Chapter 752: Cruel Straps of Fate
"Mummy—"
"Both girls are lucky, aren’t they?" She smiled at him. "You’re happy to see Kozuki again, aren’t you?"
"Mummy please get out of the car please please please —" He shouted. Or did he?
She reached one hand back over the seat to brush his cheek with patient maternal calm — and a new laugh came from his side, light and warm and familiar in a way that made his small heart spike, and his head whipped to the seat beside him —
From Aunt Melissa.
Twenty-eight years old, cream sundress. Dark hair loose over her shoulders. Mouth still curved from the laugh she had just produced, eyes warm and amused and looking down at him with the small patient indulgence of a young aunt who had been delighting in her seven-year-old nephew for the entire car ride.
The small phoenix at her throat caught the light.
Oh no.
Oh, no.
Because Phei knew this car and everything that was happening this... this afternoon.
This was the day.
That day.
The day he had last seen his mother. The day he had last seen his father and Aunt Melissa became, by sundown, a twenty-eight-year-old only-survivor (and him) and his entire world’s last remaining anchor.
The day that had defined the horrors of the next ten years of his life.
"NO."
His small body thrashed.
The harness held him; the straps cut into his small shoulders. He kicked at the seat-edge with his small feet and his small feet did not reach the floor.
He hammered his small fists against the harness buckle and his small fingers were the wrong shape for the adult mechanism. He bit the strap. He bit it hard. His small teeth could not break the woven nylon.
He twisted his small body sideways against the harness and the harness twisted with him and locked tighter and the straps now cut into his small ribs as well, and he felt the safety-engineering of the seat do exactly what it had been designed to do — keep his small body contained against any imaginable forward, lateral, or upward force — and the cosmic perfection of the design felt, in that moment, like the universe’s deliberate cruelty.
The straps were the very Will of Fate, holding him in place and watch it all happen once more, in cruelty, while he helplessly thrashes in the seat unable to do anything!
"MUMMY!" His voice came out at the volume his small throat permitted.
It was not enough.
The same thing kept playing exactly like that and the conversation about his future and his two wives and his father kept driving, and his mother had turned back forward, the small maternal hand that had reached for his cheek.
"MUMMY GET OUT OF THE CAR MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY PLEASE — "
His small body fought.
His seven-year-old chest heaved against the harness with every ounce his small ribcage could produce, and the harness answered — the five-point cruelty of fate tightening into the skin of his small shoulders, the cross-strap pressing harder into his small chest, the buckle locking deeper at his small breastbone — and his small body had been engineered against, by his own mother’s loving careful selection of the safest seat money could ever buy.
Now being used against him!
He kicked.
His small feet did not reach the floor.
He kicked the back of his father’s seat. Once. Twice, his feet going through the seat like he was incorporeal.
He hammered his small fists against the buckle.
His small fingers were the wrong shape. His small fingernails were too soft. The release was a side-press dual-action mechanism — designed by adults who had foreseen, in their patient care and worry, every small-fingered escape attempt a child might attempt on a long highway — and his small hands could not, on the first try or on the tenth try or on the thirtieth try, make the buckle open.
He bit it.
His small upper teeth caught the woven nylon of the cross-strap and his small jaw clamped down, and the strap was nylon, and nylon did not break against milk teeth.
He bit harder.
He felt his small lower lip split against his small front teeth. He felt the hot copper of his own blood flood his small mouth. He felt the strap not part.
He twisted his small body sideways against the harness in a desperate small-bodied attempt to slip an arm out from under the chest-strap.
The chest-strap did not permit it.
It tightened.
He twisted the other way.
It tightened more.
He lunged forward against all five points at once with everything his small body had. The harness locked. He lunged backward. The harness locked. He kicked his small legs again and his small feet kicked air, and his mother’s scent kept arriving in his small nose with every panting breath, and the small phoenix at Aunt Melissa’s throat kept catching the late-afternoon Paradise sunlight every time the car turned, and the radio’s woman’s voice was rising into the chorus’s high held note, and his father turned another page and the cartoon dragon flashed.
The safety-engineering of the seat was doing exactly what it had been designed to do.
The cosmic fate’s perfection of the design felt, in that moment, like the universe’s deliberate cruelty — his mother’s love for him, expressed in the careful purchase of the safest seat available, now the precise mechanism that prevented him from saving her.
His small throat tore on the next scream.
"AUNTIE MELISSA THE TRUCK BEHIND US HE’S COMING HE’S COMING HE’S — "
Aunt Melissa, beside him, laughed at his small flailing.
"I think Kozuki is going to declare a fight against Yuki for who gets to keep him." The three of them laughed, unaware of his actions or warnings.
"That’s exactly what Kozuki would do!" His father and mother said at once.
Melissa reached one hand toward his small shoulder to cuddle him: "Say, Mei-Lin, do you think both Houses would reach a conclusion about both girls becoming his betrothed or are they—"
His seventeen-year-old mind, occupying the small body, recognized — with a cold familiar bitterness — that this was the moment of his life he had been replaying for ten years. The few seconds between knowing and the impact while his small body was strapped in.
Seven years old.
Strapped in.
Useless.
HOOOOOOONNNNKKKK.
The sound came in long and deep from behind.
A truck-horn... horn from the last few seconds of a life, not from its middle.
It filled the cabin from the rear and travelled up the small bones of his small ears and rang inside his small head like a divine warning that the time was here, that the seconds were the last seconds, that whatever could have been done was now no longer possible.
His parents did not turn.
They did not seem to have heard the horn.
Their conversation kept playing.
Aunt Melissa, beside him, laughed —
The horn was a mockery.
Or it was an angel, calling him — calling him to try, calling him to do something, calling him to be the one who saved them.
Or it was a devil? Or the Grim Reaper, laughing in his face. Or Hell’s messenger. Or the Angel of Death announcing that the appointment fate had set could not, by any small body’s and his future self-effort, be cancelled.
His small eyes tunneled.
The cabin compressed inward to a single dilated point at the center of his sight, and at the periphery — bleeding into the tunnelling vision — he looked helplessly at the coming truck.
A massive vehicle.
Approaching from behind.
It was a quarter mile back.
Then it was an eighth-of-a-mile back.
It was not slowing.
It was accelerating.
His small body stopped thrashing for one single dilated heartbeat as his small mind tried, and failed, to fit the math into anything mortal. Vehicles did not approach other vehicles at this rate of closure on this stretch of road.
The everything was wrong... everything had been wrong for some time, and his seven-year-old self had not, in the actual afternoon ten years ago, looked at the rear window in time to see it.
Now he saw it.
His small eyes — by luck or mockery of fate — focused.
He saw, on the driver’s-side door of the approaching truck, a small dent at the edge of the panel. He saw the brand of the headlights.
He saw the licence plate with one digit smudged by mud, saw the windshield catching the late-afternoon Paradise sun.
And finally, Phei saw, behind the windshield, two figures.
Two.
The driver — broad-shouldered, hand at the top of the wheel.
The passenger — smaller, narrower, leaning slightly forward.
His small eyes moved to the driver.
A man.
Grinning.
The grin was wide. It was theatrical and pleased like he had been waiting for this specific afternoon for a specific reason for a long time, and the afternoon had finally arrived.
His seventeen-year-old mind, occupying the small body, recognized the face in a single cold burst.
Danny... Maxton.
