“Neither am I,” he responded easily—almost too easily. Jo had assumed the Bone Carver would be keeping his android identity a secret in order to keep the police off his tail.
“I don’t mean in the way that you do,” Jo clarified but not really. “I mean that—“
He held up a hand stopping her. “I think I see what’s going on here.”
“You do?”
“My sensors can pick up that you’re not human, but the electromagnetic signature that you give off is . . . How to put it? Unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before. Your existence appears to me as an orderly list of impossible contradictions.” He paused as the coffee pot sputtered and stopped percolating. He continued speaking as he poured two mugs. “I think I spoke incorrectly. It isn’t unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. This anomaly has been presented to me once already, in another entity. He called himself the Wish Granter.”
Snow. Charlie remembered Snow. But of course he did. Time had not been rewritten yet, so this was still a man who remembered making a wish—a wish that had yet to be granted.
He crossed the kitchen, handing her one of the two mugs, before starting toward the living room. Jo was helpless to do anything other than follow. She was genuinely curious now about what the man knew and what he had seen in Snow with his sensors—what he was also seeing in her.
Or, the more obvious question of what had broken in her magic that was making her be able to interact with real world objects without being clocked into time. Whatever that was, she doubted Charlie could tell her.
“So, was I wrong to assume that you are an assistant to the Wish Granter? Should I have left my alarm running?”
“No, you’re not wrong,” Jo said, hastily sitting on the sofa opposite Charlie’s chair. “I suppose you could say I’m his assistant.”
“You suppose?”
“Well, there’s more than one of us, were more like a team that he commands.”
“How interesting.” Charlie sounded genuinely fascinated by this tidbit of information. Jo could almost see the digital pathways in his head making note of it. “What are you, then?”
“It’s . . . hard to explain.” Jo couldn’t help a glance at her bio band again. She was still clocked out of time. Something had gone haywire. Really, really haywire. “If I’m honest, I don’t even quite know how it is that you see me right now.”
“What do you mean?”
Of course he wouldn’t understand, he had only interacted with Snow. As far as he knew, all entities like Snow shared the same signature, could all be seen, and could all grant wishes.
Jo took a sip of her coffee, using the time to collect her thoughts. She wondered how much she should tell the man. Was it dangerous to impart knowledge of the Society to him? When time was reset, he would certainly forget it. Furthermore, it wasn’t as though he could hunt any of them down. And even if he could, they were on his side.
With the mere thought of being on his side, Jo was forced to remind herself what this man was: a killer.
But, in a way, so was she. Even if she excluded the Society, how many people had died, or had their lives ruined, because of the choices she’d made? Because of the people she’d helped with her “odd jobs”? Gray areas stacked on gray areas until her existence seemed like a veritable wall of ambiguity.
“We have a sort of time system,” Jo started cautiously. “If we’re not utilizing it, we shouldn’t be able to interact with the real world.”
“Real world?”
“Your world.”
“If this is my world, what is your world?” He spoke as though he were a professor, debating a thesis.
“We exist outside of time.”
“Interesting. . .” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the large wingback chair. “Perhaps that is why your data on my sensors seems to be so contradictory. Time is a funny thing, virtually indescribable by science. It can break down even the greatest of equations.”
Jo had never thought of her existence from a scientific perspective. She had been offered the explanation of magic from the beginning and had never questioned otherwise—never sought an alternate explanation.
“Perhaps. . .”
“So I can presume your presence here has something to do with the wish I have made?”
“Yes. I was—” the memory of the USB came back to her “—simply collecting some information.”
“Is there any that I could provide you that may be helpful?”
