and grabbed on to a towering stone angel, almost lost my balance. Whiskey jitters were finally catching up with me.
“You shouldn’t drink that black-market crap,” she said. Her speech patterns were changing. I detected a faint Scottish brogue, a late twentieth-century accent. I had to watch out. She could collapse if the memories came back too rapidly. “I worked on all the synthetic alcohol patents. Whiskey’s probably the worst.”
I nodded. We finally had something in common. Standing in the middle of a cemetery beneath a silvery moon, we both agreed that contraband liquor was bad news. A whispering breeze passed between us, stirred the mists into curving rococo eddies. Just then I turned away and leaned against my angel friend again. Vertigo forced me to wobbly knees.
“Drink tequila next time,” she said.
I held up my hand to silence her. Even a Babysitter deserves a moment of peace. Especially when he’s curled over with jitters. The world seemed to be all mist and shadow, everything in soft focus, like I was looking through a camera fitted with the wrong lens. I wiped my face on my shirt-sleeve, then caught my breath and stood up.
“Angelique?” Dead leaves rustled and tumbled through a narrow courtyard.
She was gone.
“Hey, yeah! Angelique. Where are you?” Stone met stone, shadows changed from gray to purple to black.
Babysitting 101: Never turn your back on a Newbie. Especially on Day One.
There were no sounds except my own footsteps as I stumbled through uncharted darkness; my own heartbeat, as it chugged along like a train on rickety tracks. I began to jog between temple-tombs, moved through what looked like a black-and-white vampire-movie set. I imagined Dracula, arms open wide, imagined Angelique welcomed into a land of the undead. A hundred dangers lurked in the shadows: thieves, murderers, kidnappers, hiding in the neat and narrow spaces between the tombs, waiting for tourists, hoping someone would pass by, someone unarmed and innocent.
Someone like my Newbie. Memories rose to the surface, stories of half-baked Newbies, caught and sold into slavery. They were so easy to program during the first week. I was running faster now. Thought I saw someone, watching me from a dark corridor between the tombs.
“Angelique—where are you?”
That was when I rounded a corner and found her, kneeling in front of the burial tomb of a legendary voodoo queen. She stared at the stone slab as if it belonged to her; she was running her fingers through a fresh pile of Mardi Gras beads left by pilgrims seeking favors from the dead, a puzzled expression on her face. She must have heard me, but for the longest time she didn’t move. She just continued to stare down at the tokens, mumbling to herself. Finally she turned and looked at me.
“Did you see him?” she asked.
“Who?” I glanced behind us.
“He’s running away, he’s free now.” She tried to stand up, a ghostly smile on her lips, a long-dead memory. But then she blinked, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed, disappearing beneath the mist.
I picked her up, checked her pulse, sheltered her in my arms for a moment while my head cleared. “She’s fine,” I said to myself, as if I needed some sort of reassurance. I struggled to forget about all the things that could go wrong, about the hidden clauses in the Fresh Start contract that protected me from scenarios just like this. I was tired of being the one that always came out on top of every bad situation. “You’re going to be okay. Hang in there, kid,” I mumbled as I carried Angelique toward the street. “We’ll get you straightened out. Some jumps are just rougher than others.”
But deep down inside I knew that wasn’t true. There was something wrong here: too much information was trying to get through. Almost as if whoever did her jump didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Fortunately the cab was waiting exactly where I left it. I signaled the driver.
Then I used two Master Keys, preprogrammed commands hardwired into every Newbie at start-up, and I whispered into Angelique’s ear. “Wake up. Focus.”
She instantly opened her eyes, stood up and climbed into the cab, one hand holding mine for support.
We drove away.
I was too tired to care about another Newbie whose life just got mangled and torn in Fresh Start machinery. Too tired to realize that there might be more going on here than just a rugged jump.
It was the first mistake I would make on this case. But that didn’t