Kaori was a blank-faced statue carved from marble by the Envisioner. I saw a crack in her mask, though, in the way her white-knuckled fingers jammed the end of a pen so hard that she could’ve blasted blue ink all over her white coat.

By her side, Yusuf crossed his arms, his furrowed eyebrows carving deep valleys into his forehead. I tried to catch his eye as I jostled towards the front of the crowd.

On one of the huge wall screens, tumbleweeds of crumpled paper rolled past a chipped bus stop bench at a city street corner, with signs in a language I didn’t know glowing in the pink evening light. Universiteit. Trein stasie. Museum van de wateroorlog.

I tried to ask someone what was up, only for them to shoot a deathglare at me. The Storyteller voice whistled. Well, this is going to get interesting.

“Countdown?” someone by the front shouted.

“About thirty seconds,” another voice called. “The next bus to roll in.”

They seemed to hold their breaths around me. I fought a tiny, mean urge to yell surprise! and scare the shit out of the whole room. Someone by the front of the crowd started a New Year’s Eve countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Instead of a ball all lit up for the New Year hovering above us, a long gray bus with its sides gashed with spray-paint rolled onto the screen. Inside, twenty or so people held onto railings and leaned against windows on their ways home from work. Four. Three. The bus puttered at the side of the road, letting a few people off, before it whizzed away, belching a white cloud of water vapor exhaust.

Two. One.

The crowd around me lost their shit.

Someone popped a champagne bottle and the cork sailed across the room. Cheers from the nerd herd, and those little honking noisemakers, and someone by me screamed speech, speech! The bottle of champagne made the rounds, even though it was before ten in the morning, and the white coats poured it into paper cups or glugged from the bottle. Lots of back-patting and we couldn’t do this without yous, with me cheesing for them, contact-high off the energy. Heads tipped to the center of the room to where Kaori and Yusuf waited by the Envisioner, in the invisible spotlight cast by all their eyes.

The way that Yusuf’s gaze swept to the floor while he stepped back, I knew he was curling into himself. Someone shushed the crowd, and in the silence, Kaori clicked her pen one last time.

“We’re saving lives,” she said. “Now, let’s get back to work.”

*   *   *