Look Into My Eyes: A Romance, With Consequences

Delia Garrett is the last of a bloodline three empires wrote laws about. The family gift got traded down somewhere in the long dim middle of history: the stone is gone, and what's left is ninety seconds. Look her in the eye on purpose - both ways, like a handshake - and for ninety seconds you cannot say a false thing. Then, for exactly eleven minutes, you love her helplessly. Then it stops.She's forty-one. She notaries documents in a Florida strip mall between two unrelated businesses both named Cloud Nine, six dollars a signature, and she has spent twenty-two years learning to look at people's chins.Then a compliance officer from a bureau that classified her great-great-grandmother as an "instrument" walks in, meets her eyes, and nothing happens. He hasn't told a lie since 2007. He's also there to inform her that her file has been moved to Acquisition - because someone upstairs has worked out how to run her gaze through fourteen thousand kilometers of fiber-optic cable and point it at the entire world.They call it ambient clarity. Delia has a shorter word for it.A comedy about bureaucracy, hurricanes, a prophetic parrot imprinted on 1980s infomercials, and the one thing nobody in six centuries thought to ask: why eleven minutes?From the author of The Conical Conspiracy and Cooties.