The door opens, and he is face to face with the Unmoor rep. She smacks a piece of gum, and she’s staring at her phone, swiping through something by waving her hand upward.
She looks up.
Squints.
“Felix Serna?”
She flicks her wrist.
Right next to him, there’s a projection of the photo he used in the app. He’s not wearing the thick black-framed glasses now, but all the rest is the same. Tight fade, a dust of facial hair above his lip and on his chin, the scar from falling off his bike cutting through his left eyebrow.
He nods.
“I’m Mirella,” she says. “Where do you want to get started?”
He watches her wiggle two fingers on her right hand, then gesture downward, and the phone in her left hand gently floats to a pocket on the inside of her cloak. She doesn’t verbalize her spells, he realizes. Just moves her fingers. She isn’t even concentrating on what she’s doing.
“I charge by the hour, you know,” she says, and her voice is husky, her tone clipped. She’s staring beyond him, and he clumsily moves out of the way, gesturing to invite her in. Her cloak—which he now sees is actually a midnight blue—flows behind her. She’s got matte black nails, too, and there are graceful tattoos creeping up the back of her neck. They must have sensed him staring, as the green tendrils and colorful petals scatter and hide under the collar of her shirt, away from his gaze.
His parents are still there, still huddled together on the couch. She looks from them to him, then back again. She waves her hand, this time to the side, and Felix keeps his eyes on her lips, painted delicately in black, but they don’t part, don’t move. Yes, her spells are silent.
She’s the coolest person Felix has ever seen.
An image materializes in the air, crackling as it does so. It’s the contract Felix and his parents signed. She narrows her eyes as she reads over it. “Huh,” she says, more to herself than the others in the room. “They didn’t tell me I was doing a minor case tonight.”
She turns to his parents. “You signed this, right?” Two of her fingers pinch together, then widen, and the contract focuses on their signatures. “He didn’t forge this?”
Papá shakes his head. “No, that’s definitely us.”
“We all signed it together,” Mamá adds. “Como una familia.”
There’s a spark in the air, just beyond Mirella’s fingertips. Runes. She draws one in front of his parents, and he doesn’t recognize it. A curtain of light drops down, then sparkles. It’s a sheet of magic, one that helps determine if someone is telling the truth. Everyone learns basic runework in school, but this shit she’s doing…it’s way more complicated than anything he’s ever seen.
Even his parents are impressed as the magic shimmers for a moment, then fades away. “That’s incredible, magiquita,” Papá says, using the respectful term for a younger mage. “Where did you go to college?”
She barely looks at him. “Didn’t.”
They all still, and Felix is thankful his parents do not lecture her about their belief in school-sanctioned magework.
Mirella looks to him. “You ready, Felix?”
Panic slips over his skin, like she has cast one of her rune curtains over his body.
“Yes,” he says.
This is what he wants.
No.
This is what he needs.
“Just take me to the first place,” she says. “Wherever you want.”
Felix leads her out of the living room and toward his bedroom.
“Take your time.”
Mirella’s voice is calmer. She does not seem as detached as she was just seconds ago. When he arrives at his room, he lets her enter first, then regrets it. Books are piled on his desk in a haphazard stack; his dirty laundry hangs out of the basket. He curses under his breath. “Sorry,” he says, then whispers one of the organizational spells his mamá drilled into his mind when he was younger.
The books straighten. The clothes fly into the hamper, and the lid closes it off. The duvet on his bed stretches to cover the unmade sheets underneath it.
“I’ve seen worse,” Mirella says, and she sits in the chair at his desk. “And it’s fine to leave it like it was; it might work better.”
He slinks over to his bed and falls onto it. “I’ve seen the ads. And I had a friend use Unmoor last year. But…I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.”
She smiles, and it warms up the whole room in an instant. Felix relaxes as she takes off her cloak and hangs it over the back of the chair. Rubbing her hands together, she focuses briefly on Felix’s face, then blows on her cupped hands.
The image before him is of Mirella and another stranger, someone who is sitting at a wooden table in…a kitchen. It’s definitely a kitchen. Mirella reaches out to hold the person’s hand, and she speaks. “Just think of the memory,” she says, and her voice is soft, just like it was once they were out of earshot of Felix’s parents. “Bring it to the front of your mind. My job is to ‘unmoor’ it from this location, from this physical space.”
The person brushes hair out of their face; their image is just blurred enough that Felix cannot make out any real details. Their identity is protected. “Okay, I’m doing it,” they say, and then the image fades away, and Mirella is still there, looking at Felix with anticipation.
“It’s that easy,” she explains. “You just sit there and recall the memory you want unmoored. The more detail you can remember, the easier it is for me to grasp it with my magic. Then one quick tug, and that’s it.”
“That’s it?” Felix says, raising an eyebrow.
She nods. “It really is exactly as we promise.”
This is what he wants.
This is what he needs.
“Let’s try one,” Mirella says, and she tucks her blond streak behind an ear. “Take a deep breath.”
He does.
“Another.”
He does.
“Bring it forth, Felix.”
Arturo stood on his tiptoes. He strained to reach, and Felix could smell…something. A fragrance, floral and earthy, and he knew then that Arturo had found one of those dudes on the corner who could enchant the collar of your shirt with a scent. They yelled at you when you got off the train, told you that “she won’t be able to keep her hands off you, pa,” and it delighted Felix that Arturo had done this, had probably not told them he was doing it for another guy.