Free Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan Page B

demonstrating the efficiency of the market, had been accepted in seconds.
    The seller, JackZapp79.
    The buyer, DarkLordBaal.
    The offer:
THE SOUL OF SHERRINGFORD JACKMAN
    The reward—oh. He wrote, “I, Jack Zapp, the Electric Detective, in order to fulfill Jack Zapp’s Restless Pledge, require the power to defeat the demon that killed me.”
    Scheme. I think we should go faster.
    She plunged forward. The Scepter’s blinking red lights cast her shadow lower and longer as she jogged away, and then we were in the trees, Scheme feeling her way along the thin track. The trees were a screen of shifting black and gray. I was blind.
    She cried out, and there was a loud rustle and a crash.
    Scheme?
    “It’s okay,” she said. “I tripped.” I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear her moving in the darkness. “Oh, wow,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.”
    We were back in the safety of the Tata, under the protective glow of its dome light. Scheme had a dark box in her lap—whatever she’d tripped over in the woods. It was a squat metal thing, filthy and corroded, with ports on the back. There was a cable plugged into one of them that ran for three inches before unraveling into wires and tatters. The box had a ragged hole in the side, and pine needles spilled out. “One of Sebastian’s repeaters,” she said, wiggling a finger inside. “I’m glad somebody got some use out of it.”
    She turned it over, and on the bottom I saw, stenciled in bright yellow paint, now worn and faded:

    Scheme ran a palm over it, clearing some of the dirt. “I painted this,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “I thought we were going to graduate and start a company, just the two of us. Design things.” I could see her face in the rear-view mirror. It was still pale and raw from the cold. There were bits of twig and leaf stuck in her hair. “Maybe get a dog.”
    Something landed on the Tata’s hood with a crash that shook the whole car’s frame, and then I saw, leering through the windshield, the face of Jack Zapp, his mustache bristling above a brand-new mouth, a mouth bursting with curved black teeth.
    Scheme put the Tata in reverse, stomped on the accelerator, and buzzed backwards through the empty lot. Monstrous, lion-jawed Jack Zapp slid off the hood and fell onto the concrete, where he stood and reared back, wings at full extension.
    Oh. He has wings now.
    Scheme dropped the car into drive and gunned forward. Jack Zapp was lit up in the headlights. His new additions were multiple-jointed mechanical things, webbed with spidery latticework just like Sutro’s Scepter. He was solid now, not ghostly-transparent, and his jacket was pulled tight around a body that was stretched and swollen. The skin that was visible—his hands, his neck, his face—was dark and fibrous, like ragged rubber. His teeth were black daggers, and his eyes—his eyes were missing.
    Scheme aimed right for him, but at the last moment he leapt up into the air and didn’t come down. She slammed on the brakes.
    “Shit.”
    The dome light was still on. She reached up and flicked it off. Then she pulled the car around and made the motor spit plasma.
    We were hurtling back down Market Street; the streets below burned orange in the gathering night. My eyes were turned all the way up and the world was a riot of noisy hissing pixels. Every few seconds, I caught a shape crossing the sky behind us.
    Scheme, Jack Zapp found Doctor Faustus. And he made a trade.
    “Jesus. What for?”
    He wanted to be as powerful as a demon.
    “That’s it? No details?” We ran a stoplight and it washed over Scheme’s face in a blood-red bar. She grimaced. “He should have read the terms of service.”
    I had every piece of pattern-recognition software I possessed scanning the sky around us, all set to maximum sensitivity. They were beeping and clanging and telling me we were surrounded by giant squid and Woodrow Wilson and passages from Hamlet.
    I felt completely overwhelmed.