Wattys shortlist 2021. One morning the sun rises a few hours early, striking levitating skyscrapers in Soliara ahead of schedule. People in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their watches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving...
Nova glared at Cristo. Somehow it seemed he had frozen everyone in time except the two of them.
The boss was stopped with his mouth open and Stephen and security and the crowd behind were all stopped like statues and Leander was holding Cristo's pistol out, still just inches from where Cristo was now standing glaring back at her.
Nova gave one last look over the stopped faces and then strode to where Cristo stood at the center of it all.
"I asked you a question," she reminded him, unsure where else to even begin the conversation.
"I was talking to the person who keeps stopping time for me — you. It was you, of course it was. You got it past me last time yet now here you are, not stopped with the rest of them."
"I'm not doing this."
"Oh, of course not. You didn't go to the past and set up a backstory and a whole pretend life here just so you could pretend not to know me when I came back later, and you didn't stop time, you just innocently didn't stop with everyone else here and what, you woke up a hundred years earlier with amnesia and a mysteriously elaborate family history? The Dasilva family, massacred in cold blood and lots of it, really? How did you do it? But no, that doesn't make sense, does it?"
"No," Nova said, her stomach roiling at the dark red images he callously conjured up and she tried to focus on what he was saying. "It doesn't make sense, can you start over? I don't understand what you're trying to say."
He was crazy and she had to get a grip, banish the dizzy vertigo that was making the dark patio spin, so she closed her eyes and pictured pure white and took three slow, long, deep breaths.
When she opened her eyes, Cristo shook his head, but he wasn't looking at her any more and there was desperation in his eyes along with the crazy. "I have to get out of here before time starts again."
He took his gun back from Leander, the man who was one of many frozen in time, and said more to himself, "But I can't seem to link. Maybe when time starts again."
He turned and walked out of the center of the tableau, leaving all the frozen people as they were, where everyone in the solarium had been magnetically drawn toward him and he was now missing, and he made his way through the arboretum talking to himself. Nova pranced after him to keep up. She couldn't make out what he was saying, so she ran around in front of him.
"Tell me who you think I am," she said, but he just laughed. "Take me with you, then. I want answers. I won't let you just run off, even if you're crazy. I want to know what you think is happening."
He turned back away from her but it seemed only to check on the stopped crowd to make sure they hadn't started again. "Why isn't time starting again?" he muttered. "Last time all I had to do was ..." he trailed off and pulled his gun back out and pointed it straight in the sky — but it didn't fire.
He brought it back down and for a terrifying second while it pointed at Nova he looked at her with the same wild, confused eyes, and he said, "What am I supposed to do?"
Then he holstered the weapon again and from his left inside pocket drew out a narrow piece of metal that looked like he'd snapped it off a sundial and Nova looked past him trying to make out through the twilight shadow whether the boss's sundial still had its time-telling rod.
Cristo was looking at her again as if trying to see right inside her, and he was almost breaking a sweat from the effort even in the winter air.
"You're not her, are you?" he said finally, still holding the piece of sundial up like a lightning rod. "And I know a way to find out." Next to them a link opened onto a quiet, dark street, and Nova immediately said, "I'm not going anywhere with you, I changed my mind." Not as long as she was unarmed and he wasn't.
He lifted his gun for the second or third time, and now he did point it at her and said, "If you're Nova Potestas, you won't be able to enter it."
"Potestas? I'm not a Potestas."
"Walk or I shoot," said Cristo.
"It won't fire," Nova said with amazing patience. "I just saw you try, and it won't fire."
"I don't know if it'll fire," said Cristo. "I don't know why time stopped or what we have to do to make it start again, and I don't know why I can make a temporal link and not a spacial link, why I can't link out of here, why I can't just fire off a shot into the sky but maybe I can fire at you and maybe time will start again — as if someone stopped it and I can only do what they want. Ultimately, you think you have a choice to see if I can shoot you or to see if you can enter the time link, but I don't think it's up to you at all. Time won't start again until we do what they want. Let's try the link first, and if that doesn't work I'll try shooting you."
"Sounds like a plan," said Nova. "But how about you tell me first why I wouldn't be able to enter that link?"
"Because if you can walk through to the other side, it means you don't exist."
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Thank you for reading Stars Rise. Be well wherever you're reading this! Happy weekend if it's still Friday or Saturday or Sunday when you're reading this!
