The bus lurched through morning traffic, diesel fumes mixing with the smell of too many bodies in too small a space. Makun stood near the back with one hand on the overhead rail and watched the city slide past the grimy windows. The Upper City gave way to the middle districts, clean streets turned into cracked ones and glass towers into concrete blocks, and the faces changed with them, fewer suits and more tired eyes. By the time the bus crossed into the Lower City, he was one of five passengers left.
He pulled the cord, and the bus hissed to a stop.
47 Osapa Street was three blocks east. His phone said 8:52, which suited him; he wanted a look at the place before he walked into it. The buildings here leaned into one another like drunks, with narrow alleys between them full of trash and shadows that seemed too dark for the hour. Street vendors shouted from their stalls, and the smell of frying plantains mixed with exhaust and sewage.
The address belonged to a three-story building with faded yellow paint peeling off in strips. Rusty metal stairs zigzagged up the outside to each floor. There was no sign, nothing to say it was anything but somebody's home.
Makun stood on the sidewalk and stared up at it. Fifty dollars to a stranger who probably had a script memorized: I sense dark energy around you. You need a cleansing. That'll be another hundred. But he was here, and he had nowhere else to go, so he climbed.
The metal groaned under his weight and the railing wobbled. Someone had left a broken chair and a pile of empty beer bottles on the second-floor landing. On the third floor, the door of apartment 3B was plain, scratched wood with the number painted in faded white and no nameplate. He raised his fist, hesitated over one last chance to walk away, and knocked.
Quick, light footsteps answered, and the door opened.
She looked exactly like her photo: mid-twenties, dark skin, hair pulled into a tight bun. What the photo hadn't captured was how sharp her eyes were, or the way they cut through him in that first second, assessing him and filing him away. She wore a plain tank top and jeans, and the tattoos on her forearms were more intricate than he had realized, symbols flowing into one another in shapes his eyes couldn't hold onto.
"You're early." Her voice was flat and professional.
"Makun. I booked for nine."
"I know who you are. You booked online. Come in."
The apartment was one small room doing the work of several. A couch stood against one wall and a low table sat in the middle, surrounded by shelves crammed with books, jars of herbs and stones, and carved wooden figures he didn't recognize. Ordinary things lived among them: a laptop on the counter, coffee mugs in the sink, sneakers by the door. The place smelled of incense and coffee.
Zuri locked the door behind him and pointed to a worn cushion by the table. "Sit."
He sat cross-legged. She sat across from him and spread a cloth between them, covered in circles within circles and lines joining points he couldn't make sense of. From a wooden box she took cowrie shells and smooth stones and set them beside it.
"Fifty dollars. Cash."
He counted out the bills. She took them without checking and pushed them into her pocket, then picked up a small notepad.
"Name."
"Makun."
"Full name."
"Just Makun."
Her eyes flicked up. "No family name?"
"No."
"Who gave you that one?"
"Nobody knows," he said. "It came with me."
Her pen stopped for a second before she wrote. "Birthdate."
"March seventh. I think. I was abandoned, so the hospital guessed."
She wrote that down too, and the rest went quickly: twenty-three, no family, no one close to him. Then she set the pen down, gathered the shells and stones in both hands and said, "Look at the cloth. Don't look away."
He stared at the symbols. At the edge of his vision they seemed to shift, but whenever he focused on one, it held perfectly still. Zuri closed her eyes, and her lips began to move in a language he didn't recognize, low and rhythmic, a sound that made his teeth ache.
She threw.
The shells scattered across the cloth and settled into a pattern, some face up, some tilted on their edges. Zuri studied them without any change in her expression, then scooped them up and threw again. This time one of the stones rolled clean off the cloth and came to rest against Makun's knee. It was cold, a deep, burning cold he knew from somewhere, and it took him a moment to place it. The chains in his dream felt exactly like that.
Zuri looked at the stone, then at him, then back at the cloth.
She threw a third time, whispering under her breath, and the shells clattered and the stones clicked against one another and lay still. Makun was watching her face, so he saw the exact moment it changed. Her eyes went to his wrists, then to his throat, and widened by a fraction. Her fingertip moved over the cloth as if tracing a mark that wasn't drawn there, and then her hands, which had been perfectly steady, began to tremble.
"What?" Makun leaned forward. "What do you see?"
She didn't answer. She touched one of the shells and snatched her hand back as if it had burned her.
"You see something. Tell me."
When her eyes met his, there was emotion in them for the first time since he had walked in, and it was fear.
"Get out."
He blinked. "What?"
"Get out." She swept the shells and stones off the cloth in one violent motion, sending them clattering across the floor. "Now."
"I just paid you fifty dollars."
"I'll send it back. Just leave." She was already on her feet, backing toward the door.
Makun stayed where he was. "You saw something. Tell me what it was."
"I didn't see anything. Go."
"That's bullshit." He stood, fists clenched. "Your hands are shaking."
"I said get out!" Her voice cracked, and the echo that followed it was wrong, far too loud, as if several voices had spoken through hers at once. The jars on the shelves rattled.
Makun stared. "What the hell—"
"Out!"
She grabbed his arm with a grip far stronger than it should have been and hauled him toward the door.
"Wait. Just tell me—"
"I can't!" The fear in her voice was raw now. "I can't help you. No one can. Just go. Please."
She shoved him hard enough that he stumbled backward into the railing, and for one sickening second he thought it would give and drop him three stories. It held. The door slammed, and three locks clicked shut one after another.
No one can.
The words hit harder than the shove. He had heard a lot said about him in twenty-three years, but nobody had ever said that, and never like a fact read off a table. For a moment he simply stood there with it.
Then the anger came, because anger was easier. He pounded on the door. "You can't just—I paid you! I know you saw something! Tell me what it was!"
Nothing.
"Fraud!" He kicked the door, and the sound echoed down the stairwell. "You're just another damn fraud!"
The door stayed shut. He kicked it once more and stopped, and noticed his hand was shaking, and that it wasn't the anger doing it. She had been terrified of whatever she had seen in those shells, and some part of him had been frightened right along with her.
He went down the stairs with his chest burning: fifty dollars gone, for a reading that ended with him thrown out like something diseased. At the bottom he looked back up at the third floor. The curtain in the window of 3B moved, just slightly, and fell still.
Makun stared at that window for a long moment before he turned away. Mystics and curses were bullshit, he told himself, like everything else. But he couldn't stop seeing the fear in her eyes, or stop asking the one question she wouldn't answer.
What had she seen?