My favorite part of the hotel has always been the office of Melody Fairbanks.
Fairbanks designed the Paradox, from the font of the logo to the dreadful carpet underfoot. And through the entirety of the construction, she maintained an office on the second floor, down a hallway and past the gift shop, near some restrooms that no one ever seems to use. It wasn’t behind a door—it was a drafting table and a desk out in the open, so she could be accessible. As the story goes.
She disappeared shortly after the hotel opened. No one knows why. Some think it’s because she considered it her greatest achievement, so she hung up her hat and left for some remote beach to live out her days. Others say she went nuts, that the weight of her career finally caught up with her.
A few people have said they’ve seen a woman who resembles her roaming the hallways at night. Which any other day I would call bullshit, but I see my dead girlfriend in the bathroom, so who am I to talk?
Regardless, the office remains, preserved in amber, like maybe she might come back and it’ll be ready for her. It sits on a platform now, tucked into a corner, and guests are allowed to wander around the space, to look at the hotel renderings on the drafting table, the paperwork on the desk, browse the books on the floating shelves along the wall. Flip through her notebook, the contents of which were used to write a book about her after she disappeared.
Some folks have tried to swipe souvenirs, so most things are bolted or glued down. Except the books on the shelves—design manuals and studies on physics and time travel classics. For some reason, no one ever seems to take the books. And while the spot is not exactly secluded, it’s usually a quiet place to sit. So hopefully, once I’m done with Smith, I can sit down for a quiet confab with Ruby.
Because I don’t like all this talk about anomalies and issues with the system. I know I’m giving it a lot to do, but it should be picking up on things faster. Even though Shou was checked in under an assumed name, it should have caught the forgery. Hell, it should have caught the dinosaurs the second they left his room.
But I wait to broach it, letting Ruby follow me up the ramp to the second floor, past the gift shop, which is now filled with people picking up food and supplies, like suddenly a little snow and a few delays and the world is ending. I take the final turn and the lights flicker again. I need to talk to facilities about this, and I consider paging Chris but then get distracted by a gap, like a missing tooth, in the row of books. Guess someone finally got brave.
Kolten is perusing the shelf, hands clasped behind his back, slowly contemplating the spines. He’s wearing an AC/DC T-shirt—that’s a hell of a deep cut—along with tight jeans and sandals. He looks less like he wants to buy this place and more like he wants to play hacky sack on the quad.
It’s easy enough to pick him out with the amount of time he’s spent on TV lately, serenely avoiding questions in congressional hearings about Axon’s data collection methods. But I’ve only ever seen him sitting at a table. Standing, he looks like a bird of prey. All long limbs and gawky gait. I wonder if he pulled the book off, but he’s not holding anything, and there’s not one sitting nearby.
He’s not alone either. He’s accompanied by a white dudebro in a checkered blazer who recently lost interest in running but gained interest in beer. His tucked-in shirt is straining against his gut, but he carries it well. He sees me and barrels over.
“You must be January,” he says, his diction so precise it feels practiced. “I’m Warwick Smith, COO of Axon.” Kolten hasn’t moved from where he was standing on the office platform, and even though it’s only a step, it feels like he’s looking down from above us. “I’ll leave the two of you to talk,” Warwick says, glancing between us.
Kolten descends from the platform, coming down to my level. As he gets closer I notice the mala beads on his left wrist, small little spheres of sandalwood. Buddhist, for concentrating on meditation and mantras.
Mena had a bracelet like that, though she never wore it. She got it as a gift. Turns out she thought the practice of meditation was cheapened by something that could be bought in a gift shop. So they lived on the doorknob of our room, on the inside, so she could touch it every morning on the way out the door.
I appreciated the effort she put in, placing it somewhere special.
Still, I got better at giving gifts after that.
Kolten looks at me like he knew I was coming. He puts his hands together in a prayer gesture and bows slightly. “Miss Cole,” he says. “Namaste.”
I choke back a laugh. He gestures toward the desk. Behind it is a roller chair—Melody’s—and in front of it is a wooden chair for guests. “Would you like to sit?” he asks.
Before I can tell him that, no, I am not sitting in the guest seat at my own hotel, he circles the desk, offering me the roller chair. And my feet are a little tired, so I go to the chair and put them up, kicking against the pen cup, which stays in place. I get myself comfortable and lean back, the chair creaking.
“So?” I ask.
He nods solemnly, then notices Ruby floating over my shoulder, and says, “Suitcase four-six-nine-two.”
Ruby comes to a soft landing on the desk and powers down, the constant hum of its innards going silent. A lump rises in my throat but I try to hide it from my face, though I’m sure I do a terrible job.
“What did you do?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Turned it off.”
“Why did you turn it off?”
“I don’t like being recorded.”
“Says the guy whose whole stock and trade is recording people’s entire lives,” I tell him. “I guess the better question is, how did you turn it off?”
He points at the silent drone. “I own the company that developed them. I have a back door. And for what it’s worth that command only works for my voice.” He laughs. “Wow, that is creepy, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I feel like I am setting a bad tone. Look, the reality is, the reason I wanted to see you is because I’d like to offer you a job.”
It takes me a minute to figure out how to respond to that. I settle on “This is weird.”
“I have a campus in San Francisco,” he says. “I’m not a huge fan of the man running security right now. He’s not…” He folds his hands again and looks up at the ceiling, like there’s an answer written on it. “Efficient. And I hear good things about you. I checked into your background. A celebrated TEA agent. That’s an elite agency.”
“Have you seen the jokers working at Einstein?” I ask.
“You were in the stream,” he says. “You busted more than a dozen major smuggling operations. And I know about the assassination attempt you thwarted.”