by Tricia Owens
He sounded as though he believed it.
It was a stretch for me.
“How is something like that possible?”
“Well, probably because he’s—”
When Elliott snapped his lips together, silencing himself, I realized I’d uncovered a thread. Maybe if I pulled it would unravel the mystery of this place. Or maybe tugging would uncover more illegalities that I would be safer not knowing.
Too bad for me that I had a tendency to question everything.
“He who?” I pressed. I kept my voice low. “Are you talking about the man I saw? The one who was shifting with the hall?”
Elliott took a step backward. “You saw him?”
“Who is he? Is he alive?”
He rubbed at his chin, the sides of his face. “I can’t—I’m not supposed to say. He doesn’t show up very often. I’ve seen him only once, a long time ago. We don’t talk about him. I shouldn’t.” He checked his watch. “It’s time for our meal break. We should go.”
I grabbed his biceps when he tried to rush past me.
“Tell me who he is,” I demanded. “I think I might know him.”
Anxiety poured off Elliott . I would have taken pity on him except that I couldn’t help feeling that my life was at stake here. I needed this knowledge.
“You can’t know him,” Elliott whispered. “He’s The Architect.” Then it was his turn to grab me and drag me to the elevators.
~~~~~
The hotel provided a meal. I didn’t eat it.
A part of me was still in the hallway, continually shifting, trying to make contact through the dimensions with the man that I’d seen. The Architect.
My gut feeling that I’d seen him before was fading along with my memory of his face. Had I gotten a clear look at him with all the movement going on? Or had my mind filled in the blanks, creating a familiarity that didn’t actually exist?
Elliott, unsurprisingly, was of little help.
“I can’t say anything,” he insisted when I continued to stare at him. He hunched over his plate of beef stroganoff and hid from me. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”
“Just a name, Elliott. I’ll get the rest myself.”
“The Architect,” he mumbled. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“A name like that means he has something to do with the construction of this place,” I prodded. “He looks too young for that. Unless he’s some kind of architectural prodigy who designed this place when he was three. But, even then…I think this place is much older than that.”
Elliott just shrugged, radiating misery.
I finally relented and sat back, even though I had the feeling that if I turned the screws a little tighter he would spill. Torturing my co-worker for information wasn’t exactly how I wanted our relationship to start out, though, so I let it go for now, turning my attention to the café where we were seated.
Elliott had informed me that the restaurant was closed to guests after ten p.m., so the employees on the night and graveyard shifts used it as their dining hall. Elliott and I weren’t the only ones taking a dinner break. To the left of our two-top, a much larger table held six staff members from Housekeeping. If it hadn’t been for Elliott telling me, I wouldn’t have pegged them as the people who remade beds and cleaned out bathrooms.
They were all men, and they were big and burly. They wore the standard black of the Sinistera in the form of pants and long-sleeved shirts they’d each rolled up at the elbows and alarmingly—long black butchers’ aprons. Two of them, joining the group later, had walked in wearing black, elbow-length gloves, which they’d peeled off and tucked into their back waistbands before sitting down to eat. What, exactly, did these guys clean up?
One, a young guy built like a bull with a closely cropped dark beard and striking silver eyes, gave me a lingering look that had me gulping for the wrong reasons. He slid his right hand away from his dinner plate, the action deliberate, as though he wanted me to notice it.
He pointed at the salt shaker. It quivered and then it shot across the space between his table and mine, skidding across the surface of my table until it bounced off Elliott’s wrist.
“Oh, thanks, but this is already pretty salty,” he mumbled without looking up. He pushed the salt shaker away.
At the other table, the bearded man smirked and returned to eating his meal.
A Kinetic Energy specialist, then. Too soon to tell if he was higher than a Junior level, but it was curious that he was working in the Housekeeping department when he was obviously skilled at his brand of magic.
There was another small table nearby, this one holding a solo female employee. She stared back at me boldly.
“Who’s that?” I murmured, sitting straighter beneath her challenging stare. “Don’t turn,” I said when Elliott began to do exactly that. “She’s got red hair in a braid that reaches her waist. Her uniform is a long-sleeved top and a mini-skirt and—wow, that’s a lot of tattoos.”
“That’s Calia. Uroskova. She works room service.”
“She’s staring at me.”
“Don’t stare back!”
“But—”
“Just don’t!”
Spurred by Elliott’s urgency, I faced him instead. “Why? What’s the story with her?”
Yet again, he shrank in on himself, no doubt trying to shrink his secrets, too. “Just stay away from her. She can be trouble. Don’t go anywhere with her alone.”
I eyed him skeptically. “And you’re not going to give me a reason why?”
He shook his head and gave me a puppy dog look. “Just don’t, okay? I’m trying to help you.”
I inwardly groaned. It was impossible to bully him for more information. He was just too cute.
“Listen, do you happen to know of any cheap rooms for rent in this area?” I asked him.
He appeared relieved by the change of topic. “For you? Yeah. You can just stay here.”
That caught me aback. “You mean in the hotel? In the Sinister—er, Sinistera?”
He grinned at my slip. “It’s okay. We all call it that, too. And sure. We get great employee rates. I stay here. So do a bunch of other employees. Makes it easier, you know? Nova will just take it out of your paycheck.”
My relief left me feeling boneless. “That’s great.”
“I think it is,” he said enthusiastically. “This way you’ll really feel like you’re part of the family.”
~~~~~
We finished our shift two hours later. Elliott explained that he still had much to show me but for a first night we’d managed to hit the highlights. He accompanied me to the front desk to pick up my room key.
“Two-fourteen,” I said, looking with disbelief from the old fashioned Lucite keychain to Sheridan. “That’s my room? Two-fourteen?”
“Yes, that will also be your mailbox number. You have a slot here behind the desk for messages and employee notices.”
It was the same number Nova had told me to use to communicate with her and Tower. The coincidence bothered me. Had Nova known I’d be in need of a room? Had she told Sheridan that I would be communicating with the managers through that box number? Just who knew what around here?
“Okay, fine,” I said, careful not to reveal more of my suspicion.
“You’re just down the hall from me,” Elliott said cheerfully as he led me up the stairs to the mezzanine level. “Truthfully, all the employees who live in the Sinister stay on this floor. It’s the noisiest because of the lobby, so guests prefer the upper floors.”
He showed me my room and then walked four more doors down to his room. “Hope you like it here,” he said. “I think you’ll fit right in and…” He blushed. “I could use a friend in my department, honestly. It’s been kind of lonely.”
The comment reminded me of the Count’s derision when mentioning the previous Head of Security.
“Did you not get along with the previous Head?” I asked.
Elliott shrugged, evasive again. “H
e was different. Anyway, he’s gone now and you’re here.” He gave me a little wave. “Let me know if you need anything. You can knock or call me by my room number, whichever. Two twenty-two. Easy.”
I smiled. “Sure. Okay. Thanks for a great first night.”
It began to feel awkward, like we were ending a date in which neither of us wanted to kiss the other, so I let myself in and shut the door behind me. I flipped on the lights and found myself in a basic hotel room, nothing special but not dingy like a motel. It was incredibly empty, however, since I didn’t possess anything besides my backpack and scooter helmet.
Fortunately, lack of money could be solved quickly. Possibly. Excited to finally have some privacy, I tossed my belongings on the floor and sat on the corner of the double bed. I pulled out the envelope from Tower and tore it open.
A folded sheet of paper fell out along with several monetary notes. I counted them out, amazed. It was more than enough to purchase more clothes and shoes, gas for my scooter, and leave me with pocket change for food and whatnot. I quickly unfolded the sheet for an explanation.
“Damnit!” I pounded the mattress with my fist as I stared at the rows of indecipherable glyphs printed on the paper. “Not now!”
As always, my Glyph Eye condition didn’t respond to threats. It didn’t respond to anything. I bent my head over the sheet, my shoulders trembling with suppressed emotion. I was close. So close to getting some money so I could help my grandmother and protect her.
“Just wait,” I told myself in a shaky voice. “Just give it time.”
The pep talk bounced off me but I kept repeating it in my head. I was exhausted, but I didn’t want to fall asleep until I knew what Tower wanted with me. Instead of using the bed, I slid off and sat on the floor against the wall, my knees drawn up with the letter and its indecipherable symbols resting atop them. I closed my eyes and prayed for the Glyph Eye to clear up.
Some minutes passed. I heard voices outside my door. One was a male’s, deep and rumbly. The other was female, soft, occasionally breathless as if with excitement. Elliott said only the employees had rooms on this floor so that was most likely who these two were. Just as I gathered my feet beneath me to stand up so I could shamelessly eavesdrop, their conversation ended. I settled down again.
My mind drifted, sorting through everything that had happened today from the attack during the interview to Jasper’s unexpected kiss and to the strange encounters with the Count and The Architect. It had been a long day. My eyelids grew heavy. I tried to resist their downward drag.
To no avail.
I dreamed I was six years old again, crouched outside my bedroom door. Voices and cigarette smoke drifted up the stairwell from the first floor of the house. Both used to be foreign. No one in my family smoked and business had never been conducted at home. That changed with the advent of the war. Now, every day I woke up to a home that didn’t feel like mine.
A lot of lies flew around our house back then. I’d heard one of the grown-ups say to another that in the war it was a permissible sin. But my parents had always been sticklers for the truth, and I knew they would have hated the conversations that occurred in our living room while they were out doing secret missions for secret people.
The Closure Committee hadn’t existed at that point in time. Not yet. The group that met in my family’s house referred to themselves colloquially as the wardens. The group was made up of people in uniform. People in regular clothes. People who didn’t look like spies or soldiers but whom I knew must be one or the other because of the way the other people eyed them when they weren’t looking. The group deemed themselves to be de facto overseers of the war efforts, even though, as I learned later, there had been an entirely different, official group of leaders who’d believed that they were in charge.
Lies, lies, lies.
In my dream, I picked out a distinct set of voices at the bottom of the stairwell. Two males, but my aunt’s voice slipped in every once in a while, shriller than normal, tight and bright with intense emotion as if she were hanging onto a length of barbed wire.
The term “clean solution” funneled up the stairwell. Outrage propelled the words when my aunt repeated them. The third time she said them, she was hushed up. The voices dimmed.
In my dream, I did what I’d done all those years ago and stood and approached the top of the stairs. That night I was caught by my aunt before I made it to the stairs. She’d reprimanded me for being up so late and taken me back to my room.
In my dream, however, I reached the stairs. I began to descend them, my bare feet pressing carefully on each wooden step, testing for squeaky boards, trembling slightly from the excitement of my illicit journey. The stench of cigarette smoke made my throat sore. Another smell hung beneath it, acrid and sour. Later I would recognize it as the sweat that leaked from the pores of men planning terrible things.
I made it all the way to the bottom without any of the dozen or so people gathered in the living room noticing me. Or so I’d thought. I tensed and gripped the banister when my gaze met that of a man across the room. He was much older than me, but younger than everyone else in attendance. The men around him were engaged in intense discussion and he occasionally nodded as if he participated in the conversation, but his green eyes remained on me.
He wore glasses, and those thin lenses shielded so much. But when his mouth lifted into a wan smile, I read sympathy from him. I’d never seen him before. Why would he feel that way for me?
I jerked awake. I still sat on the floor in my room in the Sinistera. Tower’s letter had slipped from my fingers. I left it on the floor as I tried to fix the dream in my mind. But it was useless, the images dissolving like mist, leaving me with the impression that I’d learned something that was important.
I didn’t often dream of the past. My aunt who’d raised me had told me that this was a good thing, that the Drowning War wasn’t meant to be remembered. I’d frustrated her when I’d admitted that I believed we needed to study the war, not forget about it. It had been a topic we’d argued about constantly until she’d died of a heart attack four years ago.
Four years. Not so long when it came to the loss of someone who’d filled the roles of my mother and father in their absence. Selfishly, a part of me was glad that my aunt couldn’t see what I’d become. Her disappointment would have been crushing. I was supposed to carry the St. Marx line into future glory, or at least happy citizenship. Instead, I was a rebellious criminal who failed my most vital obligation.
My aunt, in contrast, had endured tremendous amounts of grief and somehow grown stronger and more hopeful because of it. What would she advise me to do, if she were aware of the turn my life had taken? Would she tell me to leave this place, or turn this strange employment to my advantage?
Tired and emotional, I checked the time. Not yet four a.m. I’d slept less than an hour.
When I picked up the note from Tower, it remained unreadable to me, a hieroglyphic jumble. I carried it with me out of the room to the door marked 222.
I hesitated to knock. The fewer people who knew what I was doing in the Sinistera, the better. But I had no one else. I couldn’t go to Jasper and bring trouble to his doorstep. The police may have already paid him a visit. And while I didn’t fully trust Elliott since I barely knew him, my gut feeling was that he was one of the good guys. Assuming ‘good’ meant the same in the Sinistera as it did in the rest of the world.
I knocked on his door.
It took longer than I expected for him to answer, which made me cringe inside. Bad enough I was about to give him knowledge of something potentially illegal; I had to wake the poor guy up to do it.
The door eventually opened, revealing him in a pair of boxers and nothing else. I ogled him for a few seconds before I got my act together and managed to stop drooling.
“Um, hey, Elliott. Sorry to wake you.”
His pale hair was a tousled mess, but endearingly so. So was the way he blinked sleepily. I wanted to pet him.
“Are you sure? This can wait.” I didn’t feel like it could, though. I needed to make my money and get out of this crazy place.
“No, no, it’s fine. What did you want?”
I slowly unfolded the note. I didn’t want to hand it over, didn’t want to admit to Elliott that I was a criminal, but I felt I had little choice. A quick, hopeful glance at the note showed that my Glyph Eye still hadn’t resolved itself.
“I have a condition,” I began reluctantly. “It’s called Glyph Eye. It’s not well documented and some doctors claim it’s not even real but it is. When it strikes me, letters turn into symbols. Nothing makes sense to me. It hurt me during school and it’s acting up right now.” I held out the note. “I can’t read this. I was hoping you could tell me what it says.”
He reached for it, but I pulled it back just out of reach. “Elliott, whatever it says, I need you to keep it a secret.”
It took him a few seconds to fully understand that, but once his eyes cleared I could tell he got it.
“I pay attention, you know,” he told me, a bit defensively. “I see and hear a lot of things while working here but I’ve learned to keep my lips sealed. You can trust me, Arrow. I give you my word.”
I handed him the note, and then watched his expression hawkishly. I saw it all: recognition, surprise, and finally, trepidation. He raised his head.
“This is dangerous, Arrow.”
“Will you tell what it says, please?”
He cleared his throat and began to read aloud. “‘Arrow, included is an advance against your paycheck to pay for any incidentals you may need while performing this job. There is no refusal of this. Please remember that I possess incriminating footage of your activities. I will not hesitate to send it to the authorities.’”
