by L. J. Hatton
“If I push him any further, it’s going to do permanent damage,” Winnie said adamantly. “He’s done, and so am I.”
She instructed our driver to take us somewhere we could get a room, and then to turn around and drive back across the town line, where he could pull over and sleep off the effects of her touch. Once he woke up, we’d be vaporous as a dream, with shifting features and no names. He would never know if he’d actually picked us up or not.
I felt bad for the man. He had a good heart that prevented him from dumping us at the nearest fleabag motel we passed. Winnie’s sob stories and apologies must have gotten through. He drove us to the door of a three-tower hotel that had limos and town cars waiting out front for guest use. The five of us piled out, and he took off. If there had been any cops around, he would have earned himself a speeding ticket.
People looked at us funny, looked at us sideways, and outright stared like it didn’t matter if we could see them or not. We looked exactly like people who had been on the road for hours. We didn’t match the décor, and we didn’t have any luggage except for my father’s briefcase and Klok’s backpack and satchels.
A man wearing an earpiece, a white shirt, and slacks came to meet us in the driveway. Security or a valet. Someone responsible for keeping up appearances and keeping out the riffraff.
“Are you kids lost?” he asked, sizing up Klok to see if he was an adult or not. “This is the Harts and Palms. Maybe your bus was supposed to drop you off at the Palm Tree Family Resort? Is he your chaperone? Are you meeting your parents?”
He pointed to a giant sign bearing the image of a pair of deer sharing umbrella drinks under a palm tree.
“Um . . . yeah, I think that’s the place,” Birch said. “The bus must have made a mistake.”
“Then we’ll get you a ride to where you need to be. One of our cars can take you.”
“Could we speak to someone at the desk?” Winnie asked in the way that only she could. “The driver took off with most of our stuff. We don’t have a phone or the other hotel’s number so we can check in with our folks.”
“Sure thing,” the man said politely, though visibly confused as to why he was agreeing when his intent had been to hustle us off. “We’ll get you fixed up in a snap.”
He held the door open for us, as it was the kind that locked on exit so that only registered guests could come and go. Winnie whispered a few more words that left him certain we were all society women in matching green jackets who’d come as a group to enjoy the casino.
“Enjoy your stay, ladies,” he said. “Good luck at the tables. Number nine’s due for a win!”
No wonder people like Ollie were afraid of Winnie. She could ask for the world, and someone would get it for her.
We stepped into the lobby and into another dimension where all floors were made of marble and inscribed with gold leaf in the shape of leaping deer. The chandelier, which was big enough that Klok had to sidestep it, was gold, too, as were the railings for people to lean on as they walked down the red-carpeted halls. Men and women wearing theatrical bellhop uniforms bustled from place to place, pushing carts filled with bags.
“Look at the size of this place,” Birch said. “Are all hotels like this?”
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
I’d never been to a hotel, either. I’d seen them in movies, but most of those weren’t half as grand as what I was able to feel beneath my fingers. I skimmed them over chairs upholstered with silk, and wood so polished that it shined like metal.
“They’ll never think to look for us here, that’s for sure,” Jermay said.
Even if they did, they’d never get in the front door. People who paid for places like this were the kind of people with powerful friends.
Winnie set her sights on the woman in charge of the check-in desk. A round-faced, bespectacled sugarplum with a suit coordinated perfectly to her fellow desk-dwellers, right down to the buttons that matched the seal on the floor.
Winnie marched up to her, mimicking some of the people milling around the lobby, and folded her hands on the desk the way the guests on either side of her were doing.
“May I help you?” the woman asked.
“We need a room large enough for all of us, preferably on a floor with no public access,” Winnie said.
I didn’t know hotels had floors like that. We’d have multiple layers of locks between us and the outside world.
The woman’s face went blank. She began typing and mumbling to herself, considering rooms and rejecting them for not meeting the criteria.
“Perfect. Room 1201 is still open. It’s a penthouse suite overlooking the—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Winnie said. “It’s closed for renovation and repair.”
“Ah, yes.” The woman laughed and slapped her forehead. “How silly of me. Of course it is. I’ll just note that in the log so as to avoid any future booking errors.”
“We need extra keys,” I said, nudging Winnie. The woman handed them over.
“We were never here, and you never saw us,” Winnie said. “On-site security is down, too.”
I laid my hand against the back of her computer and passed a small electrical burst through it. If I’d done it correctly, all she’d see was snow from every camera that fed into the main system.
“Repair crew is already here.” Winnie nodded to Klok and the guys. I imagined that the woman didn’t see the raggedy android we all knew, but a man with a tool bag and work jumper. “We’ve got orders to stay until the job is done. Which way are the elevators?”
Winnie wasn’t nearly as happy with her success rate as I was. Using her touch against Arcineaux was one thing, but the driver and the desk lady hadn’t hurt us. They weren’t threatening us with anything worse than a chauffeured ride to another hotel. We’d become liars and thieves; that was the price of survival.
We waited silently for the elevator to reach the top floor, sealed in by mirrored walls that reflected our faults back in infinite numbers until we faded away, smaller and smaller, into a distance with no real depth. The counter dinged and the doors opened, revealing a second set made of etched, inlaid glass.
I braced myself for the sound of thumping knives that never came.
“Not the Aerie,” I murmured to myself. “Not the Center.”
Birch squeezed my hand as he brushed past. He must have been having the same thoughts.
Beyond the elevator was another small lobby made of a pinker marble than the kind used for the floors downstairs and furnished with a long table set up with a platter of fruit beneath a mirror. On either side of the table was a set of double doors designed to keep the space perfectly symmetrical.
“There aren’t any numbers,” Birch said. “Which one’s the room?”
“Guys . . . I think it’s all the room.” Winnie checked the card in her hand. The number 1201 had been inscribed on a plate beside the closing elevator doors.
Xerxes wiggled out of the satchel Klok never put down, knocking several creeper lights loose with him. Bijou poked his head out but was happy to keep riding piggyback for the time being.
“She did say it was a penthouse,” I said as Xerxes took a running start and smashed into one set of doors. They swung into the next room and slammed against the doorstop at the bottom.
“Wow,” Birch said.
Whatever rabbit hole we’d slipped into by entering the Harts and Palms, we’d just fallen down another level.
“Wow,” I repeated. The room deserved the double take.
It was a two-story palace with a second floor rimmed in clear glass panels. The windows, which made up one entire curved wall, cut through both floors. There was a fridge filled with food and sodas, couches, multiple bedrooms, and even an office, where I deposited my father’s briefcase and computer on the desk.
Klok turned two of the TVs on to different news stations.
“We should listen for indications of Commission activity,” he said. “And game shows. I’m good a
t those.”
Someday, I would figure out how his brain prioritized information. For now, I just rolled with it.
“Pull the curtains,” Winnie said. “And look for the pay box. A place this nice should have at least one per room.”
There were loopholes when it came to functioning in dry towns, and they were all neatly detailed in a bulleted brochure on one of the tables. The laws said that tech couldn’t be observed after dark, so hotels like ours outfitted the nicer rooms with layer upon layer of blackout curtains, preventing anyone outside from seeing if screens were on or not. The same laws limited the amount of power consumed in a given area. For most people, this meant that after they’d hit their quota, their power company either cut or significantly dropped their available power. For people who could pay, it meant offsets. Cities kept a certain amount of power and bandwidth in reserve. Guests could purchase parcels via a pay box inside their hotel room that would shield them from detection.
The pay box in our room was bolted to the wall between the sets of double doors and outfitted with a plaque listing all the rules for use. They all basically boiled down to “pay us and do what you want, so long as you don’t tell us what you’ve done.”
It was a basic machine with a single, simple command in place: “Money goes in, power comes out.” I tricked it into thinking we’d paid the fee so that lingering inside the dry zone wouldn’t affect Klok or the golems. If we were lucky, none of them would turn off when we lost daylight.
I set one of the alarm clocks in the room for five minutes before sunset. When it went off, Winnie was facedown in one of the bedrooms, sleeping off the marathon use of her touch. “Do not disturb” was implied by her threat to take Jermay’s previous suggestion and make the first person to wake her up cluck like a chicken for the remainder of our time at the Harts and Palms.
Birch was keeping busy inspecting the greenery while I paced from room to room to orient myself to the layout in case I had to find an exit fast. We crossed paths in the entryway. Unlike the Mile’s trees and flowers, the plants inside our penthouse were resplendent and well cared for. He didn’t need to nurse any of them back to health, so he was upgrading them.
“I got the idea from the offset box,” he said. “If we really add things to the room, or fix it up, then we’re not stealing it.”
Not a bad idea. Once I was able to settle my nervous feet and hands, I’d see if there were any actual repairs I could do that might make our presence less of a lie.
I made sure all of the curtains on the panoramic windows were securely fastened by the time the last minute ticked down. The pay box displayed a green light on its face, and a minute past curfew, Klok had not turned into an oversized paperweight. He and Jermay were still busy scrolling through news programs to track Commission movements.
Official activity was never mentioned overtly, unless it was a parade, but there were code words to indicate increased presence in an area. If what Jermay had seen before we caught that bus was accurate, someone should have been talking.
Xerxes and Bijou were still functional, too. They and the creeper lights had come up with a game that involved the golems leaping from the upper balcony toward the crossbeams, where they had to grab one of the lights without the benefit of their wings. Bijou overshot his turn and had to loop the beam with his tail, ending up hanging like an oddly shaped monkey. Xerxes swooped down on his chosen light, then crashed beak-first into the empty couch below because he didn’t open his wings fast enough.
I started to scold them for the noise when I was stopped by one of those unexpected points of clarity between me and a set of machines that shouldn’t have been able to communicate. They were trying to help sell our cover story by making destruction . . . er . . . construction sounds. They even tried to demonstrate the concept by copying the thwack, thwack, thwack of a busy hammer.
All of the creeper lights on the crossbeams danced and shined their faces in different directions to create a strobe effect they equated with applause. They weren’t coming down anytime soon, if ever.
What had started off as one of the worst days of my life was actually getting better.
I let myself into the office where I’d put my father’s briefcase. I left the computer on the desk, still displaying its hateful lock screen, but dumped the case out on the floor so I could sort the contents into piles. Maybe I’d find the password jotted down in the margin of a notebook.
I made a pile for pictures and different stacks for different inventions. Things I couldn’t place went into a single heap that I tried to sort out as I went. I kept at it until Jermay knocked and poked his head in the door.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I found this in the welcome folder.”
He threw a laminated booklet at me—an advertisement for a magic act in one of the lobby’s showrooms. The man on the cover was decades younger than Zavel and didn’t wear the antiquated top hat that had been his trademark, but he had the same stance and the same intensity in his expression. Jermay flopped dramatically onto the room’s leather sofa.
“Next time, I vote for a ground-level room with no entertainment brochures lying around.”
“I thought you were helping Klok scan the news.”
“I was. They’ve changed the official story. Now they’re calling the debris from the Mile a freak meteor shower and blaming a comet no one’s ever seen or heard of.”
“That’s worse than calling it an equipment platform,” I said.
“Yeah, but this time people are buying it. I’ve lost all faith in humanity.”
“Is that why you stopped watching?”
“Nope. Someone’s pollinating in there. I had to leave.”
He’d switched from calling Birch fertilizer-related names to “someone”—this was progress.
“It’s a nervous habit,” I said.
“The wallpaper had flowers painted on it. He made them pop out and sprout over the windows. Someone’s going to notice that, and if they spread beyond our side of the wall, he’ll blow our cover. The smell’s enough to gag a florist.”
Jermay threw his arm over his face, his not-so-subtle way of playing for attention.
“He’s very nervous,” I said.
“How long are you going to keep making excuses for him?”
“Long enough to wear you down. Concede defeat and come help me.”
He stood up with the same exaggerated movements and joined me on the floor.
“What is all of this?”
“Stuff my father had in his briefcase. Notes and scribbles, mostly.”
Hallmarks of a cluttered mind. He’d be seized by a whirlwind of ideas and jot them down on whatever was close. Paper, napkins, clothes, and walls, even skin. They were a puzzle of unknown size and shape with an unspecified number of pieces, none of which included thirty-three letters or numbers that would open the computer.
“I recognize some of this,” I said, tapping a pile. “He was working on upgrades for the caravan exhibits. This one’s the Constrictus.”
Security specs. Attack commands. He worked on his most secret projects where they couldn’t be seen or found, even by family.
“This one is all details about Nye’s hands.”
Unfinished and drawn freehand, but the final blueprints would have allowed Nye to maintain them without my father or me.
Jermay dug through the piles, settling on some photos.
“Hey! Nagendra with no ink. He actually had hair!”
He picked up one of the snapshots I’d discarded. Half an hour earlier, I’d obsessed over it myself. Young Nagendra and my father along with two other men, all standing in an open field with a large building in the background. Some kind of estate or maybe a university.
“Who’s this with them?” Jermay asked.
“I don’t know. There’s all this stuff, but most of it’s not labeled. This folder is filled with ideas for fixing the traveling coat that took me to Nye’s Center.” Something it might be worth seein
g if Klok could duplicate. A reliable transportation device would be handy. “This one’s nothing but names, but they aren’t random. Do you see?”
I pointed to one of the names.
“Winnie?” Jermay asked.
“It took me a while to crack the pattern, but these are refugees, all grouped by age and the location they were taken from. There are seventeen in her group.”
All girls who were inside Arcineaux’s Center when she escaped. All part of the hundreds my father protected while my sisters and I stayed in the Commission’s crosshairs.
“Could this be Magnus’s partner?” Jermay held up another snapshot. This one showed my father and a man I assumed was Baba because of his size and the turban. A chubby red-faced man with a grin was off to the side, nearly out of frame. “The same guy’s in a lot of these shots. So’s this building. Maybe he’s a professor.”
“Even if it is Cyril, he could have retired years ago. We don’t even have a last name.”
“But someone there might recognize him. Have you had any luck with the computer? Surely there’s something in there.”
“I’ve only got two shots left at the password,” I said.
“That’s okay. You’ll figure it out.”
There was absolutely nothing wrong with what Jermay said or the way he said it. I knew he wasn’t making fun of me, but those last four words triggered something. I wiped my eye in an attempt to stifle the tears trying to collect there. They rushed to fill the other one. I couldn’t head them off.
It all hit. Everything. The full force of losing Evie and seeing Anise’s body broken on a dirty reed mat because we couldn’t get her the help she needed. Birdie’s frown when I sent her away. All the fear . . .
