formed a solid wall. With startling aggressiveness, Jeremy actually yanked some people out of the way, but even his efforts brought them only a few yards closer.

As more curiosity-seekers pressed in to fill the void behind them, Siara found herself wedged so tightly in the crowd she couldn't breathe. Arms pinned, she noticed everyone was looking up, so she looked up, too. High up on the building, a half-naked figure was snagged on the minute hand of the massive clock, dangling from the seat of his pants like a stuffed toy or rag doll, a thing of cloth and stuffing instead of flesh and blood. The sight was so totally ridiculous, a pained laugh burst from her throat. It was Harry. At least he was alive; at least there was a chance someone would reach him.

But her strange smile soon vanished as she saw him tug at his pants, pull at the only thing keeping him alive, as if trying to tear himself free.

“No, Harry! Don't! Harry!” she cried. She hopped, still unable to move her arms. For a moment, he stopped his busywork. She thought he'd somehow heard her, but then he just fell.

Siara twisted her frail form against the thick, unyielding bodies that braced her, crazily thinking she might somehow catch him. As she struggled, all she said was, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”

The body of the strange boy Siara loved and sometimes thought she might be in love with plunged down the side of the building, turning in the air. Harry knocked against the stone siding hard and crashed into a flagpole, looking like a broken puppet. The pole flung him across the building's corner, where she just couldn't see him anymore.

As she stared at the empty spot where she'd seen him last, her hands reached out and squeezed Jeremy's arm so hard she was sure she must be hurting him.

“It wasn't his fault,” she said, voice cracking.
The Daemon got him.

“I know,” Jeremy answered.

After that, she just kept screaming. The shocked but fascinated crowd rushed around the corner, hungry to see where the body landed. As the crowd thinned, she found she could move her arms again and breathe.

But she didn't want to.

So that was death, the consequence of time, as Harry had called it long ago. It wasn't anywhere near as magic or mythic as she'd once imagined, based on poems by Emily Dickinson (“
Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me”
). It was too real, too gross, and too horribly, horribly ugly.

She found herself imagining the details, wondering if he'd broken his neck when he hit the building, if he'd suffocated on the way down, or if he'd still been alive for a moment after he'd hit bottom, living in a broken-up body. She wondered if it had hurt for long. She wondered if he'd been thinking of her.

Picturing Harry's body crushed from the fall, she thought of the two gerbils she had as a young girl for some reason, Beckett and Joyce, a mated pair. She always thought it was sweet, romantic that gerbils mated for life. But then Joyce grew sick and died and Beckett, rather than mourn her loss, ate her corpse. When Siara tried to stop him, Beckett, for the first time in his life, bit her, latching on to her index finger, burying his teeth deep inside her flesh, holding on so tightly she had to pry him off. Even now, years later, her finger tingled at the site the wound. She later read it was another gerbil instinct to eat their dead, to prevent predators from smelling the rotting body and attacking the nest.

So much for sentimentality. So much for gerbils.

Before Harry, that was the closest she'd come to death. Now
he
was dead. And her stomach twisted tighter than a gerbil's bite.

She vaguely felt Jeremy pull her through the police cordon. She heard him try to talk to the police, to explain who they were, how they knew Harry. They still weren't allowed any closer, not while the police recovered the body, which, they assured him, they didn't want to see anyway. She heard them say the remains would be at the hospital within an hour. If they really wanted to, Siara and Jeremy could talk to the doctors there.

Another hospital. Poor Harry was always in and out of hospitals,
Siara thought; then she started to cry. Jeremy protectively wrapped himself around her, as if he were still her boyfriend, and walked them away from what remained of the crowd. They kept walking awhile, away from the Valis building. People still rushed by them, on their way to see what all the fuss was about, not realizing they'd missed it all.

A few blocks away, near where they'd parked, Jeremy found an old-style diner. It was nearly empty because of all the excitement outside, so he took her in. She slumped into a booth, felt a crack in the upholstery beneath her, and vaguely heard Jeremy ask a waitress for a cup of hot water.

The diner had chrome everywhere, and even where it wasn't chrome, it was shiny and silver: the counters, the tables, the knives and forks. It looked nothing like the dull little Formica diner back in Brenton, where she and Harry had had their only “date.” Nothing at all. But it reminded her of it just the same. And it made her cry more.

The waitress brought a cup of hot water. Jeremy pulled a little packet from his pocket and sprinkled its contents into the cup. Siara watched as the tiny grains of something floated, tinting the water with tan swirls.

Tempests in a teacup.

“What's that?” Siara asked dully. She wiped her face with her arm. Realizing that wasn't enough to sop up the tears, she grabbed a napkin and blew her nose.

Jeremy shrugged. “Herbal tea. To help you relax.”

She shook her head. “I don't want to relax. I want to be upset. Harry's…”

He pushed the cup toward her. “Take a sip. You've still got your mother's demo tonight.”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“I can't go there now,” Siara said. “My mother wouldn't expect me to.”

The steam from the tea rolled up into her nostrils. It had a spicy odor, like nutmeg. Jeremy gently lifted the cup and guided it up to her lips, like he was her dad or her big brother or something, and he wasn't going to take no for an answer. She didn't feel like fighting, so she took a sip.

The liquid, not too hot, slid down her throat. She could feel it warm her all the way down into her knotted stomach. She realized that, logically, the warm feeling should stop there, at the bottom of her stomach, but it didn't. It kept going down her legs into her toes; then it floated up her back, into her arms, even her fingers.

Everything started tingling. The knot loosened. Even the tingling where her pet had bit her finger vanished.

She blinked. She wasn't crying anymore.

“Finish it,” Jeremy said. “It will help.”

So she did. In a few moments, while the pain over Harry's death didn't stop exactly, it felt like it was floating away.

“What's in this?” she asked as she put the empty cup down. “Valerian root?”

“Something like that,” Jeremy said. His face looked so serious as it scanned her, so concerned, it made her smile. Why was she smiling? How could she smile when Harry was dead?

Something strong and warm tugged against her fingers. It took her a moment to realize Jeremy had taken her hands in his, cupped them, and pulled them toward the center of the table. She looked up into his steady blue eyes.

“It's important you keep busy now,” he said in a funny sort of monotone. What a weird thing to say; again, like he was her dad or something, only her own dad would never say anything
that
dadlike. Shouldn't he talk about how awful it was to watch someone plunge to his death? How sorry he was? How he never really hated Harry, even though, of course, he did?

She tried to raise an eyebrow at him again but couldn't find the strength. Instead, she just said, “Yeah.”

“So I think it's important that you still go to the demo tonight.”

She hesitated, but his eyes and his voice were so much stronger than she was. Their certainty invaded her, like a poem, like the tea.

It made sense, in a way. Keep distracted, keep busy.

“Yes,” she said.

“Your mother's been working so hard, there's no reason to upset her, not on her big night. So you really shouldn't mention what happened, right?”

That seemed a little funny, too, like it was dishonoring Harry. And how did Jeremy know how important the demo was to her mom?

But he seemed so sure, so she nodded. “Right.”

He slipped a black iPod out of his pocket and put it in her hands. The plastic felt smooth and cool.

“What's this?” she asked. “A present? You know I can't see you anymore.”

Her tongue felt sticky. Her voice drawled.

Jeremy smiled sweetly. “Just a distraction,” he said. He placed its two earbuds in her ears. In a second, music filled her head, washing her, pounding her brain like it was the ocean and she was the sand. She didn't know the band, but she liked them. She looked at the box she held.

“Infinity in the palm of my hands,” she said, quoting the Blake poem.

“Yes,” Jeremy answered. “You might say that. But I liked the one you wrote about Sisyphus better. Remember that?”

Siara nodded, touched that he knew her little poem.

“I want you to listen to it, and keep listening to it.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Great,” Jeremy said. “I'll drive you back to school then.”

“Thanks,” Siara answered. Her voice sounded dull and hollow, even to herself. So much so that she felt like she should apologize to Jeremy for not sounding more enthusiastic. She hoped he would understand, what with Harry being dead.

 

But death wasn't the only consequence of time.

As Harry Keller fell on purpose, he felt a pang, as if he were betraying his father by embracing a last-minute wildness. But he'd had not so much an idea as an intuition:
The Quirk says I have to fall, but it doesn't say
how
I have to fall.

It was a crazy thought, logically impossible given the height of the building, but because Harry could see what would happen before it did, he also knew it could work.

So, as he tumbled by the eighth floor, he twisted his back just enough to make it slam into the side of the building.

Omph!

The impact felt like it had crushed his rib cage, but it did what he'd hoped; slowed his fall and changed his direction just enough for him to do a belly flop onto the sixth-floor flagpole. The pole had more give than the stone, but it stung like crazy all along his body in a long thick line that started at his navel and ended on his nose.

Ungh!

With the pole flipping him sideways, at least now he wasn't headed straight down. He was moving at an angle, away from the side of the building that faced the crowd, toward a huge, wide awning that hung over a fifth-floor balcony. It must be covering some sort of open-air restaurant he figured.

Anght!

He hit the cloth hard. Its thick canvas burned and bruised his bare skin as he slid along it. Thick though it was, the awning tore as he rolled, sending him off into the air again. He was in a wild spin now, out above a side street where a huge Thanksgiving banner stretched across the avenue. The next part would be tricky, especially with everything turning around and around.

He slammed into the banner.

YEOW!!

His still-spinning form stretched the thinner cloth on impact, suspending him against it briefly in midair, until gravity took effect and he started to fall again. With a second to spare, one of his flailing arms hooked the banner's edge. He grabbed the top of the banner in both hands and held on tight.

Urngk!

The strain felt like it would rip his arms out, but instead the weight of his body tore the banner off the steel cable that held it. Holding the cloth as it tore, Harry swung across the street, lower and lower. He was only thirty feet up now, still high enough to die.

As he made the Batman-like swing, he thought that if the crowd gathered at the front of the building could see him, they'd probably applaud. As it was, with everyone stuck in a mob at the main entrance of the Valis building, the only person who could see him was an old woman pushing a shopping cart, and she didn't seem to notice the ruckus going on right above the gray hairs of her head.

The swinging banner slammed him into a brick wall.

Ack!

Barely conscious, he lost his grip and tumbled, hit another awning, this one above a street-level pizza shop. He rolled off its edge to land with a splat on a pretzel cart.

Ulg!

The cart, owned and operated by a kindly man with a drinking problem, had not been well maintained. The rusty brake that held it in place often worked, but it had not been built to handle the impact of a flying Harry Keller. As a result, it loosened, and the cart wheeled off freely, taking Harry with it. Because he'd hit it at a bit of an angle, his remaining momentum gave the cart enough force to roll out into the street, where it hit the top of a hill, topped it, and headed down the other side, moving faster and faster.

The old woman finally noticed what was going on as Harry and the cart barreled past her. Before he rolled out of sight, Harry offered a weak wave, but she didn't seem interested in waving back.

Knowing what was next, he closed his eyes and listened to the rumbling wheels beneath him.
Rumble-rumble-rumble-thuck!
A little sooner than expected, the cart slammed into the open back of a parked truck.