Page 9 of Tech Prince Troubles
With the influx of customers, there was no time for me to retreat to the office. While we served coffee after coffee, the stranger sat in the corner booth, nursing their espresso shot. Inhaling its scent the way I’d wanted to do when I’d made it. When they at last lifted the cup and sipped it, their shoulders dropped, and their expression softened.
See, I wanted to tell the baristas. We did that. Gandalf did that. They could complain all they wanted, but when the magic happened, it produced the perfect espresso.
“Sam? The register’s lagging.”
I dragged myself away from the stranger and moved to join Zane.
He punched in random numbers that trickled onto the screen like day-old syrup… then stalled. “See?” He gave his red curls an irritated shake.
I sighed. “Yes. Mateo mentioned it was lagging earlier, too. He had to reboot it.” He’d complained about IT being too busy to check it out. Something about glitches elsewhere. “Let’s try rebooting it again, and I’ll give IT another call.”
I directed his customer to Lucy at the next register while Zane rebooted his. It took its sweet time—which always made me nervous—but then pinged and started up as if there wasnothing wrong. “All right, then,” I whispered as I petted it with crossed fingers. “Please, don’t do that again.”
“Sam? The frother is stuttering.”
I took a breath and turned to Cyril, a trainee barista. “Did you wipe the steam wand before you tried to froth the milk?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Okay, well, milk gunk is the enemy, so give it a quick wipe, dump this cup, and restart it again. You’ll get it. If you want, I’ll watch how you’re doing it, but otherwise, just keep at it. They’d rather have their coffee a little late than drink bad coffee; remember that.”
“Yes, boss.” Cyril’s skull-shaped rings clinked against the mug as he dumped the contents with a wry grin and grabbed a new one. His second attempt went off without a hitch. His sassy apology was a little over the top, but his customer seemed to enjoy it, so I let it slide.
Circling from the counter to the machines—answering questions, serving coffee, fixing problems—time ran away with me, and when I glanced at the corner booth, the stranger had gone. I sighed, rubbing a hand over my face. Customers came and went every day, but something about them stuck. It rarely happened that a customer caught my eye like that, least of all someone so ethereal. The way they’d moved, the way they’d inhaled their espresso as if it was something sacred. I couldn’t get them out of my head.
As my shift chugged along, and morning turned to noon, the register held, Cyril cost us a liter of milk, and I kept imagining the stranger sitting in that corner booth.
Chapter Five
ADRI
puzzles are meant to be solved
It had been hours since my Sam-made espresso—I remembered to check his name tag—but I could still recall the rich flavor as it traveled through my system, along with the memory of its maker, with his warm grin and the twinkle in his eyes. Short, broad-shouldered, and sun-kissed, he looked built for a grounded balance. His love for making coffee shone in the way he treated the machines with the same respect and kindness he showed his colleagues, and that instinctive—aborted—urge to inhale the scent of espresso before handing it over. I stayed longer than needed, but it was compelling to watch him work, as if nothing could derail him. And I was definitely going back for more… tomorrow. One espresso a day was more than enough for my system to handle.
It would be impolite to claim that corner booth for a quick top-up on energy and not order anything. Unnecessary, too, as the past few hours of exploring the hotel had taught me—Layla’s suggestion, as I wouldn’t be meeting the IT team until tonight. There were plenty of sockets in the hotel’s common spaces.
Yesterday, Layla had sent me blueprints and a work log after showing me to my room and telling me to take the dayto rest from my journey. Humans often overestimated our rest cycle and assumed we slept like they did. Still, the bus ride had been a long one, so I spent most of the day sitting on the small balcony, drawing various birds on my low-tech digital sketch pad. One I had designed myself—after much trial and error. The final result was light but sturdy, and the canvas texture felt wonderful beneath my fingertips.
My family pinged me several times, but the reroutes and auto-responses I’d set up should satisfy them… for now.
I also studied the blueprints. The Renversé Hotel had two wings, connected to the main building by a spacious hall housing the stairs and elevators. My room was just off the hall. It overlooked a path and a narrow brook with some tall trees that hid the buildings on the other side from view. To the left was the plaza, and if I stood at the edge of the balcony, I could see the café’s patio.
So far, I’d done a quick walkthrough of the main building of the hotel to scan for issues, but aside from some slow pockets, the energy flowed smoothly. The east wing had the same feeling—until I reached the end of the corridor, and my systems threw up alerts. I froze.
Massive wrought-iron gates loomed before me. To the side, brass, old-fashioned elevator buttons jutted from the wall. The power coming off it was wrong. Powerful. Disrupted. Shielded. I itched to put my hands against the iron and… fix it, but something stopped me. Something pushed back, pushed me away. I couldn’t get a grip on it. The only thing I was certain of was that it wasn’t connected to the hotel’s system. I colored the whole thing red on the blueprints and made a note to ask Layla what that was about.
It proved hard to ignore that elevator as I stepped out on the top floor in the west wing—the wing under construction. Its disruptive energy kept luring me back. Leaning against the wall,I closed my eyes and pushed it behind a temporary shield to stop it from interfering as I worked. The familiarity of the Niren technology—more present in this wing than anywhere else in the hotel—grounded me.
The entire wing exuded a vibrant and welcoming atmosphere, despite its hampered and sluggish energy flow and unfinished state. It felt like a different hotel altogether. I slowed my pace and performed extra spot checks, but the origin of the power fluctuations wasn’t on this floor. I scanned floor after floor, but I’d never encountered such an inconsistent mess of energy flow—not even on the finished floors. The problems became more serious on the lower four levels, where glitches jittered my system every few doors. I marked every problem on the blueprints—color-coded with estimated repair times.
As the temporary shield fizzled out, I found myself back in the east wing, staring at the peculiar elevator on the first floor. The puzzle of its wrongness, the itch to fix it, crawled through my system when a voice interrupted my thoughts.
“There you are.”
Layla. I cursed. Too late now to take a break and sit on my balcony. It was time to meet the IT team.
She studied my face as I turned and shook her head. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, forget it. This elevator is off-limits to you. It’s not connected to our system.”
