“You’re right,” Sher said. “I had forgotten. But you can have a great time hitting yourself over the head later. It’s irrelevant to what we’ve got to do.”

Frances slid one daunting eyebrow upward. “Where were we then? Sunk up to the undercarriage in a symbolic pothole. Unless one of you has a metaphysical shovel?”

She hated this, I could tell. She didn’t have even the tolerance for hoodoo that I did. She hadn’t spent her life in the streets surrounded by it, making deals with it, using its forms as polite social fictions, its person-principles as swear words. If Sher’s carryings-on about energy had any truth in them, Frances’s power was from the past that gave birth to her. She wouldn’t think of asking favors from the loa.

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, of course.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said Frances. “But you could be a little more help to the rest of us.”

“What’s the use of having a god in the machine if you don’t holler for it to come out now and then? Sher, if the Hoodoo Engineers are more than a communal living experiment — are they?”

“Finish your sentence,” she said harshly.

“Can they mess with the weather?”

“It’s slow.”

“And can you ask the loa for favors, and do they deliver?”

“Santos, Sparrow, what—”

“Will they, for instance, provide a well-timed, incredibly melodramatic wind storm in the right place, if asked nicely?”

Sher was still staring at me, but Theo whistled, and said, “Far out! You could maybe even make it work. Except — how much time do we have?”

“A whole day,” Sher said dryly.

“Bummer. I couldn’t mount a windmill up there that fast without a dozen people. And you’d be able to see it from Ego, anyway.”

“So we need a really small windmill,” I said.

Theo shook his head. “Then you lose vane area. You’d need a tornado—”

“If we’re asking anyway, why not ask big? Let me think.” I rubbed at my forehead with both hands. “If — if we got the wind… we’d want an eggbeater turbine, the kind with the spin around the vertical axis, and we’d have to mount it… Chango, we’d have to build it first, because I don’t know where we’d find one.”

“New Brighton, Hopkins, or Saint Louis Park,” Frances said.

“What?” said Theo and I, more or less in unison.

“Honeywell was building Darrieus turbines for the Army, to power mountain listening posts. The eggbeaters, right? Carbon fiber and plastic, and small, to avoid flyover detection. I can tell you where the plants were. Better yet, I can show you.”

I looked at Theo. “We’ve had an eggbeater turbine in the neighborhood all this time?”

“Somebody might have already hauled ’em away,” Theo said reluctantly.

“If we’d known about ’em, we would have. Can you make it work?”

“If we can find one,” he said. “If I can get it mounted… Sher, does it mess with the symbolism if I borrow some stuff from the Underbridge?”