Officer Misaki Aiko didn’t sigh, that would be undignified, but she did take a slow, calming breath.

  Why did it have to be an airport? And Narita International Airport at that. The crowds, the sense of urgency, and the general indifference were all distractions. She didn’t have time for distractions.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true.

  But Narita? She hadn’t been there since she returned to Japan after her mother’s death. Her father…

  Misaki shook her head to stop that line of thought dead in its tracks.

  Reminiscing could wait. She had a job to do. And her hair was out of place from shaking her head. She almost rolled her eyes, just as unprofessional as sighing, and tucked her sketchbook under her arm.

  Three precise motions later, nimble fingers a blur, her shoulder-length hair was neatly tied back in place, not a single errant strand to be found. Now she was ready.

  She jotted the time, exactly 4:05:06 pm, Friday, October 7th, on her sketchpad as she scanned the terminal. The Narita ‘Arrivals’ area was her responsibility, and a frown momentarily creased her face as she calculated the number of people in there with her. A hasty internet search prior to arrival had shown almost a dozen flights landing in quick succession.

  A second sigh threatened. The airport was eroding her usual restraint. But, at least in the isolation of Borrowed Time, nobody would hear her lapse. Thousands of people surrounded her, but the slow, rhythmic beat of the blood pumping behind her ears was the only sound. Nothing else moved. Nobody else breathed. Everybody and everything around her was frozen in time.

  Which made it significantly easier to sketch faces.

  Yoshi, best to get started.

  To her left: a group of high-school students, twelve girls in matching track suits and tennis bags. With laughter on their lips and innocence behind their eyes, they weren’t the reason Misaki was in the airport, and her eyes continued their scan.

  To her right: a small girl, perhaps three, hair tied in pigtails, and wearing possibly the pinkest jacket ever made. Her small arms stretched out wide in front of her, legs frozen mid-run, towards a businessman fresh off his flight. Suitcase forgotten on the floor beside him, he crouched with open arms, smile bright as the rising sun for his daughter.

  Like the tennis club, he didn’t fit the profile, and Misaki moved on.

  There, a second businessman. Slightly overweight, with a loose tie and a suit two sizes too big, the man’s focused look stood out. Pencil scratching on paper without looking, Misaki weaved between the frozen father and his unmoving daughter.

  She glanced at her depiction as she came nose-to-nose with the man. Short, thinning hair. Flat, wide nose. Narrowed eyes. But the eyebrows weren’t bushy enough. A few quick, precise strokes fixed that, and she turned her attention to the man’s expression; he was on the hunt. Was this the suspect?

  Misaki added a quick sketch of the duffel bag at his feet to the same page, and then circled behind him to follow his line of sight. It didn’t take any great detective work to see what had caught his attention.

  A gaijin woman, thick blonde hair in curls down to her shoulders, and a red dress cut both too short and too deep turned heads behind her like a comet’s tail. Like something out of a foreign magazine, it was no wonder she was attracting attention.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Misaki’s hand moved without thought as she captured the woman’s image, adding it to her collection. While likely not the suspect, it was an excellent distraction, and Misaki checked her sketch only once before turning to the admiring crowd.

  There, they stood out; the only two men in a ten-meter radius not ogling the blonde woman. Mid-to-late twenties, scruffy faces, studded leather jackets, prominent tattoos, and impressively dated, and slicked, hair. Were they cosplaying? No luggage, but they almost stood out too much, as evidenced by the bubble of space around them.

  Misaki’s sketch of the man on the left was finished before she arrived in front of them. She checked it quickly, the hair wasn’t quite big enough, then flipped the page and completed the image of the other man. Neither of them held a spot on any watch-lists she’d seen, but she’d compare the pictures to be sure after she left the airport.

  Though frozen, the two men stood in the midst of conversation with the one on the right half-turned to go somewhere. Misaki reined in the frown that threatened; the downside of being TimeSlipped was she couldn’t follow or listen in on their conversation.

  Instead, she assessed the crowd around the men, at how it spread, at where the other people were looking and walking, even how they were leaning. Her eyes scanned the angles, the positions and flow of bodies, and obstacles like suitcases, while her mind ran the calculations.

  Connecting the myriad of details like a puzzle, the flow of traffic clicked into place. Transposed images of the men moved through the now-frozen crowd as they entered the terminal from the far side. They detoured around the foreign couple with the broken suitcase, knocked over the ‘Wet Floor’ sign, and finally paused where they now stood to get their bearings.

  Tourists? Perhaps. At the least, not familiar with the airport.

  But where would they go? Based on the way they were leaning, the angle of their gazes, and the turn of one’s ankle, it wasn’t to the luggage carousels. No, they’d head for the exit straight away. Physically, they were suspicious. Behaviourally, Misaki dismissed them and moved on.

  She added a quick sketch of the foreign couple with the broken suitcase, for the sake of completeness, but the stress on their faces was luggage related, not something more nefarious. Besides, the pair of airport security on their way over would deter the couple if she was somehow wrong. Unlikely as that was.

  Drawing as she went, Misaki worked her way through the crowd, and flipped full page after full page. Nobody, individually, gave her what she was looking for, but sometimes it was the combination of small…

  Misaki paused, her eyes locked on her latest sketch. Something was wrong, not with her drawings, obviously, but she flipped back through the pages of her book. There it was. Why hadn’t she noticed that sooner? On their own, nothing in the pictures stood out, but when she looked at them in succession, they all shared the same trait.

  Surprise. Just barely perceptible, but unmistakable when she put all the pictures together. A slight tilt of a head here, widened eyes there. By themselves, they didn’t mean much, but taken in concert, it told Misaki something was happening. Something she’d ‘paused’ by TimeSlipping.

  However, her drawings, while excellent likenesses, didn’t account for direction, and Misaki was forced to retrace her steps. At each of the last six people she’d sketched, she stopped briefly to follow their physical cues and run the angles. The luggage carousels? Whatever the disturbance was, that’s where she would find it.

  Misaki started in that direction but didn’t hurry; she didn’t need to in Borrowed Time. Sketch after sketch filled the pages as her pencil scratched while she walked towards the mystery event. Her pencil, and her forward motion, only stopped because she ran into literally impassible walls of people waiting for their luggage.

  She could climb over them, or crawl between their legs, but even the thought of either was wildly undignified, Borrowed Time or not. She had to have some standards. No, she’d find a way around them instead.

  As she did, more and more faces showed signs of reacting to something. The hints of surprise were no longer so subtle. She was getting close, and the unmoving gazes led her towards her destination like a treasure map. What would she find at the ‘X’?

  Finally, when Misaki worked her way around yet another group of tourists and their mountainous luggage, a third sigh threatening, the answer to her question became clear.

  Misaki’s blood ran cold in a single heartbeat.

  All her training flashed through her mind. Her role was to identify the potential bomber to her superiors so special-forces could be deployed to stop them. That was it.

  In a perfect world, with the utility of Borrowed Time, that could happen in seconds.

  But Misaki wasn’t in a perfect world. She was too late. They all were.

  The bomb was there.

  And it had already exploded.