Nobody answered Mara’s voice at the door.
It tried again, quieter.
“I’m sorry to wake you.”
Mara had said that last week to a guest whose car alarm would not stop. The same little hesitation after sorry. The same effort to sound pleasant when she was tired.
She put the register flat on the counter.
“Don’t talk to it.”
Gideon held the flashlight against the window, so anyone outside would see the beam instead of their faces. Luis drew June farther back.
Tessa bent over the motel plan.
“Rooms need to be intact. What counts as intact?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we’re going to look.”
She took the key rack from Mara, leaving her the ring for Two.
The timer showed thirteen minutes and change.
Mara called into the ground-floor service passage. “Sofia? It’s Mara. Bring Emmett through to the office. Stay away from the outside door.”
The passage linked the two nearest rooms to the laundry. Its inconvenient doors had saved guests a walk through the rain for years. Mara called again, adding the directions.
“Do you mean the power’s out everywhere?” Sofia shouted from beside Room Two.
“Yes.”
“Something’s at our window.”
Luis was already at the service door.
“Don’t open anything,” he said. “I’m coming through.”
“They’re in Two,” Mara told him.
He disappeared through the interior service passage that linked the nearest ground-floor rooms. The passage was not well lit even when the power worked. Tonight it was a strip of black between the drinks machine and the laundry door.
The motel had been built in pieces by people who disliked paying for architects. For the first time, Mara was grateful for every inconvenient connecting door.
Tessa went up the staff stair with Gideon’s spare flashlight.
Mara stayed with June.
“Will you keep holding this?” she asked, offering the towel’s dry end.
June took it as seriously as a job.
Mara went behind the desk. The room-status board hung above the dead computer. Four rooms already wore grey strokes for last week’s water damage. Three more had red maintenance notes. Room Eleven, where Tessa had been staying, had a warped door she had meant to plane today.
One, Two, Seven, Eight. Those were the rooms Mara could confidently rent before tonight.
She counted their beds. Then she counted people.
June could share her bed. Luis would need the spare folding mattress.
The service door opened. Luis came through with Sofia Voss holding Emmett against her hip, though he was too big to be carried easily. Their faces shone with tears or rain; Mara could not tell which.
Behind them came Ruth and Dennis Kline, both wearing shoes and coats over their pajamas. Ruth carried a canvas medicine bag. Dennis had brought a walking stick and, incongruously, the motel’s plastic ice bucket.
“All our things are in One,” Ruth said.
“We’ll get them.”
“My tablets.”
“You’re holding them.” Luis touched the canvas strap, not her hand.
Ruth looked down. Her face crumpled for a moment, then tightened.
“Oh.”
Mara had heard that sound at the desk before, from people who had left home for funerals and could no longer remember which pockets held anything.
Omar Bell followed them with a split lip and no shoes. He had left his assigned room when something struck the loose frame and cracked it from corner to corner. He wanted to know if an earthquake had hit Bellweather. Mara said she did not know.
That answer was beginning to feel like the only honest thing she had.
From the stairs, Tessa called, “Seven and Eight shut properly. No gaps.”
Nia Park appeared behind her, gripping a suitcase handle with both hands. She was the young woman who had checked in before nine and asked whether the buses ran on Sundays. Now she dragged the case down one step at a time because she would not release it long enough for Tessa to carry it.
The sound grated on Mara’s nerves. She made herself leave it alone.
Carl Dobb came last, through the service passage, wearing a leather jacket over a polo shirt. The jacket bulged on one side. He looked at the child, the wet floor, the register.
“What’s going on?”
Outside, Mara’s borrowed voice said, “I can pay.”
Carl stopped asking.
The timer had nine minutes left.
“The office is protected,” Mara said. “For nine more minutes. I think I can protect four rooms after that. We have to agree to it.”
“Agree to what?” Dennis asked.
She looked at Luis, wanting him to say it for her.
He did not. “Tell us what you know.”
“It stopped something at the door when I accepted June. The book says rooms need sound doors and charge. It hasn’t said food is coming or anyone’s getting rescued. I can’t promise that.”
Gideon turned toward the glass. “They just need to stay inside.”
“Inside the right places,” Tessa said.
Mara lifted the register. A recessed brass strip in its spine held twelve tiny glass windows. Eleven still had light behind them. She touched one; the paper showed charge beneath her fingertip, but offered no explanation of where it had come from.
It was enough for now that she could count it.
“Names,” she said. “What you need tonight. Anything dangerous you know you’re bringing in. You agree not to hurt people deliberately. Then we put down a room.”
Ruth pulled a little plastic case from her bag. “I have needles. For my insulin.”
“That counts as care,” Luis said. “You can still take your medicine.”
Mara nodded, grateful. “Yes. You can.”
“And I’m not leaving Dennis.”
“You won’t have to.”
Sofia was staring at June’s feet. Emmett had stopped crying, though he kept pulling wet breaths into himself.
“One has two double beds,” Mara said. “Would you share with the Klines?”
Sofia looked at Ruth. Ruth looked at Emmett.
“Of course,” Ruth said.
They used the service passage. Mara carried the register and kept June’s hand in hers. Gideon walked behind them, shining the beam past their shoulders. She could smell the damp lint in the laundry. An ordinary smell, attached to an ordinary problem she could not bear to think about yet.
At One, Tessa checked the latch and ran a finger around the frame. Mara entered four names. Ruth said she needed her medicine kept cool and a bed beside Dennis. Mara could provide the bed; the refrigerator was not running, and she said so.
“A bed, then,” Ruth said. “We’ll work on the other thing.”
Sofia asked for Emmett to stay with her. Emmett said he wanted the thing at their window to go away.
“We can make this door keep it out,” Mara told him. “That’s what we’re trying.”
She accepted them into One.
A fine brass-colored thread appeared along the sill. One of the register’s glass windows went dark.
Something hit the outside window.
Sofia grabbed Emmett. Dennis made a sound Mara had never heard an elderly man make, a high, angry breath. The thread held. Beyond the curtain, a hand-shaped shadow flattened against the pane and slid downward.
Ruth reached past Mara and closed the curtain completely.
“Thank you,” she said, in the tone she might have used for an extra pillow.
Mara almost cried.
She did not have time.
Room Two would hold Gideon, Omar, and Carl if Carl agreed. One double bed and one sound folding cot; the second cot had a split canvas seat Mara had crossed off the inventory months ago.
Omar gave his name. He needed his brother contacted, but when Mara explained the phones, he changed it to a place to wait until daylight. He had a box cutter in his work bag. He put it on the dresser.
Gideon said his pocketknife stayed in his pocket unless someone wanted a look at it.
“I want you to say what it’s for,” Mara said.
“Opening things.”
“Not people.”
He looked at her for a long second. Then he nodded.
Mara had known Gideon for eighteen months. She knew how he folded towels and how he apologized to older women. She had never asked him a question he did not want to answer. The distinction made her stomach tighten.
Carl stayed in the service doorway.
“I paid for a private room.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not signing something that says you decide what I can have on me.”
“It says tell us what the danger is. Then we work it out.”
“No.”
His right hand rested against the jacket’s bulge.
Mara heard herself draw breath to argue. Tessa touched her elbow and pointed at the timer.
Four minutes.
“Two stays open to you if you change your mind,” Mara said. “The office won’t be safe much longer.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
She could not make his mouth say the words. She hated him for making that matter.
She accepted Gideon and Omar. Another glass window darkened.
In Eight, Nia said her need was somewhere she could put down her suitcase. Tessa needed sleep, though she added that she doubted she would get any. They agreed to share the two narrow beds. Mara accepted them, watching a third unit go out.
Nia caught Mara’s sleeve before she left.
“Does it know whether we’re telling the truth?”
Mara looked down at the page. The girl’s entry repeated what she had said and nothing more.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then somebody could lie.”
“Yes.”
Tessa set her flashlight on the dresser so its beam pointed at the ceiling. “So could they yesterday.”
Nia did not laugh. Neither did Mara.
The suitcase had finally come to rest beside a bed. Its small wheels still shivered from the journey downstairs and up again. Mara wanted to explain that a room could contain a mistake without making every other room useless. She did not know if that was true yet.
“Keep your own door shut,” she said. “Don’t open it because a voice says you know it. If you need us, shout. We’ll answer each other first.”
Tessa nodded. “And say what we’re carrying.”
Mara waited for Nia’s nod before moving on.
By the time they reached Seven, the timer had less than a minute.
Mara’s little room held a double bed and an armchair too narrow for sleeping. A spare folding mattress stood behind the wardrobe, waiting for the owner’s grandson’s next visit. Luis hauled it down and laid it beside the wall, clear of the door.
“Luis Ortega,” he said. “I need somewhere to keep an eye on anyone who needs care. I have scissors, needles, medicines. I won’t use any of them without telling you.”
June stood at the bed’s foot. “I still want you to stay,” she told Mara.
“I am.”
The register left a space beside her name. Steward, it said, but did not fill the room for her.
“Mara Vale,” she said. Her voice nearly broke on her own name. “I need a place to sit down. And I don’t know how to do this.”
She pressed her fingers against the page before she could take that back.
She accepted all three into Seven.
The fourth light darkened. Seven remained.
Downstairs, the office gave a low click.
The little square on the map faded. The four room squares stayed bright.
Mara held her breath until it hurt.
Nothing came through Seven’s door.
“Eleven people,” Luis said. He had been counting with her. “Carl’s still downstairs.”
“I know.”
June sat on the bed, feet tucked beneath the towel. She watched Mara, but did not ask her to stay again.
Mara gave Luis the flashlight and stepped onto the landing.
The office below was dark. She could make out Carl at the window by the pale rectangle of his phone. Outside, the thing wearing her voice had stopped talking.
It put something against the glass.
Mara heard nails drag down the pane. Four lines. Then four more, lower.
Carl backed away from the window. His heel caught the rubber mat, and he stumbled against the counter.
“Mara?”
She stayed just inside Seven’s open doorway, the register against her chest.
“I’m here.”
The window bowed inward. Only a fraction. Enough to make the reflected phone light bend.
Carl looked up at her. All the grievance had gone out of his face.
“I’ll tell you,” he said.