by Robin Sloan
He’s coming, Scheme. I don’t know how he got here, but he’s coming.
“I still don’t see anything,” she said.
He was like a dog that wouldn’t stop following us. A dead dog. He came through the fence—walked straight through it—and I could see him on normal settings now. He was mostly transparent. His jacket was in tatters and he had cuts on his hands and head. Apparently it wasn’t just a game for Jack Zapp.
He stopped just inside the fence and looked up at the Scepter. I zoomed in on his face; the expression there was sad and puzzled. Something was different. I didn’t like it.
Then he disappeared.
Scheme swung out onto the ladder. The wind was wailing; it tore at her coat and roared in my ears.
Scheme, what if he’s waiting for us down there?
“Then it’s a good trap,” she said, “because there’s no place to go but down there.” Down she went, rung by rung, back to the surface of planet earth.
STUDIO S/A
We were almost to the bottom when, on a hunch, I connected to the wavering UCSS-experimental network and loaded up Doctor Faustus again.
There, on the front page. The most recent listing, demonstrating the efficiency of the market, had been accepted in seconds.
The seller, JackZapp79.
The buyer, DarkLordBaal.
The offer:
THE SOUL OF SHERRINGFORD JACKMAN
The reward—oh. He wrote, “I, Jack Zapp, the Electric Detective, in order to fulfill Jack Zapp’s Restless Pledge, require the power to defeat the demon that killed me.”
Scheme. I think we should go faster.
She plunged forward. The Scepter’s blinking red lights cast her shadow lower and longer as she jogged away, and then we were in the trees, Scheme feeling her way along the thin track. The trees were a screen of shifting black and gray. I was blind.
She cried out, and there was a loud rustle and a crash.
Scheme?
“It’s okay,” she said. “I tripped.” I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear her moving in the darkness. “Oh, wow,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.”
We were back in the safety of the Tata, under the protective glow of its dome light. Scheme had a dark box in her lap—whatever she’d tripped over in the woods. It was a squat metal thing, filthy and corroded, with ports on the back. There was a cable plugged into one of them that ran for three inches before unraveling into wires and tatters. The box had a ragged hole in the side, and pine needles spilled out. “One of Sebastian’s repeaters,” she said, wiggling a finger inside. “I’m glad somebody got some use out of it.”
She turned it over, and on the bottom I saw, stenciled in bright yellow paint, now worn and faded:
Scheme ran a palm over it, clearing some of the dirt. “I painted this,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “I thought we were going to graduate and start a company, just the two of us. Design things.” I could see her face in the rear-view mirror. It was still pale and raw from the cold. There were bits of twig and leaf stuck in her hair. “Maybe get a dog.”
Something landed on the Tata’s hood with a crash that shook the whole car’s frame, and then I saw, leering through the windshield, the face of Jack Zapp, his mustache bristling above a brand-new mouth, a mouth bursting with curved black teeth.
Scheme put the Tata in reverse, stomped on the accelerator, and buzzed backwards through the empty lot. Monstrous, lion-jawed Jack Zapp slid off the hood and fell onto the concrete, where he stood and reared back, wings at full extension.
Oh. He has wings now.
Scheme dropped the car into drive and gunned forward. Jack Zapp was lit up in the headlights. His new additions were multiple-jointed mechanical things, webbed with spidery latticework just like Sutro’s Scepter. He was solid now, not ghostly-transparent, and his jacket was pulled tight around a body that was stretched and swollen. The skin that was visible—his hands, his neck, his face—was dark and fibrous, like ragged rubber. His teeth were black daggers, and his eyes—his eyes were missing.
Scheme aimed right for him, but at the last moment he leapt up into the air and didn’t come down. She slammed on the brakes.
“Shit.”
The dome light was still on. She reached up and flicked it off. Then she pulled the car around and made the motor spit plasma.
We were hurtling back down Market Street; the streets below burned orange in the gathering night. My eyes were turned all the way up and the world was a riot of noisy hissing pixels. Every few seconds, I caught a shape crossing the sky behind us.
Scheme, Jack Zapp found Doctor Faustus. And he made a trade.
“Jesus. What for?”
He wanted to be as powerful as a demon.
“That’s it? No details?” We ran a stoplight and it washed over Scheme’s face in a blood-red bar. She grimaced. “He should have read the terms of service.”
I had every piece of pattern-recognition software I possessed scanning the sky around us, all set to maximum sensitivity. They were beeping and clanging and telling me we were surrounded by giant squid and Woodrow Wilson and passages from Hamlet.
I felt completely overwhelmed. Fadi was dead. The founder of the world’s most important internet company had initiated a sweeping transaction around a murdered soul. An undead detective from the 19th century had just been transformed into a winged marauder. I wanted to go back to Jerusalem. Or at least back to the Panhandle.
Scheme, I haven’t seen Jack Zapp in a while. I think we lost him.
She slowed down a little as Market Street flattened out and started to obey traffic signals. “If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say he was headed back to Fog City.”
That’s a relief.
“Unfortunately, so are we.”
Back up there on the Scepter, Scheme had warned me not to connect to any other sites, and I hadn’t, even though I’d felt them out there, waves of pings washing over me—greetings, invitations, promises. I’d ignored them all. But she hadn’t said anything about looking at other user profiles on Doctor Faustus. So, just before Jack Zapp showed up, I did.
I searched for a user named Annabel Scheme.
And there she was. Her history listed just three transactions, all fifteen years ago—all before Sebdex had even registered his account. Just three; there hadn’t been any after that.
The offers were small, silly things: the mastery of a dance move she’d spend weeks perfecting; a sexy memory from the summer before senior year; a tenuous friendship with a girl in her dorm.
The rewards were silly, too—silly and vain:
“I want to be two inches taller.”
“I want red hair.”
But then, the third one. Oh, Scheme:
“I want Sebastian Dexter to notice me.”
TERMS OF SERVICE
The streets were crowded. Buses whined and belched sparks. Bikes clogged the intersections, blinkers all bobbing and flashing like a swarm of fireflies.
“Hu, call Nelson at the Black Danube,” Scheme said.
The phone rang, burbling, amplified on the Tata’s speakers.
“Hullo,” Nelson answered, voice crackling. I could hear the clatter of cups in the background.
“Nelson,” Scheme said. “It’s Annabel. I need a favor, fast. I need you to read some terms of service.”
“Are you starting a new site? Octav’s going to flip out—”
“No. You’re looking for a loophole.” Her face was a grim mask. “We need to find a loophole.”
“Ah. Right. And this must be, uh, bone-chillingly urgent.”
The Doctor Faustus terms of service were already in his inbox; I’d sent them through a Locust Grove email server. No Grail-mail. Scheme clicked the connection closed, stomped the accelerator and started running red lights again.
“Hu,” she said, “rule number—what rule are we on?”
Fourteen.
“Rule number fourteen: Don’t ever, ever do deals with demons.”
The Black Danube was buzzing, thick with petitioners. Scheme went straight for the espresso counter, straight for Nelson.
“There is some weird shit in these terms,” he said, waving at the cash register’s screen, now co-opted for legal analysis. “I told you, I didn’t take that course—”
“Now you see there’s a market for interdimensional law!” Scheme said. “Show me a loophole.”
Nelson sighed and leaned into the screen, scrolling. “So, some of it is standard. ‘You grant us a non-exclusive, royal-ty-free license to use, copy, reproduce, display and distribute your content in all universes.’ Although I get the sense that when they say ‘all universes’ they really mean it.”
Scheme nodded gravely.
“Right. Then there’s this,” he said, still scrolling, eyes scanning back and forth. “The clause for force majeure. You know what that is? An act of god—like if I agree to make you a latte and then the cafe burns down. You can’t sue me. For the latte.”
Scheme cocked an eyebrow.
“Lame example. Anyway—”
I saw a dark shape approaching. Its eyes were burning, its mouth set firm, its headphones enormous. It was Kerry Chakrabarty.
“You!” he shrieked, rounding the end of the counter. “I give you a tip, and you screw me over?” He was barreling towards us, and I had a feeling he might not stop. “You spam me, you shut down my biggest traffic driver of the year, you talk shit about me to Octav—”
Scheme held up her hands. “Kerry! I didn’t talk—”
The front window exploded and through the mist of glass came the massive form of Jack Zapp. He crashed through the espresso counter and into the chalkboard behind it, taking Kerry Chakrabarty with him.
“—shit,” Scheme finished. She dropped her hands and ran for the door. At the threshold, she stopped, turned, and waved to Nelson: “Come on!”
He swiveled on his butt across the top of the counter, dropped to the floor, and scuttled towards us. Behind the ruined chalkboard, Jack Zapp 2.0 was rampaging through the Black Danube, upending tables and sending laptops flying. Entrepreneurs were shrieking and fainting.
Outside, the sun had dropped out of the sky and night was rising. Scheme sprinted for the Tata. Behind us, I heard an inflected bellow—it could only be Octav Erdos—and the thwack, thwack of a gun. More shrieks.
“Should, uh, should we just leave them?” Nelson said.
“Don’t worry about Octav,” Scheme said. She slid into the car. “He’s from Hungary. He knows how to handle monsters.”
“What was that thing?”
“Ghost in a new body,” Scheme said. Ho hum. She pulled away into the shadowed street. “Did you see him move? Like a big baby. He doesn’t know how to drive it yet.”
“Is this what you’ve been doing since you left the Black Danube?” Nelson said. He was folded up in the passenger seat, knees against the dashboard. He was still wearing his apron. “Hanging out with demons and monsters?”
Scheme nodded, looking straight ahead.
“I always thought you went into private equity.”
Scheme dug in her pocket and tossed Nelson her phone. It had the Doctor Faustus terms of service loaded up on its tiny screen. “You were saying,” she said.
“Right,” Nelson said. “Force majeure. That’s pretty standard. But here”—he was pinching his thumbs together, struggling to make the phone work—“they provide a second clause, not only for force majeure but also for—it says force diabolique. The act of, I guess, a powerful demon. That’s, uh. Nonstandard.” His eyes flicked up to look at Scheme.
She was silent. Going through an inventory of demon friends, I assumed.
“When I left Grail and did not go into private equity,” she said finally, “I found a teacher.”
She pulled out onto the Embarcadero. Up ahead, the gray column of Fog City rose and intersected the black bar of the Bay Bridge to form a giant cross that cut the sky into indigo quarters.
“And I think she can help us.”
CARLOTTA
Scheme skirted Fog City, keeping the wall of gray on our left. The fog was more active than before—it was less a wall and more a waterfall, tumbling in slow-motion. It had been a while since I checked the feeds.
Scheme, you should know, Grail’s not working. Everyone is complaining. You ask a question and don’t get anything back. It’s a black hole.
She made a low hmmm sound in her throat.
The Embarcadero was a wide street lined with palm trees that curved around the eastern edge of the city. Farther north, it was all sun and soup-in-a-breadbowl. Here, it ran like an alley between the gray boundary of Fog City and the black expanse of the bay. The Tata was the only car on the road.
Long, lonely piers stretched out into the water. Some were just ruins—half-submerged or reduced to skeletal pylons. Others still showed signs of habitation: rusty scooters parked in front, orange lights flickering through dirty glass.
Scheme pulled off the street into a narrow gravel lot. Outside the car, I could hear the lapping of the water. The bridge was almost directly above us; I traced it across the sky to it waypoint on Blood Island, then over to the glittering lights of Oakland, Alameda and the New Fleet.
Where the lot ended, there was a single skinny pier that stuck out into the bay. At the end of the pier there was a tugboat. It was short and squat, with a bulky cabin and a stubby round conning tower. The portholes were all decorated with dark curtains; it looked vaguely domestic, but also quite derelict.
“This is it,” Scheme said.
This is what?
“Her home.”
“Someone lives out there?” Nelson said. It was nice having someone else along to share the burden of incredulity.
“Her name is Carlotta,” Scheme said. “She was my teacher for a little while. She can help us.”
“Oh,” Nelson said. “Good.” It came out like a squeak.
Scheme took one step out onto the pier, and as her toe touched the first creaking plank, a light came on aboard the tugboat. It was a blue-green glow peeking out from behind the curtains.
Scheme turned back to Nelson. “I have to go alone,” she said. “That’s the rule.” She lifted each heel in turn, pulled off her shoes—simple black dance flats—and lined them up neatly. Then she jogged lightly down the pier towards the tugboat. Her feet flashed pure white against the dark, damp wood.
“I’ll just, ah, wait here,” Nelson called after us.
At the end of the pier, Scheme reached out to steady herself against the tugboat’s hull, then hopped over and in.
It was possible she had gone crazy. I reviewed my notes; she’d accumulated an awful lot of trauma points today. Also, there was the part where we connected to an interdimensional marketplace for souls and she found out that her ex-boyfriend had just traded a murdered merchant for some kind of world peace. There was that.
Back behind us, across the street, Fog City was churning like a soup set to simmer. And all across the internet, people were howling like it was the end of the world, because they couldn’t find anything. They were casting their questions into Grail, over and over, and nothing was coming back. Like coins down a wishing well.
The tugboat clanked against the pier in time with the waves, a slow metronome. Clank. Clank. Clank. Everything was quiet. Scheme rapped three times on the cabin door.
The door opened smoothly and standing inside was not a shrouded crone or a moss-haired monster, as I had expected. Rather, it was a young woman—younger than Scheme—with hair so blonde it was almost white. She was wearing snug jeans and a light blue work shirt, too big for her, sleeves rolled up around her elbows. Practical clothes. This was Carlotta.
“Annabel,” she said, without surprise—and without affection. Her eyes were cool and bright, bright blue.
“Hi, Carlotta,” Scheme said. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited sooner.”
The cabin was everything that Carlotta wasn’t. The walls were cracked and dripp
ing with mold; dark water pooled on the floor. There were books stacked on shelves built into the wall, but they seemed to have decomposed and fused into a single bibliographic mass. An oil lamp, set on a low table that was also built in, was the source of the blue-green light. It made the whole cabin look like the belly of some giant sea creature. Some giant sea creature with a terrible disease.
I was glad I couldn’t smell it.
Carlotta sat lightly on a low bench next to the galley, which was also disgusting. She looked digitally composited into the scene around her, as if she was lit by the autumn sun, not that gross lamp. Like Scheme, she was barefoot.
“You should be sorry,” Carlotta said. “We’re not finished.”
Scheme nodded. I’d never seen her so meek. “I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to learn things that make all that”—she waved a hand towards the city, towards Fog City—“look like children playing in a sandbox. You could be very powerful, Annabel.”
Scheme made no motion to sit; she didn’t even take another step into the cabin. “About that,” she said.
Carlotta smiled—a creeping, curling smile. “You need my help.”
Scheme nodded. “Someone I know made a deal with a demon.”
“It’s him, of course,” Carlotta said. “Your old boyfriend.”
Scheme was silent. I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a row of easels set up at the far end of the cabin, at the tugboat’s helm, each with a painting in progress. They showed scenes of the city from various waterborne vantage points. They were classic post-card views, painted in cheery colors—except that each had a different skyline. One had the Shard as the focal point. Another was missing the Shard, but had a huge golden cylinder instead. A third showed a tall tower pointed like a pyramid.
“Of course I’ll help you,” Carlotta said, and her smile turned sweeter. “I’ll give you a hint.”
“I was hoping you could just—intervene,” Scheme said.
Carlotta shook her head. “No, no. A good teacher doesn’t just solve her student’s problem. I’ll give you a hint, a very good one. But,” she said, “it comes with a price.”