camera, and even though she meant the thought to be nasty, she found herself, suddenly, missing Floss so much that she almost sank to her knees. She wondered if Ellis had broken down and called Honey, if he’d felt doubt molding in his airtight analysis of Marlow and decided to take the deal after all. She pictured Honey in her pajamas, flapping around her gorgeous lobby—what did the driver mean, Marlow hadn’t shown up? Her mother and husband and famous acquaintance—they would all be thinking the same thing. Where could Marlow possibly be, besides where she’d been told to go?
Here. Here, cutting through choppy, silt-filled water, away from all of them and closer to the truth. Marlow had been taught that being watched put food on the table, that there wasn’t a better way to live. But she had seen, on the sidewalks of New York, all the happy nobodies—people whose days weren’t built around lengthening the trail of attention spans floating behind them. They were paunchy and muttering and somehow more alive, and they made Marlow feel sorry for Floss and Ellis, with their endless performing, and Honey, with her army of dark-hearted disciples. They might have had all the followers, but they were never finished chasing.
Marlow was done being looked at. Now she was doing the looking, and finally seeing things differently. She found, in the sunrise, all the colors the pills had kept from her for years: a shade of orange she loved. A yellow that reminded her of when it was her favorite. A pink that might have been fine after all. She was hearing something, too, in the space her device used to fill: a brand-new voice inside her head, telling her to keep going.
She leaned over the boat’s railing, into the spray, and listened to the voice. She was almost positive it sounded like herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Orla
New York, New York
2016
Orla followed her super, Manny, off the elevator, toward his place, 1A. “Most of the building is gone for Christmas,” he said. “So we’ve got enough space for anyone who doesn’t have a watch. I think it’s better we stick together, as a precaution. Seems like it might be the whole block.”
“And none of the clocks are working?” Orla said. “Yours say the same thing, too?”
Manny nodded. “If it plugs in, it’s fucked.”
She remembered her phone then, patting for it, and slid it out of her belly pocket. “But we can use—” she said, trailing off when she saw the screen. Her background—a photo of her and Floss from the year before—had been replaced by a strange, fuzzy graphic. The screen was filled with white, rounded-corner squares—a white padded wall, Orla realized, like the ones lining cells in mental institutions. There was no time, no date, no prompts. Just the white squares, keeping them locked out instead of in. “Look at this,” she said, and showed Manny.
He grimaced. “Yeah. They all look like that.” He opened the door. When they went in, Orla noticed he locked it behind them.
Manny’s kitchen gave her déjà vu. It was the same as hers had been her first two years in the building, before men came through and updated it: yellow light even worse than the hard white that came after, cabinets with faux-pine picture frame edges.
Orla took a few steps in. There were about a dozen of her neighbors in the apartment, huddled around the kitchen table, shifting to make room for each other on the burgundy sofa. Sunk into the center of the couch was the angry old woman who spent her days on the lobby’s leather bench, jabbering at the doormen. “Punks, or some sort of glitch,” she muttered now, to no one in particular. “Talk about an overreaction.”
Leaning against the green speckled counter was the fiftysomething man from the second floor, the one whose Boston terrier carried rolled newspapers in his mouth. “Exactly,” the man said. “I lived downtown breathing dead people for a year. So you’ll excuse me for thinking not knowing the time is not the end of the world.”
In the living room were the children from the fourth floor, a boy and a girl whose ages were indiscernible to Orla and whose bright toys were always splitting into pieces in the elevator. They were staring at the television—which, Orla saw, her pulse picking up, had the same white squares as her phone. The children’s mother twisted around to look at her. She was wearing the same candy-cane pajamas as her kids. “It’s been