After work I find Sazwa at a busy Harvard auditorium, which is considerably easier to sneak into than I expected given it’s where rich people used to send their kids.

  In the front of the class a squat man with light brown skin and tiny spectacles speaks with a contagious enthusiasm about something called the Clovis First Model and the competing theories about the Peopling of America. Normally I’d need to be pretty high to find something like that interesting, but the professor has something special to him. He has the full attention of the class- the level of focus where nobody is even bothering writing notes. Everyone except one.

  She’s got her eyes down, the only one not rapt, just grading papers to make her TA money. She’s short and thin, with a beaky nose, gold brown skin and a loose, geometrically patterned hijab that covers most of her hair.

  I sit down next to her. “You’re Sazwa? I’m Vern’s friend, Heidi.”

  “I don’t know a ‘Vern’s friend Heidi.’” she says, voice dry and lightless, not looking up from her papers.

  “Did he introduce me as Harvey, again?”

  She stares at me, takes a very generous read of my chin length red hair, clean shaved face, and slapdash mascara, and somehow understands everything. “Heidi,” she repeats. “Okay. What does Vern need help with this time?”

  “Vern found some very old harddrives,” I say, and pull them out of my bag.

  “Pre quantum- yeah I have the hardware for these. Not cancerous, right?”

  “That one was in a box,” I offer with a shrug.

  “The ssd is probably wiped beyond what I can recover, I’ll see about the magnetic, depends when they were last powered. Are these connected to something?”

  “Diameter corp.”

  She freezes. Makes a gesture with her eyebrows. I nod knowingly, look up. Very far up. She gets it.

  “Oookay,” she says. “Do you know what specifically I’m looking for?”

  “More or less. Vern didn’t tell me much.”

  “Can you tell him not to send his friend next time he needs a favor?” she asks. “Cause there’s only so much I can do with this.”

  This meaning me, said in a tone like you would use when speaking about a bicycle with no chain.

  “Yeah, I’ll just tell him no, I bet he’ll love that,” I say.

  She shoots me a look. I check for cameras, nearby phones, any other electronics. One of those tacky ass cell-drones whips through the doorway to deposit a coffee on someone’s desk and idle behind their head, pointing its cameras in all directions. The whine of its engines, and the fact I gouged out my own phone’s microphone gives me some confidence, but I wait till Sazwa nods before I speak, turning my head so I can’t have my lips read.

  “He’s looking for any info on the CFO, Sudburry, thinks he’s a vampire or some shit. Other addresses, emergency contacts, next of kin, payments to blood-dolls, NDAs he’s got hidden away, missing persons cases he’s weirdly invested in- it’s a pretty broad sweep but we do have an angle.”

  “Can do,” Sazwa says, a long way shy of enthusiastic. She reads through a handwritten line of code and marks a minus sign in red pen.

  “Alright. Well. It’s been nice to meet you,” I say, stiltedly. The only witches I’ve met are my bandmates, I had kind of been hoping for more out of this when I agreed to do it. I know half the criminals in the city, I’ve been hoping to expand. I need a win.

  I wait a moment too long for comfort, push my luck. She continues to mark, then sideeyes me, closes her book, clicks her pen in annoyance. There are bags under her eyes, made all the darker by her tiny black irises. She’s not very old, but looks like she has felt every year. “Do you want to come over for supper?” she asks, as if letting a rain soaked stray into her garage. “It’s my husband’s turn to cook. I can take a crack at these, let you know right away.”

  “Yeah- yeah!” I say. “Is your husband...” I make the kind of eyebrow gesture you learn from teenage mischief.

  She, again, gets it instantly, nodding then looking toward the professor, and I watch her expression soften for the first time.

  Her husband is a short man with a frumpy sweater and little glasses. He dismisses the class, the bell a minute from ringing, but there’s no crush of students getting out the door, half of them do the opposite and approach him instead. Sazwa sits still, finishing her marking, while the man has conversations with his students, deep ones, good questions. It’s a hard thing to look away from, the way the man happily kills another half hour just talking to his students. If my teachers were anything like that I might have graduated high school.

  When he finally comes up to us he looks like a man who’s run a marathon, out of breath, but glowing from the exertion. “Sazwa,” he smiles. He turns to me and offers a hand “Hello, I’m Professor Fathi, or just Ali if you prefer.”

  I shake his hand, unreserved, warm and fierce. “Heidi.”

  Sazwa says something to him in a delicate, whispering Arabic, which for some reason always makes me think there’s a secret argument going on. Ali smiles and replies in English: “Heidi, tell me, how do you like spicy food?”

  I spend a good half hour after supper with eyes watering, nose running, and mouth burning, and repeat: “No regrets”

  Ali laughs as he does dishes. “So you’re mister Vern’s borrower?”

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  “That’s me,” I say. In a fit of wishful thinking I ask “And Sazwa is yours?”

  “Oh, no, the other way around,” he says. “No, she’s the witch of the household. We were married a few years before the magic came along, and she included me through it all.”

  “Thats kind of sweet. Most the borrowers I’ve met are more like- assistants, gophers, employees. Disposable. Sucks.”

  “It’s troubling, really.”

  “It’s their own private relationships. They signed up for it,” Sazwa says from a computer room down the hall. When we got in she clarified my pronouns and then took down her hijab.

  Ali agrees: “We can’t get bogged down in our own politics, there’s too much important work to do.”

  “Wow, is that pragmatism? Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”

  “Do you prefer a rant?” he asks coyly.

  “Sometimes.” Sazwa walks back into the living room carrying a laptop. There’s a flicker of a smile on her face that makes her look like a totally different woman. “Let me know if this is what you’re looking for.”

  She passes me the laptop with a spreadsheet open. Names. Emails. Phone numbers. Dollar signs next to each. All women, ages at the time range from twenty one to sixteen, all names that start with K, all dated about a decade ago, then tapering off as he got careful, moving to shell corporations, middlemen, fixers and lawyers, but never stopping.

  “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Weird to say I hope this is vampire bullshit cause the alternative is grosser. Can you send me that?”

  “Air gaps,” she says, as she plugs in a cord and an ancient printer coughs to life, printing out the text.

  “So, wait, there’s stuff from that recent? I thought this thing was ancient history, it’s still being used?”

  “Must be powered on somewhat regularly to have kept this stored.”

  “That’s- that on its own is huge, actually. Thanks so much, this is going to make Vern so happy.”

  God I hope it makes him happy.

  “Remind him he has to fulfill his end of this trade,” Sazwa says.

  “Thanks for coming over, it’s been nice to meet you,” Ali says. “It’s not often I get to meet another Borrower, maybe we could grab a coffee some time?”

  “Hell yeah,” I say. Maybe if I can’t find any friendly witches I’ll just befriend all their borrowers instead. “Oh- one last thing. Do you know anything about talking statues?”

  “Talking statues?” Ali asks.

  “I met a gargoyle a few years ago. He talked a bit when it was night and he was made of flesh.”

  “This was a statue of medusa, and she was a statue the whole time. Talked funny, and asked me to like, fix a mistake in a textbook. It was weird.”

  Sazwa’s stare goes hard- or more accurately, harder than her default. Ali looks to me, then back to the dishes. Someone knocks on the door.

  “This statue, talked about history? Myths?” Sazwa asks, completely ignoring the door.

  “Yeah.” I can read clear as day she knows what this is. “That bad?”

  “No- no, this is-” she raises a finger, stifles her excitement. “If this is what I think it is, it's extremely good news. I just need to be sure. What’d it ask you to do? I can help.”

  “Send a letter.” I fish the handwritten draft out of my backpack. Ali walks to the front door, where the knocking continues, doesn’t open it.

  Sazwa takes the letter from me, pinching it with the sleeve of her shirt, then looks it over quickly, squinting a little too long at a typo. “Got an address?”

  I repeat it to her.

  She nods, holds the letter up to Ali and asks “Can you make this something else?”

  He looks at it and it becomes an engraved brass plate, my words punched into the metal in a fancy font, under the green patina of age.

  “Something light?”

  Ali chuckles and it changes again, a ransom note, a post card, a blurry polaroid, then finally it’s a neatly typed letter, thick card stock, folded in three places, and smelling of sawdust. “Show off,” Sazwa says, before she slides the letter beneath the windowsill. It tumbles in the wind for a moment before a crow swoops in and grabs it in its beak.

  I’m the only one to flinch at its sudden appearance, the only one gawking as it flies off. God I wish I had a familiar.

  “Okay. Give Crow a couple hours, then go back to the statue. If it gives you something, bring that something to me. Whatever it is. It might be weird or gross or just- extremely normal. Don’t lose it. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, easy-” I grimace at the thought of breaking in again, then remember Luis’s phone number burning a hole in my pocket. “So what is this thing, exactly?

  “If this is what I think it is-” Sazwa begins, and the knocking at the door gets really loud.

  Sazwa pulls up her hood, opens the door, drags the man in, and shuts it again.

  He’s older, white beard, tall and thin in a heavy brown coat. “Hey, Ali, Sazwa, hadn’t heard from in a bit, sorry-”

  “You don’t contact me, Randy, we contact you.”

  He grimaces, scratches his hair with a degloved cybernetic hand. He catches my eye and hides it back in his pocket. “We good to talk?”

  “Heidi was just leaving,” Sazwa says. “You can show her out.”

  He winces, bows his head low as he speaks a mile a minute: “I’m just asking when the next gig will be, Arleen hasn’t sent me word in two weeks and Helle literally called the cops on me. I’m two favors away from fixing this forever, and unless I find some cash I’m also two days away from living my life in a junkyard. You of all people gotta know what I’m dealing with here. I’m just asking to speed up the deal I already made.”

  Sazwa thinks.

  “It’s- fine, it’s fine, I’ll go. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?”

  He gets a hand on the door handle before Sazwa speaks. “There’s something tomorrow night. A tranq. I’m not your witch, I’m not your pact holder, I can’t decide that it counts. But you can come.” She writes out an address on a piece of cardstock, taking the air gap thing seriously.

  The man jumps, takes both his hands out of his pockets to shake hers, then holds them back in fear. “Thank you, so much, you’re a good one, Sazwa, a true kindred metalhead.”

  “You may not want to go,” Ali says. “We don’t have anyone volunteering for the hot seat right now. Arleen isn’t going to be happy to see you, she might volunteer you for it.”

  “Hey, I get a new body at the end of this, right?” He wheezes, a sound so dry I barely recognize it as a laugh. “I’m down for it, you turn me to stone if it gets its pincers or whatever in me, like last time, yeah?”

  “Of course,” Ali smiles, looking not altogether reassured.

  “This man-” Randy says, pointing to Ali, looking at me. “This man has saved my ass so many times, the best of them. You borrowing?”

  “Not from Sazwa, but yeah. I’m Heidi,” I say. I extend a hand.

  He hesitates, looks at his own metal mitts, with the roughly textured fingertips and the tiny ridge to act as a fingernail, and then very delicately he takes mine. “Nice to meecha, I’m Randy,” he smiles. “You’re in good company, these two are sweethearts. I don’t know what business you’re doing with ‘em but keep an eye on ‘em for me, yeah, tough guy?” He looks at the crowbar in my backpack, back to me, and winks.

  “I’ll make sure.”

  “Um,” Sazwa begins. “Whatever happens, if you can’t make your subscriptions, come find me. I can jailbreak your hardware, okay? Just don’t get caught using it on camera or you’ll wish you were in a junkyard.”

  “Sweethearts!” he exclaims, as he opens the door and holds it open for me. “What’d I say?”