Turn Around, Ms. Marlowe

The concourse clock read 10:24. Sixteen minutes until the Limited reached the crossover.

Brill and a second officer walked us down the stairs and out onto the marble floor, and every head in the hall turned. The second officer had found Hector at the stairwell door and brought him along. Imani, Hector, Bridget and I walked in a line, a strange little parade.

Sedgwick stopped in front of Window Nine, where it had all begun, so that the queue could see. Two officers stood at his shoulders, and he waved Bridget back behind her glass, where she slid onto her stool without a word.

"This man was removed from my station forty minutes ago," he said, and his finger jabbed at my chest. "He broke in through a loading dock, he went through my office, and he has been spreading a story about a crossover that every inspector in this company signed off on. Officers, cuff him."

Forty phones rose. The teenager from the queue was filming again.

I didn't look at Sedgwick. I kept my eyes on the woman behind the glass.

"Turn around, Ms. Marlowe."

Bridget stared at me. "What?"

"Turn around. Look at the wall."

She hesitated. Then she turned.

The gold-framed portrait hung on the wall behind her, where it had always hung, a smiling man in a dark suit above a small brass plaque. She had walked past it every morning for two years. She had never looked.

I stepped up to the glass, so that my face and the one on the wall stood in the same line of sight.

The hair in the photograph was darker and the suit newer. The man in it was six years younger, and he was me. Same face, same crooked mouth.

Her hand went to her lips.

"No," Bridget whispered. "No, no."

Behind me, Imani said, "Oh."

Sedgwick's finger stayed in the air. His mouth had opened, and nothing came out of it.

"My name is Gideon Frost," I said. I didn't raise my voice. In that hall, I didn't have to. "I run Rider Services for the Greywater Rail Authority. I never signed Form 14."

A phone dropped somewhere behind me and hit the marble.

Bridget's face had gone white. She looked at the portrait, then at me, then at the shredder tray full of confetti, and I watched her understand exactly whose ticket she had fed into it.