“For what we’re paying I would have expected more,” the man says. “And the staff here does not seem to be very responsive.”
“Oh, it’s quaint,” says the woman.
“This is what happens when you let the government run things,” he says. “Do you know how much this is costing me?”
“I know, honey. But it’s time travel. It’s not like we’re going to be late.”
She says it like she wants him to laugh, but he doesn’t. “And the menu. The reviews are good but the food looks a little too…” He glances in my direction. “You know.”
“Just say ‘ethnic,’?” I tell him. “That way you get to maintain a fa?ade of decorum.”
“Excuse me?” he asks. Less at what I said, and more that someone of my station would address him. The wife turns away from me, beet red, not wanting anything to do with our exchange. At this point I bail and head for the stairs. I don’t want to be trapped in a confined space with these people, even if it’s just for a few moments. The way things are going, the elevator would get stuck.
As I’m walking away I hear her comforting him with the kind of tone you would use for a disappointed toddler. “I’m sure they’ll make you just a regular steak, sweetheart.”
* * *
—
The fifth-floor hallway is empty. I trudge across the blue carpet toward my room at the end, but stop halfway. Feel a little twinge outside room 526. Kind of like when I’m slipping, but different.
Instead of a bolt of lightning, it’s a dull thrum. A toothache in my brain.
The door to the room is cracked, so I give it a little knock. There’s a shuffling sound from inside and Tierra opens the door, black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, carefully put together in her gray maid’s uniform. She looks me up and down, confused.
Then I get confused, because when I look past her, in the empty space between the doorjamb and her flank, I see someone lying in the bed.
Why is she cleaning the room with someone still in there?
Then I notice the trail of crimson blood spilling down the white sheet.
“Is everything okay?” Tierra asks.
Blood. Definitely blood. And Tierra is standing there like her biggest concern is that I’m distracting her from whatever she’s listening to on the buds crammed in her ears.
“Everything okay with you?” I ask.
She looks around and shrugs, eyes sliding right off the body, then turns back to the room, wiping down the dresser with a rag. She leaves the door open, so I step in after her, navigating around her pushcart of cleaning supplies.
Yeah. There is a dead body in the bed.
And it’s the guy. The leather daddy from the lobby.
“Can I help you?” Tierra asks, getting annoyed.
It takes me a second. “Guest says they lost an earring in here. Have you seen it?”
She knows I’m not accusing her, but still she gets a little steamy, her Jamaican accent coming on stronger. “I found a phone charger in 470. And a wallet in 312, but I took that right down to the front desk.”
“Okay.” I pretend to poke around, like maybe she overlooked it, which annoys her too, but it allows me to get closer to the body.
The image is hard to process. The bed is clearly made and the guy is sprawled out on top of the sheets, staring at the ceiling, blood having seeped from a dark gash in his neck. But it’s a bright, crimson red, a fresh kill, so it should still be oozing.
This must be a slip. I’m seeing a future moment. He’s probably still in the hotel.
Which raises a fun ethical question. The rules of time travel are rooted in the idea that we cannot and should not interfere with anything that’s already happened, lest we mess with the timestream, which could cause ripples and fluctuations that would be dangerous to the fabric of reality. But there’s no rule for interfering with something that hasn’t happened yet. In part because we haven’t cracked future travel, at least not beyond the occasional semischizophrenic mind trip. And according to the block model, any change I make to the future is one I’ve already made anyway, right?
Which raises a lot of disconcerting questions about free will and determination, but I’ll leave those to the guys wearing leather patches on their elbows. I’m just here for a good time.
And I may be a miserable bitch, but I’m not going to do nothing.
“I’m about finished in here,” Tierra says. “If I find the earring I’ll bring it down.”
“Great,” I tell her. “Thank you.”
I leave and make my way down the hallway to my room, and when we’re out of earshot I ask Ruby, “Where’s the guy? The one I asked you to follow.”
“Still searching.”
“You don’t have eyes on him?”
“There…appears to be some kind of interference.”
“Find him, now. If he goes near an elevator or stairwell to this wing, lock him out.”
“Why the sudden interest?”
“Do what I told you to.”
Baby dinosaurs and a soon-to-be-dead body and grounded flights and the summit. A recipe like that usually calls for the addition of tequila, so it bums me out that I don’t drink anymore.
I need a million more gallons of coffee. I need another Retronim.
I’m a little on edge when I step into 508, so I survey my room, just to be sure it’s the way I left it. I usually take stock before I leave in the morning—a good mental exercise to keep me situated—and find everything as I left it.
There’s a fresh pile of towels and toiletries stacked just inside the door, thanks to Tierra. The towel I used after I showered is still hanging from the door. My toothbrush is lying across the drinking glass sitting on the edge of the sink. The bed is unmade, because what is the point in making a bed if you’re just going to get into it again? The shades are drawn and the small armchair in the corner is sitting on the hem of the curtains, so they don’t accidentally get undrawn. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner is roughly the same size, my favorite red hoodie still in a crumple at the top of it. Stuck in the frame of the bathroom mirror is the worn, weathered postcard showing the Georges Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
And like I do every time I enter the room, I cross over and touch it. Just to remind myself it’s there, and to ask myself the question I still don’t have the answer to.
What are all those people crowded on the bank of the water looking at?
Ruby asks, “What did you see?”
I jump a little. The damn thing is so quiet it’s easy to forget it’s there. I take the fresh bottle of pills out of my pocket and set it on the corner of the sink. “Nothing.”
It knows I’m lying. It can track my pulse, intonation, phrasing. Every single indicator it took me a lifetime to learn so I could tell a truth from a lie, it has built into an algorithm.
Not that it matters. One of Ruby’s jobs, which I didn’t mention to Nik, was to report back to TEA Medical if I reached the second stage of being Unstuck. But when I was upgrading the voice, I managed to make it so it won’t tell anyone anything I didn’t give prior approval for.
In the process, somehow, I made it lazy and sometimes annoying.