Dagmar licked her lips.
“I’m looking,” she said, and her voice dried up. She coughed to clear her throat, and said, “I’m looking at it now.”
“I thought we might have breakfast together,” said Anna Tippel. “If you were feeling lonely.”
“It’s safe to have breakfast?” Dagmar said. Her words seemed spoken out of some great void: her mind was entirely taken up with the sight before her, the fire eating its way upward floor by floor.
“Breakfast is as safe as anything,” Anna Tippel said. “And we must eat.”
Through the horror, Dagmar recalled that she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous noon, not having dared the lower levels of the hotel in case looters were still present.
“All right,” she said. Tears welled into her eyes, and she could barely speak the words. “I’ll meet you.”
Yes, she thought, answering Anna Tippel’s first question. Yes, I am afraid.
The breakfast room was crowded, and Dagmar and the Tippels shared their table with a businessman from Sumatra, a man named Dingwangkara. The menu was limited: there were no Western egg dishes and no fresh fruit save for various kinds of bananas, but there were still a range of breads, steamed rice and fried rice, vegetables, and a wide variety of sauces.
The meal was starch-heavy, but Dagmar ate a lot of it.
The Sumatran businessman was talkative and asked a great many questions: Where are you from? Where are you going? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What do you do for a living?
Dagmar was suspicious at first, Zan’s warnings about kidnapping fresh in her mind. But the Tippels answered freely, and Dingwangkara was so cheerful, and so clearly what he claimed to be, that Dagmar found herself answering.
“My father died a few years ago,” she said.
He had finally succeeded in his life’s ambition of drinking himself to death.
To her surprise she found tears stinging her eyes. She hadn’t wept for her father during his cirrhosis or anytime thereafter.
She supposed she wasn’t crying for him now, not really, but for the victims, those who had lost their life savings, who were killed in the riots and the demonstrations, those who had their homes burned out from under them or who were trapped in the burning hotel.
Dingwangkara looked at her with a gentle expression.
“My parents are both alive,” he said, and then he added, “Inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” Dagmar repeated, and she blinked away her tears.
“They always want to know about your family,” said Cornelis Tippel after Dingwangkara departed. “They’ll ask any damn question they please.”
“Their culture came from the kampungs,” said Anna, “the long houses where they all lived together. They believe it’s normal for everyone to know about everyone else.”
Dagmar remembered the young policeman turning to her and asking her about her work. I always take the MAC-10.
She wondered how you were supposed to know when they were just asking questions, and when they were kidnappers trying to decide if you were worth a ransom.
FROM: BJSKI
SUBJECT: Re: Jakarta
Holy cripes! I had no idea you were even out of the country!
What can I do? Can I send you a care package? A gun? A helicopter?
Can I fly out there and help you somehow? Only problem is, I’m so broke you’d have to buy the ticket. But I’ll come!
Let me know!
Hearts,
BJ
After breakfast, Dagmar found it too depressing to wander around the lower hotel, with its looted shops, boarded windows, and frightened employees, so she returned to her room. She didn’t dare open the curtains to watch the burning Palms, so she kept the drapes drawn and watched the catastrophe on television. The talking heads on CNN discussed 9/11 and speculated about the ideological or religious motivations of whoever had set the fire, chatted about how whoever had constructed the hotel had obviously ignored a lot of building codes, and spoke of a well-known American lawyer who was jetting with his team to Singapore in hopes of signing up as many survivors as possible in order to file a class-action suit for damages.
Dagmar hoped her own hotel was up to spec.
When desperate people started throwing themselves off the burning building, Dagmar turned off the television and opened her laptop. She found she had dozens of emails from practically everyone who knew she was in Jakarta, some of them writing more than once, to all of the three email addresses she currently maintained. They’d seen the burning hotel on television, and they were desperate to know whether she was all right.
She answered one email and CC’d anyone else who had queried, so that everyone would have an answer in as short a space of time as possible.
When she was finished, she sat back in her chair while a slow sense of wonder rose in her, wonder at the sheer number of people who cared for her. Some of those who had sent email were people whom she hadn’t seen in person for years and with whom she maintained only a tenuous form of contact.
Dagmar hadn’t realized so many people cared.
She was used to the way interest groups spontaneously formed on the Internet, but there had never been one centered on her before. These people-friends from Caltech, from Britain, friends of her family in Cleveland, people in the gaming industry, players she knew only as Hippolyte or Chatsworth Osborne, individuals who came from different walks of life and whose only point in common was a personal knowledge of Dagmar-had seen news of the burning hotel and responded within hours. Many of them had clearly been in touch with one another, spreading the word that she might be in danger, and the outpouring of concern was touching.
It was then, as Dagmar decided to give everyone who had queried a personal answer, that the power died.
The lights flickered and went off, and the whisper of the air-conditioning faded away. An array of tiny plastic turbines, each the diameter of a pencil, switched on to provide her laptop with power. A breathy sound accompanied the ignition, and paper on her desk rustled to the warm exhaust.
A notice flashed on her display: the hotel’s wireless connection had gone down along with the power. Dagmar checked the room’s phone and found it worked. The phone had an Ethernet jack, and she considered connecting the laptop to it but then decided against using fuel and turned the computer off.
The screen had just gone blank when the lights wavered on again. They didn’t seem as bright as before, so Dagmar figured either that it was a brownout or that a hotel backup generator had gone on but didn’t have quite the power required.
She lay across her bed and thought about Planet Nine, and the fictional woman in the hotel room, and what uncanny series of accidents had brought her down the rabbit hole.
Tomer Zan called in midafternoon. Dagmar had just finished doing her laundry in the bidet-she’d run out of clean clothes and was dubious about giving any of her belongings to hotel staff.
“How are you feeling, darling?” Zan asked. The “darling” sounded perfectly professional, as if it were a substitute for “Miss Shaw.”
“I’ve been better,” Dagmar said.
“We’ve decided to pull you off the roof with a helicopter.”
Dagmar paused to think about this.
“You’re not moving me to a safer place first?”
“Putting you on the streets right now would be exposing you to too much risk. The situation is deteriorating fast-most of the police have walked off the job, since no one’s paying them real money.”
“So the streets are in the hands of the rioters.”
“That’s about it.” Dryly. “We’ll have a helicopter in Singapore by tomorrow.”
“So you can pick me up the next day?”