“They’re not prisoners—just real shoppers doing real shopping at the time of her enloopment; Miss Hades is stuck in an eight-minute zone waiting to pay for goods, but she never does. If it’s true what they say about her love of shopping, this punishment is particularly apt.”

“Do I have anything to bargain with?”

Friday looked at the file. “You can stretch her loop by twenty minutes.”

“How do I get to talk to her?”

“Just step inside the sphere of influence.”

I took a deep breath and walked into the globe of yellow light. All of a sudden, normality returned with a jerk. I was back in what seemed like real life. It was raining outside, which was what must have been happening when she was looped. Aornis, well used to the monotonous round of limited dialogue during her eight-minute existence, noticed me immediately.

“Well, well,” she murmured sarcastically, “is it visitors’ day already?”

“Hello, Aornis,” I said with a smile. “Remember me?”

“Very funny. What do you want, Next?”

I offered her a small vanity case with some cosmetics in it that I had picked off a shelf earlier. She didn’t take it.

“Information,” I said.

“Is there a deal in the offing?”

“I can give you another ten minutes. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

She looked at me, then all around her. She knew that people were outside the sphere looking in, but not how many and who. She had the power to wipe memories but not read minds. If she could, she’d know how much I hated her. Mind you, she probably knew that already.

“Next, please!” said the checkout girl, and Aornis put two dresses and a pair of shoes on the counter.

“How’s the family, Thursday—Landen and Friday and the girls?”

“Information, Aornis.”

She took a deep breath as the loop jumped back to the beginning of her eight minutes and she was once more at the rear of the line. She clenched her fists so tightly her knuckles went white. She’d been doing this for ten years without respite. The only thing worse than a loop was a loop in which one suffered a painful trauma, such as a broken leg. But even the most sadistic judges could never find it in themselves to order that.

Aornis calmed herself, looked up at me and said, “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“I want to know about Felix8.”

“That’s not a name I’ve heard for a while,” replied Aornis evenly. “What’s your interest in that empty husk?”

“He was hanging around my house with a loaded gun yesterday,” I told her, “and I can only assume he was wanting to do me harm.”

Aornis looked mildly perturbed. “You saw him?”

“With my own eyes.”