Ten Thirty

"Who in this terminal signs Mr. Slate's reviews?" I asked.

Gwen Hutchins looked up from her desk in the terminal operations office. She was about fifty, with a headset around her neck and the tired face of a woman who had been fixing other people's messes since dawn. "I do," she said. "Why?"

"Because I'd like to talk to whoever reads them."

Behind her, a wall monitor glowed green. PRIORITY DESK, PIER 14. SLATE, D. 99.2. NINE MONTHS RUNNING. It was the first number all morning that I did not believe.

I laid it out plainly: the pass in the ice bucket, the old man in the general line with a voucher thirty years old and entirely genuine, nine gold wristbands on people with no folders. Then I asked to see the priority desk's log.

"The log is internal," Gwen said.

"Then may I see the drawer under the desk?"

Her pen stopped for one second. "Who told you about a drawer?"

I had made a mistake, and I knew it as soon as her face closed. "I'll be honest with you, ma'am," she said. "Mr. Slate has the best score at this pier. Passengers write in to thank him by name. You are the first person to tell me his desk is crooked, and you're the one he had escorted out an hour ago."

The door opened without a knock. Dorian filled it, smiling.

"Ice bucket lady," he said. "She's been working the general line, Gwen. Telling people my desk is for sale."

"That's not what I said."

"It's what people heard." He didn't look at me at all.

Gwen pulled a form from her tray and wrote on it with hard, fast strokes. "This is a written trespass warning. You have until ten-thirty to leave Pier Fourteen. After that, the pier police walk you out and you're cited."

There was a sentence in my mouth that would have ended the whole morning in the time it takes to say it. I put it back. If I said it now, that drawer would be emptied before I got within ten feet of it.

I took the form and pressed one hand flat against my ribs, where a steel chain lay hidden under my sweater. It was 9:52. At ten-thirty, two officers would be escorting me off the pier, and I still didn't have a single thing I could hold up to the light.