My phone buzzed. I huffed. It was probably Orion sending another cold, professional reminder about the meeting for which I was now late.
Scooping up papers, I shoved them back into the portfolio without caring about order, grabbed my laptop, and finally made it to the elevator bank. But when I swiped my key card, the panel flashed red.
I tried again. Red.
“Come on,” I muttered, swiping a third time.
Red. Red. Red.
System error messages scrolled across the digital display—codes I didn’t understand. My hands started shaking.
The hallway was empty. Silent except for the distant hum of the casino floors below and my increasingly panicked breathing.
Maybe I’d held it wrong. I tried the card slower this time, carefully lining it up with the reader.
Red.
Had I damaged it somehow? Did I hold it too close to my phone? But it had worked fine last night when Orion walked me back. I tried again. And again. Each red flash made my chest tighter.
I couldn’t go anywhere, because without my key card allowing me access, I was stuck on this floor. Worse, I wouldn’t be able to get back into my room.
My phone buzzed. This time I looked.
Orion:5 minutes.
With shaking hands, I pulled up Ares’s contact number.
He answered on the first ring. “Tashi?”
“My key card isn’t working. I’m stuck and I’m late and I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Where are you?”
“Executive floor, by the elevators. I’ve tried like ten times, and it just keeps?—”
“Stay there. I’m coming.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the empty hallway clutching my portfolio and laptop, my gut roiling and my heart stuttering. I tried to talk myself down. The key card incident was probably nothing—maybe a demagnetized card or a system glitch. Hotels had electronic hiccups all the time.
Except that the error messages kept scrolling. And my hands kept shaking and my mouth went dry. And somewhere in the back of my brain a voice whispered that nothing about the past week had been normal, so why would this malfunction be?
Two minutes felt like twenty before Ares appeared from the stairwell.
“How long has it been doing this?” he asked, already examining the elevator panel.
“Since I got here. Maybe five minutes? I don’t know, I wasn’t?—”
He swiped his own key card. The panel flashed green immediately. The elevator doors whispered open. “Come on,” he said, his hand finding the small of my back. “We’ll take this one down.”
“But my card?—”
“We’ll deal with it after.” His jaw was tight. “You’re already late.”
We stepped into the elevator and descended in silence. Ares stared at the panel, his expression unreadable but his posture screaming tension.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
