I follow him into the arcade, feeling like I’m in a dream. This is perfect. Almost too perfect. I stop in the doorway and glance inside—ancient claw games covered in grime, retro-cool dance games with their screens busted through. The air is stale. Dust motes hang suspended in the slanting beams of fading sunlight like flies stuck in honey. This place doesn’t look like a trap, and Elliott doesn’t seem to fit the profile of a snitch, but still …

“How did you know about my brother?” I ask, lingering in the doorway. A few people know I’m interested in finding the helicopter and its pilot, but I haven’t told anyone the reason why. I prefer to keep people at a distance. Especially clients, and especially this jackass. It makes me more than a little nervous to know he knows so much about my personal life.

I thought I had my anxiety under control, but with that one worried thought, it starts to snowball. This whole meeting could go wrong in so many ways. There’s a slideshow of horrific outcomes marching through my head right now, one after the other, ranging from the possible to the wildly unlikely: we could get caught, shot, exiled. The helicopter could be a lie, a trap. The entire rotted boardwalk could collapse beneath our feet right now and drown us in the ocean.

The anxiety gains strength. A compulsion rears its head: I want to tap this door frame to keep myself safe while I’m inside the arcade. Three times on the left, five on the right, at exactly shoulder height. Three and five are good numbers. One is okay too, but it won’t keep me as safe as three and five would.

I go still, catching the train of thought, concerned that it took me a second to recognize it and that it came so quickly on the heels of my lock-checking compulsion earlier today. I worked so hard to get through therapy last year, before I moved to Cisco Island, before the Fracture happened. I went to war with my obsessive-compulsive disorder and I won. What does it mean that some of my old compulsions are flaring up again?

Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m fine; I know that tapping this doorway wouldn’t actually keep me any safer, that it’s magical thinking, that my OCD is lying to me as always. I wait for the urge to pass. After a moment—a few beats too long—it finally does. I try to exult in the victory but can’t quite banish my creeping worry.