Officer Rigby comes in behind them carrying two folding chairs.

Agent Ochoa takes one, plops it down with the seat facing me, and sits with her knees almost poking into my left thigh. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t smile. She just chews her gum at me behind her mirrored sunglasses. It's awkward and probably it's supposed to be.

Agent Tyler takes her time, and smiles at the other two officers. She notices Torelli is still standing. “Oh,” she says. “Can we get you a chair?”

“You don’t want us to leave?” asks Smythe.

Tyler smiles. “Not at all. We’re not like that. We’re not taking over. We’re here to help,” she says. “As partners.”

“Whether we like it or not,” says Torelli.

“That you got right,” says Ochoa, still looking at me. I think.

“The kidnappings bring us into it, I’m afraid,” says Tyler. “That and the possible multi-dimensional angle.” She looks down at me as he unfolds the chair, careful not to jostle Smythe. The room is getting tinier and tinier. “I’m sorry this has happened to you,” she says to me. “We can lay some things to rest pretty quickly with your cooperation.”

Ochoa pulls out a phone and places it on the table in front of me.

“That’s yours, Mr. Walker,” says Tyler.

Ochoa smiles.

“Free and clear,” continues Tyler. “If you have, in fact, really been abducted from another dimension, this should tell us and there are things we can do for you if that's so.”

I look at her.

“This kind of thing has been known to happen from time to time,” she says. “The notion of sending you back is highly unlikely, I’m afraid. There are so many dimensions, Mr. Walker, and quite literally millions of them are so similar that without the original practitioner's precise incantation, it’s just not feasible. There’s a chance that the dead woman in the house was not the one that cast the spell and, if so, we may be able to track down whoever it was that did. In that case, we may be able to return you home, but I don’t want to give you any false hope. It is almost certain that Ms. Lansky, the dead woman, was the one who opened the portal. I’m so sorry.”

Not knowing what else to say, I say, “Thanks.”

“If you pick up the phone,” says Ochoa. “We can start.” She’s smiling and chewing her gum. I wonder if she’s deliberately playing into the dumb, sexpot, Latina stereotype. I figure she probably is. It’s probably unavoidable really. Law enforcement types have to develop something to knock people off their guard. Smythe has the motherly thing going. Torelli is the social sniper, planting barbs, bon mots, and provocations at opportune moments. Tyler is big and you’d expect her to try intimidation so she goes for direct kindness. Ochoa here comes across as vapid and juvenile. It’s hard to tell with the sunglasses, but I guess that she’s my age. I bet she’s also the smartest one in the room.

I pick up the phone.

When I turn it on, Ochoa punches in the code with one long, manicured pink nail. “You can set it to fingerprint or face recognition later,” she says. “Open up The App.”

When the home screen pops up there’s only one icon. A big black capital A in a simple white square. I hit it with my thumb.

The screen goes black and one of those white circle thingies swirls around.

“It’ll need a moment to read you,” says Ochoa.

Smythe says, “You’ve identified the woman from the house?”

Tyler looks at me. It’s clear she’s wondering if she should say anything in front of me. She shrugs. “Anabelle Lansky,” she says. “We know her as a freelancer. Hires out for odd jobs both legitimate and otherwise. We’ve suspected her of inter-dimensional kidnapping before. Arrested twice but couldn’t make a case. We think she’s involved in some other things we’re looking into in the area. It’s why we got here so quickly. We have no idea who she was working for though.”

“In Willamette?” ask Smythe.

“Yes,” says Tyler.

“Shit,” says Smythe.

“Lady, you don’t know the half of it,” says Ochoa as the app on my phone finishes whatever it was doing. A bunch of numbers come up on the screen. “There we go,” says Ochoa. “Gimme a sec.”

She’s got her own phone, tapping on it, her fingernail clicking on the screen. “Oh yeah, he’s not from here,” she says. She looks at me, I think. She says, “The App, Mr. Walker, provides you with some basic information about yourself, and it can give it to us.” She waggles her phone and her eyebrows at me. “Like the fact that you’re from another dimension. Authorities of various types have various levels of access to your information and you can choose to allow different levels of access to others at your discretion. It’ll give you your statistics, whether or not you have a sponsor,” she says. She looks at the detectives. “Which he doesn’t. As well as any ongoing—. Holy shit!”

“What?” says Tyler.

“The Malocchio? And you couldn’t warn a girl?” says Ochoa.

Torelli shrugs.

Smythe says, “We thought you knew.”

“The Malocchio?” says Tyler. “Why aren’t we all dead by now?”

“Because there’s another one,” says Ochoa. She’s scrolling down with her thumb, reading. “The Good Eye?”

Smythe nods. “Kabbalah, I think? Jewish tradition anyway, right?”

Ochoa nods. “My God,” she says. “Both level four.”

Nobody says anything.

“Is that bad?” I say.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Smythe takes my hand. It’s a little awkward because it’s the one holding the phone. Still, I know she’s trying to comfort me. “Three is the limit, Ben. There isn’t supposed to be a level four.”

Tyler says, “Mo? How?”

Ochoa says, “Remember Lucas Pratt.”

Tyler nods slowly.

Smythe says, “I’m sorry, Lucas Pratt?”

“Cursed three times,” says Ochoa. “Back in the eighteen hundreds. He was kind of a Lothario? Seduced a practitioner’s wife. The husband hit him with an unlucky-in-love thing. Two years later, a very lonely Mr. Pratt cheated at cards. One of the men he cheated knew a guy. Pratt got hit with another level one curse, halitosis. He fucked up again later and was hit again. Acne. The three curses drove him crazy and later, it killed him. Lonely, bad breath, and acne to death. When experts examined him before and after Pratt died, it was determined that he had three level three curses instead of three level ones. They speculated that the three curses built upon each other as they interacted. The first was a level one. The second made them both a level two. The third raised them all to three.” Ochoa shrugged and grinned. “Ben here got hit with the Evil Eye, which is a known level three. The bearded guy who killed Lansky and wanted to help, hit him with the Good Eye to try to counteract the bad luck with good. Two level three curses take him to level four.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Good luck is a curse?”

Even with the sunglasses on, I could tell that Ochoa rolled her eyes.

Tyler says, “A good luck curse of this magnitude, Mr. Walker, is just as fatal as its counterpart. It tends to work very differently and slower. You win the lottery, say, and then you win it again. And then a third time, only you didn’t even buy a ticket to play. Some computer error or something makes you win. People think you cheated. The government brings you in for questioning. They can’t make a case, of course, but everybody thinks you lucked out, so to speak. They know you must’ve cheated. They start looking into you trying to see how you did it. A week later you’re one of the richest people in the world, you’ve met the woman of your dreams. Maybe you meet three of them. How long before jealousy gets you murdered? Before some crazed stalker kills you in your sleep because they can’t have you? Before some nut thinks you’ve got all your money buried in your mansion’s wall and tortures you to death to find out where?”

“Oh,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Ochoa. “Two level threes get you a level four. Who knew? Still, people are going to think you can do magic because, in effect, you can. I bet ya that if this had been two level two curses that bumped them both up to level three? You’d be dead now. It’s that fourth level that gives you some control. What do you think, Cal?”

Tyler nods. “That tracks,” she says. “I’ll run it up the chain and see what the office thinks. He have any numbers we can use?”

Ochoa nods, “You were a journalist, Mr. Walker?”

“A baby one,” I say. “I did mostly freelance stuff. I work… worked part-time at the Tribune doing odd stories.”

“It’s the Willamette Chonicle here,” says Smythe.

“Here,” says Ochoa. “Take a look at your numbers on the App.”

I do.

Name: Benjamin Pierce Walker

Sponsor: None.

Age: 24

Prime Attributes

STR: 2/3/1 DEX: 3/1/1 CON: 3/2/1

INT: 3/3/1 WIS: 2/1/1 CHA: 3/2/2

Learned Attributes

PER: 3/2/3 STA: 3/3/2 EDU: 2/3/1

Skills

Brawling +1

Computers +1

Dodge +1

History +1

Library +1

Listen +2

Psychoanalysis +1

Psychology +1

Write +2

CURSED!

Malocchio 4

Good Eye 4

“Not bad,” says Ochoa. “No ones at all in the first tier. Two twos in skills. Listening and Writing. Probably from training he got in college. We can work with this."

Tyler says, “Your degree—. I imagine you have a degree?”

I nod.

“It’s nonexistent here, of course,” says Tyler. “We’ll engineer one for you based on your data and personal history. You know, make up something that fits so you can function here.”

“Can he function here?” asks Smythe. “We’re still mopping out Interrogation Room 1 from when he had a nightmare.”

Ochoa shrugs. “No choice,” she says. “He’s here.”

“Look,” I say. “I’m sorry, but what does all this mean? Plus ones? Two, three, one for STR? Is that Strength, like from a video game?”

“Yeah,” says Ochoa, smacking her gum. “The APP was designed by nerds which of course often includes a double dose of geek and they borrow from what they know. Government practitioners designed the analysis part of The App, but it's the nerds who had to figure out how to represent the readings, see?”

I really didn’t. She can tell.

Ochoa sighs.

“Okay, so for Strength you’ve got a score of two, three, one. They’ve broken down things into three tiers. The first tier is how you stack up against all of humanity. Average strength puts you at two, see? The middle third out of everybody. Your second tier is a three. That puts you in the top third out of that first third. Tier three specifies it even further. Out of that second third, if we divided that into thirds, you’re at the bottom. See?”

“I think so. So, like Einstein would’ve been a three, three, three, right? Top third of the top third in the top third?” I say.

“Yeah, probably,” says Ochoa. She winks at me. “Your three, three, one is pretty good for brains,” she says. “Congrats.”

“Okay, I think I know what the other ones are for Primary Attributes. Those are the most important ones?” I ask.

“Not really, though everybody has a different opinion. Primaries are the ones that you're born with and develop over time. The Learned ones are more complex,” says Smythe. “They grow from the others but are too important not to be included. Babies don’t have them at all. You get those a bit later. Age six? Seven? It varies.”

“Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, right?” I say.

“Yep,” says Ochoa.

“PER is what? Perception?” I ask.

“Very perceptive of you,” says Ochoa.

Smythe rolls her eyes.

I’m pretty sure Torelli is asleep.

“What’s STA?”

“Stamina,” says Ochoa. “It’s not just physical. Mental too. We figure that means it takes just mental toughness to keep running when you’re tired as it does physical.”

“EDU is education?”

“Yep.”

“What’s going on with these Skills then?”

“Best we can figure is that for anything you try to do, it’s a combination of two attributes to see if you can do it. You’d have a decent chance to do anything involving your Intelligence, for example. But if it also required Wisdom, you might have some trouble since you’re on the low side of average there,” says Ochoa.

“Hence my current predicament,” I say.

Ochoa grins. “The skills,” she says, “Add to the ease of the roll if they apply. So, if you were driving fast, say, and needed to make a turn, you’d probably have to make a Dexterity check along with maybe a Perception.”

“Maybe?” I say.

“No one knows for sure,” says Ochoa. “And it seems to change given the circumstances. Our scientists are still figuring it out, but this is our best guess. Your Dex is highish, your Perception is even better. If you had one level of the Drive Skill, say, that’d make your chances even easier, see?”

“Yeah. But what about my curses?”

Ochoa looks at Tyler.

Tyler nods.

Ochoa sighs. “Um, we think that happens after you try to do something. Your… luck, for lack of a better term, kicks in one way or the other and shifts things. In the report, it says you can see it? Like, light and dark swirls and blotches in your vision?”

“Yeah.”

“I betcha you can kinda see probability and maybe some other stuff that applies,” she says. “Your brain has to make sense of what it's sensing somehow, right? It chose to represent it visually. You say you can see it but you know it’s not really there or affecting your actual vision?”

I nod.

“That tracks,” says Ochoa. “So, um, good and bad luck are always kinda fighting it out all around you and you can affect it somehow, like you just did with all the coins.”

“Only it gets away from me too sometimes,” I say. “Like with the sprinkler system. Or at the convenience store.”

“Yeah.”

“So, I’m fucked. Twice. No, three times.”

Ochoa cocks her head.

“I’m trapped in a new dimension without any friends or family and I’m twice cursed.”

“Oh,” says Ochoa. “Yeah, twice-cursed and thrice fucked. Sounds about right.”