Free Leopard Dreaming by A.A. Bell

help you. We’ve slipped shades past the general before, and last I heard, they still had funding to provide one more upgrade.’
    Mira shook her head, more determined than ever. ‘Kill me first. I’m done with all that.’
    ‘Fine, but don’t blame me if you fall into my arms again.’
    Frowning, she closed her eyes, this time only long enough to scroll forward until the controls preventedher from overtaking the present. Then back a twitch to avoid the agony that always accompanied any attempt to refract light from the normal visible spectrum. Yesterday still hurt for her to see too, but far more bearably.
    Walls returned on either side of her, and early morning fog suggested she’d fluked finding the same time of day, roughly. Same shade of violet, apparently. To her left, she saw the boy’s body and to her right, the moored yachts in the estuary, and she realised that Lockman had swept her back as far as the last bend in the alley.
    She saw a ghostly woman emerge from the fire exit of the Drift Inn wearing little more than a pale bathrobe and gold chains around her neck, wrists and ankles.
    The woman spotted the body, glanced around looking fearful of being caught, then ran to the boy and fell to her knees over him. Her long dark hair fell forward as she reached across his back, and Mira thought she was sobbing. Until she saw her swipe up the bloody toy using a plastic bag, which she’d had stashed down inside her bathrobe.
    Bad luck, Mira read from her lips.
    Blind, and yet she could read lips. It still seemed crazy, even to Mira, but at least she felt saner whenever she put her peculiar madness to work for good purpose — even when she didn’t quite understand all the details.
    The woman glanced about again, then made a dash back to the building, leaving Mira to worry if she needed to follow her; another distraction, or perhaps a crucial piece of the puzzle.
    Mira blinked a few times to rest her eyes, rubbing her temples until the last of the sharpest pain subsided.
    ‘You’re pale,’ Lockman said, keeping a light hold on her elbow. ‘What did you see?’
    ‘Nothing relevant to Maddy. At least, I don’t think so.’ She blushed, embarrassed and frustrated by her moments of weakness. And quit being so nice to me, she shouted with silent hands. ‘I just need to find her, okay?’
    She braced herself against the ghostly wall. Warmer than it appeared. Refocusing on the estuary, she also adjusted the controls in tinier movements.
    Time fled backwards with the sun and moon chasing each other the wrong way across the sky. Yachts came and left backwards too, while sailors bustled to and from the inn and marina. Violet nights came and went, shifting hues slightly back towards muddier blues until the sun retraced its path to dawn, roughly forty-eight hours beforehand.
    She could go no further without taking another break to blink and rub the sharpest pain from her temples.
    Lockman leaned nearer as if studying her, then cupped her cheek unexpectedly, making her flinch. ‘You’re running a temperature.’
    She nodded and pushed his hand away, but had to clamp her eyes shut tighter against the pain that continued to pierce like burning hot needles through her eyes to the back of her brain.
    ‘I’ve got morphine in the med kit. It’s in the truck. I’ll just …’
    ‘No drugs!’ she cried and straightened up a little. ‘Not even aspirin.’
    He let go and paced a circle away and back again.
    ‘Hey, I’m frustrated too,’ she confessed. ‘I’m doing my best.’
    ‘Trying too hard, more like it.’
    She slapped the wall, feeling useless. ‘We’ve already lost a whole day because of me!’ Whatever excuses he’d made about needing time for the media circus to pass through became irrelevant. With or without thatdistraction, the truth remained: it was still her inability to see any closer than yesterday which delayed her from starting the hunt for Maddy’s kidnapper.
    ‘Cops had no better luck so far