Robe

Chapter 23

" – doing good, amigo," Sonic said, and felt herself float like a feather down to the steel floor beneath her. It wasn't far, maybe two feet, but it took a while. Everything felt wrong, and heavy, like she was weighted with sandbags and was trying to swim.

But she knew what had happened.

Her feet touched the ground. "Ah, crap!" she said. Her lips seemed like giant rubber sausages. Even her eyeballs felt like oversized billiard balls in her head, bouncing about in their sockets.

She let go of the Slammer, and watched it do a slow-fall toward the floor.

"Ari, don't – don't move too quickly, we're still bubbled!" came a voice nearby. Sonic looked up too quickly (against the advice she was just given) and immediately regretted it. Her head felt like it wanted to fly off her neck.

"Bubbled?" she asked the boy at the console. Then she remembered: of course they were bubbled. They had to keep sync with Anomaly or risk losing the connection. There was a dull clack as the Slammer finally reached the floor, where it bounced in lazy slow-motion.

She was back on Earth, then.

Darn it!

The boy was facing her, clothed in the same all-black body attire she wore (an outfit known as a 'static suit'), and he was moving steadily, carefully toward her. Behind him was a holo-screen filled with screeds of data, and above that, in large blue lettering that floated in the air, were two timers. And it was these timers that Sonic stared at now. The first one read: 00:39. The 'real world' clock.

The second timer, on the other hand, read '390', and Sonic caught her breath.

"Shah, is that seconds or minutes?" she asked. She knew what the answer was, but hoped to heck she was wrong.

The boy – Shah, her counterpart – responded immediately. "The bubble clock? It's seconds, Ari," he said, and his eyes widened. "Why? How long was it?" He had stopped his weird, jilted walk toward her and was now backtracking to the console. "Ari... answer me!..."

"Three ninety?" Sonic said, incredulous. "Three hundred and ninety seconds?"

The clocks were still ticking over. The first one read 00:40, while the second was '399'.

Then '400'.

Sonic's anxiety turned to panic. "Shah, we're off!" she said. "It was hours!"

Shah cursed. "How many hours, Ari? We gotta keep the lock, it's gone weird over there!"

"Weird? How?" Sonic asked, and then realized she didn't need to know right this very instant. All that mattered was the timer. She stepped forward and almost flipped over herself, and now it was her turn to swear. In her haste to move, she had neglected that momentum in distortion fields was proportionally amplified. As such, her hands shot out in front of her, and her feet left the ground.

"How many hours, Ari?" Shah said, and there was no mistaking the panic in his voice. "How many? How many?"

Sonic tried to calculate. She hadn't started any sort of timer in Anomaly. It wouldn't have made any sense even if it worked. But subjectively... subjectively, they were with the Custodian, then they went down the road to the castle, then they went to the wall, then kapow! big ice explosion, and – "Three and a half hours, Shah! We're off by thirty!"

Shah, now at the console, bashed several buttons frenetically. The holo-screen flickered. He turned to Sonic: "Don't move. I'm about to adjust the bubble."