“Have you taken care of the billing here, Philip? When I checked in, they still had it on my card.”

“It’s been taken care of.”

She didn’t believe him. “Do we have a deadline on this story yet?”

“No.” Rausch sucked his teeth, somewhere in a London she couldn’t be bothered imagining. “The launch has been rolled back. August.”

Hollis had yet to meet anyone from Node, or anyone else who was writing for them. A European version of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way. Belgian money, via Dublin, offices in London—or, if not offices, then at least this Philip. Who sounded to her as though he were seventeen. Seventeen and with his sense of humor surgically excised.

“Plenty of time,” she said, not certain what she meant, but thinking, however obliquely, of her bank balance.

“She’s waiting for you.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes and clamshelled her phone.

Could you, she wondered, be staying in this hotel and technically still be considered homeless? It felt like you could, she decided.

She lay there under a single white sheet, listening to the French girl’s robot bumping and clicking and reversing. It was programmed, she supposed, like one of those Japanese vacuum cleaners, to keep bumping until the job was done. Odile had said it would be collecting data with an onboard GPS unit; Hollis guessed it was.

She sat up, a very high thread count sliding to her thighs. Outside, wind found her windows from a new angle. They thrummed scarily. Any very pronounced weather, here, worried her. It got written up, she knew, in the next day’s papers, like some lesser species of earthquake. Fifteen minutes of rain and the lower reaches of the Beverly Center pancaked; house-sized boulders coasted majestically down hillsides, into busy intersections. She’d been here for that, once.