by Bryan Camp
“Ramses St. Cyr,” she said, moving close enough to see the screens over his shoulder, but staying a lunging arm’s length away from him. She watched as he typed the name into a search engine that was only a text box on a blank page. It whirled for a few seconds and pulled up a page in French. He leaned forward, humming a song that she recognized, after a few notes, as “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Renai bit her bottom lip. He hadn’t mentioned a price so far, but then he hadn’t found anything yet, either.
His humming paused. “Don’t suppose he’s a real estate company in France, by any chance?”
“Wow,” she said, deadpan. “You’re a genius. Can you find Tupac next?” She bit the inside of her cheek, told herself if she didn’t hide some of her irritation, she’d never get the help she’d come here for.
“You’d be surprised how often it’s that simple,” he said, “people these days hide nothing. Secrets used to be a challenge.”
These days? Renai thought. My dude looks about thirty. Of course, appearances didn’t mean much in her world. She herself looked like she was the same age she’d been on the day she died. Her lips compressed to a tight line, and she turned her mind away from any thoughts that found similarities between her and the soulless Jack Elderflower.
Jack’s fingers were busy on the keyboard, filling a different screen—which was solid black with green text—with Ramses’ name over and over, interspersed with the numbers and punctuation marks of computer code and, occasionally, symbols that looked more like zodiac signs than letters in any language she could recognize. He raised his hand dramatically, a conductor lifting his baton, and then stabbed it down on the ENTER key. Immediately, windows popped open on his other screens: a scan of a birth certificate, a student information page with the EITA logo and Ramses St. Cyr’s school photo, an NOPD database file from something called Palantir, half a dozen social media pages, an Amazon wish list, two separate browser histories—one free of porn, one practically all there was—a Spotify profile, a cell phone bill.
In a matter of seconds, Jack had Ramses’ whole young life splayed out on his screens, cold and invasive as an autopsy.
“Voilà!” Jack shouted, throwing his fists up, triumphant, as though he hadn’t just done something horrible. “My demons will never be denied.” He bent back over the keys, pointing up at the picture of Ramses without looking at him. “This our boy?”
“That’s him,” Renai said. “And I’m sorry, but did you say ‘demons’ just now?”
His fingers froze in their dance for a fraction of an instant, just long enough for Renai to notice, and to know that the next thing he said would be a lie. “Figure of speech,” he said. He resumed his humming perusal of Ramses’ information. “Our boy has been naughty, hasn’t been to school all week.”
“Knew that already,” Renai said.
“Gunshots reported on his block, no known casualties.”
“Knew that, too. Can’t you just, you know . . .” She waved her hand at the ceiling, a half-dozen terms from cop shows and spy movies on her tongue, things like “ping” and “triangulate.” “Can’t you track his phone or something?”
“First thing I tried,” Jack said, paying more attention to the screen than his explanation. “Thought he just had his GPS turned off, but when I tried calling him to get a hit off the nearest tower, I got nothing. So he’s either got the data switched off or the whole device is dead.” Renai winced at that last word. “I’ve got a de— um, a bot dialing him every thirty seconds, so as soon as he’s back on the network, I should know about it.” He swiveled his chair to face her, and when she met his eyes, she took an involuntary step back.
“So that’s it? You’re done now?”
“No,” he said, cracking one knuckle after another, slow and methodical. “Now is when we talk about payment.”
“Payment? For what? You haven’t told me anything I don’t already know.”
Again that hundred-watt smile, though this time there was something sly in it. “Not true. Now you know exactly how hard it will be to find him without me. That, I’ll show you for free. If you want me to show you where he is, though, that will cost you.”
“If he’s so completely vanished, what makes you so sure you can find him?”
“If the one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind, the man with a video camera would be their god.”
She kissed her teeth. “That supposed to be convincing?”
“It’s just facts. Question isn’t if I can do it, question is whether you can pay. You take your time thinking it over.” He swung back around to his desk, sweeping all of Ramses’ pictures and data onto one small screen, the rest returning to the broken-up map of the city they’d displayed when she’d come in.
Much as she wanted to punch him right in his perfect teeth, his confidence gave her some hope for the first time in days. Maybe she could find Ramses before the Hallows started after all. She had no money, no valuable possessions to barter—save the jacket, and he could kick rocks if he thought she was giving that up. No real power of her own to make a favor worth anything. When she tried to decide which bank vault she could offer to empty out using the jacket’s ghost word, she realized she’d already decided to pay his price. “How much?” she asked.
“Just a single coin,” Jack said, half turning back to face her. “One of those golden coins that you take when you reap the dead.”
Renai’s surprise yanked a bark of a laugh out of her, cut short by the expression on Jack’s face. “You’re serious? What makes you think—”
“I’ve lived long enough,” he said, cutting her off, “to recognize a psychopomp when I see one, ‘Rain.’” He actually did the little air quotes when he said it, just to get the full smug-asshole effect. “And we both know that once the Hallows start, no one will notice if a single coin goes missing.”
The coin in her pocket suddenly felt dense with all the weight of her trying not to think about it. A half-dozen responses came to Renai—doubt and denial, questions and curses—but she dismissed them all. She’d come this far. Might as well see it through to the end. “Show me,” she said. “Show me what you can do that’s worth a person’s destiny.”
In reply, Jack stood, nudging his chair out of his way with the back of his legs. He slid open a desk drawer and took out a pair of brown work gloves with coils of brass wound around each of the fingers and the wrists, bent into odd glyphs on the palms and the backs of the hand. Sparks arced off of them when he pulled them on. The floor began to vibrate, a rhythmic pounding like an approaching marching band during a Mardi Gras parade. Renai thought at first that this rumbling came from Jack, but as it grew stronger, she realized that she was feeling the computer equipment downstairs coming to life. Jack reached out to the assorted monitors on his desk and, gesturing like the air in front of him was a touchscreen, manipulated the displayed map of New Orleans, zooming in on the Central City neighborhood, then a handful of blocks, then a single street, and then centered on a single house, which Renai recognized as the St. Cyr home by the two cemeteries across the street.
Renai opened her mouth, intending to congratulate Jack on inventing Google Maps, when he reached out, made a grabbing gesture, and pulled the image off the screens and held it in midair.
She’d seen holograms before, ephemeral creations of light, but this was something else. The disc of the city floating in front of Jack’s outstretched hands was more vivid than any projection and was solid as the floor she stood on. Nor was it simply a re-creation of the architecture and streets and green spaces; Renai saw cars on the streets and birds in the sky and people everywhere, all captured in a single moment. No mere computer could do this, no matter how advanced. This was a marriage of magic and technology that made Renai’s stomach flutter. Before she could articulate any of the questions she wanted to ask, Jack moved his hands again, and the city swooped and tilted until they were at ground level, looking at the St. Cyr’s front door. Renai had an impulsive desire to see what h
appened if she tried to touch the city, but then balled her hands into fists, immediately recoiling from the thought.
“Pretty impressive, no? I call him Maxwell. Now watch this.” His hands now cupped like he held a bowl in his palms, Jack slid one hand in a counterclockwise motion. Instead of spinning, like she thought it would, the frozen city began to move, cars flickering by, shadows lengthening and shifting, people on the sidewalk moving in lurching backwards steps like a video rewinding. Night rose on this city and day fell, again and again, and then Jack slowed his hands, stopping at a single moment.
Ramses St. Cyr stood at his front door in his school uniform with his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Do you know when this was—uh—taken, I guess?”
“This is the last day he went to school,” Jack said without turning away from the city, as though his attention helped sustain whatever magic he had wrought. “Five days ago.”
So three days before he was supposed to die, Renai thought. Where the hell have you been, kid? “Now what? Can you track him with this?”
“Yes and no,” Jack said. “I can’t just skip ahead to where he is right now. But I can follow him, see?” He moved his hands to demonstrate, and the image leapt forward to hover just over Ramses’ shoulder, keeping pace with him as he walked to the corner, dapped another teenager wearing the same uniform, waited for a yellow bus to pull up, and climbed aboard. Jack pressed his palms together, and the perspective shot back up, so high that it took in the whole city once again. For just a moment, before it went static and fell flat and confined to the screens once more, Renai saw a cloud drifting across the lake. If she went outside right now, would she see that same cloud? Could that strange awareness Jack had harnessed see itself? She pictured the abominable infinity that was created when two mirrors faced one another and felt a little queasy.
“So,” Jack said, pulling off those strange mad-scientist-looking gloves, “now that you see that I can run your quarry to ground, if given some time, how about my price? Do we have a deal?”
Renai took a deep breath and held it. This might be her only chance for finding Ramses. She’d be surprised if the spirits she’d collected and changed into a deck of cards on Canal Street did anything but flee if she tried to invoke them, and the usually dependable Sal had basically vanished. Once the chaos of the Hallows started at midnight . . .
She started to slide her hands into her jacket pocket, remembered that she had a coin of Fortune to pay him with right then and there, and put her fists on her hips instead. “What are you gonna do with it?” She expected that anything he said would be a lie, had already decided that he wanted to rebuild his missing soul piece by piece. But the lie he chose could be informative too.
“Does it matter?” he asked. “It’s the only payment I’ll accept to find your little lost lamb. This isn’t a negotiation. You say yes, or you say no.”
If she hadn’t deliberately placed herself out of reach, she might have hit him. She made herself stare into his unnerving, colorless eyes with all the disdain her mother would have given him. Then she gave him her best you-just-fucked-up smile. “Fine by me. I’ll just show myself out.” She took a half step toward the door. “You want me to let the next one in to hear your little ‘you say yes, or you say no’ offer?”
Jack’s brow crinkled, unsure of himself for the first time. “What next one?”
“The next one in that long, long line of psychopomps waiting outside. You know, since we’re all so eager to get you what you want.” She threw her arms up in mock revelation. “Oh! That’s right. I’m the only psychopomp here, and I’m the only one coming.” She clasped her hands together at her waist and cocked her shoulders. And waited. Patient as the grave.
He broke so quick, it was almost disappointing. He sighed and wilted like that breath was all he had filling up his skin. “I’m limited to seeing what was and what is,” he said. “With some raw destiny to work with, to incorporate into my design, I’ll be able to see what will be.” He frowned and shrugged. “And that’s all I’ll say.”
Renai thought of how easily and callously Jack had dug up every petty little secret Ramses possessed, and tried to imagine what a man like that would do with the ability to see the future. It was not a pleasant thought. Still, Jack’s computers—his demons, she reminded herself—hadn’t been able to tell Jack what Opal had seen: that Ramses was more than human. She took some comfort in knowing that this soulless whatever-he-was wasn’t truly omniscient. Nor, without a soul, did she have any way of ensuring that he held up his end of the bargain.
And that gave her an idea.
“First you find Ramses for me,” she said, “and then you’ll get your coin.”
Jack laughed without kindness. “Sure,” he said, “no problem. You want my wallet, too? How about the Rolls downstairs? I’ve got the keys around here somewh—”
“You think we carry bags of Fortune around with us?” Renai grabbed the corners of her jacket and held them out at arm’s length, revealing her shirt, her waist. “You want me to turn my pockets out, too?” She felt her face flush with the lie, with the bluff, but she hoped Jack would attribute that to frustration, if he noticed it at all. “You know what I am. You think about why I might be looking for somebody? The only reason somebody like me come calling?” The arrogant smirk slipped from Jack’s face, but Renai kept talking, wanting to drive the point home so he wouldn’t question it. “Did it occur to you that in order for me to break you off a piece of soul, I gotta find one to collect first?”
“Okay, okay,” Jack said, raising his hands in surrender. “You make a fair point.” He steepled his fingers and pressed them against his lips. Without pupils or iris, it was impossible to tell if he was looking at her, waiting for a response, or if he was staring off at nothing, lost in thought. The silence drew out, became obvious that he considered weighing his options more valuable than her time.
Renai managed to keep her reaction to just a lifted eyebrow, but inside she seethed. You had to be some kind of prick to just stop talking to a person in the middle of a business negotiation. Though she’d long since used up her patience with Jack, for some reason his rudeness didn’t trigger the righteous storm inside her. Maybe she’d used up her whole day’s mojo on those fugitive spirits. Maybe frustrated indignation just wasn’t the right kind of anger. Maybe the tempest knew, like she did, that the satisfaction of double-crossing him would be worth the wait.
Or maybe, she thought, his creepy-eyed Big Brother ass scares the storm as much as he scares me. If the spirit heard her, it gave no answer.
Jack’s lips compressed, and for a second Renai thought she’d spoken out loud, but then he nodded to himself and cleared his throat, and she realized that he’d just come to his decision. “If I were to agree to this,” he said, “I would need to secure some collateral from you.”
Renai licked her lips to keep from cursing. “Like what?”
“Your name—your true name—and a drop of blood.”
Any petty satisfaction she felt at the possibility of tricking Jack went spilling out of her. Renai was no practitioner of magic, but she knew enough about spells and workings to know that Jack’s request was both perfectly reasonable and absolutely destroyed any hope she’d had of double-crossing him. She couldn’t turn away from Jack’s ability to follow Ramses, nor could she just pay him with the coin in her pocket, not now that she’d made such a show of not having one. She’d backed herself into a corner by trying to be tricky. Tell the truth and shame the devil, she heard her grandmother say.
“Fine,” Renai said. “You got a pen?”
Jack opened a drawer in his desk and took out a small wooden box. It opened and unfolded more than once, like an intricate puzzle. When he finished, it lay flat on his desk and revealed its contents: a small sheaf of paper, a squat, dark bottle, and the elegant gossamer swoop of a single white feather. The sight of that feather filled Renai with a dread she couldn’t name or shake, nothing to do with its f
unction as a pen, but something older, something half-remembered. She watched as Jack plucked the stopper out of the inkwell with a hollow little plunk, as he dipped the quill’s nib into the ink with smooth, delicate gestures, waiting for her aversion to the feather to pass. When it didn’t, when Jack held the quill out to her, she pushed it down and reached for the pen anyway. She had no time for weakness, especially not her own.
RENAISSANCE DANTOR RAINES, she wrote in the blocky, spare handwriting that no penmanship teacher in all her years of Catholic school had ever been able to twist into cursive. She pricked her thumb with the sharp nib of the quill—her stomach writhing with nausea when she did so, not from the pain or the blood, but from that damned white feather—and mashed a bloody print onto the paper next to her name. Jack tore the strip of her name off and curled it into a little tube, which he slid into a glass vial. Renai had the sudden impulse to check the scrap of paper that Seth had given her to see if it, too, bore a brown smear of dried blood. She’d have noticed that, wouldn’t she?
Jack closed up his writing case with a series of little wooden clacks and slid it back into its drawer. He pulled his mad-scientist gloves back on and reached once more for the map of the city. This time, though, once he’d pulled it free from the monitors, he squeezed it and folded it and twisted it until it was small enough to fit in just one of his hands, too small for Renai to see. He held it close and molded it, manipulating it over and over with the bending and creasing gestures of someone folding origami. Once he was satisfied, he stood and held one hand out to Renai.
Cupped in the palm of Jack’s gloved hand was a hole in reality the size of a peach pit.
“Go on,” he said, “take it. It’s what you came for, after all.”
Unsure of what she might find, but more willing to endure pain than to show this man any uncertainty, Renai reached into Jack’s offering hand and, with two fingers, picked up the product of his work. It felt like a small glass bead, smooth but irregularly shaped, cool to the touch and without any real weight. When she held it up to get a good look at it, the light didn’t refract through it the way it ought to; instead, images swam around inside it.
