“Is something wrong with the clock?” Nik asks.
The words jerk me out of a trance. There’s a crowd of people standing around us, transfixed, all staring at the stuttering hands. The answer is, yes, something is wrong. That is very much not a normal thing. But I can’t get the words out.
Allyn glances at his phone. “No reports of radiation spikes at Einstein.”
“Probably just broken, like half the shit around here,” Reg says.
I step away and head to the elevator bank of Atwood. This is getting weird, and I want to see if the body is still in 526, or if anything about it has changed. I can’t think of anything else to do right now and I don’t want to be in the lobby. Ruby floats behind me. “Stay here,” I tell it. “Monitor things.”
“Where are you going?”
“Bathroom.”
“You just went to the bathroom.”
“Do you need to track how often I use the bathroom?”
“For health reasons, yes.”
I put up a finger. “That’s gross. Now, stay.” It floats there silently and I keep walking. When I reach the bank I hear a throat clear behind me. It’s Brandon, a look on his face like he just walked in on his parents engaged in light bondage.
“That’s an atomic clock,” he says.
“Do you want a medal?” I ask.
He holds his hands up, turning them, like he’s cradling what he wants to say, presenting it carefully. “Atomic clocks are regulated by the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation of the quantum transition of atoms.”
“I’m impressed you know so many big words, but also, no shit.”
Brandon steps closer. “So you know these clocks are insanely accurate. Like, with a quartz clock, the crystals can vary slightly in their frequency, because of temperature or manufacturing”—he holds up a finger—“but every single cesium atom in the entire universe resonates at the exact same frequency. If the frequency is changing that drastically, something is doing it. We know flights are grounded. Why do flights at an airport get grounded?”
He’s right. Whatever Allyn’s reports are telling him, the odds that timeline radiation isn’t to blame here are roughly equal to me getting through the day without punching someone in the face. It’s going to happen.
“There’s a storm coming,” I say. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because all anyone cares about right now is this meeting. They’re all so focused on the messaging and on getting what they want, they’re ignoring the obvious. It’s like a mini-Chernobyl.”
I wasn’t expecting this deep a conversation with our resident stoner porter, and it must show, because he gives a shy half-smile and says, “I know I may not seem like the best resource, but I do have a degree in particle physics.”
“And you’re working here?”
He shrugs. “The market sucks and entry-level jobs pay shit. Between this and my side hustle I make better money.”
“Fair enough,” I tell him, pressing the button for the elevator, which lights up blue under my fingertip. “Get back to work. I have to check something.”
As I’m about to step inside, Ruby buzzes me on my watch. “I hope you’re done because we could use you over here.”
* * *
—
And the lobby is back to being absolute lunacy.
It’s crowded with a large group of men in flowing tan robes and red-and-white checked shemaghs, accompanied by burly men in expensive suits. I catch snippets of conversations in Arabic. It takes me a minute to find Eshe, who is silently standing by the concierge desk, hands clasped in front of her. She’s listening to Grayson and Senator Drucker. Cameo and Reg are there too, and they both look like they wish they could climb onto a rocket and blast themselves into the sun.
Ruby appears next to me.
“There aren’t enough superluxury rooms to go around,” it says. “The prince’s party was checked in and Vince Teller was locked out and downgraded.”
“How did that happen?”
“Simple human error. But there also seem to be some anomalies within our system at the moment.”
“Is that why you can’t seem to accomplish a single thing I ask you?”
“January, this is serious.”
There are voices on the rise across the way from us and I point toward the ruckus. “That’s serious. But we’ll come back to this once I get it settled.”
I spot Grayson’s dumb haircut peeking above the scrum. “…unacceptable,” he’s saying to Reg and Cameo. “You can’t set aside a superluxury room for…” He looks at MKS’s entourage, and seems to have a couple of words in mind to describe them. Then he looks at Eshe standing so close, and cools. “You can’t set aside that kind of room for staff and then leave my boss in an inferior room.”
“Surely there must be some kind of compromise we can make here,” Drucker says, her voice with that little bit of gravel that comes from a lifetime of smoking. Her tone tells me her sense of compromise is: put Teller in the room he wants.
“Does it have a bed?” I ask, walking into the conversation. “What difference does it make?”
“This isn’t something you need to have an opinion on,” Grayson says, not hiding the eye roll that comes with hearing my voice.
“I don’t give a damn what you think and frankly I’m a bit exhausted by you,” I tell him, the words gushing out of me like water broken free from a dam. “You and your boss should stop being such crybabies about this and…”
“January,” Reg says.
“What?”
“This is Senator Drucker.” Like, cool it, sis, not around the fuzz.
Drucker smiles, a little too smartly for my taste. Like her presence is going to impress me so much that I will suddenly toe the line. I give her a big smile back and ask, “Cool. Do you have a problem with your room, too?”
Drucker nods, deciding everything she needs to know about me in that moment. Reg presses his hand into his face. Cameo betrays a hint of a smile, and seems to want to give me a high five. This is why I tend to like Cameo.
“Senator, this is January Cole, our head of security,” Reg says. “She’ll be point for the conference.”
Drucker does not offer her hand. “Very nice to make your acquaintance. I assume you’re already monitoring all ingoing and outgoing calls and texts from staff? It doesn’t help us if someone tips the press off to this.”
“I am not,” I tell her. “And I have no intention to. I like to think in terms of reasonable requests and unreasonable requests. Metal detectors and extra staffing? Sure. A full-throttle reenactment of 1984? Not so much.”
Allyn appears. His deepest fear is written all over his face: I’m talking to someone important without a chaperone. “Senator Drucker,” he says, “I see you met January…”
“Yes, she was just telling me that she’s not monitoring staff communication, which I believe we discussed, what, three weeks ago?”