by Alison Levy
Rachel nodded. The chilly temperature didn’t agree with her either, especially while her clothes were still damp. “It’s hard to shake off a chill once it settles in, huh?”
“Yes, very.” He glanced at her over the top of his magazine. “If you have a chill, there is fresh coffee in the back, very hot.”
“No, thank you.” The offer of something to drink brought out a craving. “But do you have any cherry cola?”
“Yes, with the other sodas in the back. Third cooler door from the left.”
“Thanks.” She began to move toward the back of the store, but as she did, thoughts of the oracle haunted her brain, filled her with curiosity, and stopped her in her tracks. She swiveled back toward the counter. “Mr. El Sayed?”
“Yes, crazy girl?”
“Somebody told me that this space was going to be a restaurant at one time. Is that true?”
He blinked, his eyes met hers, and he cocked his head. “Yes,” he said in a tone alight with surprise. “Yes, that is true. When Safiya and I came to this country, we intended to open a restaurant, but it was costing us too much money to get started. Who told you this?”
“A lunatic who lives under a bridge.”
“Ah,” he said with an accepting nod. “A friend of yours?”
“Sort of.”
“Crazy people know the strangest things,” he said quietly. He turned the page of his magazine and leaned back against the wall. “Enjoy your cola, crazy girl.”
She walked to the back of the store, toward the back wall, which was lined with glass-doored refrigerators. She glanced around as she walked down a line of shelves. Canned items were perfectly stacked, cracker boxes stood tall one after the other, and cleaning products sat in the far corner so as not to risk contaminating the food. It was just as it always was. Why the hell had the oracle sent her to this market? What was she supposed to find? It didn’t make any sense.
Well, she said to herself, he was right about the restaurant. He must know something I don’t. With no other leads and no better ideas, she resolved to wait.
The cherry cola was right where Mr. El Sayed said it would be. She fished out a bottle and twisted off the top. It fizzed sharply, bubbles rising to the top. She took a sip, and the bubbles fizzed all the way down her throat.
Drinking cola was like drinking laughter. Soda was impossible to get in the Arcana and customs threw a fit every time she tried to bring a case of it through the interdimensional passages. It was one of the few nice things about being stuck in the Nota dimension. This world made the best junk food.
While her back was turned, the front door of the market opened and a man walked inside. Neither Mr. El Sayed nor his young son took notice of him as he began to pace up and down the aisles. Rachel took another gulp of cola without turning around, but when she lowered the bottle to replace the cap, she suddenly caught a glimpse of the newcomer’s reflection in the glass door of the refrigerator. Her heart jumped and she quietly gasped.
It was him. It was the man in the photograph, the one she was supposed to arrest.
Slowly, she turned around. Heart pounding, she quietly moved to the far side of the store, putting as many aisles between her and the man as possible, and tried to decide what she should do next.
Very discreetly, she sized him up. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscular, but she was a small woman and he was definitely bigger than her; bringing him in might be challenging. She could tackle daemons all day long, but people were another matter. She, like everyone from the Arcana, had received basic combat training, and her mother had taken particular care to teach her daughter enough fighting techniques to protect herself, but, even so, she was not a soldier. She trusted that the Central Office would only assign one collector to this case if they’d ruled that he wasn’t dangerous. But she looked at her target again and felt her nerves twitch. Dangerous or not, she was not looking forward to the confrontation.
Keeping both eyes on the man, she tried to hammer out a plan of attack as quickly as possible. She would prefer to try to convince him to come along quietly, but then he would be alerted to his pending arrest and might run for it. Her best bet was probably to grab him from behind, but that plan didn’t sit well with her either. She pulled out her phone and rapidly typed a group message to Suarez, Benny and Wu asking for help.
Just before she could hit the send button, the man walked up to the counter with a jug of orange juice in his hand.
“Thank you, sir,” said Mr. El Sayed as he handed the man his change. He glanced at Rachel, and his eyes zeroed in on the open bottle of cola in her hand. “Hey, crazy girl, you need to pay for that.”
The man looked over his shoulder and finally noticed Rachel, who was still staring at him. The two of them locked gazes. His jaw tightened (momentarily thrusting out two pale scars on his chin), his nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed. Rachel’s blood chilled and her breath turned to ice in her lungs. Within his eyes, she saw something disturbing. And for the first time since being handed this assignment, she felt fear.
Like a dirty mirror that just barely reflected a faraway candle’s flame, the glimmer in the depths of the man’s eyes was so dull that it gave no light and no warmth. She had never seen this before but knew instinctively what it was: her target’s soul was almost burned out. Not the kind of soul that exited the body at death (a thing Rachel did not believe in and an entirely different word in her native language), but rather that mishmash of conscience, self-awareness, and humanity that defined one’s personality and connection to the rest of the species. Where the light of this man’s soul should have been, she saw only an open, gaping maw, a never-ending hunger that was devouring him from the inside out. Soon, he would be an empty shell of a man—all hunger, no substance or morality.
The only way a person could lose his soul was through obsession, and nothing fueled an obsession more readily than a daemon. This man’s daemon was probably so much a part of his life that it didn’t even need to whisper its temptations anymore; the man had given himself over to it so wholeheartedly that he could no longer separate its voice from the voice within his mind. He and the daemon had become one doomed entity.
As Rachel stood there, rooted to the ground, the man grabbed his juice, turned his back, and rushed out the door. His speed startled her. It was as if he knew she was after him. But how could he know that?
Regardless, it was her job to arrest him, and he was getting away.
She pocketed her phone and scrambled to the window. The man was walking up the street at an intimidating pace. She swore under her breath. Unfortunately, the fact that his soul was hanging by a thread meant that he was too dangerous to risk losing sight of. She couldn’t wait for her colleagues to respond to a text; she had to catch him now.
“Do your job,” she mumbled. “You have a job to do, so do it already.”
She dropped the bottle of cola onto the front counter. It wobbled frantically on its end but then righted itself. She was about to bolt for the door when Mr. El Sayed lunged across the register and grabbed her by the wrist.
“Crazy girl!” he said sternly. “That drink is not free!”
“I’ll come back and pay for it, I promise,” she said, her eyes darting back and forth between him and the front door.
“Pay me now, not later!”
“Mr. El Sayed, I have to catch up with him. It’s really important. Please,” she added when she saw doubt in his eyes. “Do you really think I’m a thief? I swear on my grandfather’s name that I will come back.”
Mr. El Sayed stared at her. Then, with a resolute sigh, he released her wrist. She immediately bolted for the door.
“You come back today!” she heard him shout after her. “Today! You pay me, or I will find you!”
Rachel sprinted up the street in the direction she had seen the man go. Her heart pounded in her ears, louder than her thundering footsteps on the pavement and her manic breaths combined. When she reached the corner, she scanned the streets in ev
ery direction, but her target was missing.
There were plenty of side streets and dozens of driveways where the man might have gone. With one hand, Rachel fished out her tinted glasses and jammed them on her face, and the world became a wild and colorful place, all the movement, tracks, and activity in the ether suddenly apparent to her. She saw several daemons along the street, all of which were going about their business without noticing her, and she saw the tracks of daemons that had passed by recently. She also saw a faint and smoky line of orangish-red floating before her at chest level, like mouse prints in a surrealist painting, heading straight up the street.
During her years of training, Rachel had been taught to identify many types of daemon trails, including this one, though this trail was technically not from the daemon but rather from the spot on the man to which the daemon had attached itself. Experts disagreed as to what, exactly, the trail consisted of, but they all agreed on one thing: it could only be left by a person who was losing his soul. The man’s obsession was providing Rachel with a clear path to follow.
As she ran, the blots of sickly color struck her in the chest and dissipated. The trail turned sharply to the right up ahead, leading down a driveway toward an apartment building. She turned to follow it and suddenly spotted the man just a few yards ahead.
His back was to her. There, attached to the back of his neck, was a squirrel-sized daemon with four needle-thin arms, each about three feet long. Its tiny jaws were buried deep in the man’s neck, seemingly into his spine, and its long, long arms were holding the man’s shoulders in a spindly bear hug.
Rachel didn’t stop to consider what type of daemon it was; she didn’t want to miss this chance to catch him off guard. Without a second thought, she ran straight at the man, arm drawn back and ready to strike.
He whirled around just in time to duck her swinging fist. Her knuckles raked the edge of his coat, knocking something solid from his pocket that crashed to the ground in a noisy bundle of clinks. In one fluid movement, he spun around and elbowed her in the back of the head. The blow knocked her to her hands and knees; her vision jiggled as her brain bumped back and forth inside her skull. Her ears rang like a fractured telephone, but she still heard a jangle of metal as the man scooped up whatever she had knocked from his pocket. As he walked past her, she heard a gravelly voice mumble, “Stupid bitch.”
It took a long moment for her to gather all her senses into a functional whole. Finally—head throbbing, body aching—she pushed herself up, slowly, to a sitting position. Holding the back of her head with one hand, she retrieved her tinted glasses from the pavement with the other, put them on, and glanced around.
He was gone. And the fight had scattered the unique ether trail all around the area like blood spatter at a murder scene, making it impossible to tell which direction he had gone. Rachel groaned, but it was just as well. Even if she caught up to him, she now knew that she wasn’t going to be able to handle him alone. That move he’d used to put her down—it was the move of someone who had been professionally trained. If she wanted to catch him and to avoid another head-bashing, she was definitely going to need help.
She held up her hands, looked at her scraped palms, and winced at the thought of the future pain. She was going to have to scrub hard to get the gravel out of her wounds. She swallowed a mouthful of blood, a gift from her bitten tongue. The taste was repulsively bitter. “You earned that taste,” she heard her mother’s voice say, “by acting rashly.”
She looked around and was relieved to see that at least no one had witnessed her getting her ass kicked.
“Stupid bitch,” she echoed in self-reproach. “This is why I hate human marks.”
She dusted off the front of her clothes and ran her scraped fingers through her tangled hair. She made a quick assessment of her injuries (headache, bloody hands, bitten tongue, bruised knees) and concluded that she was fine. A few scrapes and bruises had never been the death of anyone, and Rachel had sustained worse injuries in the line of duty. A few bandages would fix her up, and she would get right back to work.
There was an ache in her knuckles, strong enough to be distinct from the rest of the pain in her hands, that she didn’t know how to explain. Backtrack and work it out. Mentally, she relived the moment of her attack in slow motion. Lunge, dodge, elbow to head. No, back it up. There was something else, a moment of contact. When she charged at the man, her fist had struck his jacket as she lunged. Now she remembered that her knuckles had hit something hard in his coat pocket, sending it flying. Whatever it was, the target had stopped to retrieve it before disappearing.
“Doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “He’s gone now.”
“That.”
Rachel’s overtasked heart tried to escape through her throat. She jumped up much too fast and backpedaled several steps, her arms windmilling, and her wide eyes fell upon a familiar sight: the oracle from under the bridge. There he stood, mere feet away from her, his shoulders slumped, his filth-encrusted hair obscuring his features, and his abnormal blue eyes fixed on the ground.
Rachel’s shock immediately gave way to annoyance. This was not the first time she had run into him unexpectedly, but this was certainly the first time he had appeared after she had gotten her ass handed to her.
“Mr. Oracle,” she snapped, “are you following me again?”
“That.”
“Following me around is gonna get you hurt!”
“That.”
“Do you understand me?”
“That.”
She marched up to the scruffy man and grabbed him by the shoulder. The touch seemed to release a wave of foul smells; they wafted off of his body with the force of a boxer’s punch, but Rachel didn’t recoil. The gut-wrenching stink of him only fueled her anger.
“You can’t follow me around!” she said. “Part of my job is blending in! I can’t do that if you’re following me!”
Even with her shaking him, his attention never wavered from a spot on the ground.
“That,” he repeated, pointing. “That.”
Close to eruption, Rachel turned to look where he was pointing. To her surprise, there was actually something there. She leaned over.
It was a flash drive. Small, gray, relatively flat, it was almost invisible lying there on the sidewalk. However, it was also in a spot where she would have been almost sure to step on it as she attacked that man. Had she run right over it without noticing? Or had it not been there before?
“Where did that come from?” she asked the oracle. “Did you see?”
“That,” he repeated vacantly. He opened his mouth to say it again, but no words came out, and his blank stare was replaced with a look of confusion. He glanced all around, as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. He looked at Rachel and then at her hand on his shoulder. He pointed at her hand. “That.”
“What?” She looked at her hand. The knuckles that had struck the target’s coat pocket were beginning to swell. “Oh! Was that thing in his pocket, too? Did he leave it behind?”
“That.”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“That.”
“Please stop saying that,” she snapped.
He lunged forward and grabbed the flash drive off the concrete. Wide-eyed, he held it up to his face. A foamy saliva droplet fell from his mouth as he stared at it. “Yeah,” he rasped. Then, suddenly, he jolted. The flash drive fell from his hand and clattered to the ground as his arms began to flail.
Alarmed, Rachel jumped clear as the oracle collapsed to the ground, his body convulsing wildly. His electric blue eyes stared up at the sky through pinpoint pupils. Rachel shouted a few of the nastier curse words she knew as she hurried to kick anything that was within reach of his twitching limbs out of the way to stop him from hurting himself.
She waited a moment, thinking the fit might pass, but when the convulsions didn’t stop, she dashed into the street. “Help!” she shouted, waving her arms at passing cars. “Someone help, please!�
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Five cars zoomed past her, some of them honking angrily, but no one stopped. Rachel reached for her cell phone but quickly realized that there was no one she could call. She was forbidden to call Notan emergency services—part of keeping a low profile for her job—and because this man was not an Arcanan citizen, she couldn’t call for her people’s emergency medical team.
Fortunately for her, the sixth vehicle to turn up the street was a police car. The two officers inside saw her waving erratically and quickly jumped out.
“Something wrong, Miss?”
“That man!” she shouted, pointing back the way she’d come. “He’s having a seizure!”
“Seizure?”
“There! He’s over there!”
The younger of the two officers ran in the direction she was pointing and found the oracle where he lay trembling and shaking on the ground. He immediately radioed for an ambulance while his partner pulled Rachel aside.
“Do you know this guy?” the officer asked.
“Sort of,” she said, agitated. “He’s a homeless man who comes around this area sometimes. I don’t know his name.”
“What happened?”
“He had a seizure!” she said. “He’s still having it! Look at him!”
The middle-aged man held up one hand for silence, his piercing eyes silently ordering her to control herself. Obediently, Rachel clamped her mouth shut.
“Did he hit his head or anything like that?” he asked in a voice that Rachel found infuriatingly calm.
“No! He just collapsed!” She took a deep breath, relaxed her shaking hands, and exhaled through her teeth. “Look, my sister has seizures, so I know what one looks like. There was no triggering event, he just fell.”
“What was he doing just before that happened?”
“Standing there, talking to himself.”
“Were you with him?”
“I was just passing by,” she lied. “He was standing there, mumbling something, and then he collapsed.”
“You didn’t call for help?” asked the officer, his eyes darting to the phone still in her hand.