The general fired.
Kin ducked and moved forward at the same time. The round passed over his shoulder and punched into the wall behind him, and the katana came down in a long diagonal that caught the table across its surface. The blade did not cut the table. The blade ripped through it, spine and wood and the thin metal frame beneath, and the table came apart into two uneven halves that fell away to either side.
The general was already moving. He took the edge of the blade across the forearm, a shallow cut that opened the sleeve and drew a line of blood from wrist to elbow, and he stumbled back against the wall and steadied himself with the flat of his good hand. He did not drop the pistol.
He fired again.
Kin was already past the point where the table had been. The round darted past his hip and struck the door behind him, and instead of burying itself in the wood, it tore through and went into the corridor beyond, and from the corridor came the sound of a man cursing and the sound of a door being thrown open.
The guard stepped in.
He was one of the two from outside, the tall one with the scar, and he came through the doorway with his sidearm already out and his eyes already moving. He saw the general against the wall with blood on his sleeve. He saw Kin in the middle of the room with the katana in his hand and the pen still standing out of his chest.
Kin lunged before the man could speak.
The guard's hand went to the holster at his waist and came up with the gun, and he fired without aiming, and the round caught Kin in the shoulder and spun him half a step to the side. Kin felt it go in and felt it go through and did not stop. He brought his own handgun up and fired once, and the .50 round caught the guard in the chest and lifted him off his feet and put him through the doorway and down onto the floor of the corridor.
The guard's hand, falling, found the beeper on his belt.
He tapped it.
Kin heard the click first. Not one click. Not ten. A sound like a thousand small metal parts moving at once, and then the sound of boots on stairs, on tiles, on the concrete of the parade square outside, coming up from every direction at once.
System.
[Yes.]
Time stop.
[No.]
Time stop. Now.
[I cannot stop time. I can slow it to one hundredth of its rate for ten seconds. Ten seconds, and then it snaps back, and when it snaps back you will feel every second you borrowed. Do you want it.]
Do it.
The world went thin.
Not slow the way the Gravedigger's presence had slowed it. That had been a drowning. This was a thinning, a flattening, as if the room had been pressed between two sheets of glass and everything inside it had been made very small and very far away. The blood on the general's arm hung in the air where it had left the wound. The dust from the broken table stood still. The shouts from the corridor stretched into long, low sounds like the mooing of cattle.
Kin had ten seconds.
He crossed the room in two of them. He reached the general, who was still pressed against the wall with the pistol half-raised, and he took the gun out of the man's hand and threw it into the corner. Three seconds. He turned the general around and put an arm across his chest and lifted him off the floor. Five seconds. He walked to the window, which was tall and narrow and looked out over the parade square, and he put his boot through it. Six seconds. He stepped up onto the sill with the general over his shoulder and looked down, and the ground was thirty feet below and there were men pouring out of the administrative building and men crossing the parade square and a truck turning in at the gate with its headlights on.
Eight seconds.
He jumped.
Nine.
Ten.
The world snapped back.
Sound returned first. The wind, the shouting, the crack of a rifle somewhere below. Then weight, the full weight of the general on his shoulder and the full weight of his own body falling. Then the pain, everything at once, the shoulder and the chest and the ribs and the legs, the borrowed time coming due all at once like a debt called in.
He hit the ground in a crouch that folded one ankle and rolled him onto his side. The general came off his shoulder and landed beside him on the grass. Kin was up before he had decided to be up, dragging the general by the collar, and the rifle fire started and stopped in the same breath.
"He has the general! Hold your fire! He has the general!"
The voice came from the window above. Kin did not look up. He ran.
He ran through the gap between the motor pool and the administrative building, and the general bounced along beside him with one shoe missing and two fingers missing and a sleeve full of blood, and no one fired. He could hear them behind him, boots and shouting and the grinding of a truck engine, but no one fired, because the general was in his hands and the general was worth more alive than Kin was worth dead.
He reached the perimeter wall.
The wall was the one thing the folder had not solved. Three meters of concrete, topped with wire, watched by cameras. He could not go over it with the general on his shoulder. He could not go through it. He stood at the base of it with his back to the compound and his eyes on the gate, and the gate was closed, and the men were coming, and there was no third way.
Then he saw the drain.
It was set into the wall at the corner, low, half-hidden by a stack of oil drums. A storm drain, wide enough for a man if the man was not carrying another man. Kin put the general down, took him by the collar with both hands, and pushed him through the opening first. The general did not resist. He had gone very quiet, the way a man goes quiet when he has decided to survive and is waiting for his chance.
Kin followed him.
The drain ran for forty meters under the perimeter wall and came out in a service alley on the far side, between two shuttered shops. Kin pulled the general out of the mouth of it and stood him up and looked back at the compound, at the lights and the shouting and the men who would be fanning out across the district within minutes.
He looked at the general.
The general looked back at him, calmly, with two fingers gone and one shoe gone and blood drying on his sleeve.
"You will not get out of the city," he said.
Kin did not answer.
He put the general over his shoulder again and walked into the dark between the buildings, and behind him the compound boiled, and above him the sky began to fill with the sound of helicopters.