FOR A SECOND time, the recreation room didn’t disappoint. Her whole set-up was there, including new modifications Jo recognized from her time in Paris. She silently thanked the faceless god of the mansion for its intuition in knowing both what she needed and wanted.

Jo assumed her seat and opened a new notepad on the desktop. She pulled her sleeves over her hands and poised them at the ready.

Where to start?

Jo racked her memory for the initial information Snow had given them on the wish. As things came to her, she typed them down. From broad strokes to seemingly insignificant details, it was impossible to know what might prove useful. There was Canada, the nurse who made the wish, the illness. . .

Gathering up as much medical info on the disease was probably a good place to start.

She didn’t waste any time. Jo went straight for the main databases of the centers for disease control in the European Union, Canada, Russia, and Japan, dredging up all the information she could. Their firewalls and safety protocols were mere child’s play. Jo unleashed the full force of every hacking tool she knew, including what she didn’t even fully understand—her magic. She suspended any last, lingering, ingrained skepticism and forced herself to believe with all she was that she did have magic. And if she did, then damn it, she would use it.

At first, she pulled up a wide array of information, but drilling down became more difficult by the moment. She needed more than the encyclopedia basics of the disease. Jo probed deeper. But no matter how many disease research databanks she hacked, she only came away with limited information—nothing she could guarantee would be beneficial.

What made it even more frustrating was the realization that she had no idea where the patient even was. There were 200 research-focused hospitals, fifty that specialized in virology, and ten in this particular disease. But narrowing it down among those ten was nearly impossible. Without knowing the status of the patient, how could she hope to close the gap properly?

Jo also didn’t know how Eslar’s power worked exactly. She assumed he was some kind of healer, but what could and couldn’t he do? It was all guesswork.

What sort of help could she provide if she was missing the most important pieces of the puzzle?

With an aggravated groan, Jo leaned back into her chair and pushed away from the desk, rolling a couple of feet back. Running a hand over her face, she began wracking her brain for something, anything, an idea buried in the ether of her skill or magic that might allow her to help. Something that might close the gap she’d unintentionally widened.

All she managed to dredge up was a big ol’ pile of nothing.

Jo switched to other, more distracting tasks. She’d learned early on in her career that sometimes even an appropriately timed cat video could keep her mind fresh. Focusing on one thing for too long, especially if that thing continued to birth more frustration than success, was only setting herself up for failure.

Lucky for her, she had something far more interesting than cat videos to give her mind a break with this time. Not a long break, of course. Just enough to put her head back in the game fresh after the refreshing challenge of a new puzzle.

With the ease of familiarity, Jo pulled up a handful of websites, both on and off the dark web, as well as some historical databases and birth records. She started with the member of their group who she’d managed not only to get a name and date from, but also an occupation.

Wayne Davis, Great Depression, born 1910, stock broker.

She wasn’t necessarily surprised when no information on such a man came up, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t just a little bit disappointed.

She tried the same tactics with Nico and Takako, the only others about whom she had enough general information to plug into search engines and sift through the unspoken data. Outside of some vague occurrences in their time, she once again managed to dig up nothing of import. There were thousands of Takakos in Japan in the late 1990s, but Jo already knew that none of them were the Takako she was familiar with.

Just like her, it was as though they never existed.

A thought tugged unbidden at the back of Jo’s mind, a bit of information that she felt instantly guilty for the moment she’d entered the name into her slew of scripts currently spidering the databases.

Julia de’Este.

Strangely, despite the sense Jo had gotten that Nico’s fiance had continued to exist post-wish, no sign of her popped up in any records from the 1400s. In fact, the only Julia at all of note that she could find was a mistress to the assassinated Pope Alexander VI in 1504. But then again, perhaps she wasn’t a woman “of note” at all, simply the woman that Nico had loved enough to sacrifice his own existence for. Someone too common to have made the history books and preserved papers of the late fifteenth century, but someone Nico still adored even hundreds of years later.

Really, that kind of love should be the sort of thing put in history books.

Whatever that reason, Jo decided to bring her snooping to an end, letting Nico’s past remain in his now non-existent history. Even if it didn’t much answer her question.

Some love stories were too good to be tainted with logic.

Jo sighed and closed all browsers. It wasn’t her place and she’d had enough of a reprieve. “Back to this stupid fuc—”

“Well someone seems a bit exasperated.”

Jo didn’t even turn. She recognized the interrupting voice and its eerie presence almost immediately. “Pan, what do you want?”

“Don’t be rude.” Pan leaned against the desk, folding her arms. Unlike the first time in Jo’s recreation room, her focus was entirely and overwhelmingly on Jo. The look had an intimidating, cat-like air about it. “I’m here to help.”

“Are you?” Jo pushed away to look at the woman-child.

“Why are you so skeptical of me?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to help you from the start. I warned you of the dangers of meddling in the real world and I was going to involve you in the wish.”

She wasn’t wrong. So why did Jo feel so uneasy still? Jo took a deep breath and tried to let it inflate her lungs enough to be the bigger person. “Sorry. I’m just trying—”

“Trying to help? Time is ticking.” She tapped at her wrist and it was then that Jo noticed there was no watch there. A pocket watch, perhaps, like Nico’s? “Say, how about we make a deal?”

“Of what kind?” Jo asked cautiously.

“I’ll give you information if you show me your magic.”

“Didn’t you say you’d already seen it when I was working in here before?”

“Glimpses.” Pan continued before Jo could press how “glimpses” had made Pan confident enough to go to the group in her absence. “I want to see it in full.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything you want.”

Jo glanced back at the monitors. It wasn’t as if she was getting very far on her own. She still only understood the ten-thousand-foot overview of what the Society did. Then, there was the current wish itself. If no one else was going to help her, what choice did she have?

“What do you say?” Pan prodded, holding a hand out in Jo’s direction when she didn’t answer quickly enough.

Something still felt off, like signing off on a business transaction without first getting all of the details. But Jo was a slave to curiosity, and, before she could talk herself out of it, she took Pan’s hand and shook it firmly once.

“Sure. But I want the information first.”