We had four hours, no safehouse, and a single MetroCard.
The ferry to Liberty Island didn't run after dark. The next one out was 9 AM. It was 5 PM. We had the night to kill and we needed somewhere to be.
"Sleep pod," Lucy said as we walked uptown on Broadway, dragging the bike (folded, exhausted, refusing to roll). "There's an AI-Optimized Sleep Pod hostel near Times Square. I saw the ad on the back of a magazine."
"You want to give the AI more data."
"I want to sleep, Jackie. The AI is about to win because we will have fallen asleep on a sidewalk before midnight tomorrow."
"How does an AI-Optimized Sleep Pod hostel work."
"You wear a small headband. The headband reads your brain waves. It optimizes your room temperature, lighting, and ambient sound for your deepest sleep. Eight hours' worth of REM in three hours of actual sleep."
"And what does the AI get out of it."
"Three hours of your sleeping brain pattern."
"That is the most the AI has ever gotten."
"Yes, and we are going to give it three hours of fake sleep brain patterns by *not actually sleeping inside the headband.* We'll wear the headband, we'll lie still, and Rufus will sleep on top of it producing rabbit brain patterns. Meanwhile, we will sleep on the floor next to the bed, no headbands, in actual rest mode."
"That is the most paranoid plan I have ever heard."
"Thank you."
"It is also brilliant."
On West 38th Street we passed a 24-hour CVS. Lucy stopped.
We went in. We bought granola bars, cold teas, and a combination lock. Lucy bought a small notebook because her current one had four pages left. We did not speak in the CVS. We shopped the way you shop when something large is coming and you want to be holding something ordinary first. The cashier clocked Rufus in my hood and, with the diplomacy of a New York midnight shift, chose not to raise it.
---
The hostel was on West 38th Street. The lobby was a single fluorescent-lit room with a single counter and a single attendant, a small polite man in a black-and-white uniform who introduced himself as Mr. Cheng. He nodded at us the way people nod when they are expecting you, which is either a good sign or a very bad one.
"Two pods, please."
"Of course." He typed into a small old computer. "Eight-hour rest packages. Twenty-nine dollars each."
We handed over cash.
"You will receive your headbands and your room codes. Each pod is fully personalized. Our AI integration ensures the bed will adjust to you during the night."
I had been about to nod sleepily.
I stopped.
"The bed will what."
"The bed will adjust to you. Your body shape, your sleep posture, your body temperature, your respiration. The bed *responds* to the sleeper. The very latest in haptic-mattress technology. Provided by our partner, Lotus Industries, a subsidiary of Liminal Studios."
I looked at Lucy.
Lucy had gone very still.
"Mr. Cheng," she said carefully. "When you say the bed adjusts to the sleeper. What if the sleeper does not fit the bed."
"The bed will adjust the sleeper to fit the bed."
"…the bed will adjust the *sleeper.*"
"Yes. The bed will, very gently and during deep sleep, encourage the sleeper to adopt the optimal sleeping posture for the bed's design. Well within safety parameters."
"Mr. Cheng." Lucy turned, very calmly, toward me. "Jackie. We have walked into a mattress store that is also a monster."
"I see that."
"The Procrustes," she said, pivoting back to Mr. Cheng with the pleasant expression she uses right before she stops being pleasant. "Greek figure. Invited travelers into his house, put them in a special bed. Too tall, he cut their legs off. Too short, he stretched them. The bed was always the right size. The traveler was the variable."
Mr. Cheng's smile had acquired a small flaw, the way a loading screen acquires a small, noticeable stutter.
"Sir, I am not familiar with that reference. I am, professionally, a hospitality manager."
"Mr. Cheng. Show me your back teeth."
He did not show me his back teeth.
He very smoothly reached down and pressed a small button under the counter.
Two doors at the back of the lobby opened.
Out walked two security guards. Neither of them was human-shaped, exactly. Both were wearing human suits. The suits did not, exactly, fit. The suits were, very slightly, adjusting to their wearers. The wearers were adjusting back.
The guards stepped forward, and in the half-second before I uncapped the Truthsayer, I thought about what the HALO architecture had been doing in millions of bedrooms and living rooms and quiet kitchens across the country. Fitting people to the product, one small preference, one bedtime chime at a time. The Procrustes wasn't a myth that had wandered into the wrong book. He was the franchise model.
The whole system was a Procrustes. It had just been polite about it.
I yanked the Truthsayer out of my belt.
I drew, in the air over Mr. Cheng's head, the largest character I had drawn since dispelling Gong Gong.
*Truth.*
The character glowed gold and held.
Mr. Cheng began to flicker.
For half-second flashes, his polite hospitality-manager body alternated with a different body — straight-edged metal, with mechanical arms each tipped with a cleaver, and a mouth across the middle of its torso the size of a king-size bed.
The character *Truth* held in the air over his head.
Mr. Cheng. The Procrustes-thing. Screamed.
The sound was a hundred metal bed frames being dragged across a parking garage at the same time.
"You," he hissed. "You are using *truth* in my house. We do not welcome truth in my house."
I drew, beside *Truth,* the character for *honest dimensions.*
It is a long character. Three component characters in sequence. The brush did most of the work; my hand just held the brush.
The character glowed.
Mr. Cheng's bed, through the doors, changed.
The bed in the closest pod, lit pink-and-white through the doorway, shrank. From human-sized to teacup-sized. The bed had been, in its self-image, a king. The bed was, in its honest dimensions, a sample-sized hotel-bath toiletries bottle.
Mr. Cheng-the-Procrustes-thing screamed louder.
The two not-quite-human guards convulsed and fell over. Their suits, which had not in fact fit them, stopped trying to fit them, which turned out to be the only thing holding them together. They dissolved into two piles of cheap polyester and a vague smell of rubber.
Mr. Cheng's actual body — the metal-armed Procrustes — shrank with the bed, in lockstep. By the time the bed was the size of a toiletries bottle, Mr. Cheng was, in fact, the same. He was a small angry metal man-shape no taller than my palm, with cleaver-arms now no bigger than safety pins, on top of the front desk.
He was screaming at me in a tinny tinnitus voice.
I picked him up between two fingers.
I dropped him onto the bed.
The bed and Mr. Cheng, both honestly-dimensioned, fit each other perfectly.
He stopped screaming. He looked content. He yawned. The bed's haptic technology, scaled to its actual dimensions, was apparently very good. Mr. Cheng, at his honest size, closed his eyes.
He fell asleep.
I capped the Truthsayer.
Lucy, behind me, said, "…that was the shortest fight I have ever seen."
"That was a very short fight."
"You used the brush like a *therapist.*"
"I used the brush the way Zhang told me to use it. It writes truth. The Procrustes was hiding from his own truth. Truth, applied directly, was small."
She looked around the lobby.
"Also, Jackie."
"Yes."
"The Procrustes was a Greek monster. Why are we fighting Greek monsters in a Chinese-mythology book."
I thought about it.
"Because the bad ideas don't have nationalities. The technology of forcing humans to fit a frame is older than the gods. We are fighting all of it."
She nodded.
"…we now have a free hotel."
"We now have a free hotel."
"With an unmanned front desk and possibly working pods."
"…want to actually sleep in one of the pods."
"Without the headband. Yes."
We took our pods.
We took the headbands off and put them on a shelf.
We slept four glorious hours, on regular hotel beds that did not, with Mr. Cheng's honestly-dimensioned defeat, attempt to adjust to us.
---
In my dream, the wrong-blue beach. I had been having some version of this dream since the restaurant: the beach, the women, the thread. But this was the first time the middle one had a face.
The three weaving women sat at the edge of the surf. The middle one looked up.
She had Anna's face.
With my mother's wrinkles.
The face of a woman my sister might one day grow into.
She put her hand on my cheek.
She said: *Jackie. Listen carefully. The next one is going to be much harder.*
I said: *I know.*
She said: *Build the family. Eat the pancakes. Take the week. Take all the weeks you can. The strength you will need, when it comes, will come from those afternoons, not from these weapons.*
She kissed my forehead.
She said: *We will see you again.*
I woke up at 5 AM.
In the bunk beside me, Lucy was already awake. She had watched her own dream too.
She did not say what.
I pressed my hand against my left jacket pocket, where the hairpin usually lived, and felt nothing.
It was in Anna's pocket right now. She had been keeping it warm for eight days. I did not know exactly how I knew this. I knew it the same way the dream had known Anna's face: not by inference, by fact. Some things run between people without wires. The keeping was real. The warmth was real. Both were in Palo Alto, in an eight-year-old's left jacket pocket, waiting.
---
We left twenty dollars on the front desk to cover any extra charges (Mr. Cheng was still snoring). We retrieved the bike. The bike had had four hours of street sleep and was better. The lotus on the down tube had returned to its original peach color.
We rode south to Battery Park.
In the harbor, in the dawn light, the Statue of Liberty was a small green silhouette that might have been a postcard, if a postcard could hold the location of the last weapon I needed to find before midnight on Chinese New Year.
The Fire-Tipped Spear was somewhere up there.
So, I had a strong feeling, was the Monkey King.
"Jackie," Lucy said, from behind me on the bike.
"Yeah."
She was looking at the harbor. The ferry was not running yet. The water was silver-grey and cold. The Statue of Liberty, that small green figure on her pedestal, looked patient the way only things made of metal can look patient, fully prepared to outlast whatever comes next.
"You know what the Monkey King is going to be like when we find him," she said.
"No."
"Neither do I."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring."
"No. It's supposed to be honest."
The ferry horn sounded from somewhere in the harbor, early, off-schedule, the way things that belong to the divine tend to show up exactly when they were always going to.
I pointed the bike toward it.