Eli finds herself skimming across the city in a late-night cab. Her feet carry her into a hotel, through a lobby filled with hideous armchairs and Christmas music played on a grand piano. Crystal lamp shades and chandeliers cast yellow light, making the whole place look stained. Eli double-checks the room number on her phone as she rides the elevator up. When she knocks, Zara answers.
And then it rushes Eli all at once.
Zara could have been in danger. Zara is in danger. And Eli can’t do a damn thing about it.
Zara lets her in, crosses the room on timid feet, and curls up on a leather couch. Eli walks slowly through the suite. There’s a monstrous TV, a minibar, a king bed looming in the background. Zara must have spent a fortune.
Eli told her to take a cab to her apartment, but Zara didn’t want to be anywhere that people from the Aurelia could find them.
Zara is giving off porcupine vibes, so Eli sits down one cushion away. “It had to be Kestrel.”
“Kestrel,” Zara echoes.
“There’s no other explanation. Right?”
Zara looks over, but not really at her. “Someone could have broken in.”
“Was the lock forced?” Eli asks. “Was the door kicked in? Was the window over the fire escape broken?” God, she wants to help. She wants to be right. She wants this to be over so they can get to the real business of being in love with each other.
Zara shakes her head. “Nothing like that.”
“Look, we know Kestrel isn’t trustworthy.” She ticks the evidence off on her fingers. “Screaming at nobody? Throwing glass at people’s faces? Making up fake boyfriends?”
“She never said it was a boyfriend,” Zara says with a bristle that Eli cherishes. “Just that she had a secret date.”
“While I appreciate the open-mindedness, that still means she invented a significant other.”
Zara nods, but it’s a hollow motion, all the meaning scooped out. “Kestrel’s like this little girl who never grew up.”
“Wrecking that room doesn’t sound like a tantrum to you?”
“The words on the walls, I can’t think of a single reason she would write them,” Zara says. She looks at Eli and actually connects with her for a second. “Cosima told me something like that when I went in the other day. Stop asking questions and get out.”
Eli knows this is not the time, that she shouldn’t push, but what Zara is saying makes no sense. “You think an eighty-year-old woman stole a key and went uptown to re-create a scene from a horror movie.”
Zara shrugs.
She hands Eli her phone without even looking at it first. Eli has spent enough time watching Zara to know what she looks like when she’s being herself and when she’s being Echo. Right now — she’s nobody.
“What’s this?” Eli asks, nodding at the phone.
“I took pictures of the room,” Zara says. Eli opens the photo roll and the first thing that comes up is the bedroom at Kestrel’s. The warnings on the walls and the furniture and the floor — it’s way past creepy.
“Those dolls,” Eli says.
“Yeah.”
Eli turns toward Zara fast: she can’t hold this in. She has something to say. Something real. Her pants give a soft flannel swish as she hikes a leg up on the couch. That’s when Eli realizes she’s wearing pajamas. She didn’t even notice when she left the apartment — she just ran in the direction of Zara. No wonder she was getting those spiky looks in the lobby.
“I’ve seen them,” Eli says. “Those dolls. In prop storage.”
“So you think Kestrel stole them?” Zara asks. “Or . . . what if she’s dating Barrett?” Her words speed up to match Eli’s racing pulse. “If he’s Kestrel’s secret boyfriend, he would have keys to the apartment.” Zara grabs her phone back from Eli, and their fingers brush. Just like old times.
Zara scrolls through her pictures, all the way to the little dressing room right after Enna died. “Here,” Zara says, thrusting the phone into the space between them, which is getting smaller by the second. They push together, hip to hip, inspecting the handwriting on the walls of the dressing room. “It’s the same,” Zara says. “The handwriting is the same.”
“No,” Eli says. “The Hamlet quote here looks different. That was the real clue. Barrett was trying to bury it.”
“Shit,” Zara says.
“Hey.” Eli nudges Zara’s shoulder with her own. “You stole my line.”
Zara hasn’t let up her death grip on the phone. Her hands are about to explode the thing into tiny pieces. “But . . . why would Barrett kill Enna? Or Roscoe? It doesn’t make sense. There’s no motivation.”
“That’s a very actorly thing to be worried about right now.” Eli pictures that props bastard passing through the secret walkway. Pushing Roscoe. It’s not hard to believe, not at all. “We don’t need to figure out why he did it. The police can be in charge of that. We just need enough proof to get them to pay attention.” She thinks darkly of her first trip to the police station. “Believe me, that’s the difficult part.”
“We can show them the pictures of the handwriting,” Zara says.
“We need more. If we go storming into the precinct without enough evidence, they can’t arrest Barrett.”
Roscoe’s death has always been the wrong color, but it’s one thing to know that and another to be two breaths away from catching the person who killed him. Eli doesn’t know if she should be happy or terrified or just very, very tired.
“I have an idea,” Zara says, her voice pre-stubborn, like she knows Eli will fight whatever she’s about to say next. “Kestrel knows more of the story than we do. She can tell us what happened.”
Zara was right. Eli hates this idea. For one thing, she’s still not entirely convinced that Kestrel isn’t dangerous. She might have noodles for arms, but she’s not afraid to use them. “I’ll talk to her.”
“No,” Zara says. “She barely knows you. She’ll talk to me.” Zara looks over at Eli like it just fully registered that they’re in the same room. “Previews tomorrow. We should get some sleep.”
Eli nods down at her pajamas. “I came prepared.”
Zara smiles. If she wasn’t looking at Eli before, she’s making up for it now with some very direct staring.
Sleep would be good, Eli thinks. For both of them. But looking around the hotel room — two hotel rooms, really — Eli gets the feeling that they’re not going to take Zara’s very good advice.