Page 22 of The Wake-Up Call

“If you’re helping with the Ring Thing,” I say, “do you want to make it a bit more interesting?”

“Interesting... how?” Lucas says, keys still jangling.

I reach for my own keys in my pocket, Smartie’s lights blinking in the dark car park as I hit unlock. This is a conversation that feels like it might need a fast exit.

“A bet. Whoever returns the next ring wins.”

The wind blusters through the car park, ruffling the hedges, sending a lone plastic bottle skittering under the cars.

“Wins what?” Lucas asks.

“Well... what would you like?”

The keys stop jangling. He is suddenly very still.

“What would I like?”

“Mm.”

It seems colder now, the breeze sharper. Lucas’s stillness reminds me of a big cat waiting to pounce.

“I want one day,” he says. “One day in which you do things my way. I am in charge. What I say goes.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” I say derisively, but my breath quickens.

He looks at me with dark, glinting eyes. “If you win, you can have the same.”

Lucas at my beck and call, agreeing with everything I say, doing as he’s told? It is almost too good to imagine. And I’m confident I can return a ring before he can. This sort of challenge is made for me—Lucas will try to use statistics and spreadsheets, but this is about understandingpeople. I lift my chin, shucking off the strange, hot-cold feeling that’s come over me in the face of his steady stare.

“Deal,” I say, and hold out my hand to shake his.

Our palms connect hard. The feeling of his fingers gripping my hand makes my heart quicken, like the moment at the start of a race—you’re not running yet, but you know you will be.

Lucas

I arrive at the hotel the next morning to find that Izzy is already here, and has spread a great number of socks across the desk. After a moment, I conclude that this is part of an effort to sort them into pairs, which strikes me as an enormous waste of time—but then, Izzy loves to do what she calls “going the extra mile.”

“I’ve sorted your Mrs. Muller problem,” she says to me, not bothering with a hello.

One of the builders calls, “Hey, Izz!” as he strolls in, still vaping, and she gives him a big smile and a wave, all of which irritates me. Despite the two hours I’ve just spent in the gym, I’m on edge—I have been all week. The stress of working shifts with Izzy Jenkins, no doubt.

“It’s notmyMrs. Muller problem,” I say, very deliberately shifting the clothes heaped on my chair to the already teetering pile on hers. “Any problem Mrs. Muller is having concerns all of us.”

A note from Poor Mandy says that Louis Keele requested a wake-up call for eight fifteen today, so I ring him, hang up as quickly as possible—he is still mid–sleepy grunt—and then wait for Izzy to tell me what she’s done. She just continues sorting socks,humming Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits.” She has stuck a note to my keyboard—something about paint in the store cupboard, but as usual her handwriting is totally unreadable. She has also moved the pen pot to her side of the desk, even though it should live right in the middle. I am disproportionately annoyed by both these things. Maybe I need to go back to the gym after work, too.

“Well?” I say.

“Well what?”

“What did you do about Mrs. Muller?”

She smiles in satisfaction and brings out her phone, pulling up a photo of the paint splattering the wall of Mrs. Muller’s suite. I stare at it, trying to get the point, until she leans forward and zooms in on the bottom corner of the mess. Her hair falls forward, striped in green and blue today, and I make the mistake of inhaling. She smells of cinnamon again.

“See it?” she says.

I lean closer, my head just inches from hers. There is a small sign stuck to the wall.When the Muses Strike,by M. Muller, it reads.December 2022.It is just like the cards you see next to artworks in a museum.

“She was thrilled,” Izzy says. “Honoured, she said. She’s going to stay in ‘her room’ at the hotel every year from now on.”

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