Do Not Reprint

The kiosk printed her name before she typed it.

Renna Solis was restocking travel-size Tylenol when a man in a gray windbreaker set a memory card on the photo counter like a tooth he'd just had pulled. 9:12 p.m. Thursday. The strip mall had emptied itself with professional competence: nail salon dark, burrito place stacking chairs, the 24-hour drugstore fluorescent and over-honest. The bell over the door still worked. It was the most reliable employee they had.

"Index print only," he said. "Hold for pickup." His voice had the practiced flatness of a man who had said the sentence in the car until it stopped sounding like a plea. "The name's already on it."

He did not wait for a receipt. The doors exhaled him into the lot.

Renna almost called after him — we need a last name, we need a phone — and then the Fuji spat an envelope, warm, vanilla-drugstore. SOLIS, R. in the chain's ugly type. She had not keyed it. She had not even touched the screen.

She ran the job because the machine was already running, and because she was the sort of person who finished things, and because standing there holding an impossibility felt like a customer complaint she had not been trained for.

Twelve thumbnails. A contact sheet, the kind nobody asked for anymore. Her kitchen: the chipped blue kettle, the microwave with the fist-dent from a year she did not discuss, the window onto the dumpster. Her. In the last frame she was on the linoleum. Eyes open. In the foreground, a cheap red twist-timer reading 14. Timestamp in the kiosk font: 11:47 PM. Tonight.

Owen, twenty-two, Seasonal, was in a death match with a cardboard pumpkin. Headphones. He would not be useful.

Renna's first useful thought was not this is a death threat. It was: I don't own a timer that color. The second: I heat leftover at eleven-forty-seven. Every night I'm on. Fourteen minutes is how long the pad thai takes if you do it wrong on purpose so the bag doesn't erupt.

Someone had been in her apartment. Someone knew the break. Someone had used her own kiosk — her own finishing-things — to hand her the future in gloss.

The windbreaker was gone from the lot. A white Camry sat with its lights off, engine making that expensive idle. Not Owen's. Not hers. Hers was the Civic with the photo-lab lanyard hanging off the shifter like a tongue.

She still had the memory card. She still had the receiving-dock keys. She still had two hours and change, or she had the length of a drive, depending on whether the kitchen in the pictures was the place it would happen or only the place someone wanted her to go.

The screen asked, politely: REPRINT? YES / NO.

She hit NO hard enough to hurt her thumb.

Owen pulled one earcup off. "You good?"

"I'm taking ten," Renna said, which was a lie in a building full of clocks. "If anyone asks, the kiosk's down. It isn't. Don't run jobs."

The Camry's idle changed pitch, like a person leaning forward. She could stay and make the machine confess the upload. She could go home and meet the linoleum before it was scheduled. Either way the envelope was already warm in her pocket, as if it had a pulse.