I shrugged. “I don’t—I’m not sure,” I finished, since no matter how stupid this line of questioning made me feel, at least I didn’t have to repeat myself. “I know there’s a certain amount of… specificity involved. I mean, you don’t know if the one you’re looking for is male or female or human or elf or halfie. You don’t even know if you’re looking for one person or a whole crew. How do you know the person who makes it is the same one who distributes it? One of us, at least, has to know what we’re asking me to find.”

“But once it works, it’s guaranteed?”

I spent a city block rolling my answer around in my mouth, deciding whether I was going to say something I’d suspected for a while, but hadn’t quite wanted to hear out loud. It seemed like the right time. “I think I’m sort of like a polygraph. I think there’s an illusion of—there’s a word I want—lack of bias, objectivity, I guess—that isn’t necessarily there if the thing I’m looking for is a little…” I shrugged. “… Subjective.”

Rico gave me a sideways look from behind her sunglasses. “Uh. Give me some help here. Got an example?”

“Yeah. In the end, when we were trying to figure out who was the real, no-shit mastermind behind the murder at Danceland, Wolfboy asked me to find the person who met two different sets of qualifications, because he knew that the person who met both was the one behind the killing. So I found that person. But Wolfboy was already pretty sure she had done it; he was just looking for confirmation. Did I find the person who fit the specs, without bias? Or did I just locate the person that Wolfboy had in mind?”

“In that particular case, it was the same thing,” Rico reminded me, but she said it slowly, as if examining my theory as she spoke.

“Yeah. I was lucky that time, wasn’t I?”

We took a corner as if Rico expected the car to be hinged in the middle. “You’re telling me you don’t trust this gift of yours.”

“I’m telling you it’s not trustworthy. You should keep that in mind.”

“Fine. I’ll do that. Just don’t let it screw you up.”

I slid as far down in the passenger seat as the harness allowed—not far—and sighed. I don’t think she could hear me.