The Hotel Between

by Sean Easley

  “Need help?”

  “No.”

  Though as I start to pull the slacks on, I realize I might have jumped into the deep end. There are too many buttons on the fly, inside and out, and a strange clippy thing I’ve never seen before at the waist. And I have absolutely no idea how to work the suspenders.

  “What’s with these pants?” I ask.

  “You have to do it in stages.”

  I try a couple of different arrangements, but nothing feels quite right.

  “Sure you don’t need help?”

  “Nope.” Stupidest pair of pants, ever. Seriously, why would anyone need five different ways to secure the fly? I clip and button, button and snap, snap and clip, until finally I give up. “All right. How do you do this?”

  Nico instructs me on how to button my pants. I feel like a two-year-old. And it’s not over yet. The shirt has extra clip-thingies too, and a tie. The hat uses weird pins to hold it to my head. Even the socks are held up by these tight suspender-garter-thingies around my calves.

  “Feels like I’m getting dressed for the circus,” I say as he tugs the front of my shirt. “I thought valets just parked your car.”

  “Ugh. You Americans have ruined so many perfectly good words. A valet is a personal servant. It’s old-world custom in some countries. Many of the older Embassy guests are used to having things taken care of for them, so all staff must learn the procedures.”

  I’ve never worn something so stiff and restrictive. It feels like I’m made of wood.

  I look at myself in the mirror, remembering the picture of Mom and Dad all dressed up with the reflective elevator doors behind them. Dad wore the Hotel uniforms once. He could have stood right here, in clothes just like this. I bet they were never scared like I am. I wonder if they knew the answers to all the questions I have. What they’d think if they saw me standing here, filling Dad’s shoes.

  I poke my finger in one of the four horizontal loops of fabric where my breast pocket should be. They’re like the ones Nico pulled the pin out of at the hospital.

  “Don’t stretch out your pin-sleeves. They might rip.” Nico hands me a pair of black sneakers, just like his. “These are your Chucks. Guard them with your life.”

  I almost laugh, but the look he gives stops me. “Why not shiny shoes? Wouldn’t that be better?”

  Nico pushes the Chucks toward me. “We’re not exactly the most conventional hotel. Sometimes we have to do a lot of walking in strange places.” He taps the sole of his sneakers. “These are tailored to get you there and back, and they can be washed with the linens.”

  I pull the Chucks on. They’re way more comfortable than the formal shoes Oma makes me wear sometimes.

  “How does the Hotel get its guests, anyway?” I ask. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s kinda hard to explain.” He shrugs. “They say the Hotel ‘calls’ you. Like, through your dreams or something. It does all the work—tells the Business Office who to send brochures to, guides the doormen on which doors to bind, lets us bellmen hear the knocks of those it wants. You don’t choose it, it chooses you.”

  I watch his face, trying to decide if he’s telling me the truth. “Did it ‘call’ you?”

  He grins. “Those secrets aren’t mine to give.”

  I start to argue, but I realize that’s what happened to me with the dreams, and the door in the strip mall. Maybe the Hotel was calling me, too. But why would it do that, if I’m only here to find my dad? Besides, it wasn’t the Hotel that let me in; it was Nico, and Stripe.

  “Oh! Almost forgot.” Nico digs into his pocket and produces a coin—his coin, from before. “Keep it in your pocks.”

  I hold up the coin Agapios gave me. “I have my own. And Dad’s. I don’t need three.”

  “Mine is different,” he says, pressing his coin into my palm. “See, the brokers set up these vacations—best vacations ever—for people the Hotel invites. But if our guests left here remembering the magic that runs the Hotel, they’d drive themselves crazy searching for it. Or worse . . . they might find a different sort of magic. The Hotel coins let guests use the map-boards and pass through the doors, but they also bind all the memories those guests make so they don’t remember all the logistical details when they leave. Keeps things from getting messy, you know. They return their coin, and we keep those memories.”

  “That’s dumb. Why go on a vacation you can’t remember?”

  “It doesn’t take everything. Impressions of those memories still hang out in your subconscious. Guests relive their experiences in their dreams.”

  “Okay,” I say, clutching my necklace. “So how come I can see Dad’s memories if I didn’t experience them?”

  “A few reasons—because he’s family and family bindings are some of the strongest, because you’re wearing it, and because the hotel’s magic is releasing more of the coin’s bound memories to you the longer you’re here.” Nico points to his coin in my other hand. “Go ahead, put that one in your pock.”

  He’s got that mischievous look in his eye—one I know is sure to get me in trouble. But I obey anyway, sliding both his coin and my own into my left pants pocket. Or pock. Whatever.

  “My coin’s bond with me is stronger than the others.” He pats his pocket and pulls out two coins. “See? Mine always comes back to me.”

  I check my pocket to find both coins gone. He took them without even being near me. “How’d you do that?”

  “Modified it with a little magic we call ‘tailoring.’ ” He rolls the coins between his fingers. “Magic’s good for more than just doors. This coin does all the same things as the others, but it also creates a little space around it that I can reach into. It’ll always return to me when I call it.”

  “But . . . how do you keep getting the coin into my pocket?” I ask.

  “That’s just sleight of hand. You get pretty good at slipping things into people’s pocks when you’ve got something that’ll always come back. I’ve been working on a way to send it places, too, but no luck yet.”

  • • •

  Our first job is what Nico calls Breakfast Service.

  He leads me through dirty, underground back halls to an enormous kitchen with a wall of windows that look out on the Eiffel Tower in France. The kitchen staff is also all around my age and a little older, just like the porters and ballroom servants I saw last night. A girl with long, black braids chops veggies. A pink-faced boy cleans a copper pot in a sink. Another arranges fruit in a big bowl. They all wear the same white jackets and ballooning white hats as the bearded chef who’s issuing them orders.

  I jog past a row of trays piled with all manner of pastries and quiches to line up next to Nico. “Where did all these kids come from?”

  “Everywhere,” Nico says, pushing one of the carts into a back hall. Every plate it carries is a tiny work of art. Sauces swizzle back and forth over cheesy breakfast crepes sprinkled with parsley and chives. Piles of fruit are chopped into smiling starbursts. There’s even a pineapple cut and dusted with some red spice to look like flames. “Our staff hails from every country in the world. At least, the ones the Hotel can reach.”

  “But why do they work here? What’s in it for them?”

  “The Hotel chooses them; that’s all I can say. I already got in trouble for sharing Hotel secrets with you. Not taking any more risks than I have to.”

  He inserts his coin into a slot on the back of the cart and heads down the hall. Before he’s two paces ahead, the cart sparkles with an amber shimmer and starts following him on its own, as if he’s dragging it with an invisible rope.

  “That’s . . . ” I trail off, not quite believing what I’m seeing.

  “That’s simple binding. The coin connects me to the cart, and the cart does what I want. You’ll see more of it all over the Hotel, if you look closely.” He checks his pocket watch. “Now come on. We’ve got to get to work if you wanna stick around long enough to find out what happened to your dad.

  9<
br />
  War in a Room

  The guests we serve breakfast to aren’t very friendly. There’s a sheik who grouses about the noise (which Nico points out is just the waves of the Indian Ocean lapping outside his window), a couple shouting at each other in German (words I’m pretty sure I should never repeat), and an Ethiopian lord who almost chases us out of his room with a stick (why he has a stick, I’ll probably never know).

  Nico handles it all very professionally, though. I do my best to match his calm, unflappable attitude, but every stop makes me more and more uncomfortable with my decision to work here, no matter how long.

  “I can’t believe anyone would want to serve these people,” I say as we head to the next floor by way of the service elevator.

  Nico shrugs. “Not all the guests are bad. The Hotel’s meant to change people.”

  “Into jerks?”

  He laughs. “Pretty sure those people were jerks before they came here. There are plenty of good guests, too. They just don’t need as much attention.”

  “Are the guests the ones Stripe wants to stop? Or the staff?”

  Nico glances nervously around the hall. “I told you, be careful what you say about him here. The Hotel’s always listening.”

  When breakfast service is done, I want to get to work on searching for my dad, but Nico says we first have to check in with the Maid Commander in what he calls the War Room.

  We pass through a humid, seventh-floor walkway overlooking a beach with an endless teal ocean and a sky spotted with gulls. The bell-like hum of steel drums floats through the air. Little thatched-roof pagodas litter the sand; wooden masks hang from timbers painted to look like tribal spears.

  “Well, if you can’t tell me about . . . you-know-who,” I say, “can you at least tell me why the Hotel has something called a War Room?”

  “Why wouldn’t the Hotel have a War Room?” Nico replies, as if it’s the dumbest question in the world.

  Beyond the next threshold, the temperature drops, sending goose bumps up my forearms. I breathe in hot, leather-smelling air from a nearby vent in the plank wall. Moose heads and bear rugs and hunting rifles hang everywhere. In a nearby window, mountains crest the horizon like the skeleton of an ancient dragon.

  “It’s a hotel, not a country,” I say. “Hotels don’t go to war.” I adjust my jaw and another pop resonates in my eardrum.

  “Ears popping?”

  “Yeah. It’s annoying.”

  “Altitude change,” he says. “Moving to places at different heights changes the pressure in your ears. Also, you should know that if you hang around in a mountainous area for too long, you’ll get the alti-tooties, too. Be careful of that. Don’t want you farting in front of the guests.” He presses the call button on the elevator. “And as for the War Room: This is a magic hotel. The Hotel’s agenda has made it lots of enemies.”

  “Like you? And Mr.—”

  He gives a warning look. “This House hasn’t always been a hotel. That’s just what it’s currently posing as. The facade, remember? This place has been around a long, long time, and it’s been lots of things over the years. A palace. A library. A military command center.” He raises an eyebrow. “Imagine what a country could do with the power to travel the world in an instant. What an army could do.”

  “They could take over the world,” I say, gripping Dad’s coin.

  Nico grunts approvingly. “Our friend wants to keep the Hotel from being too powerful—to keep everything in balance. That means keeping tabs on what the Hotel does and taking whatever artifacts we can get our hands on.” He smiles. “Stop worrying about all that, though. Knowing all the binds and tailors of the Hotel will just make your job harder. Let Sev and me do the dirty work.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  He pulls me away from the elevator doors. “It’s not just maids and the Old Man you have to worry about,” he whispers. “The Hotel itself knows the hearts of the people inside it. If it starts to think you’re against it, we’re gonna have a problem.”

  “But aren’t you against it?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Sev and I know how to stay on the Hotel’s good side. And one of those rules is not to talk about all this stuff in here.”

  The elevator doors slide open, revealing a girl with tight, beaded braids and a nose ring. She’s dressed in the uniform Nico wore when I first met him. She looks familiar—I think she’s the girl I saw behind the counter when Nico let me peek through the Dallas Door.

  “Well, well.” The girl smiles wide. “Nico, the demoted.”

  “Shut up, Elizabeth.” Nico steps onto the elevator, and I’m so glad it’s one of the guest boxes. The walls in this one reveal a beach under the stars, an icy cave, and a city with even taller skyscrapers than the previous one.

  “Is this the new boy?” Elizabeth shoots out a hand as I step on.

  I nod and shake it. “Cam.”

  “Mistah Cam.” Her accent reminds me of voices I overhear on the Congo show Cass likes watching—round and breathy.

  Nico nods to the console. “War Room, please.”

  “War Room, War Room. Everyone to the War Room,” she says, pressing a button.

  “You’re an aviator this morning?” Nico asks as the elevator starts up.

  Elizabeth smiles and shakes her head. The beads in her braids clack together. “Fillin’ in for Audrey while she’s doing an errand in Australia for me. I’d ratha fly the lift than deal with those humungous spiders any day.” The accent’s strong, but her English is perfect.

  Nico leans in. “Aviators are lift operators,” he tells me. “But that’s not Elizabeth’s day job, is it?”

  “Betta not be. Else someone’s gonna pay.”

  “Wouldn’t want to have a debt with you, Itsy-Beth.”

  She grins.

  The way Nico does that—pretending to be everyone’s friend while secrets hide behind his smile—makes my chest cold. I’m glad I know his secret, though. Or at least I’m in on this one. It’s nice to have someone I can trust in this mess with me.

  The elevator stops.

  “Here you go,” Elizabeth says. “Try not to get knocked down any lower, or you’re gonna find yourself back on the streets of Berlin.” She gives Nico a wink as the doors close behind us.

  “Berlin?”

  Nico shrugs. “I’m from all over. When I first came to the Hotel, they brought me in through the Berlin Door.” He starts down the creamy white hall, tracing the copper-trimmed wainscoting as he walks. “The world’s not as divided as you think. Nations like their borders, but the Hotel exists between those boundaries. Borders don’t define us. I’ve met Asian families from France and Middle- Easterners from Canada and white folks from Africa. In the end, people are just people, no matter where they’re from or what they look like. It’s how they treat one another that matters.”

  He stops at a shiny, sleek metal door with the words WAR ROOM laser-etched across it.

  “Now,” Nico says, “what’d I say earlier?”

  I shoot him a playful glare. “That you’re in charge.”

  He sweeps the fallen strands of his gelled hair back into place. “That’s right. Let me handle it,” he says, and opens the door with a flourish.

  We enter into what looks like the inside of a giant, glowing orb. The domed ceiling is a brilliant cascade of colored glass cut into the jagged, unruly shapes of countries. Crisscrossing lines of latitude and longitude reach toward us over the sky-blue oceans between continents.

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” Nico keeps walking. Asia and Australia hang on the edge of the room opposite us, lit from behind with a single bright light. “The light tracks with the sun so we always know what time it is across the globe.”

  Beneath the domed map stands a circular, high-tech command center. Giant computer screens wrap around the edge of the room, displaying rosters and lists of names and security camera footage. On one screen I see the lobby with the Dallas Door. On another
, I recognize the ballroom where I met Sev.

  There are no tables or chairs—everyone in the War Room stands with perfect posture at their stations. I quickly see why. The massive floor is taken up by a different map—an old, parchment-colored monstrosity—drawn in the same flowing, inky lines as the map-boards. Only this map is far more intricate, and doesn’t make sense to me at all. Glittering ink curls under our feet in flourishes, drawing rooms and halls that connect at odd angles, overlapping where they shouldn’t.

  There are markings, too. Words, in swirling script.

  “The Map Floor tracks the coins of our hotel staff and guests,” Nico whispers. He points to little circles with names like “Malana Bustamante” and “Eric Frösche” and “Ylin Patel.” “The artificers created it after some bad stuff happened years ago. Map-boards only show you what you need to know, but the Map Floor tracks everything. The Hotel’s always watching.”

  I search the map for anything that looks remotely like this room, and find it slightly to the right of center. I recognize the names “Nico Flores” and “Cameron Jones,” alongside others I don’t know.

  And one I do. The name “Reinhart Kuhn” curls across a banner beside my own fake name. But the ink fades and disappears almost as suddenly as I see it, as if someone took an eraser to it.

  The floor must have detected Dad’s coin. But why did his name vanish when all the others are still there? Did anyone else see it? Do they know who the coin belonged to? Or maybe I just imagined it.

  “Here comes the MC,” Nico murmurs.

  Across the command center, the Maid Commander marches toward us.

  Nico’s expression tightens. “Great. Rahki’s with her.”

  The girl from last night keeps pace with the MC, clipboard clutched in her arms, squinting at us with a wrinkled brow.

  “I see you’ve brought my new recruit.” The Maid Commander stops a couple of feet away, hands fisted, looking down her sharp nose at us. A giant, multicolored Europe shines behind her. “Mr. Cameron, was it?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I say. “I’m here to work.”