We are ants that have miraculously gained control of a farmer’s cart and used it to crush the anthills of our enemies. That doesn’t mean we know who created the cart or what the creator meant to use the cart for. What if the farmer comes back? What if they are angry?~From The Letters And Journal Of Eight God Kial: Last Of The Eight Gods

I’d cleaned every room on every floor in the Chase building back when I was a janitor, but I’d never been up on the roof before.

The Chase building was a squat, gray-stoned, four-story office on the border of Goldtown and New Brixton. It looked like someone had meant to build a skyscraper, but after running out of money, slapped a roof on the four floors they’d completed and called it good.

I’d heard a story about how when Alice had the greenhouse set up, one of the tenants in the other buildings sent a rude letter complaining about how it ruined his view. The next day they woke up to find that, not only was the greenhouse still up, Alice had ringed the roof of her building with toilet bowls stained with chocolate syrup. Looking around the roof as I opened the door, either they apologized or she got bored with it because there were no toilet bowls in sight.

In the greenhouse, Alice sat on a stool across from me wearing jeans and an old, striped, long sleeve shirt under a green apron. Her iron-gray hair tied up in a bun, she looked with disapproval at a cactus plant in a pot of dirt.

I counted the little scratching sound the pot made against the table as she turned it in circles. I counted up to thirty-six when she finally spoke.

“My nephews bought this for me because they thought it was cute. They didn’t know it was carnivorous. You’d think that a plant that ate bugs would be tough to kill.” She snorted and shook her head. “You’d be wrong. This thing comes from such a mineral-poor environment, putting it in regular dirt chokes it. So I put it in a pot full of rocks and leave it alone. But the thing is still dying. Turns out that the little water I’m giving it has too much calcium. The damn thing drinks fancier water than I do.”

My gaze wandered as I fidgeted uncomfortably in my stool, wondering when Alice would get to the point of me being here, knowing that any attempt to speed her towards it would lead to an even longer detour.

The air had a sauna-like heavy wetness to it that forced me to take off my jacket and hoodie, leaving me in a sleeveless black t-shirt. I kept a black skullcap on to keep Alice from commenting about my hair.

Despite the heat, being in the greenhouse gave me goosebumps on my arms. The glass of the walls warped the city skyline, giving it an unfamiliar, nightmarish quality that put me on edge. I got off the stool, crossed my legs, and sat on the floor in the middle of the aisle. With the plants blocking the view, I rested my elbows on my knees and focused on Alice. “If it’s so much trouble, throw it away.”

“I did. But they keep asking me how it’s doing. This is the third plant I’ve had to buy to cover up my horticultural plantslaughter.” She shook her head, and then changed the subject so fast it took me a second to catch up. “I got a call for a job for you.”

Finally. “What’s the job?”

“I don’t know. They sent over an army of lawyers who wanted me to sign a bunch of non-disclosure agreements before they’d even talk details. After I signed them, all they told me was what they wanted, not why they wanted it. They get your phone number. They get-”

“I don’t have a phone and I’m not getting one.”

Alice shot me an irritated glance. “Your pager number then. You’d be on call for them twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Even if you were on a job for me, you’d have to drop it if they called you.”

I cocked my eyebrows and looked at Alice. I couldn’t see her going for that. She wasn’t a control freak but… No. She was a control freak.

“When I turned them down,” she continued, “they offered more money. When I turned them down again, they offered even more money. And then they threatened me.”

“So you called the police?”

Alice shook her head, the trowel in her hand cutting the air with a dismissive gesture. “Not that kind of threat. This was the civilized kind. The type where the carrot is bigger than the stick.”

“What are they offering?”

“We’re exchanging nudes,” she said, jokingly. “I called you here to take some picture of me among the flowers.”

I looked at her, a blank expression on my face.

She sighed and looked away, fiddling with the plant for a minute. “I’ve been talking with the feds about using PaperChase as an internship program for over a year now. The lawyers they sent over said they could put a word in.”

I blinked. “How is that a threat? And how do you know they can deliver?”

“The threat and whether they can deliver was implied in the fact that they knew more about my private business--from names of the people I talked to all the way up to the names of the people they’d have to convince--than anyone should. They didn’t say that they would actively block it if I didn’t help them, but,” she shrugged, “they didn’t have to.”

So they offered her money plus something she really wanted. There was really no reason for me to be here. She could have told me this over the phone. Unless whatever she wasn’t telling me was so bad, she feared a phone call would make me chuck my pager into the river and disappear. My face hardened. I mentally ran through the short list of things that could make me do that. I picked the third thing on the list. “I don’t do mask work and I don’t work with sentinels, Alice.”

“I know that,” she said, holding her hands up in a calming gesture. “I asked them about that specifically. They have a license, but they aren’t running around in tights with codpieces and capes, okay?”

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I glared at her.

“If it helps,” she said, “I don’t think they’re big enough to be part of whatever it is you’re hiding from.”

“I’m not hiding from anything.”

“I stay out of your business, but I know what it means when someone works as hard as you do at being hard to find. If you kept your head down any lower you’d dig through the earth and break out in Australia.”

“How does one job-”

“They lost their scout and they need someone very good, very quickly.”

“What happened to the person they had?”

“I’m looking into it.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“Meaning,” she shot me an annoyed glance, “I’m looking into it.” She continued. “So, these guys are desperate. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in whatever it is they’re doing and it’s all being held up because they don’t have good eyes. You’re available and they’re willing to pay a lot of money just to audition you.”

She put the trowel down next to the plant and pushed them to the side. With a tired look on her face, she put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “You know what good salesmen and carnivorous plants have in common? They find out what you want, and then they offer it until they have you exactly where they want you. I don’t like that they know enough about my private business to offer me exactly what I need, but I need what they’re offering, Jaquelyn. PaperChase might not be popular in certain circles, but the name is still worth something. Maybe their offer is genuine or maybe they’re trying to-” She cut herself off with an irritated wave of her hand. “Never mind that. I want you to take this job and find out whether I’m dealing with salesmen, con-men, or if someone’s trying to eat me alive. If they’re coming for the company, I want to be prepared. If their offer is serious, I want to take advantage of it.”

I sat mulling over what she’d said, especially the non-disclosure agreement she’d had to sign.“You already told them I’d do it, didn’t you?”

“I was under a time constraint,” she protested. “Look, I wanted to see what else I could find out about them so I stalled. I told them that I’d have a response for them by tomorrow. I hoped you’d do it. It would solve a lot of problems for me, but I can’t force you. If you don’t like it, forget about it. I’ll tell them you died or something.”

The kind of people who were after me weren’t subtle. If they knew I worked for Alice, I’d have had a black bag over my head as soon as I stepped into the building. "If I decide to do it, I want to get paid."

“Jaq.” She raised her eyebrows at me. "Have I ever asked you for a free one? I told you these people have money."

"No. If I decide to do it I want to get paid by you to find out what these guys want. That's in addition to the money I'll get if I take the job. And, no hard feelings if I decide there's something off about it and pull a fade."

She put her hand out. "We have a deal?"

The kind of money Alice was talking about made for a pretty compelling reason. “You’ll find out what your friends dug up tomorrow?”

Alice nodded.

“Page me." I turned away from her and gathered my things. "Let me know what they found out. Then we’ll see.”

A look of relief washed over Alice’s face when I didn’t reject her outright. The fact that she didn’t even try to hide it, or that she couldn’t hide it, bothered me more than whatever it was she had stopped herself from sharing with me.

The meeting made me nervous enough that when I left the greenhouse, I took the bus up to Allen Street to check out the calamity banshee over by the ironworks.

The realtor’s office at the top of the hill had a sign on the window proclaiming Allen as an up and coming neighborhood with a river view. Cheerfully, the sign ignored the fact that Allen Street was in Goldtown, a city that’s on the side of the river that hasn’t had anything golden to crow about for a long time.

Closing my eyes, I tilted my head. Inhaling deeply, I examined the world by way of my nose. A hint of the river was in the air, mixed in with the dusty metallic smell of new construction; another part of the old ironworks being gutted and reincarnated into condos. My nose wrinkled at the smell of wet diaper that seemed to flow out of a nearby air vent. Allen Street was the only place in the world that I could close my eyes and know exactly where I was by the smell alone.

Any halfway decent esoteric philosopher will tell you that picking a good calamity banshee started with finding a good local disaster. Preferably one with a distinct sensory aspect to it.

To keep my eyes from distracting my nose, I looked down at the scarred leather of my combat boots and headed downhill, towards the river. The yeasty aroma of rising bread drifting through the open door of a bakery made my mouth water. I snorted, clearing the sweet scent from my nose, and walked faster. Food wasn’t what I was looking for. I’d come to stir the ashes of an old disaster to see if a new one was waiting for me.

Some people swore by the banshee of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I heard it once, a couple years back, while passing through on a midnight bus. The hungry whistling, the high-pitched sound that was spectral flame whipped by the wind into a shrieking howl, was certainly memorable. It woke me up from a deep sleep. I don’t know what kind of trouble was hunting for me in Chicago, but I didn’t stay long enough to find out.

For my money, the gold standard of calamity banshees was the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts. The two-story wave of over a million gallons of hot molasses slowly suffocating twenty-one people in a quickly cooling lake of syrup meant the smell of raw hot molasses could be used to predict personal misfortune pretty accurately.

Goldtown, according to the plaque on the sidewalk on top of the hill, had the Allen Ironworks Fire of 1910. The fire raged for three days, burning down the entire block and then jumped the river, killing forty-five people. It wasn’t great as far as calamity banshees go. Unlike the Molasses Flood where the aroma could be found throughout the city or the shrieking flame of the Chicago Fire, the smoky odor that was the banshee of the ironworks disaster could only be sensed on the city blocks where the blaze had occurred. Worse, it wasn’t unusual. You had to ask the people around you if they smelled anything to make sure it wasn’t something actually burning or someone smoking a pipe or a cigar. Still, I made sure to walk by the blocks where the disaster had taken place at least once a week. The rise and fall of the scent of smoke had served as a good enough warning that it’d helped me steer clear of trouble several times before.

Halfway down the hill, inhaling every four steps, I focused on parsing out what my nose was telling me. Garbage cans. Car exhaust. Gasoline. Garlic and rotten melon. Roasted meat and plastic. Further down the street, I caught whiffs of steamed dough. Menthol outside of a massage parlor. A cloud of incense. Cigar smoke and… I stopped, closed my eyes, and inhaled again, slow and deep. No. Not cigar smoke.

Towards the end of Allen Street, I boarded a bus, coughing as the smell of smoke drifted by. I paid my fare and turned to the bus driver. “Is something burning?”

Frowning, he sniffed at the air and shook his head. “Don’t smell a thing.”

Trouble. But since the smell of smoke only started about three-fourths of the way down Allen Street, it wasn't any kind of trouble that was coming for me today.

I nodded at the driver and took a seat at the front of the bus right by the door.

The bus lurched forward, the river disappearing from sight when we turned a corner. I leaned towards the bus driver. “What’s the river called?”

The driver frowned, keeping his eyes on the road. “River’s name? It’s called…” A look of surprise flicked over his face. He hummed and mumbled to himself. Finally, he laughed and shook his head. “You know, I’ve always just called it the river. Not like there’s another one around here, you know?”

I nodded and leaned back into my seat, my thoughts wandering back to the disaster banshee. Nothing would happen today or even tomorrow. But in a week? Maybe a week and a half? Might be a good time to get out-of-town.