by Elise Kova
“What do you wish for?” he rephrased, with more urgency.
Step three: Make your wish.
As her mind was wont to do under pressure, she found herself bullet-pointing. One: She was dead, and it didn’t matter. Two: She’d been knocked out and this was all some sort of hallucination, in which case the feds had her and nothing mattered. Or Three: Her insane, improbable, surreal chance had actually panned out as her grandmother had said it would.
Jo swallowed hard.
Her next words either didn’t matter at all, or her life and the lives of everyone she loved depended on them.
“I wish. . .” she started, not wanting to lose her chance. “I wish that none of this happened. That Yuusuke was alive and my family was safe.”
The man stared down at her. She wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.
“This wish requires great power. To grant it, I will need something in return. Something equivalent to the magic I will have to expend.”
“What?” She’d give anything.
“You, your entire future, and the old magic that resides in your blood.”
Jo laughed. It’s not like she’d have a future if she didn’t agree. “Is this any way to make a deal? You’re not giving me a lot of options.” She tried to ignore her dead friend, the guns still pointed at her, her bloody hands. Jo tried to pull together a brave front. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t made deals with devils before. “Fine. Take me, I’m yours.”
“Very well.” There may have been the ghost of a smile tugging at the stony man’s mouth when he spoke, but Jo never knew for sure.
The world erupted in cold fire and when it extinguished, there was only darkness.
Chapter 2
The Society
OVER THE COURSE of her nineteen years, Jo had woken up countless different ways.
There were the more simplistic times of her childhood, when she woke to the smell of her mother’s cooking, or her father’s voice through the door. There were the more stressful times in her early teens, waking up cold and alone on some stranger’s floor after helping out with a “tech favor.”
There were the times when her head pounded and eyes peeled open, gummy from passing out with too much caffeine still coursing through her system. There were the times when she barely woke up at all, eyes functioning only enough to scan downloading files before slipping shut once more.
This was none of those times.
In fact, if Jo had to describe it, it didn’t feel like waking up at all. More just like suddenly. . . being. One minute nothing, perpetual darkness, and then the next, her bedroom.
Despite the lack of tiredness or sleep crusties at the corners, Jo rubbed at her eyes, stars popping to life beneath the pressure of her fingers. When had she come home? Hadn’t she just been somewhere else?
Jo dropped her hands and looked around, taking in the overflowing hamper in the corner, the desk piled high with her multiple monitors and equipment. The cork board behind it was littered with pictures and sticky notes, printed documents related to various side projects she’d taken before—
Her mind drew a blank. Before what? She distinctly felt herself present in an “after,” but what had preceded it?
With a stretch, Jo got to her feet, walking the length of her room. Everything looked the same. Her poster from the eighth Iron Man movie, which she’d pretended to hang up ironically. Her calendar still stuck in December 2056, because she’d been too lazy to hang the one her mother got her for Christmas. Who even used physical calendars anymore, anyway?
Everything looked exactly the way she’d left it a month ago.
A month ago, when she’d taken the job just on the edge of Big Bend, when she’d coerced Yuusuke into joining her, when they’d both been—
She didn’t exactly choose to sit down; more like her legs led her back to the bed and then buckled. Almost as if on delay, her ears began to ring from distant, dream-like gunfire. She was pretty sure she was going to throw up. Jo buried her head in her hands, the images swarming back into her brain like persistent wasps, buzzing and stinging and drowning out all other thoughts: a message from some Japanese mob boss safe in the west, Rangers, gunfire, Yuusuke’s lifeless eyes, blood, so much blood.
With a jolt, Jo ripped her trembling hands away from her face, frantically searching her palms, her nails, her wrists and arms. Nothing. Not a trace of Yuu’s blood to be found. Just her same sun-deprived skin, her fingernails bitten to the beds, and the plain, simple band of black that was her smart-watch.
It didn’t make sense. Not unless she’d dreamed the whole past month. And Jo didn’t put nearly enough stock into her imagination for that to be possible.
Frustrated, and more than a little unnerved, Jo got shakily back to her feet. She needed to get out of her room and find out how she’d gotten back to her apartment. She needed to call Yuusuke and see if she really was going mad. And then maybe talk to somebody who “knows a guy” about sleeping pills that would make dreams less. . . vivid.
It was impossible to consider, but what else could it be? Her brain seemed unwilling to wrap itself around any other possibility. Unless she was dead.
Jo stopped, hand frozen on the doorknob.
Was that it?
Was she dead? Was the afterlife her messy apartment bedroom? Could be a form of hell, she supposed.
It seemed less likely than the dream theory. When she ran her fingers through her long, brown hair, she felt every strand. When she breathed in, she felt her lungs fill with air. When she swallowed, she felt her spit travel down her throat and past the point of sensation. For all intents and purposes, she still felt alive. Living, breathing, in the flesh, alive.
But that didn’t make sense either. Her whole existence was a contradiction right now.
With an aggravated huff, Jo turned the knob on her bedroom door and stalked out into the hall. Call Yuusuke. Then maybe her mom. She could tell her about the dream, pick her brain as to what it all meant. Probably stress. But talking to her about it would ease Jo’s mind, regardless, and her mom had taken after Abuelita when it came to all manner of the occult. “I would have been a curandera like my great grandmother, you as well Josephina, if we’d stayed in Mexico,” she liked to say.
It wasn’t just the thought of her grandmother that had Jo stuttering to a panicked halt not more than two steps out of her room.
This wasn’t the familiar hallway that led to the bathroom, the living room, the tiny and barely-used kitchen. This wasn’t even a hallway in her apartment at all. This was a hallway lined with doors she didn’t recognize, decor in soft colors that were jarring in comparison to the chaos of movie posters she kept on her own walls.
This was a hallway she’d never seen in her life, and it sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be connected to her bedroom. So, Jo did the only sane thing she could think of.
She turned right back around and closed the door, staring at the familiar blue bedspread, the little spaceship hanging off the cord to her ceiling fan, the poster of Iron Man VIII that she—wait.
With a nervous drag to her step, Jo walked up to the bare patch of wall.
Where was her poster? It had been there just there a minute ago, right?
Her mind jerked, as if suddenly changing lanes. She’d taken that poster down a few months ago. She vaguely recalled losing a bet with Yuusuke, watching as he’d torn it down and replaced it with a vintage poster of America before it was carved up in the war—a piece of history that verged on contraband, depending on who you asked. In her frazzled confusion, she’d forgotten that the Iron Man poster wasn’t meant to have been there at all.
In fact, as Jo began to look around, the room seemed to look less and less familiar. The hamper had clothes in it she didn’t remember wearing, some she didn’t even remember owning. The files pinned to the corkboard seemed almost illegible when she looked at them closely, like trying to read a book in a mirror.
But it didn’t feel like a dream. It didn’t feel like anythi
ng. She didn’t feel like anything. How normal it all seemed was the worst part.
In a panic, Jo burst out of the room and back into the hallway. Being in the weird, not-quite-right version of her room was too much. She’d take strange and new to uncomfortably familiar. Her head was spinning, distracted by how wrong it had felt, how wrong everything suddenly felt.
Which was why she didn’t notice until it was too late that somebody else was in the hallway. A realization abruptly made by way of nearly barreling into the person’s chest.
“Whoa there! What’s the hurry?” A voice suddenly accompanied the presence, two hands coming up to grab Jo’s shoulders, steadying her. When she managed to get her head back on straight, she found herself staring into the very handsome face of a complete stranger. Light brown hair was slicked back in a way that made his angular features seem sharper. A crisp, white shirt had been tailored to highlight an obviously well-toned physique. His eyes seemed to spark as they scanned her face, and his lips pulled up into an amused smirk the longer she stared back. “Keep looking at me like that and you’ll give a guy the wrong impression.”
As if the heavily-accented words had broken the spell, Jo instantly backed away, suddenly realizing she’d been frozen in his arms like some gaping lunatic. The man just continued to grin, raising his hands in a way that seemed placating but obviously had little energy behind it.
“Sorry about that, dollface. Wasn’t expecting you to come out of your room so quickly. Usually takes a little while to come back to your senses,” he said, the lilt to his voice itching at some old memory.
Jo had a familiar sensation—one of being on a movie set. When the stranger spoke, it was with a sort of accent that she’d only ever heard in United North America—New York, to be exact. But also, not. . . It was older than that, pre-World War III. Way before. In fact, the closer she looked at him, the more he seemed to be straight out of one of her grandmother’s old photos, the ones that were straight to physical, black and white without any filtering.
He was the real deal—sleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders, tight black trousers, and a thick gold watch. Match that with the incomprehensible sentences, and Jo was having a hard time following any of it.
“You really must stop staring,” he chuckled, wrenching Jo back to the present. And the present matter at hand. Of course, before she could start in on her growing list of questions and concerns, the man opened his mouth with a flirtatious, “Though, you’re a real looker, so I suppose I wouldn’t be disinclined.”
Despite herself, Jo couldn’t help but feel heat rising to her cheeks. She managed a fierce scowl despite the blush, raising her chin at him for emphasis. Just because he was a good couple of inches taller than her didn’t mean she couldn’t stare down her nose at him.
“Well I would be disinclined,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, something she only ever did when she was straddling the line between pissed off and way out of her depth. “So instead, how about you tell me who the hell you are and where the hell I am.”
“Easy there, doll. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Not unless you wanted me to.” The man shoved one hand in his pocket and held the other one out in her direction, waiting for her to take it. There was an easy friendliness about it, like he was openly trying not to pressure her. “I’m Wayne Davis. And trust me, this’ll be a whole hell of a lot easier if you roll with it instead of fighting against the tide.”
After a brief pause, eyes jumping from Wayne’s face to his hand and back, Jo cautiously returned the handshake. He did have a point. Better to go along with whatever was happening for a bit until she could gather enough data to figure out exactly what was going on.
Every problem could be hacked, broken apart, and solved, but she needed the equipment and information to do it. Right now, it felt like she was trying to break into the Black Bank with an old laptop from the early 2000s. Jo’s stomach dropped a bit at the unintentional memory, so she focused on Wayne instead.
“So, what’s your story?” he asked her suddenly. She raised an eyebrow at him, tempted to ask if the lingo was an act. Maybe she was in some sort of reality TV prank show. When Jo didn’t answer right away, Wayne just shook his head, smiling. “Your name, maybe? Got to give me something to work with here. Unless you’re jivin’ with ‘doll’ for the rest of eternity. Which sounds real good to me.”
Okay. Guess they were starting there.
“Jo Espinosa,” she said, looking over Wayne’s shoulder at the rest of the empty hallway, the matching mahogany doors. “Now, where am I? And what do you mean by ‘eternity’?”
“Jo? What kinda name is that for a dame?”
“A perfectly fine one, thank you very much.” Jo bristled, hands back on her hips. “It’s short for Josephina. My grandma’s name. And I’m no ‘dame,’ so you can cool it,” she said, trying her best to mimic his accent. Poorly. “It’s 2057, dude. You’re not getting anywhere with that shtick. Also, you didn’t answer my questions.”
He continued to ignore said questions, whistling in appreciation instead. “It’s 2057 already?”
Jo couldn’t help but balk. “You’re kidding, right?” When Wayne just shrugged, smirking at her stunned surprise, Jo couldn’t bite back the huff of frustration. “You know what, forget it. If you won’t give me answers, I’ll find someone who will.” And with a last, scowling once-over, Jo turned on her heel and began to make her way down the hall.
“Hey, hey, hey! Come on now, don’t be like that!” Wayne caught up to her quickly, cutting her off with a half skip, half spin into her line of sight. “Look, I’m sorry, doll—I mean Jo. I’m sorry, Jo. I didn’t mean to upset you, honest.” The expression on his face seemed sincere, but Jo merely crossed her arms over her chest and waited for him to go on. As he did, he sighed, waving a hand in front of himself in a vague motion. “It’s just been a few decades since we’ve gotten anyone new, though you did come much faster than the last, so I got all caught up in my excitement. What I should have been doing is showing you around and making you feel welcome, so how about I do that now?”
“But welcome where?” Jo latched on to the topic shift like a fish diving back into water from dry land. Wayne straightened up again, that confident air and cocky smirk back in place. Despite the incredibly confusing, anxiety-producing atmosphere of her current situation, she couldn’t help but feel slightly at ease in the man’s presence; even if she also kind of wanted to punch him right in his stupid forced accent. “Wayne, what’s going on. . .? What is this place?”
Wayne’s eyes suddenly took on a proud and excited glint as he said, “The Society.”
When that was all he offered, Jo rolled her eyes and pressed harder. “What kind of a society?” Her bet was models, because the man before her was way too pretty, almost ethereal, like. . . like. . . A man with white hair and a strong jaw appeared on the edge of her mind, but Wayne spoke again before she could cling to the memory.
“Not a society, dollface.” Wayne grinned, walking back to her side and placing a hand at the small of her back, leading her with a gentle nudge down the hall. “The Society. Let me be the first to welcome you as the newest member of the Society of Wishes.”
Chapter 3
Capital D
JO WASN’T REALLY one for clubs.
In her rise to hacker infamy, she’d been lovingly dubbed “Shewolf” by some cabin-based upstarts in Colorado for the fact that she was never seen working with anyone else. That claim evaporated when she started taking on bigger jobs with Yuusuke, but Jo still had a soft spot for her first and favorite moniker.
It was more efficient to be alone; people had the propensity to annoy her. Barring one summer where her mother had forcefully enrolled her into a ranching camp during a futile campaign to “get Jo out of the house more,” she’d never really boasted a wide circle of friends. She believed in quality over quantity on that front. Plus, the more friends she had, the more people she’d be sticking her neck out for. Yuusuke did a good-e
nough job of keeping her hands full most of the time.
“I’m fairly certain there’s some sort of mistake here.” Actually, she was fairly certain there were several mistakes. “There’s no way I would’ve signed up to be a member of anything.”
“No mistakes here.” He was so frustratingly sure.
“Okay,” she drew out the word like he was drawing out her patience. “Then there’s at least the issue of kidnapping?” Jo really wished it was the first time she’d been spirited away somewhere against her will, but it wasn’t. At least having past experience was helping keep her marginally calm. That time had worked out fine; she just had to figure out what they wanted and then be on her way.
“Kidnapping? The Society doesn’t kidnap people.”
“Whatever you want to call it then.” She sighed heavily. “I’ve never heard of this. . . society. But I’m sure we can work out something with your boss. So, if you could just take me to him—”
“Boss? You mean Snow?” Wayne laughed. “So, first lesson for you right there, doll. You never want to willingly meet with Snow. That man lost his humor somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand years ago.”
Jo opened her mouth to speak again, but something about the look on her face must have inspired Wayne to continue. Not that he hadn’t already given off the impression of being a man who loved to listen to himself talk.
“I know it’s all downright confusing. Takako was the same way when she first came. Come along and you’ll pick it up as you go.”
He was ushering her down the hall again. And this time, Jo didn’t put up a fight.
It was clean; warm-toned wood floors met flush against whitewashed walls in almost too-perfect lines. Something about the shine on the walls where the light hit them made it seem like they would be especially smooth—damp, even—to the touch. Every ten to fifteen feet, give or take, was a doorway, and every doorway had a name.