Anyone from [YEAR REDACTED]?

This card is quite antiquated. I don’t remember when - I must have dropped it when last hurrying through the Comedy in my haste to get away from the Family. Maybe it was Marriott. But I would remember if Marriott had found me, because each time he does, I make a note of it on my own card.

It’s been a while.

The Comedy is as spruced as ever. Subtle rumor flies through the carpets laid in front of the doors. Given how early I’ve gotten up, I do not smell the tea yet, nor do I want to. I much prefer the coffee, black and musty, of the Floor of Goths.

“Victoria, Ms. Hilton,” Rafflesia chirps from beside me. Oh, they’ve caught up. “You’re thinking aloud again!”

“You don’t have to remind me, Rafflesia,” I respond. Floor of Goths is a superior epithet, and the fact that the two floors are on the same level bothers me ad infinitum. “Are all my guests still in bed?”

“They’re still in their rooms,” Raffle says.

Of course they’re in their rooms; that’s why we’re alone, standing in this long, long, long hallway. The Sisters get up promptly at eight, thankfully. Well - if I could rise past that, I would.

“Let’s proceed, Rafflesia.”

“Yes, Ms. Hilton.” We go, treading with our Nicé shoes. Soon, though, I hear the brush of a feather-duster, and the Sisters appear from behind me. Dressed in white. Their sleeves are laced. The sound their soft shoes makes on the craft-linoleum is nondescriptive and both have tea in their hands. It is England. For them. For them it is always nearly a shadow of that pompous, circumstantially white locale where queens and kings sat through elden time ever since Pendragon and her myriad scions.

Albion. A soft place. Cousin Jin Jiang leading me through hallways of tan stone, lit by braziers, in the interior of castles before I became Hotelier. Before I conducted the Exercises. Before I competed, vied, rivaled, and ultimately triumphed over brother Marriott our eldest, eternally winning his angst. And become the Chief Hotelier.

But now. I am in the present place and shall speak with the Sisters. One eternally unmarried, partnerless, soulmate-rended; the other always looking for a good husband, one from a good family and thousand pounds a year according to their customs. I find the practice stifling. But that is their own, for the Sisters create their own propriety. As decorated and subtly biting as their shoes, purchased from some forgotten Memorial.

There aren’t too many of those around anymore.

I turn to the first Sister, and give my most delicate smile. In the dimension below there have been so many adaptations of her qualms over the millennia that I now see why she cannot leave the Floor. But I wonder if Edmond would give her pause.

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“How are you doing, Miss Darcy?” I ask.

She is holding a book, its cover only slightly hanging open by the spine. Bent just so that I cannot read its cover, which I cannot because of the Convention. But how I wish to do so. It is the great tragedy of our dimension that we cannot create stories from within. However, she notices, and hands the book over to her sibling.

“I’m doing well, thank you,” she replies. She nods to Rafflesia. “Without our servants, we cannot conduct our leisurely activities uninhibited.”

“I—” Rafflesia begins to spurt.

“But it’s fine, as you too have yours. What do you do in the home, do you have a reading-room? I much prefer mine.”

The smile that her sister gives, buried in its book, demeans me. But as long as she lets Miss Darcy do the speech, I can handle dialogue. That is their power.

Raffle interrupts me by withdrawing a racket from somewhere deep in the skeins of their tangled, mahogany-sprinted braids. They turn it to, and pass their hand along the inside of its catcher. “See how the saddle is empty, allowing the tiny comets to vibrate plasmatically,” they intone in a completely different voice, one emulating the spatials of the fourth millennium’s Cometracers. “My favorite of the racket sports,” they say in their normal, crackly tenor.

Miss Darcy stares at me blankly, but holds out her finger. On it there is a ring, gold, plain but beautiful.

“I am married,” she whispers.

An illusion you have created, by your long stay in the Hotel. With the passing time, I fear that some of these guests may become permanent. So few of them even come down for breakfast, which is amply offered and sweetened each day in the star. For them we do so much.

I think of something rather clever to say.

“Incandescently,” I reply. “You wear your lace well, and your sister dances quite nicely.”

“Thank you,” her sister says. “We sometimes visit the London Sweeps, and invite their barristers and old chancellors to dance.”

“With Charles dusting it as often as he does, the ballroom will be most suitable.”

Miss Darcy beckons, pointing back behind her to their room; the door is ajar, revealing a dresser, some chairs and a low lamp, the curtains at the back drawn to let in the light. Without squinting I can make out the vista of green, filled with a tree and its leaves trembling in the morning gusts.

“Would you care to join us? We have some tea.”

One might think that they traditionally had tea in the midafternoon, but the Sisters have been guests for a long time.

“We would love to. But there’s a reading of poetry in the first-floor reading room, and Rafflesia’s so wanted to go.” I look down at Raffle, who gives us their absolute bestest smile—the sight is nearly horrifying, but thank the Nine that no creature bears witness.

“‘The snow is white, the petals drop,’” they recite. “Ms. Hilton’s been teaching me something called ‘verse.’”

I laugh and pat their shoulder. “We have a new servant to trample—tease. I never inherited much from my father’s estate—you know, work duties, ha ha,” I tell the Sisters, and they return my glimmer of plasticity with unshaken honesty in their looks. Elizabeth’s eyes are a velvet blue. Charlotte’s are a damper, more elegant brown but neither shies away. If I had more time, I’d actually talk to them. Learn their conversation. But, but—there are so many guests, and many to greet as I walk by them, down to the Foyer.

“Please invite them,” Charlotte says.