The Split Second (12 page)
“How can I help you, young man?” asked the receptionist, pushing aside the sliding window.
“I’m here to see a patient . . . ,” answered the eleven-year-old boy in his OshKosh B’Gosh jeans.
“Which patient is that?”
Becker felt a lump gathering in his throat, but he coughed it away.
“Her name is Amy Lannin.”
Since the age of five, Amy had been Becker’s best friend in The World. She always wore overalls and a barrette and was pretty much game for anything he could dream up—from exploring the no-man’s-land near Red’s Boatyard to eating the Dusty Road at the Corner Confectionary. She was also the only girl allowed on the Slab—a square piece of concrete that overlooked the river behind Connell Hutkin’s house—mostly because she had struck the “Con-man” out three times in the Little League playoffs. But even though they were too young to be boyfriend and girlfriend, Becker and Amy were about as close as you could get . . .
And then she got sick.
“Becks!” Amy sat up in her bed, stoked to see her best friend walking through the door. “I thought you would never get here.”
Two years ago, Becker hated to see the girl with brown eyes and dirty blond hair strapped to tubes and pale as a ghost, and he hated to see it even more now.
“You look like the Bride of Frankenstein.” Considering how everyone was always walking on pins and needles around her, he knew Amy would appreciate a good old-fashioned ragging contest. “She’s alive!
Alive!
”
“I’d rather be the Bride of Frankenstein than have a head that looks like a salad bowl.” Amy pointed to the disaster on top of Becker’s skull. “Waiter, can you please bring me some extra dressing on the side?”
Amy laughed, and so did Becker, but underneath his laughter was a gnawing dread, because this was exactly how it happened back then. He didn’t want to deviate from the script, though . . . at least not yet.
“Do you want to play something?” he asked. There was a stack of games sitting on a chair in the corner of the room. “Life? Sorry? Uno?”
“Uno. Maybe you’ll finally be able to win a game!”
As Becker dealt the cards, knowing his only hope of victory was to get a plethora of “Pick 4 Wilds,” he had to fight back the tears . . . and the knowledge of how unfair it was that this was written in the Plan. He wanted to yell at someone or walk right up to the top floor of the Big Building and demand a revision. But it was good to be with Amy again. So good that his anger fell away, along with his Mission, and it was just like old times—the two of them barraging each other with insults, jokes, and “Skip a Turns.” Becker had almost forgotten how much he missed her, but there was no way to avoid the inevitable.
“When do you go in?” he asked, referring to the exploratory procedure that would judge her readiness for a bone marrow transplant.
“Tomorrow morning.” Her face darkened. “They say it’s gonna be a routine operation, but I just . . . I don’t know.”
In all the years he had known her, Becker had never really seen Amy scared of anything, not even Micky Krooms, who lorded over the north side of Highland Park, extorting lunch money and pushing over little kids just for the fun of it. Amy had forced Krooms to give back little Benjamin Drane’s box of Hot Wheels strictly by the look in her eyes—but here, in her hospital bed, that look was nowhere to be found.
“Becks.” Amy turned to the window, where the city of New Brunswick was going about its day. “Do you think I’ll be okay?”
Now, as then, he wasn’t sure if she meant just surviving this operation or with the leukemia itself. On the day this Moment was frozen, Becker had answered that question by promising, “You’re gonna be fine, Amy. I just know you will,” even though he didn’t know any such thing. The fact that twenty-four hours later the best friend he’d ever had passed away from “unexpected complications” broke his heart in two, and he’d thought of himself as a coward and a bold-faced liar ever since.
“Honestly?” Amy nodded, and this time Becker wasn’t going to make the same mistake. “I kind of have a bad feeling.”
“Me too.”
As Amy began to face the fact that eleven years were all she was going to get on this earth, Becker reached across the bed and tried to hug her fear away.
“If something goes wrong,” she said, “will you make me a promise?”
“Anything.”
Both of them were crying, but it somehow felt okay.
“Promise you’ll never forget me.”
When Fixer Drane hit the ground, it took him quite a while to wipe the tears from his eyes. Though it was a terribly painful experience to relive Amy’s dying day, that guilty feeling in his chest that had been there for so long was gone. It was only when his tears literally froze upon his cheeks that he lifted himself off the ground and took in the surroundings.
He had landed on some kind of frigid tundra, with a mammoth glacier behind him and an endless field of white in front. Wind-driven snow pelted his unprotected face, and his body was immediately sent into shivers—for though he had returned to his original age (and clothes), his Sleeve and Toolkit were back where he left him with Shan Mei-Lin. Wherever she was now . . .
“Briefer Shan?” The only Tools he still had were those that were clipped to his belt, and he shouted above the wind into his Receiver. “Briefer Shan, report!”
Despite the Powers That Be’s approval of multiple new Towers to provide better reception in The World and The Seems, nothing came back over the line. For all Becker knew, Receivers didn’t function inside Frozen Moments, and a quick check of his Blinker said that though its data was still intact, the communication functions were gone.
“Nice work, Einstein.”
He angrily hung up the Receiver and cursed himself for committing a Fixer’s cardinal sin—putting your own needs above those of the Mission. His only hope was that Briefer Shan was still on the trail of the Split Second, and he could somehow reconnect with her when this Moment led to another one and another one after that. His hands and feet were both beginning to go numb, though, so he hoped this one would end sooner rather than later.
“Hello?” Becker shouted into the wild. “Anybody there?”
Surely someone was about to arrive on the scene, for obviously this arctic wasteland had provided them with a peak experience. Any minute now, a cross-country skier or a boat bearing scientists on an arctic expedition would emerge through the snowy haze to have one of the most powerful Moments of their lives, and send Becker happily on his way.
Any minute now . . .
Two hours later, Becker stumbled across the ice, having lost all feeling in his body. The only thing that drove his rapidly clouding mind forward was the possibility that the dark line on the horizon was a forest where he could find shelter, maybe even some wood to start a fire. Not that he had anything to start a fire with.
This was not the first time #37 had been faced with the possibility of his own doom, but never had he been without his Toolkit and stuck in a Frozen Moment that for some reason refused to end. And with each step, he could feel the first stage of hypothermia setting in. Stage two would soon follow— typified by muscle miscoordination and the contraction of surface blood vessels to keep the vital organs warm—concluding with the terminal burrowing and stupor of stage three.
Becker knew none of these medical details as he tripped and fell into a bank of fresh snow. If he could have felt his face, he would have known he was smiling, for he was close enough now to see that those were indeed pine trees he was running toward. Once he got to his feet, Becker could easily cover the remaining ground and finally get the Mission back on track. But first, he just wanted to rest for a while. The cold wasn’t really that bad once you got used to it—it was actually kind of warm—and this bank of snow was as comfortable as his bed back at 12 Grant Avenue.
“Twelve Grant Avenue?” he whispered hoarsely. “I wonder who lives there?”
As Becker curled himself into the fetal position and listened to the soft tones of WDOZ, he couldn’t help but notice something emerging from the tree line. It was covered from head to toe in white fur, like a polar bear or the Abominable Snowman. Becker really hoped it was neither of those things, but the closer it got, the more he started to think it was a person.
“Help!”
he tried to yell, but it came out more like,
“Uhh-hhh.”
Whatever it was, it was heading straight toward him, moving quickly across the ground with snowshoes on its feet. Moments later, the figure was taking off its jacket and wrapping Becker inside of it.
“Picked a helluva place to take a nap,” said a gruff voice from beneath a frost-covered beard. “Try to stay awake.”
Becker felt himself being thrown over a pair of strong shoulders, which began to carry him back toward the woods.
“Got a name?”
“B . . . B . . .” Becker licked what he thought may have been his lips. “Becker.”
“Nice to meet you, Becker.” The stranger carried the boy as easily as a bag of laundry, and as he turned into the wind, his powerful strides gobbled up the space between the tundra and the tree line.
“Call me Tom.”
15
. Used only three times in the history of modern Fixing, this clause allows a Briefer to relieve his or her Fixer of command based on mental incapacity or when their methods become “unsound.”
When Becker awoke, he was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and his IFR boxers. Heavy blankets covered his body, and as the waking world slowly crept into his mind, it was filled with confusion. The memory of a game of Uno with Amy Lannin came first, followed by the ugly reality of the Time Bomb. For a second, he hoped he was back in Highland Park and this was all a dream about his next Mission in The Seems, but then he realized he was lying in someone else’s bed.
On the ceiling above were the slats of a log cabin, and the rest of his clothes were washed and folded on the dresser across from the bed. Becker looked around for a clock that would tell him how long he’d been sleeping, but the only thing he spotted was a small nightstand, upon which rested a medical kit and a pot of tea.
“Hello?” he called out. “Is anybody here?”
No one answered. Becker vaguely remembered the vast tundra and the figure of the Abominable Snowman, but he couldn’t decide if where he was now was a Dream or a Frozen Moment or a Dream inside a Frozen Moment. Part of him worried that maybe he’d actually frozen to death out there, and now he was in A Better Place—an unpleasant thought that finally motivated him to leave the warm cocoon beneath the blanket.
“Ow!”
The moment his feet touched the floor, pain shot through Becker’s legs and he immediately collapsed to the ground. It was only then that he noticed his hands and feet were heavily bandaged—by what was clearly an expert hand. After a few tentative steps, he found walking somewhat tolerable, and limped over to the table. Even though the chamomile tea had gone cold, the taste of honey and lemon was soothing on his tongue.
“Hellooo . . .”
Becker opened the room’s single door, and found himself on the second floor of a mountain lodge. A quick investigation revealed three more bedrooms next to his—one a master, one with bunk beds and toys, and one with a wooden crib. Their owners, however, were nowhere to be found.
He crept down the wooden staircase and into a spacious den, where a fire was crackling in the cut stone hearth. Iron tools dangled from hooks on the walls and the fading light outside the diamond-shaped windows told Becker it was late afternoon. The only visual hint as to who called this place home was an oil painting that hung over the hearth. It depicted a young woman of half-Inuit, half-Nordic descent, her long black hair flowing from beneath a wool hat. She was standing in the snow-covered woods, smiling directly at the observer, as if surprised to meet him in such an out-of-the-way place.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Becker whipped around to see the same bearded man who had pulled him from the snow standing at the door. He was wearing a red thermal shirt, with an ax in one hand, and a bag of freshly chopped wood in the other.