Normally I ask my clients for something. A business card. A signature to prove they’d really hired me. I didn’t have one of those for Chesnes, but I didn’t need one. He worked for Drakon and everyone knew how to get into contact with Drakon.

The detective wonders: how do you become untouchable? Unreachable by any authority? Strangely, paradoxically—by always being reachable, by anyone, at anytime, always ready to begin with a helping hand and conclude with a payment. The Outscape police, where they existed, were cruel and power-hungry even by the standards of nightmares—and they knew it. They knew what would happen if they ever went after the feudal lord of the city, benevolent where it suited him and always capricious, they knew he’d dug his roots so deep that it’d be the work of ages to drag him out.

I stepped into the pastel grey phone booth and spun the dial in the old familiar pattern. “Kit Chesnes,” I said into the receiver. “He knows who I am. Tell him I want to talk to him now and that it’s important.”

“Do you have a name to give him?”

“Not yet. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Your name,” the voice on the other end snapped.

“Oh.” I thought for a moment. I’d rather not make myself too well known to Drakon’s operation—even if it was my employer. “A curse,” I said. “He’s smart enough to know what that means. Now get him before I have to feed another half-talent into this damned machine.”

Silence on the other end of the line. I contemplated how much of my pay it was eating before I heard him. “A hex,” he said without humor in his voice. “A curse. We do think we’re clever, don’t we?”

“Only some of the time.”

“Spit it out. There’s a real commot—well, that’s none of your business.” His voice drifted away from the receiver, and I heard him shout something indistinct at whatever poor lackey had the misfortune to be loitering nearby. “I’ve become busy. If you have answers, great. If you have more to add to my plate, figure it out your own self and don’t bother me.”

Time to make myself unpopular, then. “I have a lead,” I said. “But you won’t like the reason I’m calling you over it.”

“What am I paying you for?”

“A woman,” I said. “Brown hair, glasses.”

“That could be anyone.”

“Carrying around six packs of Dragon. Or more.” I checked that there was nobody nearby the phone booth. Even talking about that kind of exchange could draw some hungry customers—and nightmares who needed a Dragon fix didn’t tend to listen to reason. “I know how tightly you control supply and distribution. I know you goddamn well have to. So either you have a massive hole in your system—or you know who it is.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Where are you?”

“What? Near Babel. Um—halfway down Oneiron Boulevard.”

“Stay there. This isn’t something to discuss over the phone.”

He disconnected. The phone cheerfully informed me that I still had seven minutes of call time remaining, a neon-lit panel on its side slowly draining away. I sighed, then punched in the number for the morgue. It took all seven minutes to work my way around through Usher’s particular labyrinthine style to confirm it. Recovering Nicholson from the fire had been no easy task, nor was picking it apart. Usher filled me in on one too many details there—but they’d found a bullet, melted by the flames but still recognizable, lodged in his throat. 60% certainty that it’d killed him and not the fire.

Odds I could take. The phone clunked to a halt and I exited the booth, searching for a cigarette in my pocket. I couldn’t smoke outside by my office, not with all the rain, and it seemed like the current storm might never abate. Perhaps the one good thing about Babel.

When Chesnes arrived, he pointed us towards a small cafe, where he took the seat facing the entrance and toyed with the knife on the table. I got a coffee with too much sugar and he didn’t get anything. I kept my hands on the table so that I could feel some sense of balance around him. “You have to understand,” he said. “This is not information you pass around. It could be worth a lot, were it offered to the wrong hands.”

“I’m not planning to tick off Drakon. I know how well that plays.”

“The protocol is the same. Easier because you’re human, in fact.” He picked up the knife. “Which hand do you prefer?”

As a child—before I fell into the Outscape—I’d wondered why we had the nightmares we did. Some people were constantly threatened by falling, others by clean sterile hospital rooms, others by haunting hurtful specters of their friends and family. Blood, sweat, and teeth, it turned out. A nightmare needed a tiny piece of someone to slip into their dreams, and the most common token is a baby tooth.

I didn’t have any teeth to give Chesnes. None that I was willing to part with, anyways. So he needed the next best thing: a drop of blood. I winced as he jabbed the knifepoint into the pad of my index finger, then licked the blade clean. A pinprick of light flared in his dark eyes. “You drink too much,” he said at last.

“Do I get the usual spiel about how I shouldn’t bother running if I betray you?”

“No.”

“The things we do for small mercies.”

He dropped the knife. The mouse-faced waiter scurried over and took it away. “The woman you speak of. I didn’t want to believe it. Her name is Bianca Morés, and she was one of ours, one of our best. She’d worked her way up from street dealing to Babel, to managing some of the shipments and greenhouses. But she couldn’t make it farther than that, on Drakon’s orders. He suspected her loyalty and I suppose he was right to do so.”

I shrugged. “Guess that’s why he’s the boss.”

“A week ago, she disappeared. Not wholly unusual, especially—well, we tried all the usual ways to get ahold of her, and then we were simply looking for her stock. Morés wasn’t rich—if she wanted to run, she’d need the money.”

“The notebook.”

“Six packs of Dragon is small change compared to what that could get you. Just a hell of a lot more dangerous. You need to find her before she manages to sell it.” He handed me a folded slip of paper, ink bleeding through the back. “All her addresses are here—though, course, we didn’t find her at any of them.”

By my count, finding a whole person was a lot easier than finding a notebook. They tend to be larger. “You have the Hexel guarantee at your disposal,” I said as I stood up. “She can’t have gone too far to ground, not to sell some hot-ticket item like that. We’ll find her the same way she wants the buyer to find her.”

“I’m counting on it.”