After a sleepless night in Noel’s room, whose door she had no choice but to kick open (“Wow, I actually thought it was going to be so much harder than that,” she’d remarked, to a concerned nameless tenant of Unit C. “Oh, no, I’m not breaking in, this is my brother’s room, so it’s okay …”), Melody Quick, having undergone countless internal struggles (many of which took place entirely under a showerhead) and one or two consultations with Laura Staples (“Hey, which department of Societal Sanitation deals with spooky shit, like alien abductions or time travelers?” “Uh …”), decided to risk whatever consequences talking to law enforcement might incur, and made a visit that afternoon to the nearest metropolitan police station.

“… so you see, it’s actually me they’re looking for. Because I’m—”

“I’ve already told you, take a number. Fill out the appropriate form.”

“—I’m stuck in time, right? And this month’s been repeating, this is the eighth loop already. And I know Somnhaven PD isn’t really the place to go, but—well, it’s not like SocSan really officially exists anyway. No physical office to speak of. At least not on paper. But hey, we all know what that windowless concrete skyscraper near Shambala really is, right?” She made an attempt at a wink.

“Little girl, do not make me tell you again. Take a number. Fill out the form. Wait your turn.”

“S-so the way I figure it, SocSan’s at least aware of something weird going on with the flow of time, and they’ve got a lock on somebody who’s the source of all this trouble, and they weren’t that far off, they just snagged the wrong sibling. A-and wait, ‘little girl’? I’m a college student!”

The officer behind the desk, tired of repeating himself, pointed fumingly at the stack of forms on the counter, then at the ticket dispenser, out of which Melody finally pulled her number. She compared it to the one on the display and sighed and then took a seat on the bench.

And then she waited, a seemingly lone constant in that ever-shifting line-up of ticket-holders, to whose vacancies and occupancies she became increasingly oblivious the longer she sat, and the drowsier she became, as her mind, fighting against more than thirty hours now without sleep, teetered on the edge of some state that was not quite wakefulness yet not quite sleep, a state in which she, at one point, semi-carried a conversation that she would barely remember afterwards, with a woman who sat down in the seat to her left, a foreigner named—

“—Antimony Anchorage, yes, from the, how you say, North of America. Apologies, that my Circadian is not so good.”

(Hypnogogically): “No … Don’t call it … Circadian … You’ll end up like … my brother …”

“See, I am attempting to the locating of my child. Here is picture … This you can keep. I will be leaving this in the care of your inventory. Ah, my number is present. I will depart. Nice to meet you, Speedy Euphony.”

“Zzz …”

And had it not been for the foreigner’s fumbling of her name—which had, of all the syllables that managed to make it through that somnolent barrier separating backdrop from brain, the most influence on the latter, guiding its capricious, neurotic wanderings in all sorts of uncomfortable, ego-eroding directions—would Melody Quick still have missed her number? If somehow—

“Sblugh? No, I’m up. I’m up! You’re wrong, I didn’t miss my number!” She stood up (too quickly) and bolted (vision tunnelling) to the front desk and waved her ticket. “Hey, I’m here. My number—”

“—was called a long time ago. You missed it. Take another one. And fill out the form.”

“No, I was here, the other guy who was here before, he told me to take a number. And I took it. And I waited. Go find him, he’ll tell you, he’s—I don’t know his name … b-but he, uh, he called me ‘little girl’.”

The officer behind the desk stared back, stone-faced.

“But I’m a college student.”

The officer behind the desk stared back, stone-faced.

“A-And another thing, about the form, I told the last guy—don’t you guys have an electronic form? I can’t”—blushing at this last confession—“I can’t write long-hand. I mean, I can write my name, obviously, but anything more than that …”

Like his precedessor, he simply pointed at the ticket machine.

“Okay, look, I fell asleep. Wasn’t even for that long. Not more than a—a Somnhaven minute. Ha ha. Just kidding. Nobody says that. New York, though … You know I walked through a fake New York last week? It was cool, there was a Katarina unit, but it wasn’t real. Hey, are you a real cop, or do you just work the desk? You have any friends here in Social Sanitation? My brother, he”—noticing the officer beginning to unclasp the holster to his pistol—“alright, alright, I’m going. I’m going.”