The Ticker studied her from across the store, frowning. I’d told her a little about the girl who’d died in the hospital, but nothing like all of it. “She is… there’s something odd.”

“It gets odder, if you let it.”

“Mmm. Want me to mind the door?”

“I don’t think she’ll bolt. She might feel a little ganged up on with two of us, though.”

“I’ll be near by.”

The red-haired girl was taking boxes of colored pencils out of a carton when I approached. “Excuse me,” I said, and she looked up with an expression that suggested that I was not excused, and wouldn’t be anytime in the near future if she could do anything about it. “Are you Tiamat?”

She nodded.

“My name is Orient. I’m… looking for some stuff that Bonny Prince Charlie used to have. A mutual acquaintance said you knew about it.” It was surprisingly hard, this time, to talk about it.

“Who’s the mutual acquaintance?”

Thick, Orient—you shouldn’t have said that. “I don’t think I ought to say. But the stuff—it has to do with crossing the Border.”

“Humans can’t cross the Border,” Tiamat said, and turned back to the colored pencils.

“Not ordinarily.”

“I don’t know any Bonny Prince Charlie.”

“Nobody does anymore, unless there’s an afterlife.”

“Does that mean he’s dead?”

“You know he is.”

“I don’t know anything about him, and I don’t know about his stuff.”

“Yes, you do. You’re taking it. I can see the effects.”

Her hands stopped moving, stopped sorting. I noticed how long the fingers were, out of proportion to the palms and the thumb. What weird compound of ingredients would make your fingers grow and neglect your thumbs? Or was it even that predictable? I looked up, into her face, and found her staring at me with an unnerving mixture of hope and anger.

“What effects?” she said, and I understood. She wanted me to tell her it was working. The way the girl in the hospital had asked Rico if she could see it, could tell by looking that the transformation had happened. My stomach felt pinched.

“It’s killing you,” I said. “It doesn’t work. You’ll be dead before you see the Elflands.”

Her chin came up, shifting the folds of pasty skin. “If it doesn’t work, how come you can see the effects?”

“Sudden weight loss won’t make you an elf. You could get the same result shooting smack. I swear to God, I just saw somebody die of this a little while ago. And she looked pretty strange, but she was still human when she died.”

“You can’t prove it won’t work.”

I was silenced; she was right. Being able to dispense truth is not one of the jobs of a finder.

“But I can prove it will work,” she added.

“How?”