So I pressed the button.

Nothing happened. Then the hippie goth girl at my table had a nose bleed.

What was she? Some kind of drug addict? Asking me for money?

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit," she said. "What did you just DO?"

I was still holding the silver pen in my hand. Thumb still on the button. She was staring at it.

"Gimme that!" she snarled, grabbed the pen from my hand, and took off. Blood splattered on the table.

That couldn't be good. There was no voice in my earbuds. What was I supposed to do?

So I followed the trail of blood.

Everybody had nosebleeds.

"What's going on? What's happening to us?!!!"

"Calm down, it's alright," said @Madison Addison. She had kleenex up her nose. It was soaked through. "Mia and Sophie are down. Everybody else is just dizzy. And bleeding out their noses. Still no @Ami Upton."

We were holed up in a forgotten break room for a forgotten airline. An appropriate secret headquarters for the Flight Attendants.

"Oh my god. There was this guy. I was hitting him up for a bite to eat and I think HE made this happen. With this--" I held out the silver pen thing with the glass button.

Madison stared at it. It had nose blood all over it. Like my hand.

"Who--?" she asked, when suddenly he came bounding through the door of the breakroom.

"HIM!" I cried. "GET HIM!"

"WHAT DID YOU DO? YOU CUT US OFF!!!"

@Tracy Hyde gave the guy another kick in the side. He let out an ooof. We had him pinned to the floor of our breakroom hideout. And she was right about us being cut off. Ever since the nosebleeds happened, none of us could feel the gates anymore. In airports, we get a feel for the doors and jetways that are "open." It's like a steady background hum. But now we could hardly feel a thing.

"It's just a game," the guy said, trying to catch his breath. "It's a LARP. I met these guys online. They send me on phony 'missions' and I do what they say. It's harmless fun. We're just playing spy..."

"IT'S NOT HARMLESS YOU PRICK!" Tracy kicked him again.

This was bad. This was messed up. How could we fix this? And who was after us anyway? This kid seemed like a total douche, but he wasn't a hardcase. He probably believed the whole LARP story. I'd been pressing the button on the stupid pen thing he'd used, which was probably not a good idea, but it didn't seem to do anything. But maybe we could prevent it from happening in the first place...

So I told everybody my plan. Even though we couldn't feel the proper gates, if you squinted and turned your head just right you could still feel some of the rough edges. Those were smaller rips that were too small to fit through, and lead to short time hops backwards and forwards at DFA. We'd played around before pushing things through them with mop poles, and then find them a few hours in the future. Or we'd find a thing and know we'd need to push it through the hole to go back to the moment we found it. We'd never found much use for them except for fooling around.

The kid had a phone. We could text him through a rip, back to before he pushed the button, and tell him to stop. Call off his phony 'mission.' It wouldn't solve all our problems. And if we succeeded we still wouldn't know who was behind this. But at least we'd get our feeling back.

"Hey, can I have your number?" Tracy asked him. Then she kicked him again.

"There he is," says the voice in my earbuds. "Guy in the parka, row of seats on the right. There's a spot next to him. Sit there."

I take a seat next to the guy.

"Pull out your phone and mess with it. Act natural."

I pull out my phone and look at it, fumbling with my thumb. No messages. Then a message comes in.

ding!

THIS IS THE FIFTH TIME. CUT IT OUT ALREADY. YOU CAN DO IT! TURN AROUND AND LEAVE THE AIRPORT

"Ok, he's going to get up in a minute, but he's going to leave something behind in his seat. A small scrunched up paper bag. Don't look at it!"

The guy gets up and leaves.

"In about a minute, you're going to grab that bag and put it in your pocket as you stand up. But not till I give the signal."

ding!

AREN'T YOU GETTING BORED OF THIS? WE ARE!!! QUIT. THE. GAME.

I'm have a deja vu.

"Ok, real casual, reach over and grab the bag, now stand up and put it in your hoodie pocket, and walk back down the concourse the way you came."

ding!

AH HA! ARE WE STARTING TO GET THROUGH TO YOU? IT'S OVER. TURN AROUND AND LEAVE.

Uptown Ami here. It's so loud I can barely type! At yet another show of studded leather jacket wearing rhino head guys playing powersaw core. Well not always rhino headed. Sometimes big battle masks, alien warlords, demons. All the real thing. They play in warrens of burnt out concrete basements and under bombed out bridges.

Dirk and Krystal and Hegemony have handfuls of various currencies they've been able to scrap up during their time here, so they buy the drinks.

"Yeah emo-land is on the outskirts of all this," Dirk says, gesturing with a tin cup filled with purple froth. "But where you want to go is on the whole other side."

"There's a show they say that leads to EVERYWHERE," Krystal says with a dreamy look in her eye.

"Maybe that includes your airport?" Hegemony says, swirling her froth. "Or at least a place we've heard of called 'Red Rocks.' Maybe you've been there?"