When Andriy came to a news channel, they both yelped like children—the image was moving. They could see the face of a grim man at a desk. They could hear his voice, too. The usual cable-news trimmings—the chyrons, the ticker, the little clock in the corner—were nowhere to be found. It made the man look naked. On the desk next to him was a drugstore alarm clock, brown faux wood with red numbers.
“Emotional terrorism,” he was saying. He stopped and picked up his papers. He waited a few moments. “If you’re just joining us,” he said, “we have returned to live broadcast after almost three days of being off the air. It is December 27, 2016, and—” He checked his clock proudly. “It is 1:20 p.m. here in New York.”
Orla got up and crossed to the couch. She sank down next to Andriy, taking care not to jostle Marlow.
“The nation is in the midst of an unprecedented attack,” the man said. “On our power grid, our communications systems, and, as it’s now becoming clear, our personal privacy and security. Let’s review.” The man waited a beat, blinking. “Debra,” he said, when nothing happened, “do we not have that graphic?” He sighed and flipped up the top page on his pile. On it, someone had hand-drawn a timeline.
“Here,” he said, tapping the sketch. “Here’s what we know. In the late hours of December 24, hackers launched a multipronged attack on America, marked by the quote-unquote stoppage of time. These perpetrators were able to sabotage our power grid in such a way that they could tweak the electrical current that devices use to keep time.” He splayed out his fingers to count. “At the same time: they were hacking into the operations of major internet, cable, and phone service providers. They were infiltrating medical records systems, banks, and other large-scale keepers of personal information. They were disabling, or tampering with, GPS satellite communication. The assault was swift, comprehensive, and devastating. And now we seem to be in the midst of another phase of the sabotage. We’re getting dozens of reports about people finding their phones and other devices finally and mysteriously unlocked—only to learn that the hackers have leaked personal, and often humiliating, information about them. Leaking it to the people around them, or the people directly concerned by the matter. ‘Emotional terrorism’ is the term we’ve been—”
The man was interrupted by a distant ringtone: vaguely aquatic, like plinking rain. He looked up and past the camera. “Mine?” he said. He sounded afraid. He stood up.
A moment later, a woman in not enough makeup, her hair limp and stuck to her skull, slid into his seat. “I’m Dana Marshall,” she said. “I’ll be taking over for Bill. My husband just found out I lied about having breast cancer. So you can bet I’ll be with you all day.” She rolled around, collecting Bill’s papers. They had scattered when he pushed out of his chair.
Orla looked down at Marlow and found that the baby had awoken without making a sound. Her eyes were the widest Orla had seen them yet, and she locked them on Orla’s. They stared at each other, and Orla felt, though the clocks were back, time slipping away from her again.
Sounding over the voice coming from the TV: three hard knocks on the door.
Orla curled her body over Marlow. She looked at Andriy, who clicked off the television. He held a finger to his lips. Slowly, silently, he opened a drawer in the coffee table and took out a small switchblade. He went to the door. He leaned his eye to the peephole.
When he turned back to Orla, he was trembling with relief. He clutched his chest with one hand. “Jesus,” he said with a smile. “She is crazy, your friend.”
There was no time to explain, no time to cry out don’t. All Orla could think to do was sweep the baby into one arm and reach for the patio door with the other. She had to yank it three times, hard. When they got out onto the roof, she looked down and saw her shirt was soaked in blood. Her incision had burst.
She banged Andriy’s patio gate aside and ran across the roof, toward the door that led to the elevator. By the time she pulled the handle and felt it go nowhere—locked—Floss’s face was in the glass. She was behind her.
Orla turned around. “Get back,” she yelped. “Get away from us.”