“Then I don’t understand. After Acheron’s untimely end, Felix8 seemed rather at a loss. He came around to the house and was making a nuisance of himself, very like an abandoned dog.”

“So what happened?”

“Cocytus put him down.”

“I’m assuming you don’t mean in the sense of ‘to humiliate.’”

“You think correct.”

“And when was this?”

“In 1986.”

“Did you witness the murder? Or see the body?” I stared at her carefully, trying to determine if she was telling the truth.

“No. He just said he had. You could have asked him yourself, but you killed him, didn’t you?”

“He was evil. He brought it upon himself.”

“I wasn’t being serious,” replied Aornis. “It’s what passes for humor in the Hades family.”

“This doesn’t really help me,” I murmured.

“That’s nothing to do with me,” replied Aornis. “You wanted intel, and I gave it to you.”

“If I find out you’ve lied,” I said, getting ready to leave, “I’ll be back to take away the twenty minutes I gave you.”

“If you’ve seen Felix8, how could you think otherwise?” pointed out Aornis with impeccable logic.

“Stranger things have happened.”

I stepped out of the loop cell and was back in the bluey greenness of T.J. Maxx among the time-frozen customers, with Friday at my side.

“Think she’s telling the truth?” he asked.

“If she is, it makes no sense at all, which is a point in her favor. If she’d told me what I wanted to hear, I’d have been more suspicious. Did she say anything else to me she might have made me forget?”

Aornis, with her power of memory distortion and erasure, was wholly untrustworthy—she could tell you everything, only to make you forget it a few seconds later. At her trial the judge and jury were merely actors—the real judge and jury watched it all on CCTV. To this day the actors in the courtroom still have no idea why that “frightfully pleasant girl” was in the dock at all. Friday ran over what he had witnessed her saying, and we managed to find an exchange that she’d erased from my recollection: that she was going to bust out of T.J. Maxx with the help of someone “on the outside.”

“Any idea who that might be?” I asked. “And why did she shield it from me?”

“No idea—and it’s probably just her being manipulative; my guess is the recollection will be on time release—it’ll pop into your head in a few hours.”

I nodded. She’d done something similar to me before.

“But I wouldn’t worry,” added Friday. “Temporal Enloopment has a hundred percent past-present-future escape-free record; she’d have to bend the Standard History Eventline to get out.”