He’s a little dumbstruck by that and doesn’t respond.
“I should go to Adrian Popa, but TEA resources are not really on the table for me at the moment,” I say. “Lucky for me, I know someone with a degree in particle physics or whatever. I just found something…weird. And I need help figuring out what it is.”
He nods and leans forward, and I explain things the best I can: that there was a device embedded in the wall that made everything freeze, from Ruby to my watch. He listens, nodding along, looking at the top of the desk, and when I’m done he sits back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling.
“That’s some wild shit,” he says.
“Let’s call it that, yeah.”
“It almost sounds like you stepped outside the timestream. Or, like, you were hidden from time? There’s a term for that. It’s called ‘time cloaking’…”
“Wait,” I say, putting my hand up.
The same tech they use for the Jabberwocky.
Brandon is eyeing me now, wondering what’s gotten me so turned around. And I feel like I should not tell him, considering how top secret it is, but at this point, I don’t even know if it matters, so I give him the rundown of how the Jabberwocky works. But I stress that Allyn said it could only hide data.
When I’m finished Brandon sits back in the chair and looks around and says, “Wish I could smoke in here.”
I raise my hand to him, and he pulls a vape pen out of his pocket. He takes a hit and exhales a huge plume of marijuana smoke scented with blackberries. He offers it my way but I wave it off.
“So,” he says, “yes, obviously, time cloaking as we understand it is not sophisticated enough to move physical objects outside of time.” He holds up the vape pen like a pointer, takes another hit, and exhales. “Simms was a once-in-a-generation genius. She invented fucking time travel. So what’s to say she didn’t invent some other stuff and just keep it to herself?”
It makes sense. I don’t know what Fairbanks’s deal was, but Simms was married, and if even Cameo, the monarch of gossip themselves, didn’t know they were together, then they did a damn good job of keeping their relationship on the DL. And what better way to do that than with a secret room outside of time that only they could access?
“Allyn used some kind of car analogy for me that didn’t really work,” I tell him. “I couldn’t even repeat it if I tried.”
“It’s sort of like an invisibility cloak, right?” Brandon waves his hands around like it’s supposed to mean something. “An invisibility cloak works, in theory, by bending light around it, so you see what’s behind it. Same thing here, except you’re bending time around events.” Brandon lurches forward and makes more shapes with his hands. It is not helpful, but he seems very intent on providing a visual component. “Imagine you’re sailing down a river. That’s the timestream, right? You’re constantly moving with it and on the banks of the river are the events that are happening. You see them as you go along. The gateway lets you get out and stand on the bank, between the moments. The river stops too. You can get back in at the same point, and then it starts moving again.”
I stare at the ceiling. Things are taking shape, slowly.
“Ghosts,” I say.
“What about them?” Brandon asks.
“The ghosts, the ones in the hotel. The presences. Could it be people moving around after passing through the gateway?”
Brandon clears his throat and smiles. “Could be, yeah. Someone moving between the seconds with all the time they need. And given your condition, it could be giving you some kind of extrasensory perception.”
“Ruby,” I say, and the drone hovers closer to my shoulder. “I assume you’ve been checking the hallway. Anything jumping out on video.”
“I already checked,” it says. “Nearly all the video we lost was focused on that door.”
“Then do this: I want you to run every incident we know about. Today with Teller, Kolten’s near-death, the elevator I pulled out of service. Around the time of the dinosaur attack, plus anything that syncs up with the hotel’s electricity going wonky. Then I want you to analyze the video in the rest of the hotel. See who is not accounted for. Or who seems to be moving in the wrong direction, toward Atwood.”
“That’ll take time,” it says.
“Then get started.”
I stand up, brush off my pants, and turn to Brandon. “You still have all your clearances, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
“Good,” I tell him. “Time to go break and enter.”
* * *
—
Allyn knows I’m not in the cell. He’s storming around the lobby, cutting through crowds, stopping to talk to people, his head on a swivel. Brandon and I stick to the shadows and alcoves. I try to keep things between me and Allyn’s line of sight, and am mostly successful, managing to make it around the circumference of the lobby without so much as a curious glance.
I pass near Teller, who is tucked in a dark corner, his eyes darting like the rest of the building is full of zombies and he’s a second from being found and devoured.
“Just get me someone…who cares,” he whisper-barks into his phone. “Oh, whatever, send his family a fruit basket, I just need someone here now…”
Asshole.
Still, sucks to know Grayson had a family.
I let Brandon get ahead of me and open Reg’s office. He steps inside and closes the door, but not all the way. I move a little more, get behind a large potted plant just as Allyn is turning his gaze toward me and—shit.
He looks in my general direction and pauses. Did he see me? Does he see Ruby? No, it’s hovering behind me. I peer through the gaps in the leaves, hoping Allyn doesn’t follow his nose on this, and just as I think he’s going to turn toward me, someone grabs his attention, and he’s off, heading toward the security office.
“He’s scanning the camera feeds for you,” Ruby says. “Since we’ve already been experiencing a great deal of interference I’m blocking them, and it should appear as though whoever infiltrated our system is still inside.”
“Good job.”
I wait for Allyn to close the door, and then scurry into Reg’s office, where Brandon is sitting at the computer, tapping away.
“Don’t know the password,” Brandon says.
“Perhaps I can be of some assistance,” Ruby says. It floats onto the desk, hovering over the large, uneven piles of paperwork on the surface, looking for a safe spot to land. Nothing to be gained by keeping tidy. I push everything to the floor and it perches next to the terminal. The screen turns red and shakes, and Ruby says, “This is interesting. The security features on this have been increased. Normally I’d have access to all the computers here, but I’m locked out.”
“Can you get around it?”
“It still requires a password, and three wrong guesses will wipe the drive. I can’t brute-force it, so I’ll need a little time to dig around the system.”
“How long?” I ask.
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“Don’t make me get my boot.”
“You know what’s funny?” Brandon asks.
“What’s that?” I respond.