Keeping the statue between herself and the suits, she worked her way back through the crowd and into another hallway, then sprinted the last few yards to a bank of elevators leading up into the hotel. There was a keypad next to the buttons, but she was prepared. She yanked a room key from her purse—the key she’d lifted from the back pocket of a middle-aged salesman so engaged in video poker in the slots parlor she could have taken his belt and shoes, too—and hit the button.

Thankfully, the elevator doors opened right away, a young, drunken couple sharing a bottle of champagne stumbling out. Hailey leapt past them, hit a random floor, and slammed the door close button with the heel of her hand. There was a painful pause—and Hailey cursed to herself, as the two suits saw her from the end of the hall and rushed forward. She hit the button again and the doors started to slide shut, but slow, too damn slow. The suits were at a full run, the closest crew cut with his hand outstretched to stop the door—when someone drunkenly stumbled into him from the side, causing his hand to miss. Hailey caught a brief, blurred glimpse of the drunk—dressed mostly in denim, apologizing in a slur of words—but then the elevator doors slid shut and she was moving upward, breathing hard.

A minute later she was out on the sixth floor of the hotel, quietly pacing the long hallway, her tennis shoes sinking into the thick carpeting. Beige, more beige. She knew she didn’t have much time—the security goons would figure out what floor she was on, and they would be there within minutes. She scanned the doors on either side of her as she went, looking for a fire exit. There might be cameras in the stairwells and halls, but if she was fast enough, maybe she could get outside before anyone got to her. Her face on a camera wasn’t going to be a problem; a fingerprint went back a lot further in time than facial recognition software, because by the time she’d grown into this face, she’d become the person on her ID. It was unfortunate that her fingerprints hadn’t changed at twelve, like the rest of her body. Puberty had its limitations.

She was halfway down the hall, still scanning doors, when she heard the metallic ding of the elevator behind her. Someone was coming to her floor. Could the security goons have found her that fast? She began to panic, rushing forward, looking at door after door after door. And then she saw it: one of the hotel room doors about three feet ahead of her was slightly open. As Hailey leapt forward, grabbing at the knob, she saw why. The keypad above the knob was hanging off the door by a spaghetti twist of wires. Someone broke into this room, and recently.