Thief of Time

He knew it.
    Tick
    Susan walked back through the motionless streets, sat down in Madam Frout’s office, and let herself sink back into the stream of time.
    She had never found out how this worked. It just did. Time didn’t stop for the rest of the world, and it didn’t stop for her—it was just that she entered a kind of loop of time, and everything else stayed exactly as it was until she’d finished what she needed to do. It was another inherited family trait. It worked best if you didn’t think about it, just like tightrope walking. Anyway, now she had other things to think about.
    Madam Frout turned her gaze back from the rat-free mantelpiece.
    “Oh,” she said. “It seems to have gone.”
    “It was probably a trick of the light, madam,” said Susan. Mostly mortal. Someone like me , she thought.
    “Yes, er, of course…” Madam Frout managed to get her glasses on, despite the fact that the string was still tangled with the button. It meant that she’d moored herself to her own chest, but she was damned if she was going to do anything about it now.
    Susan could unnerve a glacier. All she had to do was sit quietly, looking polite and alert.
    “What precisely was it you wanted, madam?” she said. “It’s only that I’ve left the class doing algebra, and they get restless when they’ve finished.”
    “Algebra?” said Madam Frout, perforce staring at her own bosom, which no one else had ever done. “But that’s far too difficult for seven-year-olds!”
    “Yes, but I didn’t tell them that and so far they haven’t found out,” said Susan. It was time to move things along. “I expect you wanted to see me about my letter, madam?” she said.
    Madam Frout looked blank. “Wh—” she began.
    Susan sighed and snapped her fingers.
    She walked around and opened a drawer by the motionless Madam Frout, removed a sheet of paper, and spent some time carefully writing a letter. She let the ink dry, rustled the paper a bit to make it look slightly secondhand, and then put it just under the top of the pile of paperwork beside Madam Frout, with enough of it peeking out so that it would be easy to see.
    She returned to her seat. She snapped her fingers again.
    “—at letter?” said Madam Frout. And then she looked down at her desk. “Oh.”
    It was a cruel thing to do, Susan knew. But while Madam Frout was not by any means a bad person and was quite kind to children, in a haphazard way, she was silly. And Susan did not have a lot of time for silly.
    “Yes, I asked if I might have a few days’ leave,” said Susan. “Pressing family matters, I am afraid. I have prepared some work for the children to get on with, of course.”
    Madam Frout hesitated. Susan didn’t have time for this, either. She snapped her fingers.
    “M Y GOODNESS, THAT’ D BE A RELIEF ,” she said in a voice whose harmonics went all the way into the subconscious. “I F WE DON’T SLOW HER DOWN WE’LL RUN OUT OF THINGS TO TEACH THEM! S HE HAS BEEN PERFORMING SMALL MIRACLES ON A DAILY BASIS AND DESERVES A RAISE.”
    Then she sat back, snapped her fingers again, and watched the words settle into the forefront of Madam Frout’s mind. The woman’s lips actually moved.
    “Why, yes, of course,” she murmured at last. “You have been working very hard…and…and—” and there are some things even a voice of eldritch command can’t achieve and one of them is to get extra money out of a head teacher, “we shall have to think about a little increment for you one of these days.”
    Susan returned to the classroom and spent the rest of the day performing small miracles, which included removing the glue from Richenda’s hair, emptying the wee out of Billy’s shoes, and treating the class to a short visit to the continent of Fourecks.
    When their parents came to pick them up, they were all waving crayoned pictures of kangaroos, and Susan had to hope that the red dust on their shoes—red mud in the case of Billy’s, whose sense of timing had not improved—would pass unnoticed. It probably would. Fidgett’s was not the only place where adults didn’t see what couldn’t possibly be true.
    Now she sat back.
    There was something pleasant about an empty classroom. Of course, as any teacher would point out, one nice thing was that there were no children in it, and particularly no Jason.
    But the tables and shelves around the room showed evidence of a term well spent. Paintings lined the walls and showed good use of perspective