Rosa’s question hung in the air between them. She hadn’t sat down. She hadn’t moved from the spot where she’d stopped after he pulled her out of room fourteen.
“Holograms,” he blurted.
Rosa’s mouth grinded. “You think I’m stupid.”
“No, I just think you saw something beyond your intelligence.”
"AKA stupid, in a political way!"
"Rosa, forget about it."
“I saw four gray things floating around a ball of light.” She said it fast, the words launching, her accent thickening. “I been cleaning this motel three years. I 've seen things you wouldn’t believe. Lights in the parking lot at all hours of the night. Guests that check in and don’t check out, not the normal way. Mr. Gable never said anything, but I knew. I always knew.” She stopped, her breathing gone shallow. “So don’t tell me holograms.”
Chester’s hand moved toward the counter drawer. The neural dampener was in there, tucked behind the extra key rings and the stapler he hadn’t touched yet. He’d checked its charge that morning, before dawn, sitting alone in the office with the silence pressing in. A single application. It would erase the last twelve hours. Rosa would wake up on the floor with a headache and a blank space where the morning had been. She’d go home. She’d come back tomorrow. She’d never know.
Unless it killed her. The dampener was calibrated for his species. Humans ran hotter, their neural pathways branching in patterns the device hadn’t been designed for. The manual, which he’d read since Mr. Gable left, listed survival rates for human subjects at fifty-two percent.
His fingers found the drawer handle.
Rosa saw the movement. Her whole body went still, the way a rabbit stills when something moves in the brush. She didn’t back away. She held her ground, and her voice came out low and steady in a way it hadn’t been before.
“My mother disappeared five years ago in Mexico. She was visiting my tía in Ciudad Juárez. The cartel took her. The police did nothing. The consulate, nothing. Everyone, nothing.” She swallowed. “I been alone since then. I got nobody. And I been cleaning this motel, keeping my mouth shut about every weird thing I ever saw, because I need this job and no one else will hire me with my criminal record. But you." She pointed at him, her hand trembling. “You’re not from here. I don’t know where you’re from, it’s not anywhere I ever heard of. And if you got connections, if you got people who can do things, I need you to help me find her.”
Chester’s hand stopped on the drawer pull.
“Please.” The word cracked in her throat. “I’m asking you, no I’m begging you. Help me.”
The office was still. He didn’t open the drawer.
Rosa was still pointing at him. Her arm dropped to her side. She looked exhausted, the way people look when they’ve been carrying the weight of the world.
The paper ledger flickered.
Chester turned. The guest log replaced by a wash of static, and then the static morphed into a face. Or something like a face. The High Arbiter’s features were smooth and gray, the eyes set wide, the mouth a thin line that didn’t move when the voice came through.
“Chester Chive.”
Rosa took a step back. Her hip bumped the doorframe.
“We have monitored the situation,” the High Arbiter said. “The human has witnessed unsanctioned contact. Protocol dictates memory removal of the witness.” The wide eyes shifted, and Chester understood that the Arbiter was looking at Rosa, that somewhere across an impossible distance, the tribunal was watching this motel office, this woman, this moment. “However, we have reviewed her petition. The disappearance of her parent. The failure of her planet’s authorities. The duration of her isolation.”
“Five years,” Chester said.
“Five years, three months, and eleven days,” the High Arbiter corrected. “We are aware and have a proposal.”
Rosa made a sound; something caught between a gasp and a sob. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
“The tribunal offers a revision to your sentence,” the High Arbiter continued. “You will assist the human in locating her missing parent. You will do so without revealing your origin, your species, or the nature of this facility. You will use only the resources and identity provided to you. If you succeed, your term on Earth will be reduced by twelve years. If you fail, or if you violate the terms of concealment, the original sentence stands, and the witness will be dealt with according to protocol.”
The ledger flickered again. The face began to fade.
“Do you accept the revision?”
Chester looked at Rosa. She was still pressed against the doorframe, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wild and wide. She didn’t understand what she’d just heard, not fully, but she understood enough. She understood that someone had listened. That after five years of nothing, something had answered.
He thought about the neural dampener in the drawer. He thought about the fifty-two percent. He thought about the twenty-five years stretching out ahead of him, the gravel parking lot, the faded turquoise paint, the rooms full of guests who weren’t guests.
“I accept,” he said.
The screen went dark. The guest log reappeared, the names in seven languages, the dates, the room numbers. Nothing to show that the transmission had ever happened.
Rosa lowered her hand. Her voice came out in a whisper. “What was that? Who was that?”
“That was someone who can help,” he said. “I’m going to find your mother.”
Rosa stared at him. The morning light caught the small mole in the center of her forehead, the gray starting to show at her temples. She looked like a woman who had stopped hoping a long time ago and didn’t know what to do with the thing that was rising in her chest.
“How?” she said. “How are you going to find her? The police couldn’t. The FBI couldn’t. Nobody could.”
“I’m unlike anything you have known.”
He said it simply, and something in the way he said it made her stop asking. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, straightened up and looked at him with a spark of hope.
“What do you need from me?” she said.
“Everything you have. Names, dates, places. Anything the authorities gave you. Anything they didn’t.”
She nodded. Her breathing was still uneven, but her hands had stopped trembling. “I got a file at home. Newspaper clippings. The police report. It’s not much.”
“Bring it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” She said the word like she was testing it, making sure it was real. “Okay. Tomorrow.”
She turned to leave, then stopped in the doorway. The vacuum cleaner was still parked against the wall where she’d left it, the cord coiled neatly, the red bag half full of dust from rooms that held more than dust.
“Chester,” she said, and it was the first time she’d used his name. “That thing on the screen. It knew about my mother. It knew exactly how long.”
“Yes.”
“Is it going to help? Really help?”
He didn’t answer right away. Through the office window he could see the parking lot, the gravel pale in the morning sun, the sign that read CRASH INN with the N slightly crooked. Somewhere in room fourteen, four gray-green figures were hovering around a sphere of milk-glass light, and somewhere much farther away, a tribunal of beings who had sentenced him to a quarter century of exile was watching.
“I think so,” he said.
Rosa looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded once, picked up the vacuum cleaner, and walked out into the sun.
Tomorrow was a brand-new day.