by H. J. Lawson
The taxi moves through busy city streets. So many people and cars choke the street that we have to move at a snail’s pace. The buildings are packed in tightly next to one another. Lights shine everywhere. I have never been to Las Vegas, but it seems to me that Tokyo is so much brighter than that desert city could ever be.
Eventually we move farther out of the main city into what would be called suburbs back in the States. It’s pretty here; there are fewer industrial buildings and high-rises and more homes and gardens, like the pictures of Japanese houses I’ve seen in history books back at school.
The taxi eventually pulls to the curb. The taxi driver speaks to Scarlet and she responds, clearly verifying that we’re at the right address. But she needn’t have done that, because little Tora suddenly brightens and reaches over me to grab the door handle.
The door flies open before I can stop Tora. “Parker,” Scarlet yells at me.
I grab Tora around the waist, stopping her from running into the road. Tora frowns at me as her little body tries to get free.
“Scarlet, a little help,” I beg as she steps out of the car.
“Get back in,” Scarlet says, but it’s too late. Tora and I are out of the car. “Stay down, that’s Tora’s grandfather’s house across the road.”
“How do you know?”
Scarlet rests her head against the cab. “Vandir is here,” she tells me as the color drains from her face.
I peek over the car’s bumper for a look. Hector and Clint are walking down the street toward Tora’s grandfather’s home, escorting an older man who walks proudly with purpose. I guess that’s Tora’s grandfather, whom we are looking for. If there wasn’t a huge man at either side of him, he might not look quite so small. Other men line the path toward Tora's grandfather’s home. They don’t look like Vandir’s men; they look as if they are from Japan. Hector and Clint start talking to the men.
Scarlet pulls on my pant leg, pulling me down in turn. “What part of ‘get down’ don’t you get?” she hisses.
“Hector and Clint are with Tora’s grandfather; they are talking to some other men.”
Scarlet’s head quickly pops up, looks through the taxi window, and then goes back to hiding.
“So it’s okay for you to look?” I ask her sarcastically.
She goes back to looking through the taxi window. “Where are they going?” Scarlet mutters to herself as Hector and Clint walk away from Tora’s grandfather’s house empty-handed.
Scarlet grits her teeth together, and before she can speak Tora does in a flurry of unrecognizable words.
“No,” Scarlet replies, but the rest is in that other language—Japanese. “She wants to go to him, but I’ve explained that the men with him are very dangerous,” Scarlet says in a low whisper to me.
She gestures to Tora. “I told her they want to take her away from her family.”
“Is that really what they want? Why?” I ask.
“I don’t know. To control her father, and I guess Vandir’s men are here for the same reasons we are, for the future.”
There are tears in Tora’s eyes, and they feel like acid against my skin. I know what it’s like to lose a parent. And I was older when it happened to me. I hope with all I have that it doesn’t happen to this poor girl.
But that’s what we’re here for, right? To protect her?
Just as the thought goes through my mind, several dark cars drive up the street, stopping outside the house.
The taxi driver yells through the window at Scarlet, and she returns the flurry of words as the taxi driver looks toward the cars and Tora’s grandfather’s home. “Down!” Scarlet shouts, grabbing me by the back of my hair and pulling me forward so that my body covers Tora’s. And then I hear something I’ve only heard once outside of a movie or a video game: gunshots. The taxi jerks as the driver moves it into gear and drives away, leaving us.
“Don’t let her see,” Scarlet tells me.
But it’s too late.
Her grandfather is lying dead by the family’s garden door.
They just killed Tora’s grandfather, which brings to my mind the question: If you die in a dream, do you die in real life?
I don’t know, and I really don’t want to find out.
Chapter 13
I place my hand over Tora’s mouth to stifle her screams. The first one that escaped was blocked out by the taxi wheels’ screech as it fled the murder scene. I pick Tora up and hold her tightly against my shoulder, trying to keep her from seeing the bloody mess that lies across the road from us, but she’s already seen. And I know that memory will forever be with her, no matter what happens in her future.
With Tora in my arms, we take off running down a side street, away from Tora’s grandfather’s house.
Checking that we are all clear, I ask Scarlet, “What now?” I place Tora down and kneel beside her, letting her head fall back into my shoulder, with my arms wrapped around her tiny body.
“We have to get out of here,” she says.
“Where?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
Scarlet paces a little, her hair swinging from side to side with the movement. The whole thing feels so surreal I don’t even know what to think.
“Do you have any family around here, Tora?” she asks, repeating the question in Japanese. Tora is still sobbing into my shoulder. It takes Scarlet asking her half a dozen times for her to finally respond. She says one word: Goro.
Scarlet asks Tora more questions in Japanese, repeating the word Goro. “She has an uncle,” Scarlet translates for me. She swings her backpack around and pulls back out the tablet, tapping against the screen quickly.
“Wireless is so freaking slow in this time,” she mutters under her breath.
“How does that thing work, anyway? Since it’s clearly not from this time.”
She shrugs. “It’s designed so that it can interface with the Internet in any time period, even at a time like this when there were still a lot of dial-up options instead of DSL. It's technology from the future, way in the future. As long as there’s Internet, we’re golden.”
“And when there isn’t?”
“It’s a bitch,” she mutters, her eyes glued to the tablet screen. “We have to go to libraries and do actual research. But at least in those time periods people are more willing to gossip. We get most of our information from word of mouth.”
I’m still digesting that idea when Scarlet suddenly drops the future iPad back in her bag.
“Got it. Let’s go.”
I follow Scarlet down the street with Tora in my arms, which are now burning from carrying her for so long. But we are all she has right now.
Scarlet’s pace thankfully slows down as she approaches a line of cars, then she stops at a shiny red car. The reflection from the sun on the car makes Scarlet’s hair look as if it's on fire.
She pulls out a silver device that looks kind of like a flash drive from her bag and in seconds there is a click, and Scarlet opens the car door without any alarms going off. Nice.
We pull up outside an apartment building that looks like it had its heyday a decade ago. The paint is peeling off the exterior and the shingles on the roof are nearly gone. It's like the building doesn’t even want to be here. I can feel the eyes of the local people on us. We definitely stand out because of Scarlet’s flaming hair, my clearly not being from Japan, and our companion, a little girl whose face is smeared with tears.
We head inside the apartment building and are greeted by a pile of trash and a black cat, which looks at us with the same disgust as the locals outside. Such a welcoming place.
As we walk through the hallways, it's clear that half the people that are living here aren’t paying rent. They are squatters, and not ashamed of it. Their doors are open for the world to see the filth they live in. The pile of trash that greeted us outside was just an overflow from their homes.
The people in the apartments look at us briefly, then carry on with what they
are doing. Others are lying on the floor and look dead, with their eyes open staring out at nothing, as if drugs control them now.
We take a flight of stairs. There are the sounds of rodents’ tiny feet running around this whole building as if they are living in the walls, waiting for their next meal to overdose and die.
This floor has doors that are closed, at least, which could be good or bad. What lies behind these doors may be worse?
Scarlet knocks on the appropriate door—the door has one long crack right down the center, but is otherwise intact—and it is opened almost immediately by a woman wearing only a stained tank top and a pair of shorts, with yesterday’s makeup smeared down her face. Crazy bed hair finishes off the trailer-trash look.
She looks past us and down the hallways as if she was waiting for someone else.
“What cha want?” she asks in broken English.
Scarlet explains the situation to her in Japanese, pointing at Tora, who refuses to let me put her down. I don’t blame her, but at some point my arms will turn to jelly and I will drop her.
The woman seems to barely be following the conversation. Her eyes are glazed over, indicating that if she isn’t on drugs, then she has something else incredibly serious going on.
Finally, the woman nods down the hall, fragments of her pink nail polish flying off as she bites on her nails. Then she says in broken English, “It be no place for chillins.”
Scarlet grabs my arm, turning us back the way we came.
“Thank you,” I shout back to the lady as she twitches, shakes her head then disappears back into her apartment.
“What’s ‘chillins’?” I ask Scarlet.
“Children.”
“What’s no place for children?”
“The bar which we are going to,” Scarlet says as she walks past the stolen car we came in.
Tora wiggles to get out of my arms, to my relief. I set her down on the sidewalk, and her tiny hand slips into mine.
“Goro is at work at a bar down the street,” Scarlet clarifies, marching forward.
Tora’s big almond-shaped eyes stare up at me. She opens her mouth then stops, as if she is relieved that I can’t understand her. “What is it, Tora?”
She opens her mouth again to speak then stops, then she closes her hands and puts them up to her lips, and moves her lips. “Are you hungry? Food,” I say, then mimic chewing.
Tora nods.
“Scarlet, we need to stop.”
Scarlet turns towards us. “Stop?” she repeats, as if she’s never heard that word before.
“Tora needs some food and water. God only knows how long she’s been without it.”
Scarlet frowns. “No,” she says decisively and turns, dismissing the idea, and carries on walking.
“We’re stopping,” I tell her. “You can’t complete the assignment without Tora, and she needs to stop,” I say firmly, stopping Scarlet in her tracks.
She quickly moves toward me like a rushing fireball. “Let’s get one thing right,” she says, prodding me in the chest with her electric rod. Luckily it's off. “You don’t tell me what to do. No one tells me what to do.”
“Scarlet, this isn’t about you; it's about Tora.”
“You’ve been here for one assignment and you think you know it all? Well, you don’t know anything.”
“How could I know anything? It's not like you’re the sharing type. You have continually refused to tell me anything.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not some tour guide that’s going to show you the sights of Tokyo. Seems like you have already forgotten the information I told you. We are running out of time.”
“That’s the part I don’t get. You say we are time travelers. We control time, so why can’t we control this time?”
“We are time travelers! Go on, you try and figure out why you can’t control this time. It’s because no one else can,” she huffs, then adds, “where’s Tora?”
I look down at the floor beside me where she was, but she’s no longer there. I look around in a panic, and a face looks back at me, smiling. Tora is standing in the doorway of a store. I want to scold her for leaving my side, but this is the first time I’ve seen her smile. It makes me smile back.
“She’s there,” I say, trying to pretend I didn’t lose her.
Scarlet shakes her metallic rods at me. “One more stupid move from you, and I’m leaving you here!”
I scoop the frozen dessert into my mouth. It's refreshing after all the running. Scarlet sits across from me. I’m glad there is a table between us because she looks like she’s ready to attack me.
“Do you want to try some?” I ask Scarlet, who didn’t order any food, and is just sipping on water. I gulp it down.
Scarlet frowns.
“If you ever give up the time travel assignment job, I wouldn’t be a tour guide if I were you, because you suck at it,” I joke.
Clearly Scarlet doesn’t think it's funny, as she springs to her feet. “Jesus, I’m just kidding. Calm down, all right?”
“You don’t get it,” she says, dropping back into her seat.
“No, I don’t. What’s really going on? Why are Vandir’s men here in Japan? What do they want with you?”
Scarlet’s cheeks move as she clenches her teeth, then lets out a sigh. “I may as well tell you. This way you can hear it firsthand instead of from the gossip back home.”
“Home?” I question.
“One thing at a time. What do you want to know first?” Scarlet reluctantly asks.
I drop my spoon and rub my lips as I think.
“Today, before I change my mind.”
“Vandir... why is he after you?”
Her eyes flicker upwards as if remembering something, bringing a look of pain to her face. “He’s worse than any nightmare you could think of, and he’s not only after me. He’s after all of us,” she says, looking at Tora, who’s peacefully enjoying her ice cream, as if she’s able to block out the events from the last three hours. She’s stronger than me, but I’m glad she can’t understand what Scarlet is saying.
“Why is he after us?”
Scarlet rubs the back of her neck. “To power more of his time-travelling robots like Clint and Bruce.”
“How do we power them?”
Scarlet closes her eyes for a moment, then turns the back of her head toward me and flicks her ginger ponytail up, revealing a metal disk about the size of a quarter welded into her head. “Through this,” she says, pushing on it. It looks like something you would use to charge up a robot.
“They did this to you?”
Scarlet looks her age for a moment, then nods.
“Did it hurt?”
Scarlet frowns. “The fight getting me there hurt. And when I woke up I had this,” she says, touching her neck.
“Why do you still have it?”
“Because when you remove it, it takes away your powers, and you can no longer time travel. And if I couldn’t time travel… I don’t know what I would do.” It seems to me that to Scarlet, losing her power is more terrifying than what Vandir did to her.
“How does it work?” The tech geek inside me wants to know the answer.
Scarlet sighs. “They pin you in a chair and there is a silver electric wire attached to a computer attached into the metal hole in your neck.” She rubs the back of her neck. “Then they send a wave through your body, knocking you out.”
“They electrocute you?”
Scarlet nods.
“Damn. Does it feel like you’ve been hit by lighting?”
Scarlet frowns. “I don’t know, Parker. I’ve never been hit by lighting, have you?”
Way to go, Parker, annoying Scarlet just as you got her speaking. “No, just I hear about people being struck by lightning more than I hear about the kinds of things that have happened to you.”
“Well, I guess it's like it. When I woke from it, I had a burning taste in my mouth,” she says, moving her lips together, then she takes a gulp of wa
ter. “What else do you want to know?”
I try to move away from the subject, but I’m not quite done. “So let me work this out. Vandir has learned how to capture time travelers’ power, and he uses this power for his own time-traveling army. The more natural time travelers he has, the bigger his army can be?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Were there other time travelers there, hooked up to the machine?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get away?” I fire questions at Scarlet before she can stop answering them.
“Beth rescued me.”
“Who’s Beth?”
Scarlet goes to speak, then stops. “You will meet her soon.”
“Why didn’t Beth rescue the other time travelers?”
Scarlet pulls the paper wrapper off the water bottle. “It’s not that easy. We’ve tried to get the others out. But…” Scarlet pauses.
“But what?”
“We end up losing more people.”
Scarlet looks out the window. I give her a moment.
Tora’s spoon scrapes along the bottom of the ice cream tub. My time for questions has nearly run out.
“Why do they want—?” I nudge my head toward Tora; this way she won’t know we are talking about her.
“For what she will do in the future.”
“What will she do in the future?”
“I don’t know, I never know.”
“Don’t you go into the future to find out?”
Scarlet leans forward toward me, resting her elbows on the table, like I’ve finally said something that’s she’s interested in. “Every time. And they basically disappear off the face of the earth. Or are reported dead. I’ve never found one of them after I leave them.”
We both look at Tora. “They disappear or are reported dead?”
Scarlet nods. “But I don’t think they die. I think someone is taking them.”
“What, so we rescue them because they are important to the future, but then they disappear in the future?”