“Let’s do it right.” On one thumb, I found a rough bit of cuticle, at the base of the nail. I bit it until it bled. “Offering,” I said, and held out my hand.

“Santos, Sparrow.” But she whisked the tapestry off the cabinet/coffee table, and from somewhere in all the black-and-purple, she produced a wad of white scarf. When she laid it down, it fell open to show the deck of cards inside. “Let a drop fall on the table — no, over there on the corner. I don’t want it on the scarf.” I squeezed a decent-sized drop onto the very edge of the metal, and blotted the rest on one of the sheet’s red stripes.

She mashed her cigarette out on the side of the cabinet and began to shuffle the deck. It arced between her hands, over and over, two parts folding into one like a flower blooming backward in time-lapse. “Wish for something. D’you think maybe you were on polygons?”

“If I had any idea, I wouldn’t have had to come to you.”

She fanned the cards on the table, flipped one out of the deck onto the scarf, shuffled again. Page of Swords.

She said she’d found the deck in a botánica in Alphabetland. It was luridly colored, worse than Saint Bob, and the figures moved when you tipped the cards, like printed cardboard toys and kitschy postcards. The iconography was a schizoid blend of Christian saints, African deities, and pre-Bang SouthAm pop stars. The Page of Swords was Joan of Arc at the stake, holding a sword over her head. The flames leaped and Joan’s head nodded up to look at heaven, down to study hell. “You don’t know what you took. You really black out completely during these things?” Sher asked.

“I told you I do.”

“You’ve told me lots of dumb shit. That was the seventeenth card. Whatever you just wished for, you can’t have. Cut the deck.”

I wondered what it had been.

She snapped cards down on the scarf, growing the layout like a crystal. Joan of Arc’s suffering was overlaid upside down by Death as Baron Samedi, all bones and grin and tall black hat, with a victim under each arm: a fat white man in a pinstripe suit, and an old black woman almost as thin as the Baron. The Baron opened and closed his mouth — laughing, I’d guess — and the victims flapped their arms. Beside him went a card showing a naked brown prettyboy holding a violent yellow solar disc in front of his hips. The rays of the sun rippled when the card moved, which seemed like a waste of technology.

Snap — an overdressed black man juggling two bags, each marked with a white star. That one was upside down, too. Snap — a grinning masked figure stepping into shadow at the back of the card, a fan of five bloody swords over his shoulder. In the foreground two more thrust, point downward, in a puddle of gore with no apparent source. Snap — a man and woman dressed in movie-medieval, she in white, he in red, hands clasped; a huge, well-fed cherub like a scrubbed pink pterodactyl hovered above. Snap — a nearly naked blond woman with a quarterstaff, blocking the attack of six ninjoids, also with staves. Snap — a dark-haired, dark-tanned man or woman, lying on his or her back on a beach. The posture I’d awakened in on the river flats. He or she had ten long swords for company, the points in the palms of the hands, the knees, the belly, the groin, the breasts, the forehead, and through the open mouth. I stopped paying such close attention. Sherrea laid three more cards down.