Luckily we found a Best Buy still open and even luckier found a guy who was happy to sell me a phone and laptop without trying to up-sell me on a bunch of peripherals. I think he had been trying to cut out early when I showed up in his department. Sorry, bro.
“What do you need a computer for?” My mom asked while we waited for the guy to get the laptop from the back.
“I have a friend who’s,” I debated lying but figured Perry would understand the situation. “Do you remember Perry Carmen? He was my friend that one semester we were in Ohio.”
My mom squinted in thought. “I think so. Did he have that video game you fell in love with? I think you were playing it whenever I went to pick you up.”
I was surprised she remembered. “Yes!” I said with a smile. “Well, he and I stayed in touch and he ended up in a… kind of clandestine profession.”
“Like a spy?” She asked.
“Kinda,” I said. “He’s a hacker.”
Perry would say the term was a gross oversimplification, but essentially true. His official job on his taxes was “Net Security Consultant” but he did everything from white hat jobs, to data mining, to actual illegal hacking. That last bit I’ve never seen and Perry has never admitted to it, but he certainly has never denied it either.
“Why do we need a hacker?” My mom asked.
I paused as the sales rep came back and took my debit card. He glanced at my hand as he took it. “How long did that take?”
Ah, he was one of the people that assumed it was a tattoo. “Several months,” I said. “Probably could have done it quicker but after a while, I just don’t want to be stabbed anymore and needed a break between sessions.”
He smiled good-naturedly. “I hear ya,” he said, rolling up his sleeve and showing off the Superman logo on his bicep. “Just this was three hours.”
“Nice,” I said, hiding my anxiety. I don’t know how what to say about someone’s tattoo. I’ve never gotten one. I know what I’d say if someone showed me their tattoo unprompted, though, which was “nice.” My mom was watching this with a wide-eyed expression and I hoped the guy just thought my mother was one of those old white women who hated tattoos and not appalled at my ability to lie off the cuff.
Apparently, I passed muster as the guy rang me up and returned my card with a receipt. He handed me a big back with my laptop and the new phone’s packaging (the phone was already in my pocket). We said a polite goodbye and headed for the car.
“Why do we need a hacker?” My mom asked when we were out of the store.
I glanced around to make sure there was no one in earshot. “I’m going to ask Perry to look into Conner’s online activity leading up to his disappearance. The cops should be doing that already but I don’t know how fast they can work. I’m pretty sure they need, like, warrants and… I actually don’t know. I’m basically going off of movies. What I do know is that Perry is an internet wizard and things like “privacy” and “laws” are vague ideas to him at best. If there’s something to be found online, he can find it.”
My mom had a combined look of dubiousness and worried on her face. “That sounds illegal,” she said.
“Very,” I replied as I put the laptop in the back seat. “It’s better if you don’t ask any more questions in case the cops pull you in for questioning when this is all done.”
She gave me a wide-eyed stare as we climbed in the car. I saw her formulate several responses before settling on: “But you could go to jail!”
“I won’t,” I said. Then: “Well, not normal jail. There’s apparently a higher regulatory body for people like me, even if they are a soft touch most of the time. So soft I’ve never heard of them until recently.”
“What do you mean? ‘Normal jail?’” She was gripping her seat belt.
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I paused my reply as I navigated the parking lot and got back on the road. “Remember when I mentioned I have abilities? One of them makes it so if I don’t want cops to see me, they can’t.”
Her incredulity was almost comedic with how severe it was. “Like an anti-cop spell?”
I chuckled. “Something like that.” It affected everyone, but I can tweak the spell to have more effect on people with authority. How it knew who had authority was something I hadn’t figured out yet. It was just one of those things you say “’cause magic” to with a comically exaggerated shrug.
We were silent for a while. Me, focusing on driving in the unfamiliar city and my mom wrestling with the day. I was mildly surprised when she spoke up again.
“How does one—how do you get magic?” She asked. “I assume it isn’t easy or it’d be everywhere.”
I nodded. “True,” I said. “Though I think the main reason magic isn’t well known is because of Christianity. I hear in the East, real magic is less hidden and more of a ‘kind-of’ open secret. So you—“
“Christianity?” My mom asked, alarmed. Fuck. I haven’t spent time around her in years and forgot that she went to Church every Sunday. “What does Christianity have to do with it?”
“Aside from the whole ‘Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live’ thing,” I began, glancing at her from time to time to judge her reaction. “Christianity has, over the centuries, made great strides to either absorb or eradicate everything considered ‘spiritual.’ The Pagans and Crusades are the biggest examples I could cite without thinking too hard. From what I’ve picked up from Alice, who is much more educated in the current ‘public’ face of the magical community, magic being a secret is mostly just an old survival instinct burned into the magical community from hiding from witch hunts and Inquisitions. Some people in the community have very long lives, and for them, these habits are very real tools that have kept them alive.”
I waved my hand, dismissing the topic. “But that’s beside the point. To answer your question: There are a lot of different ways. I learned magic by being exposed to it.” And then doing it wrong for eight years. Plus bartering powers for souls. I held back a wince.
“That… incident, you told me about,” she said.
“Yeah,” the wheel made some noise as my grip tightened on it. I forced myself to relax. “Though that was just the one that went bad. We did a lot of other, more benign things.”
“Like what?” My mom asked, sounding genuinely curious.
I generally didn’t like to think about that time, with how it ended… but up until that horrible night, it had been the best time of my life. A smile slowly formed on my face as I got onto the freeway.
“Mary was trying to get a far-seeing spell to work,” I said. “We thought we were doing it right but everything came out blurry. We could sometimes tell based on the colors and general shapes that we were looking at what we targeted, but it was useless. We gave up on the spell until John had a thought. He was really into astronomy, and… I don’t remember the explanation, something about focal length and light diffusion and lenses. He worked with Mary to tweak the spell, made it larger—“ I gestured at the steering wheel. “Usually when the spell was written out it was about as big as this wheel. This time he shoved all his furniture into the corner of his studio and took up the whole floor with it.”
I let out a sigh. A happy one.
“We looked at Alpha Centauri.”
I changed lanes to get around a semi.
“I dunno what they did but it was beautiful. It wasn’t like looking through a window or a telescope. It was like someone had photo-realistically painted the star in the air, hovering over the floor of that shitty studio apartment. It wasn't super bright, either, like they had applied a filter so we could look at it with the naked eye. For three minutes it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.”
“What happened then?” My mom asked.
I shot her a glance, smirking in amusement.
“Someone forgot to carry a one or something because they fucked up the spell and it started to burn the floor. John got evicted when the landlord saw the burns in the hardwood.”
My mom put a hand over her mouth. “Oh no!”
I chuckled. “I knew John for the better part of two years, and that was one of the three times he was evicted,” I let out a rueful laugh. “He had a wild streak in him... Also a hatred for cleaning.” I added after a beat.
We kept up the light conversation until we hit the hotel. It felt nice. I don’t think I’ve ever just talked to my mom before. I called her every month but that was mostly to let her know I was still alive and to listen to what was going on in her life. I went into every check-in with the hope that she had decided to leave my dad.
I got her a room a couple of doors down from mine and said goodnight. When I got to my room I spent a few minutes started up the laptop, connecting to the hotel Wi-fi and downloading the few chat apps I’d need to contact Perry. Because I wasn’t doing it via my regular means I had to jump through a few hoops that I barely remembered.
I was supposed to go to create a new Discord account under a certain name, join a certain public server, go to a certain channel, and do a certain message. Then I was supposed to send an email with no body, but a subject with a specific message.
I don’t know what any of this accomplished. What little I knew of the internet made me think that almost every communication was filtered one way or another through the government so these rudimentary attempts at subterfuge wouldn’t do a lot if someone really wanted to intercept our communication. For all I knew Perry just demanded it so I wouldn’t come to him with minor troubles… now that I thought about it, that was likely the case.
With my two messages fired away, I took a shower and got ready for bed. Tomorrow would be a big day.