Before

  I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The question of how a college dropout recently fired from a job at a game store got to a world of magic could be answered by a single gold coin.

  So I had gotten fired from my job, failed to turn streaming into an asset that would propel my life forward in a way that made work fun, and on top of that, a lump of cells was in the process of very slowly eating my mother. That had been on my mind enough to nd me in the manager’s office at my job and end my career as a cashier at the game store. It had been enough of a distraction to mess up my attempt at turning streaming into a side gig.

  It got worse, and that only matters because the worse got me out of my house, and got me the job. Two things happened that I don’t really want to talk about, but they matter so here they are. My father wasn’t handling my mom’s condition well. He was presently drunk and trying to put a ’62 T-bird together without the patience to do so. Every problem made him erupt into a swearing fit.

  The second thing was my sister calling me and asking me to meet.

  This meant she needed money.

  I drove to my sister’s house in my mom’s car, and sighed when I parked on the street. The house was in a bad neighborhood, it was small, and the yard was completely out of control. Two cars were in the driveway, and between the two of them, they might’ve made a decent car, but neither of them worked well.

  She was already out on the sb of concrete that served as her front porch. Pale, bags under her eyes, hair looking unkempt, bobbing my nephew up and down absently on one hip and holding her phone in the other.

  “Toph, listen,” she said, before I even said a word, “I don’t like doing this, okay. I don’t like asking for money. You know that, right?”

  Tears were threatening.

  I bent and gave the toddler a grin, and he grabbed onto my finger. I made some silly noises and got him to smile, then took him off her hands. He was still small enough that I could hold him for a while without my legs starting to give me trouble. “How you doing, Brayden?” I asked him.

  “Ris,” he said, and giggled. “Unk Ris.”

  “That’s right, buddy. Uncle Christopher.”

  “I need help,” she said, not willing to wait for the pleasantries to be over.

  I made sure not to sigh, and keep my face neutral for what was going to be a string of demands.

  “What happened?”

  She took me into the house, where I immediately saw that the pce had been smashed up. There was a hole in the wall just opposite the entryway. Mirror gss had been swept up and sat in the dustpan not far off.

  “I have to get the locks changed, Toph.”

  My face twitched. She didn’t know about my job, she didn’t ask about mom, and she didn’t seem to care.

  “Travis threw a fit,” she said. “He lost his mind. Broke fucking everything.”

  “Ucking!” my nephew parroted.

  It seemed like the failure to watch her nguage in front of her own son was enough to cause her to break down. The tears came on, hard. It was ugly crying time.

  “Travis… I’m pregnant, Christopher.”

  I literally staggered back a few steps, like the words had weight and she’d struck me with them. I couldn’t have asked all the questions on my mind if I’d wanted to.

  “Travis found… found out… it’s not… his,” she sad in between the sobs.

  “The baby… isn’t his?”

  She was sobbing now, getting snot and tears all over me shoulder. And I left her like that for some time, to get it out of her system.

  She had been like this for… ever since I could remember. At least ten years. Long enough that I had trouble bringing to mind a time when she wasn’t in serious trouble or needing our parents to bail her out. And now that events had gone from bad to as-bad-as-they-could-possibly-get for my mother, the money would have to stop coming. My father was still making money, but if he couldn’t stop drinking, that wouldn’t st either. He’d get fired.

  We made our way through the house towards the py room, which had been the dining room and now contained a small kid fence with a handful of toys on the cracked linoleum. A lot were from goodwill. I put Brayden down slowly, carefully. I couldn’t have my legs buckling under me.

  “Sarah,” I told her gently, so damn gently. “We can’t… I can’t do this anymore.”

  She pulled away with her face disbelieving and rage already blossoming there.

  “What the fuck, Toph?”

  “Mom’s… she’s dying, Sare.”

  She stared at me. Wild calcutions were going on at a furious pace and I couldn’t believe how fast she blew up.

  Her hands flew up in the air, waving back and forth. “Oh, yeah, I know. I’m the bad daughter, you’re the good son. Sarah’s the super fuck up who can’t do anything right. Doesn’t visit her mother in the hospital. What a piece of shit I am. So I deserve to have Travis come over and beat the shit out of me whenever he wants, is that it?”

  “Stop it. Nobody said any of those things,” I said, summoning up the willpower to stay cool. “What do you need?”

  She took a deep breath, already knowing she’d won. “I just need enough to change the locks. Like now. Today. I don’t know when he’ll come back.”

  And then she would ‘just need enough’ to do whatever else would be next. I didn’t bother to tell her that we’d had objections to her moving in with Travis in the first pce. That ship had sailed.

  Nor would she move back. That wasn’t going to work either. She and my parents had had a spectacur blow up over Travis and the first baby. They weren’t going to take her back, and she wasn’t going to move back.

  I ended up sending her money through my phone, frowning at the diminishing bance in my own account. It was close to nil right now, and wasn’t going to suddenly balloon out unless I got a job.

  I could maybe drive a taxi as a gig worker. Deliver food as a gig worker. Do people’s grocery shopping as a gig worker. I could drive for a good few hours at a time without my legs giving me too much trouble.

  Don’t sigh, I told myself, no big sighs. Sarah’s got enough on her pte. “There.”

  She had the locksmiths on the phone a second ter.

  ~2~

  It wasn’t until the guy slid the gold coin in front of my face that I really believed he was telling the truth.

  He’d answered my application only four hours after I sent it in, with my resume and a personal essay on why I needed the job. The job description had just promised good pay and travel opportunities with on-the-job training, and that was it.

  So, I decided, hell with it. I could always scope the pce out and tell them to fuck off. ‘Good pay’ didn’t actually mean anything. I’d need a real figure before we went anywhere.

  The man himself was about as nondescript as you can get: clean shaven, average height, boring hairstyle, pstic rims on his gsses. The only thing remarkable was that his suit fit. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d mented having a suit that bunched or sagged around the shoulders, or hung oddly. Then again I was buying all thrift shop stuff. My parents weren’t made of money.

  Style and color of the suit though? Designed to be unobtrusive.

  The man held up his phone, looking at the headshot I’d sent in, and nodded toward me with a bnd smile. He walked over.

  “You’re Christopher? Christopher Fletcher?”

  “I am.”

  “Great! Do you want anything? My company’s buying, so go nuts.”

  I stood, with some difficulty, and shook his hand. “What can I call you?”

  “Mister Johnson,” he said, in a tone that said it wasn’t his real name and he was very pleased to be making fun of me in this situation. “Dick Johnson.”

  That clinched it. He wasn’t a real person. That wasn’t his real name.

  “Dick… Johnson.”

  “Yeeeaaaah,” he said, ughing. “It’s like saying your name is boner boner. I promise you, though, the job is real, I’m a real person, and I represent people who have no trouble paying for your meal, Mr. Fletcher.”

  It still seemed too good to be true, pretty fly-by-night. Did they just abduct people and put them to work in a sweatshop? Steal their kidneys? Perform experiments on them with psychotropic drugs?

  It was your average greasy spoon. The name of the pce was Fat Louie’s. I pointed to the circur gss case with all the desserts I’d never been able to afford.

  I told him I’d take a slice of blueberry pie, a burger, fries and a milkshake. Strawberry. I could afford about three more meals like this, or one more favor for Sarah before things started to look desperate.

  Soon I had pie and a milkshake in front of me, and the promise of my food coming up in just a moment. Dick Johnson had a coffee.

  “Let me start out by giving you one of these,” he said, and produced a thing like a poker chip on steroids. It was almost half an inch thick, and almost three inches across. It was a coin like you’d see in a movie, and nowhere else.

  He plunked it down on the table before sliding it across.

  I stared at it. The image of a winged person appeared on it, one leg outstretched and the other bent, looking like she was blowing me a kiss. Around the edge were inscriptions, but none that I could read. None that I’d ever seen on earth.

  I looked at him.

  He looked at me, with that smug and self-satisfied smile of someone who has told a joke you’re either going to get, or you’re not. If you do, good. If you don’t, better.

  I continued looking at him.

  And he finally broke into a wide smile, then sipped his coffee. “You can touch it if you want.”

  I did, finding it to be actual metal, possibly gold, and heavy. I turned it over, and studied the image engraved on the back. This one showed a henge, but not Stonehenge, behind that a canopy of trees, and beyond that jagged mountain peaks. More inscriptions sat beneath the henge and ringed the coin, in the same nguage I didn’t know and had never seen.

  I gnced back up at him.

  He continued staring with that impassive, maybe smug smile. And sipping his coffee.

  One st look at the coin showed me it wasn’t all gold. Tiny glittery specks of some other colors than gold showed when I turned the coin over, and when I tilted it.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this,” I told him.

  “This is how you’re going to live once we get you a job,” he said.

  “I’ll be paid… in these nice, heavy, made-in-China coins? What do I do, put them up on Ebay?”

  My food came, and conversation died while the waitress topped off Dick Johnson’s coffee, asked me if I wanted more milkshake, and then left when Dick Johnson told her I could indeed use another milkshake. I took several fries and chewed them suspiciously, staring at the man, again. Finally I waggled the hefty coin at him.

  “Yes, the coins. You actually use them in the workpce. We pay in American dolrs, Christopher. Roughly fifteen times more than what you were making at the game store, to start, with advancement opportunities, immediate full healthcare coverage, furnished housing, travel, quarterly bonuses are possible, and even hazard pay.”

  “Hazard… hazard pay.” He nodded, so I snorted. “Mr. Johnson. It sounds like you looked at my resume, but you clearly didn’t read my personal letter.”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Fletcher, we read it. We liked it very much. It was… sincere. Open. Brutally so.”

  I gulped. I’d put in that my legs had been messed up since grade school, my mom was dying, dad wasn’t taking it well, and Sarah was a fucking mess.

  I figured all my resumes would just get tossed out.

  “What is it you do at your company, then? And how is someone like me going to end up earning hazard pay?”

  “We’ll be letting you choose, but what I’d like to do is put you into a trainee program, where you’ll start drawing paychecks immediately, and figure out which line of work you’d like to go into. We need employees out away from the main city area, helping out with smaller, isoted towns. Nothing dangerous initially, but just know that we can triple your pay if you choose to enter hostile territory as part of your duties.”

  I went to hand him the coin, but he held up a hand. “It’s yours.”

  I studied it further, turning it on its edge and spinning it on the table. The weigh of it made the coin go whud whud whud as it spun. The glittery bits threw off sparkler of light.

  It was a fake, and they’d embedded sequins or cubit zirconias in there.

  “Five times your annual wage, to start. And we’ll be giving you two weeks off every three months.”

  I stared at the fake coin. “It’s cute.”

  His look turned puzzled for just a moment before his grin broadened out. “Ah, right. I can assure you that this coin is very real.”

  “In the sense that this fork is real, yes. It’s a real thing that your company has produced.”

  He smiled indulgently again, smugly also.

  “Is this… cuneiform? It doesn’t look like it.”

  “It is indeed not. The cuneiform marks of the Babylonians are, I’m told, the closest we might get in this world.”

  The words hung in the air between us. This world.

  “What is this about, Mr. Johnson? You want my internal organs? I’d sell them, but, you know… there’s no way they’re going to pay for my mom’s cancer treatments.” I barked out bitter ughter. “My sister’s turned into a money suck, too. And there’s definitely no way you’re selling me into svery.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Fletcher.”

  This world.

  It’s so strange how just a week ter I’d be grinning from ear to ear, having my breath taken away by the scenery and the possibilities, and having my family’s expenses handled by my sary in another world.

  “Okay then… why me?”

  He leaned in. “You need us as much as we need you, Mr. Fletcher. While you’re on the job site, we can make sure your family here has access to those funds in order to cover the costs of all their needs.”

  This hurt my chest to hear. Like, hurt, but in a good way. I wouldn’t have to strand Sarah in limbo and run the risk of forcing my only nephew to starve. My mother would have good care. My father would hopefully stop destroying himself.

  This world.

  I leaned in. “Listen… if you guys are going to make me a sve or sell my organs to a Chinese businessman, I need like a million. Two million!”

  Johnson stared at me for a minute before giving me an affectionate smile.

  “Enough that they won’t have to worry, okay?” I whispered. “They’ll be set for life.”

  “Oh, Mr. Fletcher… that won’t be necessary. I love the name, by the way. A professional arrow maker. I hope you’ll join us. Please drop in within the next week and we’ll get everything sorted. After a week…” He shrugged. “I’ll have to fill the position.”

  He slid his card across the table. It listed his name (Johnson), his profession (HR) and the address of an office building halfway across town. Then he dropped a stack of five twenty dolr bills on the table, gave me one st smile, and headed out.

  Late that night, the gold coin began breaking apart into streamers of light and smoke. It would take another twenty-four hours for it to dissolve entirely. I stayed home and watched it disintegrate.

  This world.

  I drove over to the address on the card the day after the coin had vanished completely.

  And this… this is Christopher getting a job.