I set down the empty crate inside the door. I didn’t mince words. “You know how to Navigate.”
“I traveled in my youth, yes,” she said. Her voice was soft, distracted, as she peered around the shop she must not have seen clearly for years. “Your father is special, but he is not unique.”
“How many others are there?”
“I have only ever met two I recognized as such. Other than myself.” She walked down the length of the store, drawing me behind her like a ship after a tug.
“Who?”
“You know them well.” She ran her hand over the top of a glass jar and grimaced at the dust on her fingertips.
I narrowed my eyes. “Then my father is one . . . but who is the other?” She gave me a disappointed look, but I had already come to the answer. “Me? But that’s . . . how can you know for sure?”
“I told you. I have seen your future.”
I gnawed my thumbnail, unsure whether or not I believed her. “What did you see, exactly?”
“You told me you didn’t want to know.”
I made a face. “I should have known better than to pay in advance.” I reached into my pocket and fished for coins. “If you want your half-dollar—”
“That’s no longer the price.”
“Well, that’s all I’m willing to pay.”
We stared each other down, and to my surprise, she broke first, her eyes sparkling as she laughed. It made her look very young. “I was wrong. You are like her.” She reached out and touched my cheek; her hand was soft and cool. Then she drew back and tottered to her spot behind the counter. “I saw you at the helm of the black ship. You took hope to a barren shore and gave a woman a new life.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s sufficiently vague.”
“It will come to pass by the time the week is out. Afterward, you may regret not asking further into the future.”
“I don’t care who I’ll marry, and I don’t want to know how I die.”
“I don’t see why not. I myself will never marry, and I will die in the Great Fire in 1886.”
Suddenly the room seemed to narrow, and my heart squeezed in my chest. How did she know? “The Chinatown fire?”
“Where else would I be?”
“You can really see the future.”
“Can’t we all? I just have clearer eyes than most. Especially now. A favor to ask,” she said then.
“For a price?” I countered.
Joss laughed again. “Certainly. In exchange I will give you hope.” She slid a cylindrical leather case out from under the counter and put it in my hands, moving confidently now. “I will keep this box,” she said, picking up the crate I’d brought the caladrius in. “As part of your payment to me.”
I opened the case and slid out the map: Chinatown in 1886, in the aftermath of the fire. “Ah.” A thick black line demarcated the outline of the destruction of the blaze, and near the center, someone had inked an X in red. “Where did you get this?”
“From your father, fifteen years ago. He asked me to tell his fortune. This map was his payment.”
“What does the X mark?”
“X marks buried treasure.” She went back to the counter, dragging the box behind her. “A note. An elixir for my condition. Money. A map of 1841. Everything I’ll need for a new life.”
Hope, she’d said, and a barren shore. “You’ll come here in 1886 . . . after the fire you died in?”
“I came here in 1886, which was after the fire I will die in. I was a young woman at the time I arrived, and poisoned besides, but with the payment from Mr. D, I was able to make my way.”
“Poisoned? You—” I put my hand to my temple, trying to piece it all together. “You came here in 1886, dug up this box, and went back to 1841. I give you a new life?”
She only smiled, but the importance of that had come to me. “And you introduced my parents.”
No answer. She took out a sheet of rice paper and a brush, drawing choppy characters in short, quick strokes.
“If you know you’ll die in the fire, why stay here now? If you know your fate, why wait for it?”
She paused then, her expression almost puzzled. “Because it is mine,” she said, as though it was obvious. “Everything must come to an end, Nix. Your father would be happier if he could accept that.” She glanced over the letter she was writing, finding her place. “Besides,” she murmured, “there is always a sacrifice. If I was already there, I never could have come.”
“You can’t come to a map where you already exist?” She didn’t answer my question; rather, she already had. My hand crept up to my necklace. “New York, 1981. That’s why it didn’t work.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why all the maps he’s collected failed?”
“Of course I did. But he wasn’t here in 1868.”
“No,” she said. “You were.”
I put my palms down on the counter to steady myself. “So this whole plan is pointless? The map Mr. D is selling is a dead ender?”
“As long as he tries to take you with him.” She paused in her brushstrokes. “Of course, as long as you stay with him, you know you are safe,” she said.