“It was… after four when we came in here?” says Yael. “So by now it’s nearly–”
Silhouine is up, scrambling toward one of the corridors. “Five o’clock tastes like burning dust,” she pants.
“How do you even know which one is twelve?” says Yael, following. “Also, what?”
“The candle told me,” says Silhouine, and hurries into darkness.
Yael blinks down at the little stub and sees that its flame is, in fact, streaming steadily toward a different portal in some invisible breeze. She hurries after her friend, thinking, they always hurry. Can’t they take their time getting to the next disaster?
“Are you a relative?” asks the triage doctor in Hungarian, Romanian, German and English.
“Oh! No! I don’t know her.”
“Angel of mercy,” she smiles.
“I shot her.”
The smile drops. “You are armed?”
“Yeah.” Zach checks his pants. “Whoops! No. Crap!”
“Your bulletproof vest. Police?”
“No, no, assassin. I was hired to kill this girl. Not that girl. Another girl. But she’s got this mommy complex so she left me with these guys, but then Hidebound, who’s supposed to be my–”
“You have a concussion,” she sighs.
“I’m still technically an intern,” says Zach, choking up for some stupid reason.
“We have always been at war with Prescription,” Golda intones.
“I’m not sure it qualifies as war,” says Nestor. “It’s more a dynamic tension that informs–”
“It is too a war!”
“That sounds like received wisdom speaking.”
“It’s not!” Golda backpedals. “It’s description! That’s what we do!”
“That’s an interesting circular problem,” says Roan. “If people choose to become Descriptivists based on our self-description, have we then prescribed a philosophy of–”
“Shut up, Roan,” says Nestor.
“Don’t tell her to shut up!” says Golda.
“Don’t end a sentence with a preposi–” is all he manages before they tear him apart.
“Warning!” chirps the schedule. “This meeting takes place in the past.”
Sighing, Mauro queues up at the tempovator. At length he steps in and drops back to 2008.
“All right,” says Beatriz, “let’s get started.”
“Can we please stop reliving this?” says Mauro. “I’m from 2010. We cut some stuff for blind kids, bump the liquor tax, nobody’s happy, everything’s fine. Okay?”
“We’ll come up with a better idea!”
Mauro looks around: they’re so old. “Where are the versions of us who were here the first time?”
“Stacked in the freezer,” says Tams.
“We’re thinking of selling their organs,” says Beatriz.