Moonstone is still sleeping, framed against the pillow by her own hair, Pre-Raphaelite; and someone bangs on the door, a cop kinda knock. It is six AM.
Hazel is cross-legged on the couch, with a bowl of cereal, very carefully completely still as Moonstone beelines for the door, only half awake but moving like a battleship cleaving waves, and then Pilot Princess Soul Defender Onyx is barging in past her, half yelling about an anonymous call to the tip line and is everything okay—
Hazel and Onyx stare at each other.
"Moon," Onyx says, in a tone that's half a question, half flat disbelief.
"Hazel, this is Onyx," Moonstone says, and clears her throat a couple of times from the sleepy rasp in her voice. "Onyx, this is Hazel."
Well, it might be from sleep. She looks exactly like she spent the night getting her world rocked.
Hazel sits with the bowl of cereal in one hand and the spoon in the other frozen, hovering, above it. "Hi," she squeaks, not looking at the table, not looking at the Professor on the table.
"Moon, there's a woman in her pajamas in your apartment," Onyx hisses in what might generously be interpreted as a surreptitious way.
"Technically, my pajamas," Moonstone fires back, sotto voce. "What do you want?"
"We had a tipoff about Robo Grandmaster! And there's a sudden stranger in your apartment—"
Hazel reaches out in a slow, carefully calculated way and nudges the cereal box on the table into the sightline from Onyx to the Professor.
"No, you're suddenly in my apartment."
"I'm going to go and put pants on," Hazel says brightly, as if to herself, strolls into the bedroom, and pushes the door nearly closed.
"Did she just — she's in your bedroom!"
"Yes, Onyx, that's what she's here for."
There's a pause, and then Hazel, peering through the cracked door at just the right angle, sees Onyx make a stealthy move for the table, shift the cereal box, and brandish the Professor at Moonstone.
She bites down on a fold of her sleeve to avoid yelling something about filthy hands and temerity.
"Hazel," Moonstone says, at a normal volume, from the other room.
"Yes?" Hazel says meekly.
"I'm going to put pants on, and then I'm leaving the apartment with Onyx and I'm going to talk to her. This is not an emergency, and I'll be back in no more than thirty minutes. Can you trust me with a thirty minute wait?"
Hazel would trust her with so many things. "Yes," she says.
"Wait hang on you can't go in there with her—"
"In my bedroom? To put pants on? What, Onyx, you wanna come too and watch me get my junk out?" Moonstone says irritably, yanks the door open, closes it loudly behind her. She leans back on it for a second, eyes closed, then straightens and walks right up to take Hazel's face in her hands.
"This I can fix," she says softly. "I promise," and kisses Hazel in a way that leaves her swaying; yanks on clothes in a practised, quick way; kisses her again. "I promise."
"I believe you," Hazel says, sincerely, and Moonstone flashes her glorious smile, and then she's springing into action, the slam of the apartment door cutting off the beginning of an outraged snarl from Onyx, and then it goes silent, and Hazel has a hard problem to solve and thirty minutes to do it.
She picks up a dust-covered alarm clock from Moonstone's dresser; a cheap old metal wind-up kind, with the little hammer to strike the actual bells on the top. She walks to the kitchen, calmly selects the meanest-looking cooking knife Moonstone owns.
Impossible problem, not enough time: we had a tool for that. It's called a Hyperproductive Science Fugue.
She picks up the Professor, dusts him off, gives him a gentle kiss on the head, and puts him square in the middle of the table. "History will remember you only as a footnote on the subject of charlatans," she says halfheartedly. "Your science is insufficient and you...shit." She wipes her eyes. "You're a muddled metaphor and a psychological hindrance and an anchor chaining me to a failed life," but there isn't the slightest spark of rant in it, and— "Shit. I'm sorry," she blurts, tightens her Psycho-shower-scene grip on the knife, lifts her arm and
brings
it
down
time is burning, each turn of the second hand a cat o' nine tails lash and she kicks and heaves for breath on the floor around the entirely psychosomatic chest pain
she is on the floor surrounded by a precisely regular arms'-length halo of tiny parts from the guts of the clock
she flicks the pad of her finger along the edge of the upright knife whose point is wedged in (the duck) the table and scrawls her manifesto in blood
there is a white-hot pain behind her eyes and a black spot in her vision, both growing as they fall toward each other, unstoppable force immovable object illogical farce impossible subject inevitably fucked inelegant reject and she is going to fucking die
again
and this time she's crying
with a sufficiency of force applied the screwdriver sinks through the sidewall of the Toyota's nearside front tyre silky smooth like heaven's judgement and Hazel (not Hazel) picks a random direction and runs.
And this is a scene to come back to, tense from a knock-down drag-out argument on a strict time limit, that may as well be titled Still life, with evaporated future:
a wall daubed with I HAVE TO GO in human blood, followed by a single line of lowercase text rendered largely illegible by crap handwriting, crap writing medium, and clotting
a minefield of tiny pins and cogs and metal brackets kicked haphazardly all over the floor
a metal device in the shape of a cartoon heart that regularly expands and contracts, without comprehensible motive power, in the ringing mechanical rhythm of a human heartbeat
and an impaled yellow rubber duck.
"That says 'death rays', that says something about building death rays, that's a fucking threat, Moon—"
and Moonstone, who will agree with everyone that the second line of text says "build death rays to", will not say that she is certain she knows what the last two smudged words are.
