Chapter 26“What are you here for?” a hotel-lobby denizen asked her.
She and Melanctha were in the lobby of the Value Palace. Melanctha stood at the barred-glasma window negotiating a room from the proprietor of this New Athens underworld hotel, by far the worst place they'd stayed in their traipse along their downward spiral.
Warped and stained paper with faded patterns peeled from the walls. The portrait of someone who might have been famous leered salaciously at them from a canted angle. The carpet admonished them to walk only within the blackened strips, where the nap had worn through to the warp and weft. The furniture declared itself unfit to sit upon, stains in multiple, overlapping penumbras attesting to urine-soaked occupants, the upholstery pattern long since lost in the tides o
