Tin Can kept a shopping cart that was retrospectively the worst thing to build a conspiracy inside of. He smelled of stolen copper and regrets, but he wore them like badges of honor.

  His cart was parked beneath the overpass, a little kingdom of rust and duct tape. Little flags made of shredded pizza boxes fluttered in the wind. He’d lined the rim of the cart with reflective tape the way a civilian might line a mantel with family photos. He looked up from a half-disassembled radio as we approached — Elly in the lead, me shuffling like I was dressed for a funeral, Lily close by and cool, Eury hanging back like some classical statue that had been dropped into a punk alley.

  “M’lady,” he said to Elly, bowing with the solemnity of someone who’d read too many Arthurian fanfics. “Other ladies.” He bowed again. “And Mr. Mercer. The spider called and said you were bringing snacks.”

  He was delighted when I produced a box of Pop-Tarts like an offering to some eldritch idol. I held on to it, though, waving it like a carrot on a stick until we got what we came for. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. Well, maybe it was. I just didn’t know the guy.

  “I would’ve brought pizza rolls, but they don’t travel well, and I wasn’t sure if you have access to a microwave.”

  “Ooh, pizza rolls. I do love those. Regrettably, my kitchen is without a microwave at the moment.” He indicated his kitchen with a sweep of his hands.

  The only thing approaching a kitchen was a dirty wash bowl. I nodded knowingly. Thawed and uncooked pizza rolls didn’t sound appetizing.

  Willard — the boy with rat ears and a grin that never fully matched his narrow face — appeared like a punctuation mark at Tin Can’s elbow, several rats clustered about his boots.

  “And you know my associate.”

  “Willard.” I inclined my head.

  “Don’t call me Willard,” he grumbled when D-list jokes were already being hurled in his direction. “I told you that last time.”

  “We all agreed it was best to use code names for you to protect your identity,” I said, which was the entire depth of my reconciliation skills. He looked wounded but also extraordinarily pleased to be noticed. Rats, it turned out, liked ego strokes.

  Tin Can, all elbows and folklore, hopped up on an upturned milk crate and addressed us like we were some kind of jury he needed to sway.

  “The slips,” he proclaimed. “They’re ledger crumbs. Every Collector keeps receipts. Think of them as subway tokens that point where the subway ends. They stick to things. They log. They route. Follow the routing and you find where the package is delivered.”

  Willard made a sound I decided to call agreement and handed me a scrap of paper pulled from a rat’s jaws. The slip looked innocuous: a rectangle of thin, waxed paper with tiny numbers and printed glyphs. Tiny ink stamps. If you stared at it too long it looked like static, like bad reception.

  “Coordinates,” Tin Can said, pointing. “Not the normal sort. You can’t put them into maps. They match the ledger. Once you have enough slips, you can triangulate the receiving node — which is to say, you can find where the Curator drops a package. There’s always a node.”

  “So these bits of paper are like keys to his pocket dimension warehouse?” Elly said, a hopeful look in her eyes.

  Immediately, I felt less dumb for bringing Pop-Tarts. This might actually work.

  “Keys,” Tin Can agreed. “But the collector’s lock is a library. You need the proper book pages in sequence for the door to open.”

  Willard’s rats had already done the tedious part: they’d been following a Collector’s pattern for days, freeloading loose paper scraps and crumbs from beneath mailbox-chests. They brought us a handful of slips, ragged and smeared. Elly arranged them on the hood of her rental car (nowhere near as cool as her witchy hatchback) like some grim sort of collage.

  “Arrange them with the central stamp facing each other,” she murmured, fingers moving fast. Runes hummed through her knuckles as she overlaid sigils on the ink.

  The spider — our frosted pantry oracle — crawled out from beneath a broken wooden pallet, attracted by magical happenings and crumbs. It perched itself on the hood of the car, watching Elly work. As she went about her eldritch duties, it swiveled an eye our way and clicked an impatient rhythm on the metal.

  “Pop-Tart?” Tin Can suggested, awfully hopeful, licking his chops as he eyed the box.

  I gave him the box like some ceremonial goblet. Foil packages were quickly split open. Tin Can offered Willard one the first pair and then put the box on the car’s hood.

  The spider dove in like it had been swallowed by endorphins. It ate one, then another, strawberry filling and crusty white frosting smearing its mandibles, and then — because we apparently trained or bribed a living breadcrumb into being our spy — it began to stutter the same little sequence that had been waking up in my apartment the last few nights: fragments of words, small patterns, the same rhythm as the slips.

  Elly read the rhythm like sheet music. “It’s responding to the stamp patterns,” she said. “We can use the spider as the trigger — if we arrange the slips to form the ledger’s spine, and then prime it, it can show us the seam where the pocket opens.”

  “Prime how?” I asked, already regretting the question.

  “It wants a key,” Tin Can said. He rummaged in his coat and produced a Juicebox straw wrapped in copper wire and a tiny slip of paper folded like origami.

  “I’m not sure this is the time for a Kool-Aid break.”

  “Psssh.” Tin Can snorted. “Plebian. This is from a Capri Sun.”

  I stared at him, waiting for any explanation.

  “Paper is sympathetic to the Collectors. We use one of their slips as the lock’s heart. Then,” he tapped his temple, “we feed it a truth. A truth, a creature’s essence, is electricity to these things. Your truth is your nullness, Mister. Lily’s flame. Eury’s anchor. Elly’s mischief. Together they make the current.”

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  I was pretty sure ‘truth as electricity’ was not on any science test I'd ever taken, but somehow Tin Can’s eyes were all pure conviction and sadness and, annoyingly, he made a case with all of his pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo.

  “Will this work?” I whispered to Elly.

  Our eyes met, hers glistening like hopeful stars. “Maybe.”

  Willard crawled into his rat den to the side of the alley, emerging with a small roll of looped slips that had a pattern none of us had seen yet. “Found this under a mailbox torso,” he said. “Enough of these, lined properly, should stabilize the seam. But you’ll need to add the final—” he looked me square in the face, “oomph to make it open.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m all about oomph.”

  “Lily would know.” Eury remarked mischievously.

  Lily giggled, and Elly grumbled, “Enough of that.”

  Elly looked at the roll. She looked at me. Then she looked at the spider still polishing its pastry and said, “We have one chance. We set the slips in a matrix. The spider sits on the center. Lily pours a wave of energy — not too much; we don’t want to burn it out — Eury arms the anchor, and you bind it with your null. A drop of your blood to complete the circuit.”

  “I thought you said I’m not supposed to lightly toss around my blood, or these things can steal my soul or something?”

  Elly nodded. “True, but sometimes you must take a risk. This might get us in. Once we do that, we can put this thing down. Then we don’t have to worry. It also gets you free of Jade.”

  “Almost free.” I corrected. “We’d own one more favor.”

  “Yeah, but we need to beat this one first, and I don’t know any other way. Elfnet is coming up empty on this one.”

  I thought for a moment. “How about Spellr? Can I date this creature? Swipe right and spit on them?”

  “I told you to stay away from supernatural Tinder!” Lily hissed.

  “Hey, jealousy later, bleeding now.” Eury suggested, all business as she watched the spider devour another Pop-Tart. “Besides, you don’t swipe right in Spellr. You trace a pentacle over their face.”

  I frowned. The idea of using my blood like a switch didn't thrill me. I thought about all the times my body had been an accidental failsafe and decided I didn’t want to make that a habit. “Is there an alternative?”

  Tin Can shrugged in a way that indicated both shrugging and some kind of cosmic resignation. “There’s always risk. There’s always sacrifice. Sometimes it’s just… practical.” He tapped the Juicebox straw. “But small. A pinprick. We’re not painting murals. We’re toggling an old door.”

  Lily slid a hand over mine. “Do it,” she said softly. “We’ll be careful.” Her fingers were warm. Her thumb traced a pattern along the back of my knuckle that felt like a blessing.

  Eury frowned in a way that was probably intended to look stern and ancient. “Make it quick. I’ll hold the anchor, solidify your gateway. If the seam fights, it becomes brittle like old stone. Hold steady, and we can rip the pocket open long enough to reach in.”

  Elly had eddied around to the spider. She arranged the slips into concentric rings on the hood of the car, each one stamped outward. The spider sat poised in the center like a jeweled crown, chittering what sounded like approval. Willard’s rats formed a living cord from the car to Tin Can’s cart — a signal net.

  “Ready?” Elly asked.

  This was the moment: the ledger grid on the hood, the spider waiting, the rats humming, a tiny pile of Pop-Tart crumbs sprawled on Tin Can’s clipboard like sacrificial altars (good thing I’d bought the jumbo pack).

  I made a shallow cut at the fingertip with the plastic straw wrapped in copper wire, Tin Can’s homemade ritual athame. It stung but not enough to be dramatic. I let one bead of blood fall on the center slip.

  The world tasted like metal for a second.

  Done bleeding, I slid the leather gloves on because that was her rule now: gloves for metal and ritual things, because apparently my hands were too null-tastic for all this sorcery.

  The spider clicked. The ink on the surrounding slips shimmered in the streetlight. The air hiccupped.

  Lily exhaled slow, a warm current that encouraged openness. Eury’s fingers flexed, and the air around them grew dense, like someone had poured liquid stone in a circle. Elly whispered an old charm of finding and location-seeking, and the runes glowed.

  Something in the pattern stuttered. The hood of Elly’s coupe rippled like a minuscule pond under a thrown pebble. The slips vibrated and then — impossibly — the air at the center folded. A seam opened like a mouth between realities. For a breath, I saw a hallway of used parking lots folded end to end, like an infinite set of mirrors. A smell of old motor oil and Armor All emerged from the seam, and in the distance, I could see the glint of the exact shade of blue paint we were searching for, hidden among dozens of other vehicles. But I’d recognize those bumper stickers anywhere.

  My heart jumped into my throat. “That’s—” I started.

  “That’s her car,” Willard said, voice small. “We’re on the right seam.”

  We had one shot. The seam looked narrow, like a slit in fabric, but it held. You could reach through, maybe, if your hand fit. But it felt like thumbing a switch in an old engine: if the seam closed before the object was fully through, the thing would be lost between folds.

  “Pull it to us,” Elly decided. “Make the seam short. Drag, don’t yank.”

  “Okay.” My pulse had gone loud, animal and rude. I leaned forward and stuck my gloved hand in.

  It felt like sticking your arm through a curtain made of syrup and razor wire. It burned coldly. The hood of the car reeked of ozone and paperwork. My glove blackened at the edge where the seam’s lip grazed it. The spider clicked frantic encouragement.

  I braced my feet and shoved.

  So normally, I couldn’t move a car by myself, but they’d already explained to me that physics didn’t work the same here. Pocket dimensions operated by their own rules. Things like mass, weight, size, and all that stuff we live our lives by don’t necessarily apply when you’re in a totally different offset of reality.

  At first the car didn’t move. Then the seam gulped, and the back bumper scraped, then the whole hatch shuddered and slid halfway through. I’m not proud of the sound I made — an unmanly, involuntary noise of concentrated effort. Two rats, tiny as a soda cans, latched onto the bumper and started chewing the car’s charms like they were tethers.

  “Elly!” I heard. Her voice was taut, a wire of command.

  She blasted the rims with a tug of fae energy, kindling the metal into willing motion. Lily breathed, a soft flame that went crawling through the seam like a heat wave. Eury pushed the anchor with a low hum, teeth clenched. Tin Can murmured to the radio as if sending prayers.

  The hatchback popped free with a sound like a book being closed. Then it was through, blue and dented and all Elly’s. It slid down onto the pavement with a thud that felt like success and like a comprehensive insurance claim for minor damage.

  We’d done it. Elly’s car sat there, three feet from the seam, smelling faintly of ink and old pockets. Willard dove into the gaps between bumper and tire, rat-hands busy, pulling away charms that would have the Collectors following the scent.

  I pulled my hand out and saw the glove scorched black at the cuff. A blistered smudge of skin peered through the leather. It hurt in a way that told me my body was no longer just a conduit; it had been used, and it noticed.

  We laughed because we were alive, and the laugh sounded small and broken in the underpass.

  Tin Can clapped his hands like thunder in a teacup. “And that,” he said, solemn as a priest, “is why you always bring snacks to a spell-casting event.”

  We had the car. We had opened a seam. We had a dozen new things to be thankful for and a dozen more reasons to be terrified. And somewhere in the curdled breeze, I thought I heard paper whispering like a far, slow applause.

  The spider clicked once, a final, satisfied punctuation. “FILED. RETRIEVED. LOGGED.”

  It clicked my nickname next in a cadence I didn’t like. “FEEDER.”

  I rolled my eyes and peeled off the burnt gloves. It was then that I noticed the slip of paper on the underside of the glove, beneath where my hand had reached through.

  I realized that the ledger-keeper had noticed our theft, and they’d caught me in the midst of it. Which meant the ledger would notice our next moves, too.

  The others saw it, too. Their eyes went wide.

  “When did that happen?”

  “Must’ve been when I reached through. There must have been something waiting on the other side, just out of view.”

  I’d been tagged. Things stopped being funny and just got real.

  “Well, hope he or she likes a pair of burnt gloves. They tagged them not me.” I said hopefully. Was that how it worked?

  No one said anything.