Well, at least someone is gracious.
“Hell of a thing,” Osgood says, as the elevator door opens, but he makes no move to step on. Maybe he’s staying on this floor, or else he just feels like making conversation out here. Not the worst idea. It gives me an opportunity to poke him a little.
“So we know it wasn’t Eshe who tried to ace you, but someone wanted you to think it was,” I say. “What do you make of that?”
“You’re the detective,” he says.
“You seem unbothered by an attempt on your life.”
“Got myself a nice big glass of brandy upstairs, and that helped,” he says. “Certainly not my favorite way to spend the evening. But the thing about bullies is, if you run away when they push you, next time they just push you harder.”
“Still, it makes me wonder, what’s your play?”
“Hmm?” he asks, understanding the question but pretending he doesn’t.
“Why this place? What do you want it for?”
He gives me a little smile. He steps closer to me, like he wants to get out of earshot of the agents.
“Do you ever wonder if the world we’re living in is the right one?”
“The hell does that mean?” I ask.
He shrugs. “If you could be anyone, do anything, what would you be?”
“I like my job just fine.”
He smiles. “But you worked the stream, right? I imagine that’s a hell of a high. Travel all over time. Do you miss it?”
“Of course I miss it.”
“And what does the Time Enforcement Agency do, exactly?”
“It’s sort of in the name. And, shouldn’t you know that if you want to buy this place?”
“Humor me.”
“We prevent people from fucking up the past, which is mostly about stopping rich assholes from doing whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want.”
“Right,” he says, clapping his hands. “Time cop. So you’re saying that if you could be anyone, do anything, you’d still want to be a time cop? Why?”
Because…
I don’t have a great answer. But rather than flounder I tell him, “I’ve always liked to travel, and that’s the only way to hop around time and get paid for it. Plus I like telling people what to do. Or, more specifically, what they can’t do. I kind of get off on it.”
“And in all this running around and telling people what to do, how do you know that you haven’t already failed? Who’s to say that someone didn’t change things already?”
“The prevailing theory is that reality would implode.”
“That’s the theory, yes.”
God, I am tired of this. Everyone acting like it’s worth testing a theory where you get either super-rich, or super-dead. Russian roulette might give a similar high without screwing things up for everyone else.
“If you’re so worried about whether we do the job or not, why not just give your fortune to us?” I ask. “More resources, more agents?”
“Who watches the watchmen?” he asks.
“You, I guess.”
He smiles. “I’m sorry. I just like asking questions. Feels like I learn more that way.”
And with that, he turns to leave, the agents tailing along, raising their eyebrows like, we dunno, we’re just doing what we’re told.
Then Osgood stops. “Pity an old man with one last question.”
Sigh. “What?”
“If you could go anywhere in time, where would you go?”
I know the answer without having to think about it. The answer lives in my chest. It’s all I think about.
“I’d go hang out with Cleopatra,” I tell him. “I bet she’d be fun at a party.”
“I want to visit Atlantis,” he says, a twinkle in his eye.
Ah. There it is. The genial attitude and the obtuse questions are there to cover up that he is a nutball. Just another Atlantis truther.
“I believe it was wiped out in the Thera volcanic eruption,” he says. “Which happened sometime between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred b.c. That’s a lot of time to explore. On top of that, we’re still not entirely sure where it was, though I believe in the Strait of Gibraltar. I’m never going to find it if I have to keep calling for cab rides. It’d be nice to have the keys to the car.”
“And what if it ends up being a myth?”
“I have faith.”
“Faith enough to ignore someone trying to kill you in the bathroom?”
He gives a little huff-laugh. “You seem to have things under control.”
I’m not entirely sure about that. I wonder if his faith is misplaced.
But I don’t correct him either.
He gives me a little wave and heads down the hall, the agents following, to his modest room on the first floor.
Ruby floats closer to me. “Of course you know Plato was using Atlantis as a metaphor, and according to the original text, it wasn’t the utopia the currently accepted mythos makes it out to be…”
“Shut up.”
As I get on the elevator it happens again. A little flash on the edge of my vision. That way when you turn your head and you think you might have seen a figure walk by, but then you stop and realize, no, it’s just your brain playing tricks on you.
Then there’s that noise again.
Clack-clack-clack.
I’m tired. That’s all it is.
But the unease lingers, and when I get to my room, something feels wrong.
I stand there for long enough, on the patch of tile inside the door, before the carpet starts, that Ruby has to ask: “January?”
It snaps me from the spell, and I move into the room like the floor is the surface of a frozen lake that might crack if I step down too hard.
Nothing seems amiss. It looks the same as I left it. The towel I used after I showered is in a heap on the floor. My toothbrush is perched on the sink, next to the drinking glass. 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 curtain, so they don’t accidentally get undrawn. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner is roughly the same size, my favorite red hoodie poking out from the bottom.
But there’s something in the air, like someone was just here. A disturbance, or maybe an odor, but so faint I couldn’t tell you what it was: sweat or perfume or just an unfamiliar laundry detergent. Enough molecules in the air that I can detect them without discerning them.
“January?” Ruby asks again.
I search the room. Check my belongings. Look behind the bathroom door in case someone is wedged there, waiting. All this thought of ghosts is making me feel not alone. By the time I’m done it feels like, okay, maybe it’s just me being jumpy. Maybe it’s the way my brain is firing like an old wire. I know I said I would take it easy, but I take out the bottle of Retronim, place a tab on my tongue, and down it with a glass of water. Thirsty. How many was that today? That’s only my second, right?
“January?”
“Shut up and go charge,” I tell it.
“I’m worried about your current state of mind.”
“You should be,” I say, falling to a hard sit at the edge of the bed, letting the mattress and the tangle of sheets envelop me. One thing I will say about this place: the bedding is pretty rad. Focus on the positive.