32 #2
I was shaking so hard I could barely see, my eye burning, the glue ringing my throat tight, painfully tight, and getting tighter. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. But all I could do was hold myself together and weather it, endure it. Pain. Fear. Grief. Rage.
I looked back at him, balanced on one foot, face twisted and hands balled into fists.
I should’ve left him. I could’ve. It would’ve been easy.
The time stream was holding slow and stable.
If I’d left, I could’ve made it back to Nicola’s apartment, climbed back through the cat flap, and collapsed somewhere familiar, somewhere safe, all before he took his next breath.
That was what Nicola would’ve told me to do, if she were here.
But she wasn’t . . . and I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t just walk away from this, from him.
I couldn’t let him get away. Not again. Not after everything he’d done.
I had to see this through. I had to make him understand. I had to at least hurt him, even if I couldn’t hurt him the way he’d hurt me, even if I couldn’t make it right. I couldn’t walk away.
I guess I’m just dramatic like that.
I released the time stream.
Kyle’s foot thudded down on an empty patch of dirt. He stared down for a moment, then looked around, breathing hard. When he saw me, several meters away, watching him, he staggered back with a choked shout.
I didn’t give him time to get used to the idea.
I brought time to a standstill again and dragged myself back toward him.
This time, when time snapped back into motion and he saw me, a few inches from him, he screamed.
His next kick was easy to dodge. I froze him, shuffled half a meter to the left, and then let his foot fly, missing me. He screamed again, eyes wide and white in the moonlight.
“You did this,” I said again, pushing the words out into the world, forcing them to exist. My voice sounded from his dropped phone, closer and clearer than before. “You did it. You! You! You!”
He scrambled backward, splashing through a puddle, almost tripping over his abandoned blazer, desperate to get away.
I followed, close, closer. “You killed me, Kyle Lawson! You killed me!”
“I didn’t!”
“You. Killed. Me!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t! I—”
He vanished.
It happened so suddenly that for a brief, sickening moment, I thought I’d lost control of time, that he’d fled, leaving his phone on the ground, the beam of light still shining up, illuminating the swirling dust particles in the air. Then I heard a short, pained breath.
I inched forward, my metal joints squeaking and scraping, until I found the edge of a hole, one of the dozens littered around the site, big and round with dried concrete at the bottom, bristling with rebar.
Kyle sat at the bottom, tangled in the prongs of metal, clutching at his thigh, panting.
The moonlight turned his coppery hair silver, his skin chalk white, and his blood black.
A twisted pole of metal rebar was sticking through his leg, pinning him to the bottom.
He pressed at the wound, fingers shaking, breathing fast and broken.
“Kyle.”
He looked up at me.
For a long moment, we just stared at each other.
“It’s really you, isn’t it?” Kyle whispered, voice strangled with pain. “You really are Lucy.”
“Why did you do that to me, Kyle?”
“I . . . didn’t . . .”
“Why did you do that to me, Kyle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you—”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said, and bowed his head, shoulders shaking. “I swear, I didn’t. I lost control. It happened so fast.”
“Did it happen fast with Nicola?” I spat, the static in the phone crackling and squealing around the echoey sound of my voice.
“Please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean .
. . I . . .” His eyes locked onto the camera mounted on my chest, and his expression changed.
His panic faded. His breathing slowed. “Yes,” he said, voice shaking but clear.
“Yes. I admit it. I killed Lucy McQuinn. I killed you.” His tone pitched upward.
“But I didn’t mean it! You were Krissy’s friend, Lucy.
I wouldn’t hurt you. Not on purpose. Th-that’s why I left you beneath the willow.
I didn’t want you to be somewhere ugly. I didn’t want—”
“You think I care where you buried me?”
He reached out then, tried to grab onto the wall, tried to pull himself up, despite the bar of metal through his thigh.
The sides of the hole crumbled, wet and muddy, beneath his fingers.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t. It was a wombat hole.
I just covered up the entrance. You remember the willow, right?
The one near the creek where we used to play as ki—”
“You think I care where you buried me?!” I screamed. My voice broke and clipped through his phone, staticky and distorted.
He recoiled, pressing his hands on either side of his head. Mud and blood smeared in his hair. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Please. I confessed. I told you where the body is.”
The body. Not “your body.” Not “you.” Not even “she.” Just . . . the body. That was all I was to him. A body. A body he killed and dumped in a wombat hole. A body he was trading in exchange for his life.
“I’ll go to the cops,” he continued. “I’ll tell them I did it. Just get me out of here! Please!”
“Nicola was right,” I said without meaning to, the thought swimming through my mind, abnormally sharp and clear. “I didn’t think Plan B would work but . . . she was right.”
“Plan B?” he echoed. “What do you—”
I turned and walked away from the hole, my metal feet slipping and scraping in the dirt. Time wanted to slow down, and I didn’t fight it. I let the stream catch and swirl around me until it became sleepy, sluggish, and almost stagnant.
I’d won.
It didn’t feel like I’d won, but I had.
Kyle had said he’d go to the cops and, even if he was lying, I had a video of him confessing. Plan B had worked. He was going to spend the rest of his life locked up behind bars, just like Nicola promised he would. Everyone would know what he’d done, what he was. He’d never hurt anyone ever again.
I staggered to a stop and pressed my metal claws into my face, shaking as the storm flooded through me, rage, grief, pain . . .
I stopped by a small motorized concrete mixer, a pallet of cement bags sitting beside it under a tarp, and a hose leaking a puddle onto the ground beside that.
The workers hadn’t even bothered to pack away the yellow power cables.
They wound back across the construction site, connecting the concrete mixer to an unseen generator, or perhaps straight into the mains.
I tottered up to it and stretched my spider legs out until they were rigid straight, balancing up on the tips of my toes so I could jam my claw into the power switch. It lit up a bright, angry orange. Something buzzed, low, like a kicked hornet’s nest. The bowl of the concrete mixer began to turn.
I watched it slowly power up. The sounds distorted and strange by the slowing of time. Kyle must’ve heard it, because he started shouting again, confused and panicked, voice echoing around the empty construction site, distorted so that he sounded inhuman, bestial, and strange.
I’d won.